nts in full
New York 17th December 1783
JOHN CAPE

Think of the Governor of New York now submitting such a bill for such an
entertainment of the French Ambassador and the President of the United
States! Falstaff's views of the proper proportion between sack and bread
are borne out by the proportion between the number of bowls of punch and
bottles of port, Madeira, and beer consumed, and the "coffee for eight
gentlemen"--apparently the only ones who lasted through to that stage
of the dinner. Especially admirable is the nonchalant manner in which,
obviously as a result of the drinking of said bottles of wine and
bowls of punch, it is recorded that eight cut-glass decanters and sixty
wine-glasses were broken.

During the Revolution some of my forefathers, North and South, served
respectably, but without distinction, in the army, and others rendered
similar service in the Continental Congress or in various local
legislatures. By that time those who dwelt in the North were for the
most part merchants, and those who dwelt in the South, planters.

My mother's people were predominantly of Scotch, but also of Huguenot
and English, descent. She was a Georgian, her people having come to
Georgia from South Carolina before the Revolution. The original Bulloch
was a lad from near Glasgow, who came hither a couple of centuries ago,
just as hundreds of thousands of needy, enterprising Scotchmen have gone
to the four quarters of the globe in the intervening two hundred
years. My mother's great-grandfather, Archibald Bulloch, was the first
Revolutionary "President" of Georgia. My grandfather, her father, spent
the winters in Savannah and the summers at Roswell, in the Georgia
uplands near Atlanta, finally making Roswell his permanent home. He
used to travel thither with his family and their belongings in his own
carriage, followed by a baggage wagon. I never saw Roswell until I was
President, but my mother told me so much about the place that when I did
see it I felt as if I already knew every nook and corner of it, and as
if it were haunted by the ghosts of all the men and women who had lived
there. I do not mean merely my own family, I mean the slaves. My mother
and her sister, my aunt, used to tell us children all kinds of stories
about the slaves. One of the most fascinating referred to a very old
darky called Bear Bob, because in the early days of settlement he had
been partially scalped by a black bear. Then there was