Enclosure: Memorial of Alexandria Merchants, 29 March 1804
Enclosure: Memorial of Alexandria Merchants
To his Excellency Thomas Jefferson Esquire,
President of the United States
The undersigned Merchants of the Town of Alexandria, having understood that an address or memorial has been secretly handed about for signatures, requesting the removal of the Collector of the Customs for this Port from office; consider it to be a duty, which they owe to your Excellency as well as to themselves respectfully to make Known to you, that the Business of the Custom House at this Place ever since the appointment of the Present Collector, has been conducted in all respects to their satisfaction and they believe with vigilance and strict attention to the faithfull collection of the duties in this District;
And believing that the removal of the Present Collector would neither Promote the Public good nor facilitate the Transacting Business at the Custom House, but that the appointment of a Person in his place, unacquainted with the revenue laws, and the established forms of Proceeding in the Collectors office, would most probably subject them to embarrassments and diffeculties, in their mercantile Pursuits
They most respectfully and earnestly, request your Excellency to continue the Present Collector in office.
RC (DNA: RG 59, LAR); undated; in an unidentified hand, signed by 102 individuals or firms; with Brent’s notation “F,” “R,” or “d,” indicating Federalist, Republican, or undetermined, next to each signature.
undersigned: Brent indicated that four of the signers—George Gilpin; Samuel Croudson, who was an applicant for a consulship at New Orleans in 1801; Robert Gray, a bookbinder; and William Dunlap, retail merchant and bottler—were Republicans. He placed a “d” alongside the signatures of Charles Slade, a hardware merchant and nail manufacturer; Abraham Hewes, who in 1799 operated an auction house with Mordecai Miller, who signed this memorial and was identified by Brent as a Federalist; and Joseph Mandeville, Jr., of Douglass & Mandeville, retailers of liquor and groceries on King Street. Brent made indeterminate marks next to the signatures of Joseph M. Perrin, a merchant who operated under the name Perrin & Brothers, and Mathurin Perrin, and he placed no mark by one illegible signature. He identified the remaining 92 signers as Federalists. Jacob Hoffman, William Fitzhugh, Cuthbert Powell, Jonathan Swift, Richard Conway, and Lewis Deblois had received “midnight” appointments from John Adams as justices of the peace. John Janney and three other members of the Janney family, as well as two Janney firms, signed the memorial and were all marked “F.” by Brent. John G. Ladd handled consignments for TJ at Alexandria in 1801. John Dunlop and William Oxley were directors of the branch Bank of the United States. William Hodgson, James Kennedy, James Patton, Hezekiah Smoot, Nathaniel Wattles, William Hartshorne, and James B. Nickolls were among those elected as officers and directors of the Marine Insurance Company between 1798 and 1811, as were Conway, Swift, Hewes, Janney, and Miller. Signers who were directors of the Bank of Alexandria at various times included William Wilson, John Dundas, Thomas Irwin, Hugh Smith, Anthony C. Cazenove, Ferdinand Marsteller, Miller, Dunlop, Conway, Janney, Patton, and the Republican Gilpin. Charles Simms became a director of that bank in 1800 and a director of the insurance company in 1808. Along with Hoffman, Fitzhugh, Swift, Nickolls, and Cazenove, Simms and signer George Deneale, clerk of the Alexandria court, founded the Washington Society in 1800 “to pay homage to the memory of George Washington” (, 1:19-20, 119-20, 168-9, 202, 226-7, 320-1; 2:127, 232-3; Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, 6 vols. [Charlottesville, 1976-79], 4:200; Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette, 16 Jan. 1800; Alexandria Times, and District of Columbia Daily Advertiser, 23 Jan. 1800; Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer, 1 Mch. 1803; Alexandria Expositor, 5 Dec. 1804, 21 Nov. 1805; Alexandria Daily Advertiser, 5 June 1805, 24 Feb. 1807; Vol. 33:173n, 282-3, 546n; Vol. 35:136n, 734, 740, 746; Vol. 36:133-4, 314-17, 417n; Vol. 37:170).