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had voted on the question, or to vindicate his motives for his vote. When the documents called for by the resolution of the House of 17th January, 1822, were on the 23d of February communicated by the message from the President, they did indeed show that this portentous proposal had been made; but that it was by the concurrent act of all the American plenipotentiaries. They also showed that upon the expediency of making the proposal, there had previously been taken a vote, on which occasion Mr. Russell had been in the minority. The documents were, by order of the House, laid upon the table, and there reposed for the space of nearly two months till the 18th of April.

In the mean time the correspondence from Washington, and the newspapers indoctrinated by it, had not been equally inactive. Through these channels, the public were assured that the proposal of offering the navigation of the Mississippi for the fisheries, had been made by me; that Mr. Clay had uniformly declared that he would not sign the treaty, with such an article in it; and that the proposal had been finally set aside, by Mr. Bayard's having changed his mind, and come over to the opinion of the minority. Not one of these three statements was true, though Mr. Russell has since positively asserted the second, and gone still further than the third, by alleging that the proposal was actually made by a minority of the mission, against the will of Mr. Bayard, and without giving him notice after he had changed his mind.

None of these allegations could derive any countenance from the documents communicated to the House, under their resolution of the 17th of January. But Mr. Russell's letter from Paris was in reserve. The following papers will show how it was finally brought before the House, together with a new edition of it in the form of a duplicate; and how a third exemplar, varying from both, was presented to the public, in the National Gazette at Philadelphia. The duplicate was the first of these papers seen by me, and from the moment of my perusing it, I could be no longer at a loss, for the origin of the storm, which a friendly voice had warned me was to burst upon me from the West. The letter was a tale wrought up with the ingenuity of a novelist, representing the proposition made to the British plenipotentiaries on the 1st of December, 1814, ás a deliberate and wanton sacrifice of the peace and security of the whole Western and Southern section of the Union, for the doubtful

accommodation of a few Eastern fishermen, annually decreasing iu number, entirely exempt from the danger, and unsupported by any claim of right. To take away all excuse from this procedure, it was represented as having been pursued by the majority, in wilful and express violation of the instructions to the mission, as understood by themselves, and in defiance of the remonstrances of the minority; Mr. Russell represented himself as having inflexibly opposed it to the last, and the whole purport of the letter tended to the im pression that he had, in the deliberations of the mission at Ghent, opposed the measure by urging against it all the reasons which were set forth in the letter itself. There was withal, a profession of unfeigned respect for the integrity, talents, and judgment of the majority, thus represented as having grossly violated their own sense of their duties, and been prepared to lay open to British smugglers and emissaries, and to all the horrors of Indian warfare, the unof fending citizens of the largest portion of the Union.

No one member of the majority was specially named in Mr. Russell's letter, as peculiarly responsible for the obnoxious proposal, but the joint letter of the mission to the Secretary of State, of 25th December, 1814, had been drawn up by me. Mr. Russell, who had signed it without discussion, and without proposing any alteration to it, excepting those noticed in these papers, had, as appeared by this duplicate, taken it as the text for an adverse commentary. The joint letter, written the day after the signature of the treaty, to be despatched with it, had given to the Secretary of State, a concise and summary narrative of the proceedings of the mission since the 31st of October, 1814, the date of their last preceding despatch. In this narrative were mentioned the circumstances under which the proposal to the British plenipotentiaries of 1st December, 1814, had been made; the reasoning by which it had been discussed with them, the counter-proposition which they had offered as a substitute for it, and their final acceptance, in its stead, of the alternative which we had offered with it, of omitting altogether the article by which they would have abandoned their claim to the boundary line to the Mississippi. It was to the reasoning interwoven with this narrative, reasoning which had been used by the American mission in debate with the British plenipotentiaries, and as adversaries in argument to them, that I found Mr. Russell's duplicate was a deeply-studied, counter-argument. He had

undertaken, after the conclusion of the treaty, to do that for the enemy which they had not done for themselves; but the glaring fallacy of his letter was, that it represented that which had been urged on our part in discussion with them, as if it had been a subject of debate among ourselves. It undertook to prove, that the principles which we had asserted, and the arguments we had urged to the British commissioners, in support of our fishing liberties, contested by them, were entirely without foundation; that we had no right to the fishing liberties, and no right even to advance a claim to them; and that these had been among his reasons for refusing his consent to the proposal of a stipulation for securing them. The duplicate,

"Tam ficti, pravique tenax, quam nuncia veri,"

blended with these misrepresentations, the objections which Mr. Clay had made, not only against the proposal which was offered, but against an article which never had been offered, and alleged as capping the climax of all Mr. Russell's reasons against the proposals, that it was in express violation of instructions which had been cancelled before the proposal was made.

