ALS, DNA: RG 59, Miscellaneous Letters.

Louis Le Bègue Duportail (1743–1802) had served in the French army as an officer of engineers since 1762 when he was sent to America by Franklin in 1777 as “Colonel in Chief of Engineers” of the Continental army and promoted to brigadier general in November 1777. When the French army arrived in the United States in 1780, he was attached to it with the rank of lieutenant colonel and directed work on the trenches at Yorktown. Returning to France, he remained in the army and, through the influence of Lafayette, was made minister of war in November 1790. He resigned after Lafayette’s fall. He fled to the United States in 1794 and died at sea in 1802.

Duportail’s letter to GW concerns the affairs of the Scioto Company, the largest single enterprise of speculator and assistant secretary of the Treasury William Duer. In 1787 Duer, at the time a member of the Board of Treasury, secured a tract of land that later surveys showed to be over four million acres north and west of the purchase of the Ohio Company of Associates and bounded on the west by the Scioto River. Thirty shares were issued to a group of American businessmen including Duer, Andrew Cragie, Royal Flint, and Richard Platt. Payment was to be made to the Ohio Company in six installments at 66⅔ cents an acre after the survey of the land was completed (“Copy of Transfer of Land from [Manasseh] Cutler and [Winthrop] Sargent to Colonel William Duer in November 1787,” in Belote, “Scioto Speculation,” description begins Theodore Thomas Belote. “The Scioto Speculation and the French Settlement at Gallipolis: A Study in Ohio Valley History.” University [of Cincinnati] Studies, 2d ser., vol. 3, no. 3 (September–October 1907): 1–82. description ends 65–66). In mid–1788 Duer and his partners sent the young Connecticut poet Joel Barlow to France to sell land to French investors. In Paris Barlow soon found an ally and business partner in William Playfair, an unscrupulous English speculator, and the two formed the Compaignie du Scioto, designed to peddle the company’s western lands to unwary French investors. An inflated Prospectus was issued promising prospective settlers a veritable paradise, with cleared land and thriving cities. A group of French investors in the company, calling themselves the “Twenty-Four,” was formed in Paris in January 1790, and some of the members, including the marquis de Lézay-Marnésia, the comte de Bärth (Barthe), and François Adrien Thiebaud. Some members of the “Twenty-Four” actually emigrated to the United States. The majority of the emigrants, however, were Parisian shopkeepers and other small investors, and over five hundred of them came to America in reponse to the Scioto Company’s alluring promises. For their unfortunate fate when they reached the frontier, see Belote, “Scioto Speculation,” description begins Theodore Thomas Belote. “The Scioto Speculation and the French Settlement at Gallipolis: A Study in Ohio Valley History.” University [of Cincinnati] Studies, 2d ser., vol. 3, no. 3 (September–October 1907): 1–82. description ends 48–60. Congress continued to maintain the position that negotiations on the Scioto lands were between that company and the Ohio Company, and by the spring of 1790 it was evident that the Ohio Company was unable to make its own payments to Congress and the Scioto Company itself was bankrupt. The remains of the company disappeared in the wake of the 1792 financial panic. Eventually some restitution was made to the settlers. See Belote, “Scioto Speculation,” description begins Theodore Thomas Belote. “The Scioto Speculation and the French Settlement at Gallipolis: A Study in Ohio Valley History.” University [of Cincinnati] Studies, 2d ser., vol. 3, no. 3 (September–October 1907): 1–82. description ends 37–43; Davis, Earlier History of American Corporations, description begins Joseph Stancliffe Davis. Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1917. description ends 1:213–53.