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 concur 

 rent act of all the American plenipotentiaries. They also showed 

 that upon the expediency of making the proposal, there had pre 

 viously 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 

 ef 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, wilh such an article in it ; and that&quot; the 

 proposal had been finally set aside, by Mr. Bayard s having chang 

 ed 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 minori 

 ty of the mission, against the will of Mr. Bayard, and without giv 

 ing 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 ot&quot; 

 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, as 

 a deliberate and wanton sacrifice of the peace and security of the 

 whole Western and Southern section of the Union, for the doubtful 



