But Mr. Russell did not say, that he had understood the applica tion from Mr. Brent to him, to know whether he could furnish the duplicate of the letter called for by the House, had been made with my privity, or by my authority. He did not say that it had not been his intention to deliver it as a duplicate. He did not say that he had purposely dated it "Paris, 11th February, 1822," to give notice that it was not the letter written by him in 1815, called for by the resolution of the House. He did not say that it was at my option whether to communicate it to the House or not, nor did he insinuate that the alteration at the Department of the date from 1822, first to 1816, and then to 1815, had been made without his approbation or consent. To all this he knew the refutation was too near at hand to admit of its being said at that time and place. As to his giving explanations to me, what explanation could he give? What explanation has he given to the public? The call of the House was for a specifical paper written by him-he had furnished a paper as a duplicate of it, in his own hand-writing. It had been detected as a paper, so much the same, and yet so different, that it was susceptible of no explanation consistent with fair dealing and the expedients to which Mr. Russell is reduced, in attempting to account for it now, afford the most unanswerable proof, that he has for it no honest explanation to give. He desperately seeks an apology for it, by imputing to me a design to entrap him, by the alteration of the date of his duplicate, from 1822 to 1816, and then to 1815, made at the Department. These alterations were made like the application of Mr. Brent to Mr. Russell, for the duplicate without my knowledge, and happened thus.

After comparing the two papers together, I gave the duplicate to Mr. Bailey, for a copy of it to be made, to be reported to the President, for communication to the House. Mr Bailey gave it to be copied to Mr. Thomas Thruston, a Clerk in the Department, a young man of a fair and honourable mind. Perceiving the date of the letter to be "Paris, 11 February, 1822," and knowing that Mr. Russell had been through the whole of that month attending Congress in this city; not suspecting for a moment that this date had been designedly assumed by Mr. Russell, he consulted Mr. Brent, who, concluding with him that the date of the year was an inadvertency, authorized him to rectify it in the copy. Mr. Thruston thought that he might extend that kindness to Mr. Russell further, by making the same change in the paper itself. He passed his pen therefore through the figures 1822, and wrote over them. 1816, thinking that was the year in which the letter was written. This change was not only made without my knowledge; but when made known to me was disapproved by me. Mr. Brent supposed that all would be set right by making known the alteration to Mr. Russell himself, and obtaining his consent to the rectification of the date of the year. He did so; and Mr. Russell not only approved of the change, but brought his original draft to the Department, and showed the date of it to Mr. Brent, to confirm the second correction. I only ask, how intense must be the pressure of that con

sciousness, which attempts to palliate the variations in Mr. Russell's two papers, by representing incidents like these, as crafty wiles of mine to ensnare his innocence ?

Mr. Russell complains that, after the original of his letter had been found, the duplicate should have been communicated to the House at all. He complains that I should have presumed to make remarks upon both of them. He complains that I went to the House of Representatives on the 6th of May, and there in person sought for a member who would consent to make the call which was necessary for the official publication of my personal remarks. As usual, part of these statements is true, and part is not-my call at the House of Representatives on the 6th of May, was accidental; being on my return from witnessing the experiment of Commodore Rodgers's noble invention at the Navy-Yard. I did not there seek for a member who would consent to make the call. I never asked any member to make the call; though I told several members who spoke to me on the subject there, and elsewhere, that it was my wish the documents should be communicated to the House. The President's message to the House of the 4th of May, which Mr. Russell had seen before he left the city, had informed the House of my desire that the letter should be communicated, together with a communication from me respecting it.

The truth is, that my desire for the communication of Mr. Russell's letter to the House had commenced on the same day that his own had ceased. Mr. Russell, from the 26th of January to the 22d of April, had been indefatigable in his exertions to bring this letter before Congress and the public. He had procured the original draught of it from Mendon; he had procured the call for it from the House; he had endured the toil of re-writing, with his own hand, at least once, a letter of seven folio sheets of paper; he had brought, and delivered it with his own hand, at the Department. At the moment of fruition his appetite fails him. Doubts of consequences to himself, as well as to others, seem to flash across his mind. He leaves the paper--For what? For communication to the House, in answer to their call? No! "To put it in the power of the person who might consider himself the most liable to be affected by its publication"-for the previous examination and consent of the ADVERSE PARTY." He seems to invite objection to its being communicated. He is quite indifferent whether it be communicated or not, and, it not communicated, he desires that it may be returned to him. But to make its terrors irresistible, he has double and treble charged it with crimination of violated instructions; and to vouch his charges, has twice armed himself with official copies from the Department, of the cancelled part of the instructions of 15th April, 1813.

