Adams Family Correspondence, volume 10
1795]
I have received your Letter of December 30th.— I approve of your caution and applaud your discretion. You ought nevertheless to reconoitre the Country round about you, like a good officer. Between you and me, I believe you to be Surrounded by a gang of sharpers, and I wish you to keep a good look Out, preserve your own honour; keep a clear Conscience and clean hands: but examine every Man and every Thing. You will Soon be respected in this Course, even if you stand alone. Is there any Land Office? Where is it kept? in what House? or other Building? Who are the Land Officers? Who is the
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Man or who are the Men, who have by Law Authority to sell Lands? What is that Law & when was it made by which those Persons are impowered to sell? Is there any Land Book? that is to say any Volume or Volumes of Records in which grants, Deeds or Conveyances of Land are registered? Is this Office, and are those Books publick? has every Citizen a right to examine those Records? to take Copies, paying for them &c.? There are honest Men about you, no doubt.1
It would be worth your while, to make an Inventory of Clintons Lands. Enquire in what Part of the State he has Lands? When he purchased them? How much he gave for them? of whom he bought them? What Quantity of Acres in a Parcel? improve cultivated or wild?— Information of every kind should be sought with Ardour by a Young Man.2
You need not recurr to the Supposition of foreign Gold to account for the other Mans Wealth. if I am rightly informed, he made an hundred Thousand Pounds, by a purchase and a Sale of Lands. I know not the Mystery.
If Professions of Simplicity & Republicanism and Democracy & sanscullotism & Jacobinism &c are a sure Way of making Plumbs Per soltum, We shall have Professors enough. Look about you charles and be neither sharp nor Dupe
RC (MHi:Seymour Coll.).
The New York Land Office Commission was established in 1784 to dispose of bounty lands to Revolutionary War veterans. The commission, which met in New York City, was composed of the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the assembly, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer, and auditor, and with the exclusion of the governor, three commissioners were required to execute a land grant. In March 1791, after a near halt in land sales, the state legislature expanded the discretionary powers of the commission, which subsequently approved 35 grants, totaling 5.5 million acres and generating just over one million dollars in revenue, all in the span of five months.
This flurry of activity drew the attention of George Clinton’s Federalist opponents, who levied allegations of misconduct and misappropriation toward the governor during the 1792 election. Clinton won reelection and subsequently solicited and published affidavits from several of the grantees, denying his participation or financial benefit. In Nov. 1793, a jury further exonerated Clinton in a libel suit he brought against William Cooper, one of his more vocal detractors. The stigma of misconduct, however, persisted in Federalist circles (John P. Kaminski, George Clinton: Yeoman Politician of the New Republic, Madison, Wis., 1993, p. 195–197; Young, Democratic Republicans,
p. 233–234, 237–239).
Clinton was a savvy land speculator who chose productive farm lands or small parcels in locations primed for development. Many of his investments were made in partnership and were managed in such a way that initial outlays were recouped within a few years, while the balances were held as investments. During and after the Revolutionary War Clinton substantially increased his land holdings through speculative purchases of undeveloped land along the frontier. The largest was a multi-partner investment in a 40,000-acre tract in Oneida County; another included a 6,000-acre parcel in the Mohawk River Valley near Utica, for which Clinton partnered with George Washington in 1783. Clinton, largely as a result of his success as a land speculator, left an estate valued at
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$250,000 (Kaminski, George Clinton, p. 14, 51–52, 249–250; Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, N.Y., 1995, p. 156–157; Young, Democratic Republicans,
p. 35–36).
1795].1
I received this day your kind letter of the 30th ult.2 With cordial affection and sincerity do I reciprocate your compliments of the season, and wish you and yours many happy returns of these pleasant anniversaries.
There has lately been published extracts from a Journal of Brissot, in which, as upon many other occasions, there has appeared a disposition to give to Mr. Jay as much of the honour of the peace as possible, and to take away from your papa as much of it as possible. Mr. Jay is represented as insisting on an acknowledgment of our independence antecedently to treating, and as bringing me over to his opinion.3 Mr. Jay’s commission was in autumn of 1782. In July, 1781, more than a year earlier, and indeed before Mr. Jay had anything to do with peace,—before the commission was issued by Congress, in which Mr. Jay was united with me in the negotiations for peace, the enclosed letters were written by me to the Count De Vergennes, received by him, and transmitted by me to Congress, received and read by them, and now stand recorded in the office of the Secretary of State.4 By these you may judge whether Mr. Jay brought me over to his opinion, or whether I brought him over to mine; whether I joined with Mr. Jay, or Mr. Jay joined with me.
God forbid that I should deny Mr. Jay’s merit in that business, or diminish his fame. All I desire is, that my children, if they should ever have any tenderness for their father’s character, may know where to look for the means of maintaining it. Show these letters to Col. Smith and to your brother Charles. And if either Col. Smith or your brother think it worth while to show them to Mr. Webster, in confidence, they have my leave to do it.
I am, my dear child, / Your affectionate
MS not found. Printed from AA2, Jour. and Corr.,
2:113–114.
The dating of this letter is based on WSS’s letter to JA of 9 Jan., below.
Not found.
Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville’s Nouveau voyage dans les États-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale, 3 vols., was originally published in Paris in 1791. The first two volumes appeared in translation in New York in 1792 and in London in 1794 in single volumes entitled New Travels in the United States of
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America. In the work, Brissot related an anecdote about the attempt of the Comte de Vergennes, the French secretary of state for foreign affairs, to convince the American peace commissioners “that the independence of America should not be considered as the basis of the peace; but, simply, that it should be conditional. To succeed in this project it was necessary to gain over Jay and Adams. Mr. Jay declared to M. de Vergennes, that he would sooner lose his life than sign such a treaty; that the Americans fought for independence; that they would never lay down their arms till it should be fully consecrated. … It was not difficult for Mr. Jay to bring Mr. Adams to this determination; and M. de Vergennes could never shake his firmness” (1794 edn., p. 114).
The extracts appeared in a defense of John Jay, originally published in the Virginia Gazette, 10 Dec., and reprinted in the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States, 20 December. For more on the original article, see Hamilton, Papers,
20:36–38.
For JA’s letters to the Comte de Vergennes of 13, 16, 18, 19, and 21 July 1781, and his letters to the president of Congress of 14 and 15 July, all dealing with the terms of negotiation of an Anglo-American peace and American acceptance of the Austro-Russian mediation, see JA, Papers
, 11:413–417, 418–422, 424–430, 431–434. Congress received these items on 3 Oct. (
JCC,
21:1032).
Jay was appointed to the joint peace commission on 13 June 1781, but JA did not receive word of that appointment until August; for a discussion of the decision to expand the peace commission and its full text, see JA, Papers
, 11:368–377.