To Thomas Jefferson from John A. Graham, 2 January 1805
From John A. Graham
New York Jany 2d. 1805
May it please Your Excellency
Having been informed that certain Individuals have said, or written to the Executive of the United States, things which have called in question my want of attachment to the present administration, so derogatory to my honor and feelings—.
I here take the liberty to forward the enclosed letter, which I procured to be published in Vermont more than three Years since: as by the affidavit hereunto annexed will appear—And have to request that Your Excellency would have the goodness to find leisure for its perusal—And be Assured Sir, it was written from the effusions of the heart.—
I should not have troubled Your Excellency in this way, neither had I the vanity to wish the Author to have been known, had not some personal enemies endeavoured to injure me, fearful that my services might be called into Action by the Executive—I am may it please your Excellency with profound respect.
John A. Graham
RC (DLC); in a clerk’s hand, signed by Graham; at head of text: “To the President of the United States”; endorsed by TJ as received 10 Jan. and so recorded in SJL.
John A. Graham (1764-1841), a colonel in the militia and a classically trained lawyer, was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 1785. He moved to Vermont and practiced law in Rutland. From 1796 to 1799, Graham was in England, ostensibly on church-related business but also avoiding creditors in the aftermath of divorce and a mining fraud. While abroad, he wrote A Descriptive Sketch of the Present State of Vermont and achieved renown in political and literary circles. He moved to Washington in 1803 and was appointed to a Senate clerkship by Stephen R. Bradley before they had a falling out. After being in Benjamin Rush’s care briefly for a “severe Attack of derangement,” he eventually settled in New York City, where he pursued a career as a criminal attorney (; Dorr Bradley Carpenter, ed., Stephen R. Bradley: Letters of a Revolutionary War Patriot and Vermont Senator [Jefferson, N.C., 2009], 39-40, 206, 224-7, 232-4, 419).
enemies endeavoured to injure me: in response to a satirical piece about Stephen R. Bradley in the New-York Evening Post in December 1802, Graham signed his name to a lengthy and spirited defense of the U.S. senator from Vermont in James Cheetham’s American Citizen. Graham also railed against the Post’s editor, William Coleman, who had an unpaid loan from Bradley. Graham likened Coleman to Peter Porcupine and James Thomson Callender, and insinuated that his “attack on the spotless and exalted character of the President of the United States by unprovoked lies, leaves you upon a par with the devils.” When Coleman denied the charges against him, Graham wrote a letter of apology, stating that he had been acting as Bradley’s agent and had been deceived by him. Graham wrote “An Address to the Public, together with a Copy of a Letter to Stephen R. Bradley” and published it as a pamphlet in New York in 1805 (New-York Evening Post, 17 Dec. 1802, 3 Jan. 1803; New York Republican Watch-Tower, 5 Jan. 1803; Albany Register, 11 Jan. 1803; No. 3322).