Peter Force (1790–1868), printer and documentary editor, was born in Passaic County, New Jersey, but grew up in New York City. There he learned the printing trade, was president of the New York Typographical Society, 1813–15, and served in the War of 1812. Force moved in 1815 to Washington, D.C., where he continued to work as a printer. He edited and published a semiweekly political newspaper, the National Journal, 1823–30, which added a daily version in 1824. Force also published the annual National Calendar, 1820–24 and 1828–36. He sat on the Washington common council, 1822–24, was an alderman, 1826–33 and 1835, and served as mayor, 1836–39. Force collected historical materials on a grand scale and used them to publish Tracts and Other Papers, relating principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, 4 vols. (1836–46), and an even more ambitious documentary history, American Archives, 9 vols. (1837–53). The latter work ended short of its projected twenty volumes when federal funding was withdrawn. Force sold his collection of manuscripts, pamphlets, newspapers, incunabula, and other archival material to the Library of Congress for $100,000 in 1867. He died in Washington (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Ainsworth R. Spofford, The Life and Labors of Peter Force, Mayor of Washington [1898]; Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, One Hundred and Thirty-Fifth Session, 1912, vol. 12, no. 28, pt. 3 [1912]: 94–7; Wilhelmus B. Bryan, Forms of Local Government in the District of Columbia, with list of Washington city officials appended [1903], 34–9; U.S. Statutes at Large description begins Richard Peters, ed., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States … 1789 to March 3, 1845, 1845–67, 8 vols. description ends , 14:464 [2 Mar. 1867]; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 24 Jan. 1868).

On 2 Oct. 1819 TJ also received a letter from Thomas McKean Myer dated 22 June 1819, not found, recorded in SJL as coming from Washington, with the bracketed notation “do” to indicate that it, too, related to the American Colonization Society. James Madison also received a letter from Myer, not found, and replied on 12 Oct. 1819 that “Your letter with the second annual report of the American Colonization Society, presented by the Managers in a volume so elegantly printed & bound, having got into a wrong channel did not till lately come to hand” (Madison, Papers, Retirement Ser., 1:531).