Heterogeneous and incongruous as were these materials, they had obviously been mixed up with the design of exciting the resentment and indignation of the Western and Southern sections of the Union against the offer made to the British plenipotentiaries, and against those by whom it had been proposed. When the original letter from Paris was found, a comparison of it with the duplicate disclosed this design in still broader light. All the new paragraphs had a direct tendency either to aggravate the criminality and injustice of the majority, or to make special claims for the writer to Western favour and gratitude, or to deprecate by flattering compliments the resentments of the Eastern fishing interest. То any person unacquainted with the real transactions at the negotiation of Ghent, the composition was mingled with so much address and plausibility, that it was eminently calculated to produce its effect. It was difficult to suppose that the Ghent documents, and this letter in particular, had been called forth from their slumbers of seven years for any other purpose.

There were circumstances of a peculiar nature, imposing upon me the obligation of meeting this accusation at once, and in the most explicit manner. The documents called for by the House in

their first resolution of 17th January, were to be furnished from the Department of State; and some mistrust had been discovered, that there would be a disposition there to withhold some of them. The second call, was for a paper known not to be forth-coming from thence, until it should be furnished by Mr. Russell himself; for which he had taken care to be prepared. Mr. Russell, too, by observing, when he delivered it at the Department, that he was indifferent whether it should be communicated or not, but if not, that he wished it might be returned to him, evidently disclosed a supposition on his part, that I should feel reluctant at the communication of it to the House--that I should shrink from the exhibition of its contents to the world. My official duty was to report it to the President for communication to the House, and if precluded from the privilege of remarking upon it, I should have been reduced to the singular predicament of being made the silent reporter of my own condemnation. A deceased, and an absent colleague, were implicated in the charges of the letter, apparently as much as myself. Could I in justice to myself, I could not in duty to them, be the bearer of these imputations to the Legislative Assembly of the nation, without declaring them to be unfounded. I did, therefore, in reporting the paper to the President, request that in the communication of it to the House, it might be accompanied by my Remarks. The following pages will show the sequel.

In the collection of these papers, however, the defence and justification of myself and my colleagues of the majority, forms but a secondary purpose. Its primary intention is to prove

1. That the principle assumed by the American mission at Ghent, at the proposal of Mr. Clay, and in a paragraph drawn up by him that the rights and liberties of the people of the United States in the North American fisheries, were not abrogated by the war of 1812, was a just and sound principle, entirely conformable to the law of nations.

2. That the article first offered by Mr. Gallatin, which was not proposed to the British plenipotentiaries, and the amendment to the 8th article of the project, also offered by Mr. Gallatin, which was actually proposed to the British plenipotentiaries, and by them rejected, was only a declaratory recognition of that same principle, applied to the British right of navigating the Mississippi, as well as to our fishery rights and liberties.

3. That, considered even on the narrow ground of conflicting sectional interests, this article and amendment proposed to place the East and the West in the same state as before the war; without gain to one or loss to the other.

4. That the objection, by the minority, against the article and amendment, insisted, in principle, upon the sacrifice of an Eastern for the benefit of a Western interest.

5. That the Eastern interest to be sacrificed, was of very great importance to the Union, and of vital magnitude to the State of Massachusetts; while the Western interest, for which it was to be immolated, was altogether speculative and imaginary. It was most truly denominated, by the member of the mission now no more, bragging a million against a cent.

If, therefore, the letter of Mr. Russell, of 11th February, 1815, from Paris, had been the real exposition of the motives of the minority, for objecting to the proposed article and amendment of Mr. Gallatin, its whole foundation, both of law and of fact, failing, would have left the minority without any justification for their votes whatsoever. With regard to the comparative value of the two interests in question, it was impossible for the minority with more sincere and deep conviction to believe the views of the majority to be erroneous, than the majority thought those of the minority to be so. But it never entered into my head, and never could have entered into my heart, to treasure up these errors of opinion for after-use against a colleague of the mission; to "set in a note-book, con, and learn by rote," opinions expressed in the mutual confidence of associates in a great national trust, in order to bring them forth, after many years, as engines to ruin a rival reputation.

But the letter from Paris was no exposition of the opinions which had been manifested by the minority at Ghent. The principle, that the fishing liberties had not been abrogated by the war, had been asserted by the mission at Ghent, on the proposal of Mr. Clay. The refutation of it is the most heavily laboured part of the letter from Paris. If individual opinions upon the expediency of particular measures adopted by the mission, are to be made the test of merit or demerit for individual members of the mission, it is not a little whimsical that Mr. Russell, for the minority, should now disclaim the principle adopted at the motion of one of them, and which has been completely successful in maintaining the interest in de

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