229 



CONCLUSION. 



THE interests of the West are the interests of the whole Union 

 r and so are the interests of the East; and let the statesmen who 

 are the servants of the whole, beware of setting them in conflict 

 with each other. A review of these papers will show that the in 

 terest really at stake in the negotiation of Ghent, a deep and import 

 ant stake, was an interest of the East ; that there was wo Western 

 interest affected by the article first proposed by Mr. Gallatin. or by 

 the amendment finally offered to the British plenipotentiaries at his 

 proposal, and rejected ; that the only plausible objection to it, rest 

 ed upon a gratuitous assumption, contrary to all reason and expe 

 rience, that it would have given a right of access to, and of inter 

 course with, our Indians, to the British. This, the British had 

 possessed by another article of another treaty, acknowledged to be 

 extinguished by the war but it would no more have been granted 

 to them, by a right to navigate the Mississippi, than by a right to 

 enter the harbour of New- York. The whole argument rested upon 

 a fallacy; a mis-statement of the question. Happy would it have 

 been for Mr. Russell, if, after assenting and pledging his signatures 

 to the decision of the majority, he had as cautiously withheld from 

 his government, and his country, the allegation of his reasons for 

 having voted against it, as he did at the time of the discussion, from 

 his colleagues. But, in the vehemence of his zeal to vindicate his 

 motives for one unfortunate vote at Ghent, which but for himself 

 would probably never have been known to the world, he has been 

 necessitated to assert principles of international and municipal law, 

 and to put forth statements as of fact, more unsubstantial than the 

 pageant of a vision. He has been reduced to the melancholy office 

 of misrepresenting the subject of which he treats, the conduct and 

 sentiments of his colleagues in a great national trust and his own. 

 He has been compelled to disavow his own signatures, to contradict 

 his own assertions, and to charge himself with his own interpola 

 tions. He has been forced to enter the lists as the champion of his 

 country s enemy, upon a cause which he had been specially entrust 

 ed to defend and maintain to allege the forfeiture of liberties which 

 he had been specially instructed not to surrender to magnify by 

 boundless exaggerations, an ideal, and to depreciate in equal pro 

 portion, a real, interest of his country to profess profound re 

 spect for the integrity and talents of men, while-secretly denouncing 

 their conduct as treacherous and absurd and, finally, to traduce 

 before the Representative Assembly of the nation, the character of 

 the absent, and the memory of the dead. 



It has been my duty, not only in justice to my own character and 

 to that of the colleagues with whom I acted, but in respectful defe 

 rence to the opinion of that nation of which we were, and two of 

 is still are. the servants, to justifv the .conduct thus denounced in 



