From Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 5 November 1793
To George Washington
Tuesday Nov. 5. 1793.
Th: Jefferson with his respects to the President sends for his perusal some of the letters which had been accumulating at his office, and which he received yesterday. He will wait on the President to-day to translate the Spanish papers sent by Mr. Short, as also with some other letters in foreign languages.
Th:J. sends to the President a supply he received yesterday of paper, of which the President will be pleased to take any proportion he may have occasion for. He sends him wafers also and wax, and could furnish him copying ink, but he believes the President has no press here.—Th:J. did not understand yesterday whether any meeting was desired to-day or at any other particular time.
RC (DNA: RG 59, MLR); endorsed by Washington. Tr (Lb in same, SDC). Not recorded in SJL. Enclosures: (1) William Carmichael and William Short to TJ, 15 Aug. 1793, and enclosures. (2) Short to TJ, 20 Aug. 1793, and enclosure. (3) Thomas Pinckney to TJ, 27 and 28 Aug. 1793, and enclosures. (4) David Humphreys to TJ, 1 Sep. 1793. (5) Elias Vanderhorst to TJ, 1 and 3 Sep. 1793. (6) Ezra Fitz Freeman to TJ, 5 Sep. 1793, enclosing No. 7 (not found, but recorded in SJL as received from “N.W. territy.” on 4 Nov. 1793; see , 245). (7) Petition of Abraham Freeman to Washington, Northwest Territory, 5 Sep. 1793, relating that in 1791 his son Dr. Clarkson Freeman of New Jersey had turned himself in upon being accused of aiding in the counterfeiting of public securities of the United States; that Abraham Ogden, the federal attorney for New Jersey, had taken down his evidence and promised him a pardon in exchange for his testimony at the trials of his accomplices, who were accordingly captured and indicted; and that even after his associates subsequently escaped from prison before trial, Freeman spent six months in the Newark prison but, tired of waiting for his promised pardon, escaped to Canada, from which he now greatly desires to return; giving as an additional reason for compassion that Isaac Freeman, another of the petitioner’s sons, had been murdered by hostile Western Indians in 1792 while attempting to negotiate a peace treaty under a flag of truce in the service of the United States; and accordingly requesting a pardon for Clarkson Freeman (Tr in DNA: RG 59, Petitions for Pardon; endorsed by George Taylor, Jr., and bearing his later notation that it was enclosed in an 18 Nov. 1795 letter from Ogden to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering). (8) Stephen Moylan to TJ, 19 Sep. 1793. (9) Christopher Gore to TJ, 21 Oct. 1793. (10) Tobias Lear to TJ, 1 Nov. 1793 (see note to TJ to Lear, 5 Nov. 1793).
Although TJ recorded the receipt of all of these enclosures in SJL under 4 Nov. 1793 and sent them to Washington a day later, they are listed in the President’s journal as having been received from and returned to TJ on the 4th, there being no entry for the following day (, 245).