Good-by "Charle": The Lee-Adams Interest and The Political Demise of Charles Thomson, Secretary of Congress, 1774-1789
Interest and The Political 'Demise of Charles Thomson, Secretary of Congress; 1774-1789 WHEN death finally rescued Charles Thomson from senility, almost fifty years to the day after the meeting of the First Continental Congress, we lost forever the intimate knowledge of the scholar who had been "the graphic faculty of the old Congress, the hand and pen of that body" during its fifteen-year life. Even before the definitive treaty of peace between the United States of America and Great Britain had been signed, John Jay urged Thomson to devote at least one hour of each four and twenty to a political history of the Revolution. It "will be most liable to misrepresentation, and future relations of it will probably be replete with both intentional and accidental errors. Such a work would be highly advantageous to your reputation, as well as highly important to the Cause of Truth with posterity." By 1785, Thomson had prepared more than a 1,000 pages based on everything omitted from the Journals; as John Adams and other students of the Revolution have complained, that included much of the business as well as the politics of Congress. But sometime after 1789 Thomson destroyed his history and the appeals of historians who promised to stress his role in exchange for what he knew elicited only brief, unrevealing replies. Why the reticence? "I 1 Part of the research for this article was conducted with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Charles A. Beard, ed., The Journal of William Maclay (New York, 1927), entry for July 13, 1789; Jay to Thomson, July 19, 1783, New-York Historical Society Collections for the Year 1878 (New York, 1879), hereinafter cited as NYHSC, 175; Marbois to Vergennes, Feb. 25, 1785, George Bancroft, History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America (New York, 1882), I, 414; David Ramsay to Thomson, Sept. 20, 1809, James P. Wilson to Thomson, Mar. 1, 1813, Thomson Papers, Library of Congress, hereinafter DLC.