Note 102 — Chapter XXXIII
Reading edition
Sparks's “Life and Writings of Washington,” xi., 137. In a note to this letter, Mr. Sparks says: “No correspondence, after this date, between Washington and Jefferson appears in the letter-books, except a brief note the month following, upon an unimportant matter. It has been reported and believed, that letters and papers, supposed to have passed between them, or to relate to their intercourse with each other at subsequent dates, were secretly withdrawn from the archives of Mount Vernon, after the death of the former.”
Washington's unlimited confidence in Mr. Jefferson's sincerity appears to have been finally shaken. In a letter to John Nicholson, in March, 1798, he said, “Nothing short of the evidence you have adduced, corroborative of intimations which I had received long before through another channel, could have shaken my belief in the sincerity of a friendship which I had conceived was possessed for me by the person to whom you allude.”