to in your letter, this office has no information other than that stated by

you.

I am, sir, respectfully, your obedient servant,

TO JOHN S. VAN DYKE, Esq.,

A. O. DAYTON.

Attorney-at-law, No. 503 Market street, Philadelphia.

PHILADELPHIA, May 7, 1841.

SIR: Your letter of the 30th instant came duly to hand; and, on viewing the contents, I find no statement of his pay, up to his death, as one of the officers of the United States, of the monthly pay and rations of Lieutenant Henry Van Dyke; he could not have been paid at the time of his death. You have given a statement of what Congress ordered to be paid for L'Insurgente frigate, and do not give any account of the other two prizes that came in at the same day, and under convoy of the frigate Constellation, into Hampton Roads, for there is where Lieutenant H. Van Dyke dates his letter to his mother, on board the Constellation, in 1799. Henry Van Dyke made a gift of it to his tender mother, as a donation from her much-respecting son, as a reward for the many moments of sorrow she must have endured, requesting her to attend to the getting of the whole amount of prize money that he was legally entitled to, as one of the officers of the Constellation, coming from the capture of L'Insurgente and the two privateers. He has not stated their names in the letter. My mother was at that time beginning to decline in her health, which lasted for several years, and I was very young. She never did receive any part of it. Dr. Robert Harris, who was in the United States navy as surgeon at that time, was the first to say to me that there must be something coming from the United States, if it had not been paid. I told him my mother had never been paid, nor myself, who was the only surviving heir; and he said I was wrong in not seeking for what was my right.

Sir, I have taken a view of this thing, and find that the Government of the United States had not the right to make Charles Biddle the agent, without the consent of Charlotte Van Dyke, to whom that money is coming, from his letter to his mother, from the United States, legally and truly. As for C. Biddle's heirs, I have nothing to do with them. It is the United States that stands bound for the payment. It having been placed in C. Biddle's hands does not release the United States of its liability to pay me, as there has never been any assent on our part to what has been done on the part of the United States. In that business it was the United States that was indebted to her for the amount of Henry Van Dyke's prize money, as one of the officers of the frigate Constellation, and therefore I have no right to look to C. Biddle; it is due from the United States, and to them I must make my claim. Having consulted with some men of talents at the bar, they are of opinion, with myself, that the United States is bound to pay the amount of my claim; for their not having done it, as far as the Government made themselves liable, they should have paid the claims as they came in, agreeably to the regulations of war. He states that if they were sold for any thing like their value, he thinks that his mother will receive from $3,000 to $4,000. Sir, I should like to have it settled as soon as expedient. I am, sir, with great respect, your obedient servant, JNO. S. VAN DYKE.

A. O. DAYTON, Esq.,

Treasury Department, Fourth Auditor's Office.

TREASURY DEPARTMENT,

Fourth Auditor's Office, May 12, 1841.

SIR: I have received your letter of the 7th instant, in which I understand you to complain that you have not been furnished with a statement of the pay due to your brother, Henry Van Dyke, formerly of the United States navy, at the time of his death, about which you inquired in your recent letters; and that although I have mentioned the sum allowed by the United States to the officers and crew of the Constellation, as the captors of L'Insurgente frigate, I have given you no account of certain other prizes said to have been sent in by the same vessel. If you will revert to my letter of the 24th ultimo, you will find it there stated that all the accounts of the pursers of the vessels which cruised in the Mediterranean between the years 1796 and 1804 having been burned by the British in 1814, or having been destroyed when the Treasury building was consumed in 1833, I was unable to ascertain whether any balance was due to your brother at the time of his death.

In my letter of the 30th ultimo you were told that this office was possessed of no information respecting the prizes to which you referred as having been captured by the Constellation, other than L'Insurgente frigate. As to the question which you raise respecting the right of the Government to pay to Charles Biddle, as prize agent, without the consent of Charlotte Van Dyke, the money allowed for L'Insurgente, I have only to say that it appears that the payment was made by warrants upon the Treasurer, issued in favor of Mr. Biddle, by the Navy Department; and that any question, as to his right to receive it, must be settled with that Department, which it is presumed was put in possession of sufficient evidence of his being the regularly constituted agent of the captors.

