The Virginia Gazette

To the inhabitants of the UNITED STATES of AMERICA.

FRIENDS and COUNTRYMEN,

The present situation of publick affairs demands your most serious attention, and particularly the great and increasing depreciation of your currency requires the immediate, strenuous, and united efforts of all true friends to their country, for preventing an extension of the mischiefs that have already flowed from that source.

America, without arms, ammunition, discipline, revenue, government, or ally, almost totally stripped of commerce, and in the weakness of youth, as it were with a staff and a sling only, dared "in the name of the Lord of Hosts" to engage a gigantick adversary, prepared at all points, boasting of his strength, and of whom even mighty warriors "were greatly afraid."

For defraying the expences of this uncommon war, your representatives in Congress were obliged to emit paper money; an expedient that you knew to have been before generally and successfully practised on this continent.

They were very sensible of the inconveniences with which too frequent emissions would be attended, and endeavoured to avoid them. For this purpose they established loan offices so early as in October, 1776, and have from that time to this repeatedly and earnestly solicited you to lend them money on the faith of the United States. The sums received on loan have nevertheless proved inadequate to the publick exigencies.

Our enemies prosecuting the war by sea and land with implacable fury and with some success, taxation at home and borrowing abroad, in the midst of difficulties and dangers, were alike impracticable. Hence the continued necessity of new emissions.

But to this cause alone we do not impute the evil before mentioned. We have too much reason to believe it has been in part owing to the artifices of men who have hastened to enrich themselves by monopolizing the necessaries of life, and to the misconduct of inferiour officers employed in the publick service.

The variety and importance of the business intrusted to your delegates, and their constant attendance in Congress, necessarily disables them from investigating disorders of this kind. Justly apprehensive of them they by their several resolutions of the 22d of November and 20th of December, 1777, and of the 3d and 9th of February, 1778, recommended to the legislative and executive powers of these states a due attention to these interesting affairs. How far those recommendations have been complied with we will not undertake to determine; but we hold ourselves bound in duty to you to declare, that we are not convinced there has been as much diligence used in detecting and reforming abuses as there has been in committing or complaining of them.

With regard to monopolizers it is our opinion, that taxes judiciously laid on such articles as become the objects of engrossers, and those frequently collected, would operate against the pernicious tendency of such practices.

As to inferiour officers employed in the publick service, we anxiously desire to call your most vigilant attention to their conduct with respect to every species of misbehaviour, whether proceeding from ignorance, negligence, or fraud, and to the making of laws for inflicting exemplary punishments on all offenders of this kind.

We are sorry to hear that some persons are so slightly informed of their own interests as to suppose that it is advantageous to themselves to sell the produce of their farms at enormous prices, when a little reflection might convince them that it is injurious to those interests and the general welfare. If they expect thereby to purchase imported goods cheaper, they will be egregiously disappointed; for the merchants, who know they cannot obtain returns in gold, silver, or bills of exchange, but that their vessels, if loaded here at all, must be loaded with produce, will raise the price of what they have to sell, in proportion to the price of what they have to buy; and consequently the land holder can purchase no more foreign goods for the same quantity of his produce than he could before.

The evil, however, does not stop at this point: The land holder by acting on this mistaken calculation is only labouring to accumulate an immense debt by encreasing the publick expences, for the payment of which his estate is engaged, and to embarrass every measure adopted for vindicating his liberty and securing his prosperity.

As the harvests of this year, which by the divine goodness promise to be plentiful, will soon be gathered, and some new measures relating to your foreign concerns, with some arrangements relating to your domestick, are now under consideration, from which beneficial effects are expected, we entertain hopes that your affairs will acquire a much greater degree of regularity and energy than they have hitherto had.

But we should be highly criminal if we did not plainly tell you that those hopes are not founded wholly upon our own proceedings. These must be supported by your virtue, your wisdom, and your diligence. From the advantage of those seats in the national council with which you have honoured us, we have a pleasing prospect of many blessings approaching this our native land. It is your patriotism must introduce and fix them here.

In vain will it be for your delegates to form plans of oeconomy; to strive to stop a continuation of emissions by taxation or loan, if you do not zealously cooperate with them in promoting their designs, and use your utmost industry to prevent the waste of money in the expenditure, which your respective situations in the several places where it is expended, may enable you to do. A discharge of this duty and a compliance with recommendations for supplying money, might enable Congress to give speedy assurances to the publick that no more emissions shall take place, and thereby close that source of depreciation.

