To amount of the drafts of General Lincoln, drawn at Charleston, in the month of March, 1780, on Samuel Huntington, President of Congress, to the order of M. de Francy, for the purchase of the cargo of the corvette the Zephyr, sold by Captain Mainville to the said General Lincoln, Commander of the Southern army of the United States, for the sum of two hundred and twentyfour thousand three hundred dollars, (this for memorandum,) for which two hundred and twentyfour thousand three hundred dollars I am yet to be credited, no return having been made to me.
Errors and omissions excepted.
CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS.
Paris, May 18th, 1782.
TO GEORGE WASHINGTON.
Office of Finance, June 4th, 1782.
Sir,
I have received your Excellency's letters of the 17th and 25th of May, with the enclosure. I am much obliged by the attention paid in your circular letter to the situation of my department. I am very sorry to inform you that it is really deplorable. I with difficulty am enabled to perform my engagements, and am absolutely precluded from forming any new ones. I have therefore been under the very disagreeable necessity of suffering the public service to stand still in more lines than one. I have been driven to the greatest shifts, and am at this moment unable to provide for the civil list.
I can easily suppose that military men should murmur to find the salaries of the civil list more punctually paid than their own. To enter into arguments on this occasion will be unnecessary, for I am persuaded that your Excellency must be of opinion with me, that unless the civil list is paid neither civil or military can exist at all.
I am well persuaded of your Excellency's desire to promote the success of those measures I have taken, because I am sure you are convinced that their tendency and my intentions are all directed to the public good. Indeed, my Dear Sir, you will hardly be able to form an adequate idea of the earnestness with which I desire to relieve you from the anxieties you must undergo. But when the several gazettes shall have announced the sums received for this year's service, and I am well convinced that the whole did not on the 1st of June amount to twenty thousand dollars; when it is recollected that our expenses at the rate of eight millions annually, are near twenty thousand dollars a day; and when it is known that the estimates on which the demand was founded do not include many essential branches, among which the Marine and Foreign Affairs are to be numbered; surely it cannot be a matter of surprise that the army are not paid; surely the blame is to fall on those from whose negligence the evil originates. But I will not give you the pain of hearing me repeat complaints, which you know to be but too well founded.
I pray you to believe, that I am, Sir, &c.
ROBERT MORRIS.