George Washington Letter Found in Scrapbook

By KAREEM FAHIM

UNION, N.J., April 26 — The letter from George Washington is pasted between poetry and party invitations, stuffed into a dusty scrapbook amid jokes and cutouts of handsome men, and all the highlights of a lucky little girl’s life.

It was written in May 1787 and addressed to Jacob Morris, grandfather of Julia Kean, the precocious 10-year-old who started the brown leather scrapbook in 1826 and put the letter under a portrait of the nation’s first president.

The letter is just 111 words long, a scant two paragraphs, but it mentions a rival of Washington, Horatio Gates, and includes enough hints of intrigue to whet the appetite of scholars. They learned of the letter’s discovery only recently, after it was found among the private papers of one of New Jersey’s most prominent families.

“The happiness of this Country depend much upon the deliberations of the federal Convention which is now sitting,� reads the second paragraph of the quill-and-ink letter. “It, however, can only lay the foundation — the community at large must raise the edifice.�

Washington was writing from Philadelphia, where the Constitutional Convention was under way. It was two years before he became president.

His correspondence was wide and frequent, but discoveries of his letters, especially those in which he says something notable, are somewhat rare, scholars and archivists say. It is rarer still to find such a letter in so unusual a place as a child’s scrapbook. (The last discovery of a Washington letter previously unknown to scholars was about two years ago; the owner said it had been hanging on a friend’s wall.)

Finding the letter in such a place “I think is unique,� said Theodore J. Crackel, the editor in chief of The Papers of George Washington, a project to collect copies of all of his correspondence. The comment about the Constitutional Convention “is Washington at his best,� he said.

Julia’s letter was bequeathed to Kean University this spring with the rest of the contents of Liberty Hall, a 50-room Italianate mansion that was home to generations of Keans and is near the campus here.

The scrapbook was found among turtleback trunks and packed bookshelves; an icehouse full of documents are yet to be read. “It gives me goose bumps,� said the university president, Dawood Farahi. “I believe it is one of the last great undiscovered collections of Revolutionary America.�

Mark Lender, the chairman of Kean’s history department, has already set about trying to solve the first of the letter’s mysteries, Washington’s reference to forwarding written “enclosures� to Gates. “They were not on good terms at all,� Mr. Lender said.

The convention “was of monumental importance to the history of the new republic,� Mr. Lender said. “I don’t think you have to read between the lines to see that his position was sympathetic to the strong, nationalist implications of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.�

The scrapbook and the letter, taken together — in fact, they are firmly stuck together, thanks to Julia — provide a glimpse of the era’s great men and the families that moved in their orbits.

Julia also saved a letter from Thomas Jefferson to her step-grandfather, a Polish count who was traveling back to Poland to help Napoleon in a military campaign. She also included invitations to balls celebrating the end of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.

There are scrapbook pages spread with playing cards and clippings of miscellaneous items from newspapers, marbled pages and others festooned with mementos from holidays and glimpses of the fashions of the time.

The 10th page is reserved for George. The letter paper was too long to fit, especially under the large portrait, so Julia cut a strip off the top and plastered it vertically on the page, next to the letter’s envelope.

Written on acid-free linen paper, and hidden from the light, the letter is faded but well preserved. No one has yet settled the question of whether to remove it from the book, which would certainly increase its commercial value. For now, the few historians who have seen it are preoccupied with its other attributes, particularly the reference to enclosures for Gates.

In 1777, Gates was widely credited with the victory in the Battle of Saratoga, at a time when General Washington was struggling on the battlefield, and there was a call for Washington to be removed as commander in chief. Congress even considered the change, but the matter was dropped after Washington caught wind of correspondence in which Gates criticized him as a weak general.

There are letters between the two men during the war, but they are not especially friendly, Mr. Crackel said, adding, “It would be very interesting to know what he sent to Gates.�

So, however brief Julia’s letter, it is significant because it alerts scholars to the existence of other letters, pieces of puzzles that may be in other collections, or have still not been collected. Washington’s letter to Morris was a reply; where is the first letter? Was that a reply?

The man sorting through the thousands of documents in the Kean family collection is Ken Summers, who used to work in insurance. He found Julia’s binder in the vault that sits next to his office.

“I saw the Washington picture, but I don’t think the first time I went through it I realized it was a letter from him,� Mr. Summers said. He noticed the letter about a year ago, but for various reasons “the family wasn’t ready to go prime time with it.�

It was only in recent weeks, after the collection was given to Kean University, that outsiders were notified about the letter. One of those is Terry Golway, who is curating the Liberty Hall collection for the university. (Mr. Golway writes occasionally for The New York Times.)

Julia Kean remains something of a mystery. She painted, and she took her vacations in Ballston Spa, N.Y. Along with the remarkable letters, the scrapbook hints of bookishness: it is lined with newspaper articles and passages from Shakespeare, Wordsworth and others. At 20, she married Hamilton Fish, a lawyer who became secretary of state.

Her descendant, John Kean, Julia’s great-great-nephew and a first cousin of former Gov. Thomas H. Kean, was responsible for handing her scrapbook and the rest of Liberty Hall over to the university.

“It was a little difficult,� he recalled. The deal was signed two weeks ago, and Mr. Kean said he hoped it will help interest a new generation in the Revolutionary era.

“She was an amazing young lady,� he said of Julia Kean. “The heroine of the day.�

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/nyregion/27george.html?em&ex=1177819200&en=b7065a62ed6c124e&ei=5087%0A