As to what I found, none of it made sense or seemed related to the other papers in the packet. Though there were two fragile pamphlets that were possibly of some monetary value—that was something. The first, published in London in 1625, was called A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight; upon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas … July 15. 1610. The second had been published in London in 1613. It, too, appeared to be a description of a shipwreck that involved the island of Bermuda: A Plaine Description of the Barmudas, also called Sommer Islands With the Manner of their Discoverie, anno. 1609 by the shipwrack and admirable deliverance of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Sommers by Silvester Jourdain.

There were three more items. An original document, a letter written on August 23, 1814, by someone named Hobson Banks, with a return address in the St. Louis district of Middleburg, a part of town that had been an African-American community. Leland had put the letter in a page protector. The handwriting was difficult to decipher and the spelling and grammar were poor, but it was written to an unnamed woman—Dear Madam—and discussed the author’s success at getting “the preschus package” safely from the President’s House to a place of safekeeping located where President Madison did meet President Washington. “I am certin,” he wrote, “that Pres. Jefferson wood aprove.”

In the last paragraph he inquired whether she had received any news on the success of the other mission carried out by the gentlemen from New York in which his friend Paul Jennings had been of some assistance. Banks concluded by wishing her well and praying that God would protect her and the president in this terrible time of war, promising to return as soon as he was able to do so. It was signed, “Your humble servint, Hobson Banks.”

By the time I finished reading, I was sure the letter had been written to Dolley Madison, First Lady and wife of President James Madison. Madison had been president during the War of 1812, fought between Britain and America, but more important, in August of 1814, the month this letter was written and as the war still raged, British troops had marched into Washington, D.C., burning not only the White House and the Capitol, but torching much of the city. Had Hobson Banks removed something from the White House—known in those days as the President’s House—for safekeeping at Dolley’s request? Was he the slave who had managed to flee the city before the British arrived with the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington that Dolley had so famously cut out of the frame?

So what, if anything, did Hobson Banks’s letter have to do with Prescott owning a copy of the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson had written out for James Madison?