1. With JA’s 13 March letter to Carmarthen, above, the commissioners began their effort to obtain a response from the British government to JA’s 29 July 1785 submission of a draft Anglo-American commercial treaty (vol. 17:280–282). With this letter and its enclosure they were responding to William Fraser’s 3 April 1786 letter to JA (Adams Papers description begins Manuscripts and other materials, 1639–1889, in the Adams Manuscript Trust collection given to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956 and enlarged by a few additions of family papers since then. Citations in the present edition are simply by date of the original document if the original is in the main chronological series of the Papers and therefore readily found in the microfilm edition of the Adams Papers (APM). description ends ). Fraser, Carmarthen’s undersecretary, wrote that because the previous draft “was not confined to Commercial Matters only,” Carmarthen wished to receive from the commissioners a “Project of a Treaty of Commerce containing only such Points as are necessary for that Purpose.” The fact that one day later JA and Thomas Jefferson responded to Carmarthen’s request by lifting five articles from the 29 July 1785 draft and then departed on a tour of English gardens likely indicates their belief that the new draft was no more likely to receive a substantive response than the original one, and in this they were correct. For the commissioners’ report on their efforts, see their 25 April 1786 letter to John Jay, below.

2. This article and the following four articles correspond to Arts. 2, 3, 4, 25, and 27 of the draft submitted by JA in July 1785 (vol. 17:223–236). It should be noted, however, that the conditions for trade in Arts. 1–3 in this draft are based on the reciprocal rights accruing to “natural born” citizens or subjects of the two countries rather than the most favored nation as was the case with the 1785 draft.