1. On 20 Jan. 1816 Postmaster Gen. Return Jonathan Meigs Jr. informed House Speaker Henry Clay that “reports were in circulation unfavorable to the character of this Department, in relation to its fiscal concerns,” and requested an investigation. The House Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads conferred with Meigs, who told its members that the rumors had originated with clerks in the general post office, who suspected that “some persons in the Department” were “in the practice of selling draughts upon deputy postmasters for premiums, which have not been passed to the credit of the Department on the books.” The committee was unable “to justify this rumor,” but on 29 Jan. it recommended that “a more particular inquiry” was “due to the character of the Post Office Department, as well as to the interest and policy of the Government,” and appointed a select committee. Further correspondence between Meigs and the select committee identified eight more specific charges for investigation, most of which centered on allegations to the effect that the assistant postmaster general, Abraham Bradley Jr., and his brother, Phineas Bradley, had misapplied post office money for their “private use,” that Phineas Bradley had received “corrupting presents” from mail contractors, that the books of the general post office had been kept improperly, and that the Union Bank of Georgetown, of which Abraham Bradley Jr. was the president, had profitted “by the sale of post office draughts.”

It was also alleged that Meigs had prematurely terminated an 1813 contract for carrying the mail between Washington and Fredericksburg, Virginia, and then paid “about double the amount given for the same service” to Col. John Tayloe. On 27 Mar. the select committee reported that after a “very extensive” investigation, it had “to abandon [its] undertaking,” having found “no person” able to make “any specific charges” and the members being unwilling to “listen to rumors and hearsays of some of the witnesses to prove the facts.” The committee accepted Meigs’s explanation for his renegotiation of the contract for carrying the mail between Washington and Fredericksburg and requested that it be “discharged from the further consideration of the subject” (Annals of Congress, description begins Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States … (42 vols.; Washington, 1834–56). description ends 14th Cong., 1st sess., 731, 771, 846, 1278–83). The committee report and the accompanying evidence are reprinted in ASP description begins American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States … (38 vols.; Washington, 1832–61). description ends , Post Office, 50–61.