Thomas Jefferson Free Frank as President, From a Letter to the First Winemaker in the United States

According to “The History of Wine in America”, Peter Legaux and his Pennsylvania Wine Company carried out the “first notable post revolutionary attempt to establish a successful viticulture”, thus being the first serious attempt to grow grapes for wine in the United States. In 1785, Legaux arrived in the United States with grape vines from France with the avowed intention of creating a wine industry in America. He set up quarters in Spring Mill, near Philadelphia. There he established a vineyard, and sought the assistance of the State Legislature in an effort to establish the wine industry in Pennsylvania. In 1789, only two years after he set out his first vines, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society, a badge of unquestioned acceptance in the City of Brotherly Love. The experiment that he was making in vine growing at once aroused hopeful curiosity, and was the object of much attention. George Washington and other notables are known to have journeyed the thirteen miles from the city to see the promising new vineyard.

Legaux was passionate and left no opportunity untried to attract investors for his project. On March 4, 1801, the day of Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, he wrote Jefferson to congratulate him on his election, saying: “The moment of the birth of the arts, the regeneration of liberty in America, and the encouragement of its agriculture, urged for so long a time, has finally arrived this day; I rejoice boundlessly in it, as do those regions that were awaiting it with infinite impatience. The fear of wounding one of the slightest qualities of the philosopher who is going to accomplish these happy forecasts, his natural modesty, I mean, imposes limits to what I could and would wish to say besides, but it can set none to the most respectful sentiments with which I have the honor to be perfectly.” He also, in that letter, offered to send Jefferson some thousands of vines from Legaux’s nursery so that they might be tried in Virginia.

Jefferson politely declined in a letter dated March 24, 1801 and mailed about a week later, thanking Legaux “for the kind offer of a number of vines. by this time I presume the season is too far advanced for their removal, & consequently that I must decline till another year availing myself of your liberality. and even then I would confine it to a few only, & of the eating kind preferably, my absence from home and other circumstances excluding me from the possibility of becoming a winemaker. I am not able to say why Governor [James] Monroe has failed to answer your letter…”

This is the free frank from that very letter. Free frank, postmarked Washington, April 1 [1801], to Legaux, the writing all in Jefferson’s hand, and signed “Th. Jefferson, Pr[es]. US.”

Legaux responded more boldly, sending Jefferson an account of his struggles to found the company and inviting the President to join him as a subscriber. At last, in January 1802, the required minimum number of subscriptions to establish the Pennsylvania Vine Company was obtained, the company’s incorporation was officially sealed, and Legaux was made superintendent of the company’s vineyard. It had taken him nearly ten years to reach this official starting point, yet the names of his shareholders, though they did not include President Jefferson, make a roster of the Federal Era aristocracy – Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Stephen Girard, Citizen Genet, and Benjamin Rush, to name a few, were all investors in the Pennsylvania Vine Company.