To Benjamin Franklin from Richard Nicholls Colden, 6 April 1774: résumé
From Richard Nicholls Colden6
ALS: American Philosophical Society
<General Post Office, New York, April 6, 1774: Has received Franklin’s letter of January 5 by the Mercury, and assures him he will be diligent in preparing the accounts. Encloses Richard Hanson’s second bill for £50 sterling on Sir Lyonel Lyde & Co.; the first bill was sent of March 2.7 His father came to town two days ago; he is recovering his strength, sends compliments, and hopes to write soon.>
6. See his letter above, Jan. 5. The present letter, still addressed to BF as “Postmaster General for North America,” is the last one extant from any of the Coldens; and the absence of further communication obscures an important aspect of BF’s problem in settling the American postal accounts.
7. Colden’s letter of that date, like BF’s of Jan. 5, is missing. Richard Hanson was a Virginian factor for the London tobacco merchants, Lyonel and Samuel Lyde, and was among the largest cash purchasers of tobacco in the region of the upper James: Robert P. Thomson, “The Tobacco Export of the Upper James River Naval District, 1773–75,” 3 W&MQ, XVIII (1961), 398. Lyonel Lyde (d. 1791), in partnership with his brother, was the son of a Bristol merchant of the same name, and had been made a baronet in 1772. John B. Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies … (2nd ed., London, 1844), p. 331; Gent. Mag., LXI (1791), 682.