Autograph letter, signed. 4 pp including integral stampless address leaf.
To his brother William B. Clymer, Morris-Ville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, via Le Havre and New York: Written by the Naval Surgeon aboard the USS Constitution, eight years after the legendary warship was poetically immortalized by Oliver Wendell Homes, this letter offers an uncommon defense of controversial Commodore Jesse Elliott (1782-1845) who chose the Constitution as his flagship while commander of the Mediterranean Squadron. Elliott was subsequently court-martialed for filling the ship's hold with antiquities (like an Egyptian Mummy) and cluttering her gun deck with horses, mules and hogs. Dr. Clymer, socially-prominent grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, did not share the hostility of the junior officers who had brought the charges against Elliott, and, in this long letter, elaborates on the real source of Elliott’s disfavor - the petty enmity of General Lewis Cass, Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War, newly appointed US ambassador to France, later Secretary of State and a leading presidential contender. When the General had come aboard for an official diplomatic voyage to Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Elliott had gone out of his way to accommodate him, his wife, son, three daughters and six attaches and servants. But Cass had later left the ship in a huff, writing what Clymer calls “a tissue of falsehoods…destroying his character for veracity and independence…” As none of Clymer’s frank account of Cass (“pretty much of a humbug”) and his extravagant, social-climbing daughters (a “poor sample” of American womanhood) appear in histories of the USS Constitution, and even differ sharply from Elliott’s own later defense of his reputation, they are a significant anecdotal contribution to the Naval history of “Old Ironsides”. (Full text of the letter available on request).