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Colonial and State Records of North Carolina
Letter from William Tryon to Wills Hill, Marquis of Downshire
Tryon, William, 1729-1788
February 25, 1769
Volume 08, Pages 11-12

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[From Tryon's Letter Book.]
Letter from Governor Tryon to the Earl of Hillsborough.

Brunswick 25th February 1769.

The disappointment I experienced in not obtaining from the Assembly a provision of powder and lead for his Majesty's service and the defence of this Government gave me real concern, from a conviction of the importance of those articles and the defenceless state of this Colony for want of them.

The Resolve for the appointment of Mr Henry Eustace McCulloh as Agent to this Colony I should have had no objection in assenting to, had the resolve reached me: It dropped in the Council. The opinion of the Lords of Trade declared in their letter to Governor Dobbs bearing date April 14th 1761, has been the rule of my conduct in the mode of the appointment of an agent. I could wish it might be understood how far his Majesty would have his Council share in the nomination of the person to be appointed Agent. This would settle the difference of opinion on a particular which has caused the principal obstruction during my administration to the legislative appointment of an Agent.

The Assembly's request to me to undertake agreeable to the resolve of their house January 1768, the commission for providing proper materials for the paper currency, has induced me to renew my solicitation to Messrs Drummond to provide the above materials, if his Majesty and his Parliament should grant a dispensing power to this Colony to emit the sum petitioned for. The same reasons subsist for the necessity of a larger medium of trade for this province that was set forth in my letter to Earl Shelburne of the 2nd February 1768.

Many good ends I am persuaded would flow from the grant of this petition, particularly if it should be made a stipulation that the new emission should be exchanged for that now in circulation, and the whole of the latter to be burnt as soon as collected in: it is estimated, as appears by a return I shall send your Lordship that upwards of fifty thousand pounds of paper currency is now in being, therefore by buying up and sinking this sum, there would be an addition of only fifty thousand pounds currency in circulation, by obtaining the grant to the said petition which would not be an over

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proportion to the increase of the inhabitants in this province, since the former emissions. I should not presume, my Lord, to urge the necessity of this emission after the full measure in which your Lordship has wrote to me on the subject, if I did not clearly see the great and beneficial effects that would be communicated to this Colony by a new emission.