Sep 17, 2015 - Sale 2391

Sale 2391 - Lot 25

Price Realized: $ 6,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
"AN ASSYLEM FOR THE DISTRESSED, AFFLICTED AND PERSECUTED" (AMERICAN REVOLUTION--PRELUDE.) Cary, Richard. Letter discussing military preparations, high hopes, and American-grown tea. Autograph Letter Signed to Samuel Purviance, Junior, chairman of the Committee of Observation in Baltimore. 2 pages, 12 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches, plus integral blank docketed on verso; short separations at folds with three early tape repairs. With typed transcript. (MRS) Charlestown, MA, 3 March 1775

Additional Details

Richard Cary (1746-1806) was a Massachusetts native and Harvard graduate who had settled in Maryland for business, but returned shortly before the outbreak of hostilities. He would soon serve as lieutenant colonel and aide-de-camp to George Washington. This letter reflects on the coming conflict: "The New England colonies are alarmed, & are now exerting their most vigorous endeavors to support their liberties & constitution at all events. It looks by the preparations makeing on both sides as if a distressing scene will open in the course of the summer. If America should succeed in this noble struggle, what reputation would she acquire, how glorious to have her become an assylem for the distressed, afflicted and persecuted. God grant it may the happy case, that civill & religious liberty may ever be maintain'd & flourish in this our land."
On a more practical and immediate note, Cary adds in a postscript that "provisions & military stores" are being accumulated at Worcester, where "it's probable an Army of Observation will be form'd this spring." Efforts to retrieve cannons from Salem have failed, but "our people behaved with so much spirit & resolution in the affair as must convince all persons they will fight."
Cary also discusses the efforts of Americans to grow their own tea, as a way of avoiding the heavily taxed British imports. The first crop of American-grown tea had been harvested in Georgia in 1772. Purviance had sent him some of this tea in a recent letter. Cary comments: "I dined lately at Doctor Cooper's . . . when the American tea was bo't forward and examined. It was judged sumthing further was necessary to be done to bring people this way to a likeing of it. They think it somehow taste herby."