Allen acknowledges receipt of Turner’s letter, but,  

     “I have committed to acknowledge it until the arrival of the donation so liberally contributed by the Citizens of the first Society in Colchester. I now have the satisfaction of informing you that the box of clothing etc. arrived here on the 13^th instant in the Sloop Penn and Sarah of New London, accompanied by a note from Messrs. Robert Coit & co. informing of its shipment and the payment of its freight.

     The first Ship for Greece, bearing a full cargo of provisions, clothing etc. left this port on the 9^th inst. But our prospects are flattering, that we will be enabled to transmit another cargo in the course of a few weeks, when the generous donation of your Citizens will be conveyed to the objects for whom it is intended.

      Be pleased to impart to the donors in this occasion, the gratefull acknowledgements of this Committee for the assistance they have thus afforded us in adding to our means for the relief of this distressed people…”

     Allen, a wealthy sailmaker without formal education (evidenced by the misspellings in this letter) served as the 55^th Mayor of New York City from 1821 to 1824. He was later a State Senator, led the commission that rebuilt New York’s commercial center after the Great Fire of 1835, and was killed in a steamboat disaster in 1852.

The Greek Revolution of 1821 (in which Lord Byron died at age 36) ended successfully in 1830 with the country winning independence from the Turkish Empire. It immediately claimed such sympathy from Americans –  forty years after their own Revolution, as “another people struggling for emancipation from an oppressive imperialism” who were left “homeless, naked and hungry” in Turkey’s “cruel war of extermination” -  that James Madison seriously proposed to President Monroe that the Greeks be included in his contemplated declaration supporting independence of the Latin-American republics from colonial domination - what became known as the Monroe Doctrine.