RC (NHi: Gallatin Papers); at foot of text: “Mr. Gallatin”; endorsed by Gallatin. PrC (DLC). Enclosures: Authorization for Tench Coxe, printed below. Other enclosures not found.

William GOFORTH had served as a commissioner for settling claims on the Miami Purchase lands of John Cleves Symmes since the fall of 1801. FOSTER’S RESIGNATION: appointed to office in May 1800, Peregrine Foster, brother of Senators Theodore and Dwight Foster, was the first register of lands at the newly established land office at Marietta. John Sellman (SELMAN) joined James Findlay, receiver of public monies at Cincinnati, and John Reily on the Symmes commission. Sellman had served as a surgeon’s mate in the army on the frontier with Meriwether Lewis (Terr. Papers description begins Clarence E. Carter and John Porter Bloom, eds., The Territorial Papers of the United States, Washington, D.C., 1934–75, 28 vols. description ends , 3:97; JEP description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States . . . to the Termination of the Nineteenth Congress, Washington, D.C., 1828, 3 vols. description ends , 1:433, 437; ASP description begins American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, Washington, D.C., 1832–61, 38 vols. description ends , Public Lands, 1:112–13; Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence [Cambridge, Mass., 2002], 129–30; Sellman to Gabriel Duvall, 4 Oct. 1807, in DNA: RG 59, LAR; Vol. 35:392n; Vol. 36:301–2n, 405n, 486n).