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To Thomas Morris, New York: “I shall be much obliged by an opportunity of perusing the public letters of your father, Mr. R. Morris, while Superintendent of Finance. Their connexion with the fortunes of the War and the eventual prosperity of the country, is both more intimate and more extended than is generally known. His contemporaries alone can truly estimate them and as one of those, I shall have great pleasure in reading them. The steam boats land a mail at Upper Red Hook Landing, where the book may be safely left…” During the Revolutionary War, Armstrong was aide-de-camp to several of Washington’s commanders, while his father, a Major General of the Continental Army, played an important part in several key battles of the War. Robert Morris, meanwhile, a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, was the powerful Superintendent of Finance of the United States, responsible not only for financing the War, but for managing the entire economy of the struggling new nation. After the War, he fell on hard times, imprudent speculation in millions of acres of land driving him to bankruptcy and three years in a debtor’s prison before his death in 1806. Armstrong had good reason to sympathize with Morris’ fall from grace: During the War of 1812, while serving as President Madison’s Secretary of War, Armstrong left Washington, D.C. undefended and was blamed for the capture and burning of the Capitol by the British invaders. Like Morris, he learned that the democratic public, after shouting its last hurrah, could be fickle and unforgiving. It’s uncertain to what Morris “book” Armstrong refers in this letter. Thomas Morris inherited his father’s voluminous official letter-books and other papers, and in 1830, loaned these manuscripts to historian Jared Sparks to use in a book about Revolutionary diplomacy - but the full text of the Morris correspondence was not published until the 1970s.