Your Affectionate and Obedient Servant

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 56.

At the same time, Washington was dealt a further setback when his bright and by-now-indispensable secretary, Joseph Reed, decided he could no longer delay a return to Philadelphia to see to his affairs and look after his family. “You cannot but be sensible of your importance to me…judge you therefore how much I wished for your return,” Washington would tell the absent Reed in one of a string of letters. “I miss you exceedingly; and if an express declaration of this be wanting, to hasten your return, I make it most heartily,” he wrote another day.

John Adams, who had come to know Reed in Philadelphia, described him as “very sensible.”

“amiable,” even “tender,” and Washington felt much the same way. To Reed, as to almost no one, he signed his letters not with the standard “Your Obedient Servant,” but “Your Affectionate and Obedient Servant.”