To Alexander Hamilton from Abraham Ellery, 10 October 1803
From Abraham Ellery1
Dear Park,2 near Natchez [Mississippi Territory], October 10, 1803. Requests Hamilton’s assistance in securing a clear title to lands in upstate New York which his wife, Charlotte Weissenfels Ellery, had inherited from her father, Charles F. Weissenfels.3
ALS, Hamilton Papers, Library of Congress.
1. Ellery, a native of Newport, Rhode Island, and a lawyer, had been a captain in the Sixteenth Regiment of Infantry during the undeclared war with France and was honorably discharged when the Additional Army was disbanded on June 14, 1800. Ellery and his wife left New York in May, 1803, and arrived in New Orleans in August.
2. Deer Park, Louisiana, is on the Mississippi River approximately fifteen miles south of Natchez, Mississippi.
3. Weissenfels was a veteran of the American Revolution. On July 9, 1790, for his service during the war (“An Act for granting certain Lands promised to be given as Bounty Lands by Laws of this State, and for other Purposes therein mentioned” [New York Laws, 7th Sess., Ch. XLIII (May 11, 1784)]), Weissenfels was granted six hundred acres of land in Lot No. 77 in Locke, the eighteenth township in the military tract, and six hundred acres in Lot No. 90 in Romulus, the eleventh township in the military tract (The Balloting Book and Other Documents relating to Military Bounty Lands in the State of New York [Albany, 1825], 66, 125, 132).
Weissenfels, a resident of New York City, held the lease on the ferry from New York City to Hoboken from 1787 to 1788. In 1792 and 1793 he was a collector of the revenue in New York City. At the time of his death in 1795 he was a major in the Fifth Regiment of the Brigade of the City and County of New York.