Many letters in code from John Armstrong in Paris to Secretary of State James Madison are preserved in DUSMF ("Dispatches from United States Ministers to France, 1789-1906") under Record Group 59 in the US National Archives. While most of them can be read with a key (THE=972) reconstructed from decoded materials, there is one, apparently in a different code, that remains undecoded. The letter is:
John Armstrong to James Madison, Paris, 20 February 1808 (images 29-32 at DUSMF (image 31 is a cleaner copy of 30)
A transcription is found at Founders Online.
This letter was brought to my attention by Ms. Angela Kreider, the current editor of the Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia (Papers of James Madison, Founders Online), desiring to share this to the cryptographic community. If anyone succeeds in solving this, please let me know.
She kindly provided me with a summary of Armstrong's work in France.
John Armstrong replaced his father-in-law, Robert R. Livingston, as U.S. ambassador to France in the fall of 1804, a year and a half after Livingston and James Monroe had negotiated the Louisiana Purchase.
Livingston and Monroe believed that the purchase included the territory then known as West Florida, extending from Baton Rouge in the west to the Perdido River, now the boundary between Alabama and Florida, in the east. President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison also became convinced that this was the case, but the Spanish government of West Florida refused to hand it over to the United States.
Armstrong discussed this situation with the French government, and in 1805 he reported to Madison that Napoleon had offered to mediate negotiations between the U.S. and Spain leading to a U.S. purchase of East and West Florida. Essentially this meant that Napoleon would force Spain to sell, and then claim the proceeds in the form of debt payments that Spain owed to France. The Jefferson administration agreed to try this, convinced Congress to sign on, and sent James Bowdoin to negotiate in Madrid. But the Spanish government delayed and Napoleon didn't carry through his part of the deal, despite Armstrong's nagging.
Armstrong also had to protest against the Berlin Decree of 1806 and the Milan Decree of 1807, both of which threatened to capture and confiscate American ships as part of France's economic warfare against Britain. He demanded clarification on whether the decrees would be enforced against U.S. ships, but the French government delayed giving clear answers, while using the possible effects of the decrees as threats to motivate American compliance with additional schemes exploiting the U.S. interest in Florida.
On 15 February 1808, Armstrong reported to Madison that Napoleon had offered to turn a blind eye to an American invasion of Florida if the U.S. would enter into a military alliance with France against Britain. That letter was followed by Armstrong's of 20 Feb. 1808, in an unknown code and shorthand. His letter of 22 Feb. 1808 conveyed his belief that Napoleon intended to enforce the decrees against U.S. ships. We can only guess that the 20 Feb. letter had to do with some of the problems discussed in the letters that preceded and followed it.
Ms. Kreider observes that the letter in question "was docketed by State Department chief clerk John Graham, but we've found no evidence that it ever was decoded, nor that Madison acknowledged receiving it".
The code numbers range from 1 to 1900. Frequent symbols are:
|
17 12x 18 12x 38 10x 14 8x 1 7x |
12 5x 47 5x 170 5x |
11 4x 48 4x 176 4x 1267 4x 1480 4x |
From statistics with a related code (THE=972) below, "the", "s", "of", "to" are likely to be among these.
From the first line on the first page, 𝄑, occurring 9 times in the letter, seems to be a noun. Then, a relatively frequent 1480 before that may be a preposition.
Interestingly, this letter is not only encoded in a code different from other letters from Armstrong during the same period, but also is written partially in graphical symbols that may appear to be a shorthand.
James Madison used various codes and ciphers throughout his career (see another article).
During the period when Madison was Secretary of State under President Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, minister to France before Armstrong, used a 1700-element code THE=968 (WE027) in writing to Madison (The WE number is a designation in Ralph E. Weber, United States Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers, 1775-1938). The arrangement of words/syllables is blockwise alphabetical (i.e., it consists of many blocks, with each block having alphabetically ordered entries).
Madison sent THE=1385 (WE028), a 1600-element code with a blockwise alphabetical arrangement, to James Monroe, who had been sent to Paris to assist Livingston. This particular cipher somehow continued to be in use for many decades (see another article). My transcription of this code is here.
John Armstrong used THE=972 in his correspondence with Madison, except for the letter in question. My partial reconstruction is here, which I made from a single letter some years ago and covers only a small fraction of the code. See another article, which provides a specimen in which one can see how the numbers represent words/syllables/letters. In this short specimen, high frequency symbols are "the"(8x), "s"(6x), "of"(5x), and "to"(3x). Similar statistics may also apply to the letter in question. (Ms. Kreider confirms the usual code between Armstrong and Madison is a 1600-element code and was used in all other encoded correspondence by Armstrong, including those from 15 and 22 February.)
Ms. Kreider and her colleagues have already tried the key reconstructed from other letters of Armstrong and other State Department numerical codes including those printed in Weber and found they do not match.
One interesting feature of this letter is that there are passages in graphical symbols here and there. The symbols look like a shorthand, but a possibility of a substitution cipher cannot be excluded.
I tried to sort the symbols, but some are difficult to classify.
One shorthand that was used at the time is Taylor Shorthand (Wikipedia) published by Samuel Taylor in 1786 (Google). A specimen in Taylor shorthand is given below, but the symbols seem to be different from those used by Armstrong.
I note AFIO (Association of Former Intelligence Officers) claimed that this code was broken by Yaacov Apelbaum ("We Have a Winner in the Armstrong-Madison Encrypted Letter Contest!"; judging from the URL, posted on 27 May 2025). While the website does not provide the ciphertext of the contest, the letter is identified as "Letter from John Armstrong to President [sic] James Madison, 20 February 1808". However, although applying their key to the transcription reveals fragments similar to their "Decrypted Text" ("... 88[that] 1340[your] 27[french] 121[government] 356[has] 454[declared] 17[of] 1640[american] 1276 14[this] 1760[ships] 1267[have] ..."), further tweaking and extensive omission are required to reproduce their "Decrypted Text". Even if we assume the contest ciphertext was only the first page, the solution does not seem convincing. Here is the result of my verification, with their key and "Decrypted Text".
Their interpretation of frequent symbols are as follows.
|
17(12x) of 18(12x) the 38(10x) and 14(8x) this 1(7x) our |
12(5x) rights 47(5x) - 170(5x) - |
11(4x) - 48(4x) relation 176(4x) - 1267(4x) have 1480(4x) - |
At least, symbols occurring multiple times should be accounted for.
In the following transcription, I marked brackets where the reading is uncertain.
