The May 17, 2019, edition of the Providence Journal contained the following:
A letter written by Alexander Hamilton in 1780 to the Marquis de Lafayette that was stolen from the Massachusetts state archives decades ago has been found, and now an effort is underway to return it. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston on Wednesday filed a forfeiture complaint in federal court asking a judge to order the Revolutionary War-era letter returned to its rightful owner. Hamilton’s letter was stolen by an archives employee sometime between 1937 and 1945, according to the government. “The theft, which also involved original papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere and Benedict Arnold, among others, was not discovered for several years,” the federal complaint said. The stolen items were sold to dealers in rare documents and books throughout the United States. The employee was eventually arrested in 1950.
Most of the other documents were recovered, but Hamilton’s letter, which opens, “My Dear Marquis,” remained missing. The letter to the French aristocrat who served as a general in the Continental Army appears to detail the movements of British forces. “We have just received advice from New York through different channels that the enemy are making an embarkation with which they menace the French fleet and army,” Hamilton wrote to Lafayette while he was based in Rhode Island. “Fifty transports are said to have gone up the Sound to take in troops and proceed directly to Rhode Island.” It’s signed “Yr. Most Obedt, A. Hamilton, Aide de Camp.”
According to Small State Big History, a website run by historian Christian McBurney, British commander Sir Henry Clinton had planned a surprise attack on Newport, where a French fleet had recently arrived, with the hopes that a crushing victory might take France out of the war. The attack was eventually called off as the French hurried to fortify defenses.
The letter from the Founding Father and first secretary of the Treasury resurfaced in November when an auction house in Alexandria, Virginia, received it from a South Carolina family that wanted to sell it. The letter had been in the possession of a relative who died. The U.S. Attorney thinks that person purchased it in the 1940s from a rare book and document dealer in Syracuse, New York.
I highlighted this letter in my 'Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island' book. This letter was the result of intelligence obtained by the famous Culper Spy Ring that operated on Long Island and was the subject of the TURN! cable television series. The intelligence warned of an imminent attack on Newport to dislodge the newly-arrived French army and perhaps drive the French out of the war. I discovered, however, despite the claims of other historians, that the letter was not the first warning Lafayette and Rochambeau received about the planned attack. It was not even the second one.
- Christian
McBurney