I had never wished for the communication to the House or to the

public of the letter, until I had seen it. The effect of its perusal upon my mind was certainly different from what Mr. Russell appears to have anticipated. I saw at once what it was and what it

meant. I also saw, in a great measure, what its writer was, which I had never seen before, and the discovery of the original letter, two days after, disclosed him to me in all his glory. In the private relations between us, I remembered what he had been to me, and what I had been to him, for more than twelve years before, until, and including that very morning. I saw that he was now to be, in substance and in intent, my accuser, and that of the colleagues with whom I had acted, before the House, of which he was a member, and before the nation. In the original he had been a secret aceuser, under the mask of self-vindication. In the duplicate he had laid aside the mask, though not the professions of unfeigned respect; and to all the secret discolourings of the conduct and opinions of his colleagues, had added the new and direct charge of a wanton and wilful violation of their instructions, as understood by themselves. To have shrunk from these charges would, in my estimation, have been equivalent to an admission of their truth have suppressed them, after the prying curiosity, which had long been stimulated, to see this mysterious and fearful letter, would have been impossible. No honourable course was left me but that of meeting the ADVERSE PARTY on the scene which he himself had selected for his operations; and I knew that little more would be necessary for my own vindication, and that of my colleagues, in the minds of all impartial men, than from the materials furnished by. Mr. Russell himself, to expose to the House at once the character of the accusation and of the accuser. I did, therefore, desire that both the letters of Mr. Russell, and my remarks upon them, should be communicated to the House; but even then, if Mr. Russell, instead of affecting indifference, had fairly acknowledged his error, and requested that the papers might not be communicated, I would have joined him in that request to the President.

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Both the letters were communicated to the House; both were strictly within the call of their resolutiou, which was for “ any letter which may have been received from Jonathan Russell, in conformity with the indications contained in his letter of the 25th December, 1814." I remarked upon both; and if that has proved a mortification to Mr. Russell, he should recollect that he brought it upon himself. It was his fault there was any difference between them to remark upon. He should also remember, that if the original alone had been communicated, he would have been deprived of the benefit of "those corrections of the copy in possession, which appeared to him proper to exhibit his case most advantageously before the tribunal of the public."

Mr. Russell is mistaken in supposing that I attach any importance to his protest, as adding authentication to his professions, or proving his sincerity. What difference can there be between the word of a man, with or without protest, who, after writing the word duplicate upon a letter written and signed by himself, to be communicated as a public document to a legislative body, tells the public that he gave no further intimation, much less an assurance, that it

was so, and avows that it was not so? If the name of God, under Mr. Russell's pen, could not deter him from converting the past into the future, that he might enjoy the honours of prophecy, and couple with his trust in the Deity, his confidence in the valour of the West, what excuse could I have for considering the declaration of Mr. Russell as either more or less sincere for being backed by his protest?

"To add a perfume to the violet

"Is wasteful and ridiculous excess."

But if Mr. Russell, after delivering on the 22d of April his du plicate at the Department of State, and especially after he knew that the orignal had been found, was no longer solicitous that either of them should be communicated to the House, he had neither given up the inclination, nor the intention of appearing before the public, as the accuser of his colleagues of the majority at Ghent.

He left the City of Washington on the 5th of May, the day after the House of Representatives had received the President's answer to the call of the 19th of April-with that answer the President communicated to the House my report to him, which had been accompanied by a copy of the duplicate left by Mr, Russell at the Department for communication. But the President did not communicate the copy of the duplicate itself. He informed the House that the original had also been found-that it had been marked as a private letter, by the writer himself that it disclosed differences of opinion which would naturally call for answers from those implicated by it; and that I, as one of them, had already requested that it might be communicated, together with my remarks upon it, Under those circumstances the President declined communicating the letter called for, unless the House, upon a knowledge of them, should desire it-in which case he informed them that it would be communicated, together with my report upon it.

All this was known to Mr. Russell when he left the city; and it is presumed that he also knew that the call for the letter would not be renewed by the mover of the resolution of the 19th of April; yet Mr. Russell went to Philadelphia, and there caused to be printed in the National Gazette of the 10th of May, another variety of his letter of 11th February, 1815, from Paris, to Mr. Monroestill differing from the original-differing also from the duplicate, which he had delivered at the Department, but satisfactorily prov ing with what ingenuity he had told me that the two last leaves of his original draft had not been found at Mendon, and that he had been obliged to supply their contents in the duplicate from memory-the triplicate of the National Gazette was accompanied by an editorial article, vouching for its authenticity as a copy vouching from good authority that Mr. Russell had had no share in the call (of the House of the 19th of April) for the private letter-and commenting in a style, the apologetical character of which indicates its origin, upon the privacy, which it urged was not secrecy, of the letter; upon the professions of Mr. Russell's respect for his col

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leagues in the letter, and upon the frequency of such personal and separate explanations in the annals of diplomacy--all this, upon the face of it, came directly or indirectly from Mr. Russell himself. The letter, as published in the National Gazette, was not marked private, as the original had been, which was now known from the President's message. It had discarded the panegyric upon the disfranchised fishermen-the self-eulogium for enlarged patriotism and subdued predilections and prepossessions-the prophetic inspirations, 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 Mississippi, 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 "I can,' that luminous exposition of atmospheric humidities and incessant fogs which had been discovered to have so nearly annulled the value of the Labrador fishery; and although the cancelled instructions 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 the 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 triplicate 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. Russell'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 impeachment 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 remarks upon the original and duplicate of his accusatory letter, I styled it a laborious tissue of misrepresentations. He complains of