Report of the Secretary of State, On the Subject of the Cod and Whale Fisheries,
in Gazette of the United States, Vol. III, Nos. 2 - 14, 17 - 19 (Whole Nos. 210 - 222, 225 - 227).
Philadelphia: John Fenno, May 4 - June 15, June 25 - July 2, 1791.
Large Post folio, overall 16-1/2 x 10-1/4 in. (41.8 x 26 cm), the pages 16-1/4 x 10 in. (41.2 x 25.5 cm). Sixteen issues of the Gazette sewn together at an early date, constituting the first publicly disseminated issue of the Report. Later quarter brown morocco over gold, green and black Spanish moiré pattern marbled paper boards continued onto endpapers, gilt title on spine, black morocco title piece with gilt title and rules on front cover, all edges cut. Printed on thin laid paper. Collates [2 ll.], 16 ff. ( 16 four-page bifoliums, each a separate number of the Gazette, with running pagination upper center pp. 5 – 56, 65 – 76), [2 ll.] (this compilation skipped Whole Nos. 223 and 224). Very good, inconspicuous edgewear bottom edges of boards, slight scuffing on cover papers, the text paper uniformly slightly toned with occasional negligible nicks and stains, inked figures (apparently, pounds, shillings and pence) in marginal gutter of p. 23; overall in an extraordinarily good state of preservation.
The Report was presented to the House of Representatives on February 4, 1791 and was printed for the House by Francis Childs and John Swaine as a 28-page folio issue. It was communicated by message from the House to the Senate, which ordered 200 copies to be printed, embodied in John Fenno’s 34-page folio issue. (See, respectively, Charles Evans, American Bibliography, 1914, vol. 8, p. 226, nos. 23911 and 23912.) Fenno’s subsequent compilation in sixteen issues of his Gazette commencing May 4, 1791 presents the entire main body of the Report in Whole Nos. 210 - 215 and annexes I – XI in Whole Nos. 216 - 222 (omitting, however, annexes IX and X, which were not printed in the Gazette) and concludes with annexes XII – XVIII in Whole Nos. 225 – 227. A comparison with the manuscript Report in the Library of Congress reveals that the Gazette’s annex XI is numbered No. 9 in the manuscript, and that the Gazette omits manuscript annexes Nos. 10 and 11, comprising extracts in English of French Acts of the King’s Council of State at Versailles, 28th September 1788 and December 7th, 1788, prohibiting importation into the French Kingdom of foreign whale and spermaceti oil but subsequently exempting products of the United States fisheries.
B. L. Rayner, in his magisterial Life of Thomas Jefferson (Boston, 1834), judges (p. 275): “The report of the secretary of State on the cod and whale Fisheries of the United States, is one of those ancient State papers which, unlike the innumerable multitude that perish with the occasion, seem destined to be perpetual. [...] This sound and energetic report was submitted to Congress on the 4th of February, 1791. It was accepted, published, and applauded by the great majority of the people. The policy so urgently recommended by Mr Jefferson, was adopted; and its utility was soon demonstrated by the restoration to the United States, upon a prosperous and permanent footing, of one of their most important branches of domestic and maritime industry.” This compilation in the Gazette, itself a rare survival, is the first wider publication of the Report, three months after its presentation to the Congress and the now excessively rare printings for the House and the Senate. Fenno’s ostensibly Federalist-Hamiltonian Gazette had lost its patronage printing of the official documents of the fledging United States “By Authority” in September, 1790 after incurring Jefferson’s displeasure at its running publication of John Adams’s Discourses on Davila. To repair his standing with Jefferson, Fenno suspended the Davila series that December, and in January the Gazette evidenced a shifting political tone which must have facilitated the Senate’s commissioning Fenno to print Jefferson’s Report. See Marcus Daniel, Scandal & Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) at pp. 48-51, 306-7, nn. 92-3. Indeed, following the first installment of the Report in Whole No. 210 is the publication once again “By Authority” of the official translation of a decree of the French National Assembly and proclamation of the French King transmitted to Jefferson as Secretary of State.
The grand history of the Report comprises, nevertheless, but a small portion of these sixteen issues of the Gazette. They begin with a “Discourse of Stephen Boetius” (having a distinctly libertarian, thus anti-Davilan ring), end with a Notice of the Treasury Department soliciting proposals for provisioning rations to the troops at posts extending to the Ohio river frontiers and include, inter alia, news (e.g., the “New Constitution of France, accepted by the King, and ratified by the People, July 14, 1790” at p. 38), editorializing (much for the expansion of commerce), advertising (for the sale of antiquarian libraries as well as public and private securities and lottery schemes) and literature, anti-literature and arch anecdotes. Thus, this run of the Gazette provides a broad civic, political, commercial and cultural view of the infant United States in the spring of 1791.
Provenance:
Paul Bentalon (1755-1826) (name in ink on upper left of first pages of Whole
Nos. 210 – 221, occasionally shaved in part), who as Captain (later
Colonel) in the Continental Army attended the mortally wounded Count Pulaski
at the siege of Savannah and then assumed command of his troops; later Marshall
in the United States District Court for Maryland.
Reference:
Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Papers Series 1, General Correspondence.
1651-1827, Thomas Jefferson to House of Representatives, February 1, 1791,
Response to Report on Cod and Whale Fisheries, with Draft Copy (the
manuscript Report, scanned at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/).
Johnston, Richard Holland, A Contribution to a Bibliography of Thomas
Jefferson (Washington: Library of Congress, 1905), p. 12 (Fenno’s
Senate publication).
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