253 



tommutiicaiion, whether public or private, of the time when, napqi 

 the person by whom, it might have been received, and by iis worcl- 

 ingit seemed adapted to obtain precisely such a paper as Mr. Rus- 

 sell did produce, yet, after what has been said by Mr. Floyd, I 

 must infer, that in making this call of 19th April, he did not know 

 that Mr. Russell's letter from Paris was a private letter. But Mr. 

 Russell himself did know it, and had, nevertheless, repeatedly ex- 

 pressed the wish, that it might be communicated to the House un- 

 der the first call of 17th January. In the interval between the 

 first and second call, he had sent for his own original of it to Men- 

 don — had received it, and was immediately afterwards pre}>ared 

 with his duplicate, not marked private, but delivered by himself at 

 the Department of State as a public letter. 



Of Mr. Floyd's anxious wish first, that the whole correspond- 

 ence, and secondly, that this letter of Mr. Russell should come 

 before Congress, there can assuredly be no question. With re- 

 gard to the correspondence, my wish to gratify him was the more 

 earnest, from the hope, that whatever might be his motive for 

 the call, he would be convinced there was none in the executive 

 for concealment. As to Mr. Russell's letter, before I knew its 

 contents, I wished it might be communicated, for the gratification 

 both of Mr. Russell and Mr. Floyd; and after I knew them, for my 

 own vindication and that of my colleagues of the majority at Ghent, 

 against them. 



Mr. Floyd, when he says that I procured Mr. Fuller to make 

 the call (of 7th May,) which he, Mr. Floyd, had desisted from, 

 adds, that it seems this was so desirable to me as a mean of getting 

 into the newspapers 



A biographer of Mr. Fox, charged the physicians who attended 

 him in his last illness, with having hastened his death by adminis- 

 tering foxglove The physicians answered by declaring that the}*^ 

 had administered no foxglove to him ; upon which the biographer 

 turned upon them with a charge of having caused the patient's 

 death by omitting to administer foxglove, a remedy known to be, 

 suited for his disease. Thus Mr. Floyd, after moving a call for 

 the Ghent papers, without excepting even such as the President 

 might think it improper to disclose ; after moving a second call for 

 any letter or communication, unless injurious to the public good, 

 which may have been received from Mr. Russell, on the subject, 

 after manifesting the utmost impatience for the papers, and not 

 sparing the excitement of suspicions that they would be garbled 

 or suppressed ; now turns upon me for concurring with him in the 

 wish, that they might all be produced, and imputes it all to a desire 

 •on my part of getting into the newspapers. 



It was not into the newspapers, but before the House of Repre- 

 sentatives, that the motion of Mr. Fuller was adapted to bring me , 

 and it was at the call of Mr. Floyd, with the conrnrrini^ will aud 



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