Your governments being now established, and your ability to contend with your invaders ascertained, we have on the most mature deliberation judged it indispensably necessary to call upon you for forty five millions of dollars, in addition to the fifteen millions required by a resolution of Congress of the 2d of January last, to be paid into the continental treasury before the 1st day of January next, in the same proportion, as to the quotas of the several states, with that for the said fifteen millions.

It appeared proper to us to fix the first day of next January for the payment of the whole; but as it is probable that some states, if not all, will raise part of the sums by instalments or otherwise before that time, we recommend in the strongest manner the paying as much as can be collected as soon as possible into the continental treasury.

Though it is manifest that moderate taxation in times of peace will recover the credit of your currency, yet the encouragement which your enemies derive from its depreciation, and the present exigencies demand great and speedy exertions.

We are persuaded you will use all possible care to make the promotion of the general welfare interfere as little as may be with the ease and comfort of individuals; but though the raising these sums should press heavily on some of our constituents, yet the obligations we feel to your venerable clergy, the truly helpless, widows and orphans, your most gallant, generous, meritorious officers and soldiers, the publick faith and the common weal, so irresistibly urge us to attempt the appreciation of your currency, that we cannot withhold obedience to those authoritative sensations.

On this subject we will only add, that as the rules of justice are most pleasing to our infinitely good and gracious Creator, and an adherence to them most likely to obtain his favour, so they will ever be found to be the best and safest maxims of human policy.

To our constituents we submit the propriety and purity of our intentions, well knowing they will not forget, that we lay no burthens upon them, but those in which we participate with them; a happy sympathy that pervades societies formed on the basis of equal liberty. Many cares, many labours, and may we not add, reproaches, are peculiar to us. These are the emoluments of our unsolicited stations; and with these we are content, if you approve our conduct. If you do not, we shall return to our private condition with no other regret, than that which will arise from our not having served you as acceptably and essentially as we wished and strove to do, though as cheerfully and faithfully as we could.

Think not we despair of the commonwealth, or endeavour to shrink from opposing difficulties? No! Your cause is too good, your objects too sacred, to be relinquished. We tell you truths, because you are freemen who can bear to hear them and may profit by them; and when they reach your enemies, we fear not the consequences, because we are not ignorant of their resources or our own. Let your good sense decide upon the comparison. Let even their prejudiced understandings decide upon it, and you need not be apprehensive of the determination.

Whatever supposed advantages from plans of rapine, projects of blood, or dreams of domination, may heretofore have amused their inflamed fancies, the conduct of one Monarch, the friend and protector of the rights of mankind, has turned the scale so much against them, that their visionary schemes vanish as the unwholesome vapours of night before the healthful influences of the sun.

An alliance has been formed between his Most Christian Majesty and these States, on the basis of the most perfect equality, for the direct end of maintaining effectually their liberty, sovereignty and independence, absolute and unlimited, as well in matters of government as of commerce.

The conduct of our good and great ally towards us in this instance and others, has so fully manifested his sincerity and kindness, as to excite on our part correspondent sentiments of confidence and affection. Observing the interests of his kingdom, to which duty and inclination prompted his attention, to be connected with those of America, and the combination of both clearly to coincide with the beneficent designs of the Author of Nature, who unquestionably intended men to partake of certain rights and portions of happiness, his Majesty perceived the attainment of these views to be founded on the single proposition of a separation between America and Great Britain.

The consternation and confusion of your enemies will point out to you the ideas you should entertain of the magnanimity and consummate wisdom of his Most Christian Majesty on this occasion.