I am, sir, respectfully, your obedient servant,

To JOHN S. VAN DYKE, Esq.,

A. O. DAYTON.

Attorney-at-law, Philadelphia.

2d Session.

P. O. Dept.

POSTAGES, &c.

LETTER

FROM

THE POSTMASTER GENERAL,

IN REPLY TO

A resolution of the House of Representatives of 10th of September, 1841, requiring information respecting the number of letters carried by the public mails, &c.

APRIL 20, 1842.

Referred to the Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads.

POST OFFICE DEPARTMENT,

April 6, 1842.

SIR: At the few short intervals of time left me by the pressure of the current business of the office, I have taken up the resolutions of the House of Representatives adopted on the 10th September last, on the motion of the Hon. Mr. McKay, with an anxious desire to make a full and satisfactory response to them, but I have not been able to perceive how it can be done without withdrawing from other important public duties an amount of clerical labor which would not only derange and embarrass the business of the Department, but prove detrimental to the interest of a large number of individuals whose business would be thereby postponed or delayed.

That I may not appear to have overrated the amount of labor to be performed in answering these resolutions, I will proceed to enumerate, under specific heads, the items of information they require to be furnished.

1. The number of charged letters carried in the mails of the United States for one month or longer period of time.

2. The number of letters charged at each of the legal rates of postage; that is, at 6, 10, 121, 184, and 25 cents.

3. The number charged at more than 25 cents; that is, letters double, triple, or quadruple the rates over 12 cents, or letters charged by weight. 4. The revenue arising from each rate in each State and Territory.

5. The number of free letters and packages.

6. The number franked by members and officers of Congress.

7. The whole number of newspapers sent in the mails.

8. The number at one cent postage.

9. The number at one cent and a half.

10. The number of printers' exchange papers. 11. The number of periodical pamphlets.

12. The number of pamphlets not periodical.

13. The amount of revenue arising from each class of newspapers, pamphlets, and periodicals.

14. The number of dead letters for the year ending 30th June, 1841. 15. The amount paid to postmasters for the delivery of free letters at 2 cents each, during the year ending 30th June, 1841.

The information embraced in the five specifications first named can only be obtained by two methods: first, by taking the post bills returned by the postmasters with their quarterly accounts, and transcribing them, so as to set the items on each bill in columns under the respective rates of postage; the other, by preparing and sending to each postmaster in the United States a printed circular, with a form of return so devised as to embrace the thirteen points of information first enumerated. The latter method, it is true, would be attended with the least labor at the Department; but, with respect to the letters, the results would not be near so accurate as those which would be obtained from the post bills; because, as our experience derived from similar attempts to procure information by circular has invariably shown, great numbers of the postmasters would answer informally, although provided with the most specific directions; others would not answer until they had held a correspondence with the Department about some matter of detail; and many would not answer at all; whereas nearly all of them, in the ordinary process of rendering their quarterly returns, transmit their post bills to the Department.

The specifications numbered 6 to 13 can be answered only by means of a circular to the postmasters, of whom there are nearly 14,000; and besides the sending of a circular to each postmaster, not less than one thousand of them would, before answering, write to the Department for instruction on some trivial point, thereby requiring an equal number of letters to be written in reply, before the returns required by the circular could be got in. The post bills, then, affording the most accurate data as to the letters, and there being no other way of procuring the information above referred to except by circular, both modes of proceeding would necessarily have to be adopted. In the first process, more than two hundred bushels of postbills, bits of paper about four inches square, would have to be assorted into the States in which they respectively originated; and then to be transcribed, so as to show the number of letters of each rate, the revenue derived from each rate, &c. Each column of the transcript, which would reach several thousand pages, would then have to be added up and recapitulated, in order to present the results contemplated in the first five specifications. The returns from the postmasters, in answer to the circular, would have to undergo a similar process of recapitulation, in order to arrive at the information embraced within the scope of the eight specifications referred to.

To ascertain the number of dead letters for the year ending June 30, 1841, it would be necessary to handle all the quarterly accounts of postmasters for that year, about 56,000 in number, and to take an account of the letters returned on their respective quarterly bills as dead, in order to sum up the aggregate number for the year. While handling the accounts. for this purpose, the account current belonging to each quarterly return wou'd have to be referred to, and an account taken from it of the amount