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.