UNION, N.J. – A letter George Washington wrote more than two centuries ago has been found in a child’s scrapbook, and it presents historians with some fresh mysteries into his efforts to found a new nation.
The 111-word letter was sent in May 1787 to Jacob Morris. Morris’ 10-year-old granddaughter, Julia Kean, pasted it into a scrapbook about four decades later below a portrait of Washington.
Washington wrote it two years before he became America’s first president from Philadelphia, where he was attending the Constitutional Convention.
“The happiness of this Country depend much upon the deliberations of the federal Convention which is now sitting,” it reads. “It, however, can only lay the foundation – the community at large must raise the edifice.”
Washington also refers to sending written enclosures to Horatio Gates, a fellow Revolutionary War general who had been critical of Washington’s military performance.
“They were not on good terms at all,” Kean University history department chairman Mark Lender told The New York Times, which reported on the letter in Friday’s editions. He is examining why Washington and Gates were communicating.
The scrapbook was given to Kean University this spring along with the other contents of Liberty Hall, a 50-room mansion near the campus where members of the Kean family had lived since 1811. It is now a museum.
The gift was made by Julia’s great-great-nephew, John Kean, a first cousin of Thomas H. Kean, who served as New Jersey governor from 1982 through 1990.
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