Nothing else was done in the matter until Madison visited him at Monticello and acquainted him with the situation. But even Madison could not win his consent,[235] and the President had to assure Jefferson that the duties of his office would probably not be quite so complicated and hard to execute as he might have been led at the first moment to imagine.[236] It was not a command, but while the President left him free to decide he expressed a strong hope and wish that Jefferson would accept. So, on February 14 he sent his letter of acceptance. In the meantime he had married Martha to Thomas Mann Randolph, Junior, "a young gentleman of genius, science, and honorable mind", who afterwards filled "a dignified station in the General Government, and the most dignified in his own State."[237] Although Jefferson had wished for such a marriage, he had left Martha free to make her own choice, as he explained in a letter to Madame de Corny: "Tho' his talents, disposition, connections, fortune, were such as would have made him my first choice, yet according to the usage of my country, I scrupulously suppressed my wishes, that my daughter might indulge in her own sentiments freely."[238] The marriage took place on April 2, 1790, and on the next day Jefferson set out for New York to take his place in the Cabinet. He reached Philadelphia on the twelfth. There he stopped to pay his respects to the man "he has succeeded but not replaced", old Doctor Franklin then on the sick bed from which he never arose. "My recent return from a country in which he had left so many friends, and the perilous convulsions to which they had been exposed, revived all his anxieties to know what part they had taken, what had been their course, and what their fate. He went over all in succession with a rapidity and animation almost too much for his strength." It was on this occasion that Franklin put in his hands a paper containing an account of his negotiations with Lord Howe to prevent a war between the colonies and their mother country, papers which, unfortunately, Jefferson entrusted later to William Temple Franklin, who "delayed the publication for more than twenty years."[239] Jefferson arrived in New York on the twenty-first, took his lodgings at the City Tavern, and finally rented a small house in Maiden Lane. Congress was in session and business had accumulated on the desk of the new secretary: he plunged at once into work. All his colleagues had already taken charge of their respective departments: Colonel Alexander Hamilton was in charge of the Treasury, General Henry Knox of the War Department, Edmund Randolph, Attorney-general. Those were the only departments thus far created and among them the four secretaries divided all the different attributions of the executive power. With them he was to sit in Cabinet meetings presided over by Washington until his retirement from office, in December, 1793.