Letter to Elisha Phelps, Commissary of Provisions, at Ticonderoga

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A draught of a Letter to Elisha Phelps was read and approved, and is in the words following, to wit:

In Provincial Congress, New-York, June 29, 1775.

SIR: Your letter of the twenty-second instant was this day received in Congress, and the contents observed. The embarrassments you and the Troops stationed at Lake Champlain might have met with, in respect to the Provisions and Stores at Albany, we are persuaded did not arise from any other design than that of fulfilling the orders the Commissaries appointed by this Provincial Congress received previous to your appointment as Commissary, in consequence of a later order of the Continental Congress. Your difficulties, if they are not already, will now, we trust, be removed; and that you may have no farther trouble on that head, we have wrote a letter and order to the Commissaries heretofore appointed by this Board, to deliver up all the Provisions and Stores in their custody for that service to you, and have enclosed to them a copy of the order of the Continental Congress, by which they will perceive they are superseded in that business.

We also received a letter, dated 15th instant, from your Deputy, Adonijah Strong, directed to the Committee of Albany, couched in terms not so very suitable. However, for answer to the most necessary parts, we remark, that two of the articles mentioned in it as wanting, to wit, Rice and Rum, were sent up some time ago. A sufficiency of Peas we suppose can be procured at Albany; you will please, therefore to buy there as much as is requisite on the publick credit of this Colony. Butter and fresh meat we know to be scarce commodities at Albany; the former we shall endeavour to send you a proper supply of from this City, and the latter article we imagine you do not for the present stand so much in need of, as it appears, by Governour Trumbull' s letter of the 19th instant to us, that a drove of fat cattle was forwarded up to you. We shall also send you from hence ten hogsheads of Molasses, to brew beer with.

We are, Sir, your very humble servants. By order.

To Mr˙ Elisha Phelps, Commissary of Provisions.

Ordered, That a copy thereof be engrossed, signed by the President, and transmitted.