137 



tish Traders and Agents access to our Indians. If this access, 

 owing to existing circumstances, had not hitherto, to any great ex 

 tent, been practically derived from the right to approach and to 

 navigate the Mississippi, yet this tight, having become the only 

 means of access, would undoubtedly have been made the thorough 

 fare of this nefarious intercouse. If 1 erred in this opinion, still 

 I should hope to find charity for my motives. As a citizen of Mas* 

 sachusetts, i believed that justice and sound policy required that 

 we should treat fairly and liberally every other section of the 

 Union, and to do as we would be done by. As a minister of the 

 United States, it was my duty to act impartially towards the great 

 whole. 



The inconsistency of Mr. Adams doctrine with his conduct, in 

 relation to the fishing liberty, needs no illustration. If that liberty 

 was, as he alleged, inseparable from the general right, why sepa 

 rate them, by offering a specific proposition for the one, and leav 

 ing the other to rest on the treaty of 1783 ? If this liberty was, by 

 our instructions, included in the right, why discuss it, as those in 

 structions forbid us to bring that right into discussion ? If {his 

 liberty was an attribute of our Independence, why rely for its 

 continuance on the peculiarity of a treaty, and at the same time 

 offer to make it an article of another treaty, where there could be 

 no such peculiarity to perpetuate it ? If that liberty was indeed 

 an attribute of our Independence, 1 say that it depended on no 

 treaty, but on those eternal principles on which it had been de 

 clared previous to any treaty and on that high spirit and resistless 

 energy which dictated and accomplished that declaration. When- 

 ever that Independence, or any of the essential attributes of the 

 sovereignty, which necessarily results from it, shall be denied or 

 questioned, I trust in God and the valour, not of the West only, 

 but of all, that we shall not resort to the dreams of a visionary, or 

 to the dead letter of a treaty, to assert our rights and rank among 

 the nations of the world. 



I shall now close this defence against an unprovoked and unprin 

 cipled attack, trusting it, for my vindication, with the justice and 

 liberality of my fellow citizens. If I had been previously entrust 

 ed with the remarks of Mr. Adams, as he frankly was with the 

 paper which has mainly been the subject of them, I should have 

 had an opportunity of simultaneously offering these explanations, 

 and been spared the unpleasant necessity of thus appealing to the 

 public. If I have not retorted the virulence and acrimony of Mr. 

 Adams, it is because I have not felt them sufficiently to forget the 

 respect which I owe to myself and to the public. I regret, equally 

 with Mr. Adams, the necessity which he has supposed to exist for 

 the virulent character of his remarks, but I shall have abundant 

 reason to rejoice, if, in directing the infirmities of his temper against 

 me, they shall have been diverted from a course in which they 

 might have been disastrous to the country. 



JONATHAN RUSSELL. 