They perceive, that selecting this grand and just idea from all those specious ones that might have confused or misled inferiour judgments of virtue, and satisfied with the advantages which must result from that event alone, he has cemented the harmony between himself and these states, not only by establishing a reciprocity of benefits, but by eradicating every cause of jealousy and suspicion. They also perceive with similar emotions, that the moderation of our ally, in not desiring an acquisition of dominion on this continent, or an exclusion of other nations from a share of its commercial advantages, so useful to them, has given no alarm to those nations, but in fact has interested them in the accomplishment of his generous undertaking to dissolve the monopoly thereof by Great Britain, which has already contributed to elevate her to her present
power and haughtiness, and threatened if continued to raise both to a height insupportable to the rest of Europe. In short, their own best informed statesmen and writers confess, that your cause is exceedingly favoured by courts and people in that quarter of the world, while that of your adversaries is equally reprobated; and from thence draw ominous and well grounded conclusions, that the final event must prove unfortunate to the latter. Indeed, we have the best reason to believe that we shall soon form other alliances, and on principles honourable and beneficial to these states. Infatuated as your enemies have been from the beginning of this contest, do you imagine they can now flatter themselves with a hope of conquering you, unless you are false to yourselves? When unprepared, undisciplined, and unsupported, you opposed their fleets and armies in full conjoined force, then, if at any time, was conquest to be apprehended. Yet what progress towards it have their violent and incessant efforts made? Judge from their own conduct. Having devoted you to bondage, and after vainly wasting their blood and treasure in the dishonourable enterprise, they deigned at length to offer terms of accommodation with respectful addresses to that once despised body the Congress, whose humble supplications only for peace, liberty, and safety, they had contemptuously rejected, under pretence of its being an unconstitutional assembly. Nay more; desirous of seducing you into a deviation from the paths of rectitude, from which they had so far and so rapidly wandered, they made most precious offers to tempt you into a violation of your faith given to your illustrious ally. Their arts were as unavailing as their arms. Foiled again, and stung with rage, embittered by envy, they had no alternative, but to renounce the inglorious and ruinous controversy, or to resume their former modes of prosecuting it. They chose the latter. Again the savages are stimulated to horrid massacres of women and children, and domestics to the murder of their masters. Again our brave and unhappy brethren are doomed to miserable deaths in jails and prison-ships. To complete the sanguinary system, all the extremities of war are by authority denounced against you. Piously endeavour to derive this consolation from their remorseless fury, that the Father of Mercies looks down with disapprobation on such audacious defiances of his holy laws; and be further comforted with recollecting, that the arms assumed by you in your righteous cause, have not been used by any unjustifiable severities. Your enemies despairing however, as it seems, of the success of their united forces against our main army, have divided them, as if their design was to harass you by predatory, desultory operations. If you are assiduous in improving opportunities, Saratoga may not be the only spot on this continent to give a new denomination to the baffled troops of a nation impiously priding herself in notions of her omnipotence. Rouse yourselves therefore, that this campaign may finish the great work you have so nobly carried on for several years past. What nation ever engaged in such a contest under such a complication of disadvantages, so soon surmounted many of them; and in so short a period of time had so certain a prospect of a speedy and happy conclusion. We will venture to pronounce that so remarkable an instance exists not in the annals of mankind. We well remember what you said at the commencement of this war. You saw the immense difference between your circumstances and those of your enemies, and you knew the quarrel must decide on no less than your lives, liberties and estates. All these you greatly put to every hazard, resolving rather to die freemen than to live slaves; and justice will oblige the impartial world to confess you have uniformly acted on the same generous principle. Consider how much you have done, and how comparatively little remains to be done to crown you with success. Persevere, and you ensure peace, freedom, safety, glory, sovereignty, and felicity to yourselves, your children, and your children's children. Encouraged by favours already received from infinite goodness, gratefully acknowledging them, earnestly imploring their continuance, constantly endeavouring to draw them down on your heads by an amendment of your lives and a conformity to the divine will, humbly confiding in the protection so often and wonderfully experienced, vigorously employ the means placed by Providence in your hands, for completing your labours. Fill up your battalions, be prepared in every part to repel the incursions of your enemies; place your several quotas in the continental treasury; lend money for public uses; sink the emissions of your respective states; provide effectually for expediting the conveyance of supplies for your armies and fleets, and for your allies; prevent the produce of the country from being monopolized; effectually superintend the behaviour of public officers; diligently promote piety, virtue, brotherly love, learning, frugality and moderation; and may you be approved before Almighty God worthy of those blessings we devoutly wish you to enjoy.

Done in Congress by unanimous consent, this 26th day of May, 1779.

JOHN JAY, President.

Attest. CHARLES THOMSON, Secretary.