Philada. Janry. 26. 1779
Sir
The inclosed Information is of singular Importance to you.1 I therefore forward it instantly Via Boston,2 and will add some further if the Post is not too quick for me.
Your most humble Servant,
James Lovell, for the Commtee for for. Affrs.
Receiver’s copy, Lee Family Papers, University of Virginia Library. Written and signed by James Lovell.
1 The information of "singular importance" is almost certainly the information transmitted by Virginia governor Patrick Henry and laid before Congress this day by the Virginia delegates alleging that Arthur Lee’s secretary, Rev. Hezekiah Ford, was "an enemy to the American cause of independence." JCC, 13:116. An extract of Henry’s letter to the Virginia delegates, dated 9 January 1779, is in the Lee Family Papers microfilm, University of Virginia Archives.
Governor Henry charged Ford, a former Anglican minister in Virginia, with sedition and counterfeiting American money in 1776 - 77 before fleeing to the British warship St. Albans. Long before Lovell’s "enclosed information" could reach France, Ford had left carrying dispatches for Congress from the American commissioners. Ford arrived in Virginia on 1 August 1779, and he was ordered to Williamsburg to answer the charges before the governor and council. In his own defence, Ford explained that he had been captured by the British while serving as a chaplain to a North Carolina regiment and taken to England, from where he made his way to Paris and ultimately became Arthur Lee’s private secretary. Whatever the truth of Ford’s story, he had not appeared in Philadelphia when James Lovell again wrote to Arthur Lee on 17 September 1779, and his trail thereafter disappears from view. See Wharton, Diplomatic Correspondence, 1:539 - 40; James Curtis Ballagh, The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, Volume 2, 1779 - 1794, 2:42, 112 - 13, 116, 119, 122, 145, 152, 157; Butterfield, Adams Diary, 2:364n.3, 366 - 67; Committee for Foreign Affairs to Arthur Lee, 29 January; and James Lovell to Arthur Lee, 17 September 1779.
2 Lovell enclosed this letter to Lee in the following brief letter this date to the Eastern Navy Board: "Your favor of Decr 30th demands my thanks. I beg you would be pleased to forward the enclosed to France by the first opportunity." PCC, item 79, fol. 246.