To all,

I don't anticipate getting an answer to this query, but perhaps folks will find it interesting nonetheless. Has a diplomatic code that would have been used by Virginia's government during the Revolution ever been found and deciphered? The particular code I'm interested in shows up in a letter of 30 Nov. 1780 from Philip Mazzei, then serving as the state's agent in Europe, to James Madison and can be seen via the link below:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/mjm.01_0298_0300/?sp=2

Volume 2 of the Papers of JM prints the letter and a translation but also notes that Madison was unable to decipher the code because he lacked the key and later learned that the state's copy of the key was destroyed during Benedict Arnold's raid on Richmond. I'm assuming that the trail has run dry there, but perhaps in the intervening years another copy of the cipher turned up, or some other information on the Virginia government's use of codes during the Revolution. With its array of Greek letters, numbers, and other symbols, it is entirely different from the code that the state's delegates to the Confederation Congress used and that is reprinted in Ralph E. Weber's United States Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers. It doesn't match up with any of Weber's codes and was likely something Virginia authorities and Mazzei cooked up shortly before he was dispatched to Europe in 1779. A small scrap of a very similar looking cipher appears in a draft of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Mazzei, which recently turned up at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence.

Thanks for any help, advice, etc.,

Bland Whitley
Papers of Thomas Jefferson

______________________________________
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html

This list is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).