Adams Family Correspondence, volume 10
Your favours of 18th. and 19th instant are so full of your Plans and Labours in Agriculture, that I begin to be jealous you will acquire a Reputation as a Farmer that will quite eclypse my own.
I rejoice at length that all Tenants are dispossessed and that Land stock and Utensils are now at our own Disposal.— I am glad you have bought a Yoke of oxen and hope you will buy a farm horse.
Our Thomas is fitted off with Horses saddle Bridle and Saddle Bags and on Monday last sett off upon the Circuit with Mr Ingersol— He will be absent Six Weeks. He goes to Chester Lancaster York Carlisle &c
Mr Trumbull our Friend the Painter goes with Mr Jay as his private Secretary.1
I send you an illiberal Party Pamphlet or two2 and am tenderly
Has Mr Cranch opend his Post office?3
RC (Adams Papers); internal address: “Mrs A.”
John Jay particularly requested that artist John Trumbull serve as his private secretary on Jay’s mission to Britain. He believed that Trumbull’s “acquaintance with the characters and things of London” would be of greater use to him than the skills of a lawyer or trained clerk. They sailed together in May (Stahr, John Jay,
p. 317–319).
The pamphlets have not been found but were possibly John Taylor, A Definition of Parties; or, The Political Effects of the Paper System Considered, Phila., 1794, Evans, No. 26861; and William Findley, A Review of the Revenue System Adopted by the First Congress under the Federal Constitution … In Thirteen Letters to a Friend, Phila. 1794, Evans, No. 26973; see
AA to JA, 10 May, below.
Richard Cranch was appointed the first postmaster for the town of Quincy in 1793 (
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
11:374).