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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
July 02, 1770
Volume 08, Pages 211-212

[From Tryon's Letter Book.]
Letter from Governor Tryon to Lord Hillsborough.

Newbern 2d July 1770.

Agreeable to your Lordships desire expressed in your dispatch No 32 I have herewith the honor to inclose an estimate of all the monies that have been emitted &c in this government since the year 1748

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(the time of the first grant of proclamation money) shewing the periods of the respective grants the purposes to which the money was appropriated and the taxes that were laid to sink the same.

I also inclose your Lordship an account, as perfect as can be obtained of what sums have been collected—and burnt agreeable to the Acts of Assembly. By comparing these two estimates your Lordship will observe that £58,535 14 8 still remain outstanding. The Council and Assembly coming to a resolve in 1768 that the tax of one shilling per poll for sinking the £12,000 granted in the year 1760, and the tax of two shillings per poll for sinking the £20,000 granted in the year 1761, had had their effect, and the country afterwards agreeing in the same opinion (tho' I rejected the Resolve not being satisfied for want of information) One shilling per taxable, and four pence per gallon, on spirituous liquors imported, have been collected only for the last two years, which taxes are supposed to continue until they sink all the Proclamation money now in circulation.

The £20,000 certified notes that were emitted to satisfy the troops at the Hillsborough expedition in 1768, and other outstanding demands on the public, are not considered as proclamation money, being merely promisory notes, without a legal tender, yet such is the necessity and avidity of the country for a medium to trade with, that these notes circulate as freely as the proclamation money.

The repeated assurances your Lordship has given me of the favorable sentiments you entertain of my conduct in my public station, and the honorable manner in which you have expressed those sentiments to our royal master, have not only laid claim to my gratitude, but naturally led me to hope I should have gathered some fruit from such promising blossoms: I cannot therefore but lament the information that diverted your Lordship from carrying your intentions towards me into execution, when the government of New York became vacant.

I feel the properest sense of his Majestys most gracious indulgence to my humble request made for leave to [go to] England for one year from last spring twelve months, The instrument for which, under the sign manual, your Lordship is so obliging as to promise to send out to me by the next conveyance.

The copy of the merchants' memorial to your Lordship respecting the naval stores from this colony, shall be laid before the next General Assembly (prorogued to the 30th of November next) for their adoption of so many of the regulations therein proposed, as shall be ght advantageous to the purposes intended.