To Thomas Jefferson from Rufus Briggs, 14 May 1804
From Rufus Briggs
Washington 14th May 1804
Sir
your goodness will readily excuse my thus addressing myself to you, when I inform that I have that unhappiness within which surpasses all shew. Owing to my unhappy pecuniary situation. Nothing but Stearn necessity could compell me thus to address you the much honoured Chief of happy America.
My Friends live in Berkshire Massachusetts, they are neither Naybobs nor dependants, but live esteemed by their fellow Citasens, and unhappily for me I am at this time, when both in Constitution and frame a bankrupt. I am absent from them, I have been the year past in the south endeavouring but in vain to regain my former health, I am truly unhappy and can only say with the Poet—“Light griefs are plantive, but the great are dumb.” I Lodge at Miss Dashields Pennsylvania Avenue, if not too presuming I would happy to wait on you, honoured sir pray let me hear from you Sir all of to morrow untill then I am your Most.
Obt. Huble. Sert.
Rufus Briggs
RC (MHi); at head of text: “Thomas Jefferson P. of the U.S.”; at foot of text: “Monday afternon”; endorsed by TJ as received 15 May and so recorded in SJL.
Rufus Briggs (1779-1816) grew up in Adams, Massachusetts, the son of a blacksmith and the eldest of 12 children. By 1810, he was living in Clermont, New York, and acting as agent for Robert L. Livingston, from whom he assumed ownership of a Saugerties flour mill in 1813. The following year, Briggs and Livingston partnered with six other men to establish the Woodstock and Saugerties General Manufacturing and Mining Company. By the time of his death, Briggs owned several small parcels of land in Ulster County, was married with four sons, and acted as benefactor to his younger brother George Nixon Briggs, later governor of Massachusetts (Samuel Briggs, The Archives of the Briggs Family [Cleveland, 1880], 217; William C. Richards, Great in Goodness: A Memoir of George N. Briggs, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from 1844 to 1851 [Boston, 1867], 15, 39-40; Albany Balance, & New-York State Journal, 12 June 1810; Kingston Ulster Gazette, 7 Dec. 1813; Kingston Ulster Plebeian, 1 Oct. 1816; Laws of the State of New York Passed at the Thirty-Seventh Session of the Legislature [Albany, 1814], 122).
say with the poet: Seneca, Hippolytus, line 607.
Briggs lodged at Miss Sally Dashields’s boardinghouse on pennsylvania avenue, adjacent to Samuel Harrison Smith’s printing office. Dashields’s boarders in 1804 and early 1805 included John Randolph, who called his lodgings “Miss Dashiels in the swamp,” and Rembrandt Peale, who set up a “painting room” in his quarters for those “desirous of obtaining copies of the Portrait of the President” (National Intelligencer, 11 Feb. 1805, 13 Apr. 1810; , v. 2, pt. 2:786n).