Your excellency will understand, in considering the attached extract, with what absolute and urgent necessity its contents have compelled me to appeal to you, given that the minister plenipotentiary of the United States to this country has exclusive access to the treasury held here, so you may have the goodness to authorize the bankers of the treasury in Amsterdam to take care of paying me my current annual salary of 1,300 dollars, according to the act of Congress of 14 October 1785, which is known to your excellency, half-yearly as I have drawn it from Paris up until now, the current half-year of which will expire next October.1 As there is always a loss in the exchange between here and Paris, I have often thought of proposing to your excellency and to Mr. Jefferson that the payment of my salary be transferred from Paris to Amsterdam, but, averse to importuning for my sole pleasure and convenience, I continued along the same path. But more is presently at stake: namely, my daily subsistence, which has allowed me to live securely from day to day, and without which I would not know how to live. To lessen my anxiety in this regard, I began sounding out those 114 good gentlemen in Amsterdam. But, to preserve full faith in the credit of Congress, I have not informed them of the contents of Mr. Jefferson’s letter, offering them only my wish to receive my salary from their hands in the future, as from the most natural, shortest, and least onerous, wasteful route, adding that I would pray your excellency to authorize my request. They thereby gave me to understand that, with such an authorization, they would grant it. Therefore, I urgently pray your excellency to authorize these gentlemen to pay me the current half-year’s income of 650 dollars when it falls due next October and to continue along the same lines until further orders from you; since it is doubtlessly of no consequence to the United States whether I am paid in Amsterdam or in Paris, as long as I am paid, while it cannot be immaterial to their honor and credit that my distress become public. It may indeed become public despite me as soon as I shall no longer be able to count upon this payment in good time. I have waited patiently and continue to await the sum due me in arrears, until it pleases the treasury finally to expedite the order which I have requested for so long, the object of which, in spite of the momentary financial difficulty of the United States, is too small to leave me in distress for so long against the express will of Congress. The interruption of my current salary would deprive me of all means of living here, and this at a time when I could not even seek refuge at my small farm in Gelderland, where military forces have recently disarmed and subjugated the entire people, and where we are at all moments exposed to pillage and slaughter as much in cities as in the plains. Mr. der Capellen van de Marsch has just sought refuge with his pregnant wife and five children at Deventer, so much is certain, and the rumor runs that the Zutphen garrison has laid waste to his lands.2

Allow me, sir, to attach herein the duplicate of a dispatch that was entrusted to me by the Regency of Brunswick. It is made known to me that the Baron Féronce, who signed it, is one of the principal ministers of the reigning Duke of Brunswick.3 Besides, it has to do with the interests of a United States citizen.

Allow me also to present my respects and those of my family to Mrs. Adams and Smith, as well as my best compliments to Mr. Cutting. I am, with great respect, your excellency’s most humble and most obedient servant