I have made acquaintance and connexion with a House, to whom I shall address in future all my despatches for you, and under cover to whom you may in safety address to me your letters, viz. Messrs Lalande & Fynge, merchants, Amsterdam. If you will send me regularly, by your vessels going to St Eustatia and Curaçoa, one at least of your best public papers to the address above pointed out, or in the packets of friends in France, I will make good use of it for your service in our periodical papers. They complain everywhere of knowing nothing of your affairs, but what the English wish Europe should know; and on this subject we have often to wait some months before the truth is unfolded from a heap of impostures, which do not fail sometimes to answer the malice of your enemies in leaving false impressions on minds, which I wish to be able to destroy in their birth.
I have the Honor to be, &c.
DUMAS.
TO THE COMMITTEE OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
August 22d, 1777.
Gentlemen,
In spite of my extreme circumspection, your enemies are not altogether without knowledge of me, and, not able to persecute me openly, are endeavoring secretly to deprive me of my post in this country. I sent an account yesterday to Paris, and today to a certain person at the Hague, of what has happened to me. I am sustained in all my losses by the firm resolution to live and die the faithful servant of United America, and by consequence, also, with the most profound respect for the honorable General Congress and yourselves. God bless your just arms.
September 5th.—It would be useless for me to give you copies of the last letters that I wrote to Paris. They chiefly concern myself; and I await their answers. I will say only in general here, that from the moment when I was first honored with your orders and your confidence, I have devoted to you in every event, my person, services, and fidelity; and this for the love I bear to your cause, and on the most perfect conviction of its justice. I have conducted myself in the execution of your orders with all imaginable prudence, circumspection, and patience. At last, however, I am the victim of the suspicions and implacable hatred of your enemies. They have found it an easy task to injure me indirectly in the sordid, ungrateful, and treacherous heart of a person on whom my fortune depended, and who is devoted to them. I should be ruined, with my family, if I had not firm confidence of receiving in your service the annual stipend allotted for their subsistence, of which I have been deprived. To this injustice they have added the insult of tempting me by deceitful offers, which I rejected with disdain, because I could not accept them without exposing your secrets, or at least degrading the character with which you have honored me, in the eyes of those who have knowledge of it. My refusal has exasperated them against me; they will secretly ruin me as far as they are able. But I have said enough of myself.
Your enemies have begun to take the Dutch vessels in Europe as well as in America; among others, one for St Eustatia. They are impatient at Amsterdam to know how the Regency will take this; and they write me that this circumstance will, probably, be the cause of the detention of vessels, bound for the Islands, two months in this port.
I have the honor to be, &c.