The Henry Letters were created by a fraudster named John Henry. The letters reflected that the British government operating in Canada had employed him to try to persuade the New England states to leave the United States and join Canada. A bundle of letters was sold to President James Madison for $50,000. The letters were fraudulent, but both the President of the United States and the United States Congress were deceived, increasing tensions with the United Kingdom before the War of 1812.
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“American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)