McHENRY TO HAMILTON.
Princeton, October 22, 1783.
Dear Hamilton:
The homilies you delivered in Congress are still recollected with pleasure. The impressions they made are in favor of your integrity; and no one but believes you a man of honor and republican principles. Were you ten years older and twenty thousand pounds richer, there is no doubt but that you might obtain the suffrages of Congress for the highest office in their gift. You are supposed to possess various knowledge, useful, substantial, and ornamental. Your very grave and your cautious, your men who measure others by the standard of their own creeping politics, think you sometimes intemperate, but seldom visionary: and that were you to pursue your object with as much cold perseverance as you do with ardor and argument, you would become irresistible. In a word, if you could submit to spend a whole life in dissecting a fly, you would be, in their opinion, one of the greatest men in the world. Bold designs; measures calculated for their rapid execution; a wisdom that would convince from its own weight; a project that would surprise the people into greater happiness, without giving them an opportunity to view it and reject it; are not adapted to a council composed of discordant elements, or a people who have thirteen heads, each of which pay superstitious adorations to inferior divinities.
I have been deterred, from day to day, from sending you the extract you desire, by a proclamation on the subject, which I expected would have passed. It is still in dubio. I have reported on Fleury’s case, on the principle you recommend. I fear his half-pay will not be granted.
Congress, some time ago, determined to fix their Federal town on the Delaware, near Trenton. Yesterday they determined to erect a second Federal town on the Potomac, near Georgetown; and to reside equal periods (not exceeding one year) at Annapolis and Trenton, till the buildings are completed. We adjourn the twelfth of next month, to meet at Annapolis the twenty-sixth.
Adieu, my dear friend; and in the days of your happiness drop a line to yours.
James McHenry.
P.S. Our exemplification of the Treaty has passed, and will be transmitted to the State officially.
J. McH.
To the Hon. Alexander Hamilton, Esq.