Thomas Jefferson Papers

From Thomas Jefferson to William Eustis, 30 December 1801

To William Eustis

Wednesday Dec. 30. 1801.

Th: Jefferson requests the favor of The Honble Doctr. Eustis’s company to dinner the day after tomorrow at half after three oclock—

RC (facsimile in Washington Post, 8 Oct. 1961); in Meriwether Lewis’s hand.

William Eustis (1753–1825), a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard College, was a surgeon during the Revolutionary War. Eustis held a seat in the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature from 1788 to 1794, and he served from 1801 to 1805 in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was known as a moderate Republican. TJ consulted Eustis in Washington about chronic diarrhea, for which Eustis recommended English physician Thomas Sydenham’s remedy of riding “a trotting horse.” During Madison’s administration, Eustis was secretary of war from 1809 until his resignation in 1812. Thereafter he was minister to the United Netherlands, a congressman again, and governor of his native state from 1823 until his death. Eustis married Caroline Langdon of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1810 (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, New York and Oxford, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; Vol. 32:349n; TJ to Henry Fry, 17 June 1804).

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