203 



successfully. Had Mr. Russell been in the mission of Great Biv 

 tain instead of that of the United States, he could not have perform- 

 ed a nfiore zealous and acceptable service, than by maintaining the 

 doctrines of his letter of 11th February, 1815. As to the object 

 at issue, it was ihdr argument that he urged. As to the spirit he 

 excited, it was tUeir interest he was promoting. Excellent indeed 

 would have been the account to which they would have turned 

 their right of navigalin?;- the Mississippi, if, at the very moment while 

 they disclaimed it, thoy could have obtained for its renunciation, 

 that of these United States to their nshing liberties. Besides the 

 immense disproportion of what they would have gained by the ex- 

 change, tliey would have planted in the heart of the Union, a root 

 of bitterness which never could have been plucked up but with 

 its blood. Had the fisheries been surrendered— when the people 

 of New-England came to inquire where were their liberties in 

 them, and how they had been lost ? what would their feelings have 

 been to be told— they Avere lost, that we might gain the right of for- 

 bidding British subjects from descending the Mississippi river in 

 boats l With what human endurance would they have heard it said, 

 We have lost nothing, upon the whole. You, indeed, have lost 

 your fisheries — but we have acquired the right of interdicting all 

 Englishmen from travelling a highway in the Western Country. — = 

 It was not in the power of man to devise an expedient better suited 

 t# detach the affections of the people of New-England from the 

 Union, or to till their bosoms with heart-burning and jealousy 

 against the people of the West. 



I have already shown that the importance which Mr. Russell 

 strains to the utmost all his faculties to give to this British right of 

 navigating the Mississippi, is all founded upon a mis-statement of 

 what it was. He begins by saying that it would be absurd to sup- 

 pose that the article meant no more than what it expressly purport- 

 ed to mean ; and then he infers that it would have been understood 

 to mean the same thing as the third article of the treaty of 1794 , 

 and as the free access, both of intercourse and of trade with the In- 

 dians within our territories, which that had given to the British, had 

 caused inconveniences to us, which had been mentioned in tb^ in- 

 structions of 15th April, 1813, he infers that all the same evils 

 would have flowed from the continuance of their right to navigate 

 the Mississippi. No such inference could have been drawn from 

 the article. The article was precisely what it purported to be, and 

 no more ; and if, under colour of it, British subjects had ever at- 

 tempted to give it a greater extension, it would always have been 

 entirel}' in the power of the American government to control them. 



It is the first common-place of false and sophistical reason- 

 ing, to mis-stale the question in discussion ; and Mr. Russell, after 

 making this, withoutreason or necessity, a question of one sectional 

 interest against another, changes the nature of the question itself, 

 Tor the double purpose of m.-^o-nifving- the Wo-tern. and of diminish 



