John Rodgers to Minerva Denison

10.6.08

John Rodgers (1773-1838). The highest ranking American navel officer during the War of 1812 and U.S. Secretary of the Navy in 1823. John's missives won Minerva Denison's heart and the two were married upon is return to America following the Tripolitan War.


The magnetic power of your charms have to this moment prevented my heart from varying a single second. I know no art in love as you may plainly discover by the diction of my scribbling, but the professions I have made were dictated by heart as honest, as proud, and honorable as that of any other being in existence, and if to possess such feelings be a crime, the errors are not mine but his who made us both. I feel my intellect so perfectly inadequate to an expression of the sensations I feel, that I am oblig'd with painful reluctance to drop the subject.

written, GeminiSide

Tina Etheredge