To George Washington from Miles Merwin, 13 June 1793
From Miles Merwin
Philadelphia June 13th 1793
May it please the President,
Having received information that, Mr Lear, Your private Secretary has resigned his Office, this address is designed as an application for it, if it is not already supplied.1
If Your Excellency should think this request deserving an answer it can be conveyed to me by Master Custis at my Schoolhouse, or by a Servant at my dwelling north second street No. 191.2
Relying on your generosity alone, to pardon my assurance in making this application, without any other apology, I have the honour to subscribe myself your Excellency’s most obedient and very humble servant
Miles Merwin
ALS, DLC:GW.
1. On Tobias Lear’s resignation, see GW to D.C. Commissioners, 13 June 1793.
2. GW wrote to Merwin on 16 June: “I thank you for making a tender of your Services to me to supply the place of Mr Lear. At present, I have no intention of adding any one to my family for this purpose” (ADfS, owned [1970] by Dr. Victor M. J. Weil, Paterson, N.J.; LB, DLC:GW). Merwin apparently had established his own school after having been a teacher at the Friends’ Latin School in Philadelphia, 1790–c.1792 (Jean S. Straub, “Teaching in the Friends’ Latin School of Philadelphia in the Eighteenth Century,” [October 1967], 91:445). He and his wife, Mary Perkins (b. 1765), died later in 1793 during the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia ( , 147). On 17 May 1793, GW had paid Merwin $13.25 for “a qtr tuition” for George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s grandson ( ).