Robert Treat Paine Papers, Volume 4
I have long expected to have had the pleasure of seeing you in Congress: but I now begin to despair. Pray are Have you wholly disengaged yourself from public affairs? I cannot persuade myself you have. I should therefore be glad to know whether you at times turn your attention to the nursing of Salt petre making, a child of your own, which cost you much pains at the birth. I fear through the carelessness of the nurses it is in a dangerous way.
To Drop Allegory, I wish to know whether people continue the manufacture of that useful article: And shall be much obliged if you will send me a paper written on that subject by (If I recollect) a clergyman pointing out 109 an easy & expeditious method of making it by mixing lye of ashes with the lye extracted from earth.1 Your Compliance will much oblige
RTP had widely distributed a pamphlet on the subject by Dr. William Whiting (see Whiting to RTP, Oct. 6, 1775, RTP 3:92–95).
I have the honor to present you with a pamphlet the contents of which ought to have reached you and the public thro another medium, and so I presume it, or its most essential parts would have done, had not a wicked faction in Congress suppressed it to cover their own misdeeds.1 I hope however that the time will come, when the great council of America will know the propriety of protecting public virtue in the public servants, and chasing vicious characters from employments of State. You Sir have good right to one of these pamphlets, having been an early Laborer in the Vineyard of Liberty. I wish you happy Sir being very sincerely your friend and very humble servant,
P:S., If you are pleased to acknowledge the receipt of this letter my direction is to the care of the Post Master at Leeds Town in Westmoreland County Virginia.
Lee had five hundred copies of his brother Arthur Lee’s letter of Feb. 10, 1779, to Congress, printed as Extracts from a Letter Written to the President of Congress (Philadelphia, 1780). The letter, which was also widely published in the newspapers, was the result of a long-standing antipathy between Lee and Silas Deane, both of whom served in various capacities in the American delegation to France. It refuted Silas Deane’s charges of Arthur Lee’s collaboration with the British and his ineffectiveness as a diplomat, and in turn charged Deane with corruption and treason for profit. As a result of the mutual charges, Deane was recalled on Dec. 8, 1777, and Lee’s commission was revoked on Sept. 27, 1779 (James Curtis Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee [1911, 1914; New York, 1970], 2:168; Louis W. Potts, Arthur Lee: A Virtuous Revolutionary [Baton Rouge, 1981], esp. ch. 8).