8 



accommodation of a few Eastern fishermen, annually decreasing in 

 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 under- 

 stood by themselves^ and in defiance of the remonstrances of the mi- 

 nority; Mr. Russell represented himself as having inflexibly opposed 

 it to the last, and ihe whole purport of the letter tended to the im- 

 pression that he had, in the deliberations of the mission at Ghent, 

 opposed (he 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 propo- 

 sal, 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 ap- 

 peared by this duplicate, taken it as the text for an adverse com- 

 mentary. 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 pre- 

 ceding despatch. In this narrative were mentioned the circum- 

 stances 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 rea- 

 soning interwoven with this narrative, reasoning which had been 

 used by the American mission in debate with the British plenipo- . 

 tentiaries, and as adversaries in argument to them, that I found Mr. 

 Russell's duplicate was a deeply-studied, counter-argument. He had 



