?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
SIGNER FROM PENNSYLVANIA RUSH, BENJAMIN. Autograph Letter Signed, "Benj'n Rush," to James McHenry in Baltimore, congratulating him upon his departure from the Adams cabinet. 2 pages, folio, with integral address leaf; small seal hole on blank, minor soiling. Philadelphia, 12 August 1800
eloquent retirement wishes for his protégé. Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, physician, and founding father. Here, he writes to his medical protégé James McHenry, who had recently been terminated as Secretary of War by President Adams due to a political dispute. Rush tries to put a positive spin on the affair: 'Permit me to congratulate you upon your recovering your freedom & independence by retiring to public life. Public measures & public men appear very differently to persons who see them at a distance, from what they appear to persons who are actors in, or under them. . . . While children dispute, and fight about their gingerbread and meats, and party men about posts of honor, the pleasure of one evening's successful investigation of a moral or physical truth, or an hour spent in literary or philosophical society, will more than outweigh all that ambition ever conferred upon her votaries. You convey into retirement the love and esteem of all good men. To me you have ever been very dear.' Rush also sends a Philadelphia man named Harrison who has failed in business, and asks for help getting the unfortunate man established in Baltimore. Provenance: McHenry's son John McHenry (1792-1822); grandson James Howard McHenry (1820-1888); Parke-Bernet sale of the James McHenry Papers, 3 May 1944, lot 177.
