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 statement of the real facts, it must be taken entirely from under him. The real facts are these:

On the 17th of January last, the House of Representatives of the United States adopted the following resolution:

"Resolved, That the President of the United States be requested to cause to "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 to 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 after the signature of the treaty. It was not marked private, but it related 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 Mississippi 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 in 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 discovered the existence of this letter; and a question occurred to me 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 treaty -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 one 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 minority, and reserved to himself the power of assigning his reasons, thereafter, for the purpose of vindicating his motives. It was doubtful 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 withheld the letter might have given

rise to surmises of special motives for veiling from the eye of Congress, and of the nation, the discovery of that fact. As Mr. Russell was upon the spot, and a member of the House, I determined to mention the letter to him, and place it at his option whether it should be communicated to the House or not. I did so, at my house, as he has stated; and it was on the 26th of January. But Mr. Russell did not say that he had no distinct recollection of the letter, to which I alluded, and that he wished to see it before he gave his consent to its publication. I had not asked his consent to its publication. I had told him there was such a letter; and left it at his option whether it should be communicated in the answer to the call of the House of Representatives, or not. His first reply was, that he thought it was a private letter, which it would be improper to communicate to the House; but, after a pause, as if recollecting himself, he said he wished to see the letter, before giving a definitive answer. To this I immediately assented. Mr. Russell accordingly repaired to the office, and saw his letter; not in my presence, or in the room occupied by me, but in that of Mr. Bailey, the clerk who has charge of the diplomatic documents. Mr. Russell then desired to examine the whole of the correspond. ence relating to the Ghent negotiation, and afterwards twice in succession requested to be furnished with copies of one paragraph of the instructions to the commissioners, of 15th April, 1813. That paragraph is the one which, in the duplicate, is cited so emphatically, and with so many cumulative epithets, in support of the charge against the majority of the mission, of having violated both the letter and the spirit of their explicit and implicit instructions. After all these examinations, and after a request to be furnished with a copy of this most pregnant paragraph, in all of which he was indulged to the extent of his wishes, he told me that he saw no objection to the communication to the House of his separate letter of 25th December, 1814; with the exception of a part of it, not relating to the negotiation. He was informed that the part only indicated by himself would be communicated; and accordingly that part only was communicated. Mr. Russell then added, that there was another letter, written at Paris, conformably to the indication in that of 25th December, 1814, and containing his reasons therein alluded to; and which he wished might also be communicated with the rest of the documents, to the House. This was the first intimation I had ever received of the existence of the letter of 11th February, 1815; and I told Mr. Russell that, if it could be found upon the files of the Department, it should be communicated with the rest. I directed, accordingly, that search should be made, and afterwards that it should be repeated, among all the files of the Department, for this letter. It was not to be found. After a delay of several days, for repeating these ineffectual searches, I deemed it necessary to report, in answer to the call of the House; and the documents were all sent, including that portion of his letter of 25th December, 1814, which he himself had marked for communication.

It was not alone to me that Mr. Russell had expressed the wish that his letter of 11th February, 1815, might be communicated with the other documents to the House. He had, as appears by the statement of Mr. Bailey, repeatedly manifested the same wish to him. He had even gone so far as to inform him, that he had a copy of it at Mendon, and to inquire of him whether a copy of it from himself would be received at the Department, for communication to the House. He did not, indeed, make the same inquiry of me, nor was I then informed that he had made it to Mr. Bailey. If I had been, I should have immédiately answered that it would be received and communicated. I knew not what were the contents of the letter but I knew that, whatever they might be, I could have no objection to their being communicated, at the desire of Mr. Russell himself; and far from suspecting him capable of believing himself permitted to make any alterations in the copy, to suit present purposes, I should have thought the bare suspicion an outrage upon his honour.

As an asso

But I had no desire of my own that the letter should be communicated. I regretted even that Mr. Russell had chosen that the part of his letter of 25th December, 1814, which announced his disagreement with the majority of the mission, should be communicated. I regretted that he had ever thought proper to inform the Secretary of State what had been his vote upon that occasion; and I was perfectly assured, that there never had existed a moment when there could have been any necessity for him to vindicate his motives for that vote. I was assured that neither the government nor the nation would ever have inquired of him how he had voted, if he had not been so over-earnest in his solicitude to tell them. And I was equally convinced, that after he had told them, it would not ultimately redound to his credit. I had no feelings of enmity towards Mr. Russell. Our private intercourse had been, for more than ten years, that of friendship, which, in no instance whatever, had been, in word, deed, or thought, violated by me. ciate in a trust of great importance, the general result of which had been satisfactory to the country, he had always had claims, sacred to me, to my peculiar regard. With the high and honourable duties of that great trust, I had mingled no little expedients of selfaggrandizement by the debasement of any of my colleagues. I had sown no seed of future accusation against a brother commissioner, in the shell of a pretended vindication of myself. I had laid up no root of rancorous excitement, to be planted, after the lapse of years, in the soil of sectional prejudice, or party prepossession. I lamented to discover that Mr. Russell had not so dealt with his colleagues of the majority; and I was mortified to see the earnestness with which he appeared determined to blazon forth this disagreement of opinion, and the part that he had taken in it, to the world. I felt that it neither became me to object to the communication of either of his letters to the House, if desired by him, nor officiously to offer him facilities for the communication, which

he had not suggested to me himself. I, therefore, did not ask him to furnish, himself, a copy of his letter from Paris, to be communi cated to the House; but, on the 21st of February, reported to the President, for communication to the House, all the other documents, embraced by their call of the 17th January preceding.

