“ honour to write till this day, and cannot sufficiently express my acknowledgements for the offer you make me of occupying the place you mention, in your office.

"Having been for some time past engaged in endeavouring to establish a Weekly Gazette in Monmouth County, East Jersey, and having at present a prospect of succeeding in a tolerable subscription, I find myself under the necessity of declining the acceptance of your generous unsollicited proposal, in justice to my engagements with the people in the quarter of New Jersey above mentioned, and other patrons of my plan.”

On July 21, Jefferson wrote to Madison: “ . . . I am sincerely sorry that Freneau has declined coming here. tho’ the printing business be sufficiently full here, yet I think he would have set out on such advantageous ground as to have been sure of success. his own genius in the first place is so superior to that of his competitors. I should have given him the perusal of all my letters, of foreign intelligence & all foreign newspapers; the publication of all proclamations & other public notices within my department, & the printing of the laws, which added to his salary would have been a considerable aid; besides this, Fenno’s being the only weekly or half weekly paper, & under general condemnation for it’s toryism and it’s incessant efforts to overturn the government, Freneau would have found that ground as good as unoccupied . . . ”

On August 4, Freneau wrote to Jefferson: “So many difficulties occurred in regard to my removing from this city to Philadelphia and personally establishing the paper, the hint of which you, Sir, in conjunction with Mr. Madison were pleased to mention to me in May last, that I had determined in my own mind not to attempt it. However, upon recently talking over the matter with Mr. Madison and Col. Lee I have proposed a concern (which they have accepted) with Messieurs Childs and Swaine in a press at the seat of Government for the purpose above mentioned.

"I am now so far advanced on our plan as to have finished a copy of Proposals for the National Paper I have in view, and which upon my arrival at Philadelphia on Tuesday next I shall request the favour of you to glance your eye over, previous to its being printed.”

On August 16, Philip Freneau was appointed Clerk for foreign languages in the office of the Secretary of State, with a salary of two hundred & fifty dollars a year. His appointment, signed by Jefferson, is in the Jefferson Papers in the Library of Congress.

On November 20, in a letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jefferson wrote: “ I now inclose you, & shall continue to do so, Fenno’s & Freneau’s papers. the latter in two papers a week will contain at least as much good matter as Bache’s six papers a week, & will be a relief to the post. those I send you will enable our neighbors to judge whether Freneau is likely to answer their expectation. I have not given in Col ^o. Bell’s list of subscribers, because I do not know whether the post from Richm ^d. to Staunton is yet commenced. I observe that one fourth of the annual price is to be paid at the end of the first quarter, consequently they may as well send it on at once . . . ”

On March 13, 1792, Jefferson sent to Freneau a lsit of 11 persons in Charlottesville who have [ sic -- Ed. ] desired to receive his paper, and added: “ Th: J. will pay to m( ^~r ) Freneau the necessary advances as soon as he will be so good as to furnish him a note of them.”

On September 9, 1792, Jefferson to Washington a letter of 12 pages against Hamilton, who he said had in Fenno’s Gazette accused him of various things of which no. 3 was: “ setting up a paper to decry & slander the government. . . . that such an one [i.e., Hamilton] I say would have brought forward a charge against me for having appointed the poet Freneau translating clerk to my office, with a salary of 250. dollars a year. that fact stands thus. while the government was at New York I was applied to on behalf of Freneau to know if there was any place within my department to which he could be appointed. I answered there were but four clerkships, all of which I found full, ”