339 



Frail and tottering as is this scaffolding to support the cause of 

 Mr. Russell's candour, I am concerned to say, that by a mere state- 

 ment of the real facts, it must be taken entirely from under him. 



The real facts are these : 



On the 1 7th of January last, the House of Representatives of the 

 United States adopted the following resolution : 



" Reaolvcd, That the President of the United States be requested to cause iu 

 '* be laid before this House, all the correspondence which led to the Treaty of 

 ** Ghent, together with the Protocol, which has not been made public, and 

 ** which, in his opinion, it may not be improper to disclose." 



In the ordinary course of business, this resolution was by the 

 President referred to the Department of State, to report the papers 

 Co be communicated to the House, in compliance with the call. 



In examining among the archives of the Department for those 

 papers, I found among them a short letter from Mr. Russell to the 

 Secretary of State, dated the 25th of December, 1814, the day aftei* 

 the signature of the treaty. It was not marked private, but it re^ 

 lated principally to Mr. Russell's own affairs ; and, referring to the 

 joint letter of the mission, of the same 25th of December, 1814, in 

 which it had been stated that a majority of it had determined to offer 

 to the British an article confirming the navigation of the Mississip- 

 pi to the British, and the fisheries to us, as stipulated in the treaty 

 of 1783, it acknowledged, in candour, that he, (Mr. Russell,) was 

 in the minority on that occasion, and reserved to himself the power 

 of communicating thereafter his reasons for being in the minority. 



With Mr. Russell's candour '\n the transaction, at the time, I shall 

 not now trouble the public. It was in the examination of the files 

 for the purpose of answering the call of the House, that I first dis- 

 covered the existence of this letter ; and a question occurred tome 

 whether it should be communicated with the other documents to 

 the House or not. It was not strictly within the letter of the call, 

 for it was not a part of the correspondence which led to the treatr 

 — having been written the day after the treaty was signed. It had 

 no bearing upon the information which had been assigned to the 

 House as the motive for the call ; and the only fact relating to the 

 negotiation which it communicated, was, that upon o?je vote which 

 had been taken in the joint mission during the negotiation, and that 

 vote upon a question whether an offer should be made, which, 

 when made, had been rejected, Mr. Russell had been in the mi- 

 nority, and reserved to himself the power of assigning his reasons, 

 thereafter, for the purpose of vindicating his motives. It was doubt- 

 ful whether it would be proper to disclose this difference of opinion, 

 and Mr. Russell's solicitude to vindicate his motives for voting 

 against a rejected offer, which had terminated in nothing. But, on 

 the other hand, this might be, of all the documents relating to the 

 negotiation, the most desirable one to the purposes for which the 

 call had been made. The call might have been made with the 

 special intention of eliciting this letter, or the disclosure of the fact 

 which it attested. To have withhold the If ttor might have given 



