Beschreibung:

WASHINGTON, George. Autograph letter signed ("G: o Washington") as President, to his private secretary Tobias Lear (1762-1816), George Town, 29 March 1791. 2 pages, 4to, tiny mend at top of fold, with Lear's autograph docket: "From the President of the U.S..." In extremely fresh condition, with no show-through of ink. PREOCCUPIED WITH PLANS FOR THE NEW CAPITOL, WASHINGTON DEPLORES A SCOUNDREL, WHOSE LYING "PROVES HIM TO BE, WHAT I WILL NOT CALL HIM" A fine letter written from Georgetown, where Washington had gone for an important conference with the Commissioners for the new District of Columbia in order to finalize the exact boundaries of the nation's new capital (formally announced only two days later). Much of the letter, though, concerns Washington's frustration with a certain land agent. Before he was elected President, Washington took renewed interest in his motley tracts of frontier land in western Virginia and Pennsylvania, hoping to profit at last from their rental, timber and agricultural products. Finding reliable tenants and honest, dependable agents to collect the rents (usually paid in wheat or split rails) was to prove a time-consuming exercise in frustration. To manage some of these lands, Washington had employed a Col. John Cannon, giving him considerable leeway in the sale, rental and collection of rents (see his letters to Cannon, 28 Nov 1786 and 13 Apr 1787). Then, for months on end, he and Lear received neither remittances nor reports from Cannon. When pressed, he furnished no statements and offered flimsy accounts of uncollectible rents due to poor wheat prices. Washington--who kept a close eye on the prices of commodities like wheat--finally lost patience with the mendacious Cannon, whose subterfuge, he comments, "proves him to be, what I will not call him." "...as the Mail is about to be closed (leaving this morning before sun rise in the morning) I shall, as I must, be short. I return some letters to be filed; one from Col. o Blaine to be given to Gen. l Knox, to be acted upon as he pleases; he is as well acquainted with the man as I am, and knows the want of such a character better than I do; another letter from Col. o [John] Cannon, which I may venture to say, proves him to be, what I will not call him; and, that I need never look for any rents from him. I pray you to say to him, if he does not come to Philadelphia during my absence, that his own statement, given in at New York, does not justify this pres[en]t report, and that I am too well acquainted with the prices of grain and the dem[an]d for it last year in his own neighborhood to be imposed upon by such a tale as his letter exhibits. In a word that I am by no means satisfied with his treatment of me; for sure I am I shall get nothing from him but assurances of improvements, whilst he is either applying my rents to his own use, or suffering the tenants to go free from the payment of them." He asks that "one of the Pads to the wagon harness," be sent "by the stage to Alexandria," and adds "I am not able to say yet, how long I shall be detained in this place, where I arrived before breakfast this morning." In a postscript, he adds: "I send with my best remembrance a sermon for Mrs. W[ashingto]n. I presume it is good, coming all the way from New Hampshire; but I do not vouch for it not having read a word of it..." (The sermon, by John C. Ogden, compared President Washington to Nehemiah; see Papers , Pres. Ser., ed. Twohig 7: 214-215). The letter in Papers , Pres. Ser., 8:21-22 (with note that it is one of several letters from Washington to Lear thought to survive only in a 1905 printed source).