Daniel Belteshazzar Plantagenet Eccleston to Thomas Jefferson, 1 January 1810
From Daniel Belteshazzar Plantagenet Eccleston
Lancaster January 1st 1810
Sir
Permit me to return you my sincere thanks for the very polite Letter I had the pleasure of recieving from you, in return for a Medallion of your predecessor General Washington, which I had the honor of presenting you.
Could I procure a likeness, I perhaps might become the Medalist of the Presidents of the United States, and those Medals, in all probability, many generations hence, will be preserved in the cabinets of the Vertuosi, when you and I are mouldering in the dust.
May you long live to enjoy, in your retirement from public business, the more solid happiness which it affords, is the sincere wish of Dear Sir
Daniel Belteshazzar Plantagenet Eccleston
RC (DLC); dateline adjacent to signature; at foot of text: “Thomas Jefferson Esqr”; endorsed by TJ as received 15 July 1810 and so recorded in SJL.
Daniel Belteshazzar Plantagenet Eccleston (ca. 1745–1821), a merchant and insurance broker in Lancaster, England, traveled as a young man in Antigua, Barbados, Canada, and the United States. In 1794 he issued a halfpenny token that circulated in Lancaster, Manchester, and Liverpool. Eccleston also produced bronze medallions to honor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and George Washington in 1805, sending the latter to TJ, Bushrod Washington, and John Marshall in 1807, James Madison on 1 Jan. 1810 and, at some point, Alexander I of Russia (Edith Tyson, Daniel Eccleston [1975], 1, 2, 9–11, iv–v; Carolyn Downs, “The Business Letters of Daniel Eccleston of Lancaster [1745–1821]: Trade, Commerce, and Marine Insurance in Late-Eighteenth-Century Liverpool, Lancaster, and Whitehaven,” Northern History 41 [2004]: 129–48; , Pres. Ser., 2:154).
TJ’s polite letter of 21 Nov. 1807 (DLC) acknowledged Eccleston’s letter of 20 May 1807 (DLC) with its enclosed medallion of Washington.