The message from the President to the House, communicating the documents, was delivered on the 23d of February, and was or dered to be laid on the table.

On the 19th of April, the following resolution was adopted by the House, having been first moved the day before:

"Resolved, That the President of the United States be requested to cause to be communicated to this House, if not injurious to the public good, any letter, or communication, which may have been received from Jonathan Russell, Esq. one of the Ministers of the United States who concluded the Treaty of Ghent, after the signature of that Treaty, and which was written in conformity to the indications contained in said Minister's letter, dated at Ghent, 25th December, 1814."

It will be observed, that nearly two months had intervened between the report of the Ghent treaty documents to the House, and this second call, which Mr. Russell has admitted was made at his suggestion.

On Saturday, the 20th of April, the day after the adoption of the resolution of the House, and even before it had been officially referred to the Department for an answer, Mr. Daniel Brent, the chief clerk of the Department, without consulting me, but knowing the anxious desire that I should feel, of being enabled to report the paper called for by the House, knowing also that it was not upon the files of the Department, called upon Mr. Russell, at his lodgings, and inquired of him whether he could furnish the letter desired; and was told by Mr. Russell that he could, and would deliver it to the President. Mr. Brent, it seems, suggested that it would be better that it should be delivered as a duplicate than as a copy, to which Mr. Russell assented. This distinction, which has reference chiefly to the forms of office, would not have occurred to Between a copy, marked as such by the writer, signed by him, and all in his own hand-writing, and a duplicate, furnished as such also by the writer, I can perceive no difference of substance, though, as evidence in a court of justice, or as a document in the public archives, one might bear the character of an original paper, and the other only of a copy. Mr. Brent had too much respect for Mr. Russell, to imagine it possible, whether he gave the paper as a copy or as a duplicate, that he should give it other than as the letter originally written, and called for by the resolution of the House.

me.

Mr. Russell, however, did assent to the suggestion of Mr. Brent, and, with his own hand, wrote the word "duplicate" on the paper, which he had already prepared to deliver, to be reported in answer to the call of the House. He did more: he erased with a scraper the word "copy," which he had previously written in its stead, and the traces of which are still discernible on the paper.

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What, then, does Mr. Russell mean, when, in the Boston Statesman of 27th June last, he says, that when he delivered the paper at the Department, to Mr. Brent, on the 22d of April, "the word [duplicate] had indeed been written on it, in consequence of his "suggestion, as above stated: but I gave no further intimation, "much less any assurance, that it was so.' These are Mr. Russell's own words; and what can they mean? They have been, at least by some portion of the public, understood to mean, that the paper had been styled a duplicate, not by Mr. Russell, but by me. Ono! the word was written with Mr. Russell's own hand; and when I received the paper I knew not that there ever had passed a word between Mr. Brent and him whether it should be delivered

as a duplicate or a copy. The Boston Statesman, of the same day in which his reply is published, says "Mr. Russell, without much reflection, consented" (to give it as a duplicate.) I should think he had time enough for reflection, while at work with the scraper, to efface the word "copy," for which it was substituted. Mr. Rus sell's meaning is, therefore, that, although he wrote the word duplicate with his own hand, yet he did not intend it should be received as an intimation, much less as an assurance, WAS SO."

THAT IT

Mr. Russell had been explicitly told by Mr. Brent, that his call to inquire whether he could furnish the paper called for by the resolution of the House, had not been at my desire, or with my know. ledge, but of his own motion. But it seems Mr. Russell did not be lieve him; and instead of delivering the letter, as he had said he would, to the President, he brought it to the Department, and delivered it to Mr. Brent himself; observing that he was indifferent whether it was communicated to the House or not; but, if it should not be, he wished it might be returned to him.

The singularity of this observation is not among the least extraordinary incidents of this transaction. Mr. Russell, who, while the first resolution of the 17th of January, calling for the Ghent treaty documents, was to be reported upon by the Department of State, had expressed to me, and repeatedly to Mr. Bailey, the wish that his letter from Paris should be communicated-Mr. Russell, at whose suggestion the specific call from the House of the 19th of April, for that letter, had been moved-Mr. Russell, who in the interval had written to Mendon for the original draft of his letter, had received it from Mendon, and on the morning after the resolution of the House calling for it, was already prepared with a "copy" of it to deliver to the President, a copy consisting of seven folio sheets of paper-transforms this copy, at the suggestion of Mr. Brent, into a duplicate, and after having again on Saturday declared to Mr. Brent his wish that it might be communicated to the House, brings it on Monday morning to the Department, and in delivering it to Mr. Brent, says he is indifferent whether it should be communicat ed to the House or not; but; if not, wishes it may be returned to him.