LS, DLC:GW.

William Prentis (d. 1765) was an important storekeeper in Williamsburg, and William Withers (1731–1802) was Dinwiddie’s secretary. They appear to have been acting as partners in a business venture at this time. Withers served as Dinwiddie’s secretary from about June 1752 until Jan. 1758, when Dinwiddie’s tenure as lieutenant governor ended. As early as 1751 Dinwiddie wrote with a very unsteady hand, and in 1756 he was “seiz’d with a Paraletic Disorder” (Dinwiddie to the Earl of Halifax, 24 Sept. 1756, P.R.O., C.O. 5/1329, f. 16). Because of his maladies, Dinwiddie depended heavily on Withers’s secretarial skills. Most of the surviving letters from Dinwiddie to GW are in Withers’s hand. On his secretary’s behalf, the lieutenant governor used his influence to expedite confirmation of a private act settling a lawsuit between Withers and Samuel Washington (Dinwiddie to James Abercromby, 6 Sept. 1755, in Brock, Dinwiddie Papers description begins R. Alonzo Brock, ed. The Official Records of Robert Dinwiddie, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Virginia, 1751–1758. 2 vols. Richmond, 1883–84. description ends , 2:197). After his patron returned to England, Withers carried on as a merchant in Virginia and eventually settled in Dinwiddie County.