153 



leagues in the letter, and upon the frequency of such personal and 

 separate explanations in the annals of diplomacy — all tljis, upon the 

 face of it, came directly or indirectly from Mr. Russell himself. 

 The letter, as published in the National Gazette, nas not marked 

 privaie, as the original had been, which was now known from the 

 President's message. It had discarded the panegyric upon the dis- 

 franchised tishermen — the self-eulogium for enlarged patriotism 

 and subdued predilections and prepossessions — the prophetic in- 

 spirations, and the trust in God and in the valour of the West, 

 which were in the duplicate and not in the original. It had stripped 

 off all the cumulative epithets added in the duplicate to the charge 

 of a wilful violation of instructions- — it had even dismissed the 

 charge of having violated their instructions relating to the Missis- 

 sippi, as construed by themselves, and the emphatic citation of the 

 explicit and implicit cancelled instructions of 15th April, 1813. 

 But it had retained the interpolation of " we directly violated our 

 •instructions,'''' and the substitution of " we could" for " 1 can," in 

 that luminous exposition of atmospheric humidities and incessant 

 togs which had been discovered to have so nearly annulled the 

 value of the Labrador fishery ; and although the cancelled instruc- 

 tions were no longer cited in the text of the letter, yet to support 

 the remnant of interpolated charge, that they had been violated, 

 they were expressly subjoined as an appendage to the publication, 

 with an abundance of italicised words to point out the heinousness 

 of this violation; and this was after the interview in which I had 

 shown to Mr. Russell at the Department, the record, not only of 

 the letter of 4th October, 1814, to tiie Commissioners, which had 

 not, but that of the letter of the 19th October, 1814, which had been 

 received before the proposal, upon which the charge of violation 

 rested, had been made to the British plenipotentiaries. The tri- 

 plicate of the National Gazette had restored the postscript of the 

 original, which had been dismissed from the duplicate, containing 

 the three hopeful other ways of proceeding devised by Mr. Rus- 

 sell's resources of negotiation, two months after the negotiation was 

 over, instead of the course which we did pursue, the word other 

 only being omitted. The triplicate of the National Gazette, in 

 short, proved that the original draft from Mendon had been com* 

 plete ; and that all its own interpolations, as well as those of the 

 duplicate, and its omissions, had been owing, not to deficiencies of 

 memory, but to superfluities of invention. 



Such is the true history of the tactics of Mr. Russell, in bringing 

 before the House of Representatives and the nation, his impeach- 

 ment of his colleagues, the majority of the Ghent mission — that it 

 was such of me, is fully admitted by himself in the Boston States- 

 man, by styling me the adverse party, and in that publication he 

 sufficiently indicates his disposition in the progress of his operations 

 to concentrate his charges against me alone. Be it so. In my re- 

 marks upon the original and duplicate of his accusatory letter, I 

 styled it a laborious tissue of misrepresentations. He complains of 



