To Thomas Jefferson from Abraham Baldwin, 29 March 1802
From Abraham Baldwin
Monday 29th March 1802
Abr Baldwin to the President
of the United States
Mr Mansfield informed me several weeks ago that he should avail himself of your obliging offer by forwarding to your address a box containing fifteen copies of his Mathematical work. The delay is so much longer than I expected, that there is reason to apprehend they will not reach us. I shall write him on the subject tomorrow
RC (MHi); addressed: “The President of the United States”; endorsed by TJ as received 30 Mch. and so recorded in SJL.
Baldwin and Jared MANSFIELD were both natives of Connecticut and lived in New Haven as young men. Baldwin, four years older, was a tutor at Yale College during part of Mansfield’s time there as a student in the 1770s. Mansfield published his Essays, Mathematical and Physical: Containing New Theories and Illustrations of Some Very Important and Difficult Subjects of the Sciences in New Haven in 1801 ( No. 3733; , No. 866; , 3:432, 691–2).
TJ probably conveyed his OFFER to help distribute the book in a conversation with Baldwin rather than by letter.