CONCLUSION.

THE interests of the West are the interests of the whole Unionand so are the interests of the East;-and let the statesmen who are the servants of the whole, beware of setting them in conflict with each other. A review of these papers will show that the interest really at stake in the negotiation of Ghent, a deep and important stake, was an interest of the East; that there was no Western interest affected by the article first proposed by Mr. Gallatin, or by the amendment finally offered to the British plenipotentiaries at his proposal, and rejected; that the only plausible objection to it, rested upon a gratuitous assumption, contrary to all reason and experience, that it would have given a right of access to, and of intercourse with, our Indians, to the British. This, the British had possessed by another article of another treaty, acknowledged to be extinguished by the war-but it would no more have been granted to them, by a right to navigate the Mississippi, than by a right to enter the harbour of New-York. The whole argument rested upon a fallacy; a mis-statement of the question. Happy would it have been for Mr. Russell, if, after assenting and pledging his signatures to the decision of the majority, he had as cautiously withheld from his government, and his country, the allegation of his reasons for having voted against it, as he did at the time of the discussion, from his colleagues. But, in the vehemence of his zeal to vindicate his motives for one unfortunate vote at Ghent, which but for himself would probably never have been known to the world, he has been necessitated to assert principles of international and municipal law, and to put forth statements as of fact, more unsubstantial than the pageant of a vision. He has been reduced to the melancholy office of misrepresenting the subject of which he treats, the conduct and sentiments. of his colleagues in a great national trust and his own. He has been compelled to disavow his own signatures, to contradict his own assertions, and to charge himself with his own interpolations. He has been forced to enter the lists as the champion of his country's enemy, upon a cause which he had been specially entrusted to defend and maintain-to allege the forfeiture of liberties which he had been specially instructed not to surrender-to magnify by boundless exaggerations, an ideal, and to depreciate in equal proportion, a real, interest of his country-to profess profound respect for the integrity and talents of men, while secretly denouncing their conduct as treacherous and absurd-and, finally, to traduce before the Representative Assembly of the nation, the character of the absent, and the memory of the dead.

It has been my duty, not only in justice to my own character and to that of the colleagues with whom I acted, but in respectful deference to the opinion of that nation of which we were, and two of us still are, the servants, to justify the conduct thus denounced in

the face of the country-and to prove that the letter which contain ed that denunciation was a tissue of misrepresentations. The at tack of Mr. Russell was at first secret-addressed to the Executive officer of the administration, at the head of the department, under whose instructions the mission at Ghent had acted. It was made under the veil of concealment, and in the form of a private letter. In that respect it had failed of its object. It had neither made the Executive a convert to its doctrines, nor impaired his confidence in the members of the majority at Ghent. Defeated in this purpose, after a lapse of seven years, Mr. Russell is persuaded to believe that he can turn his letter to account, especially with the aid of such corrections of the copy in possession as the supposed loss of the original would enable him to make without detection, by bring. ing it before the Legislative Assembly of the Union. Foiled in this assault, by the discovery of the original, he steals a march upon refutation and exposure, by publishing a second variety of his letter, in a newspaper; and when the day of retribution comes, disclosing every step of his march on this winding stair, he turns upon me, with the charge of having, by the use of disingenuous artifices, led him unawares into the disclosure of a private letter, never intended for the public, and seduced him to present as a duplicate, what he had not intended to exhibit as such. To this new separate and personal charge, I have replied, by proving the paper which contains it to be, like the letter from Paris, a tissue of misrepresentations. For the justification of myself, and of my colleagues at Ghent, nothing further was necessary. But the letter of Mr. Russell from Paris, contains doctrines with reference to law, and statements with reference to facts, involving the rights, the harmony, and the peace, of this Union.

"Dangerous conceits are in their nature poisons."

If the doctrines of Mr. Russell are true, the liberties of the peo ple of the United States in the Newfoundland, Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Labrador fisheries, are at this day held by no better tenure than the pleasure of the king of Great Britain, and will be abrogated by the first act of hostility between the two nations.

If his statements are true, those liberties are the mere accommodation of a few fishermen, annually decreasing in number, too worthless to be accounted to the rest of the nation of any benefit at all.

If his statements are true, the propositions made by the Ameri can to the British plenipotentiaries, on the 1st of December, 1814, gave unrestrained and undefined access for the British to the Indians within our territories-laid our country bare to swarms of British smugglers, and British emissaries-and exposed the unoffending citizens of an immense territory to all the horrors of savage warfare.

I now submit to the deliberate judgment of the nation, whether I have not proved that these doctrines and statements are equally and utterly without foundation-That the rights and liberties in the

fisheries, are held at the will, not of the king of Great Britain, but of the people of the United States themselves, founded upon national right, unbroken possession, and irrevocable acknowledgment -That their value, both immediate and remote, direct and consequential, is immensely important, not only to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but to the whole Union-That the proposition made to the British plenipotentiaries, on the 1st of December, 1814, would, if accepted, have given to the British, instead of an unrestrained and undefined access to our Indians, no access to them whatever-That it would have given them access, even to the Mississippi river, only from a single spot in the British territories; and a right to descend the river only with merchandise upon which the duties should have been paid, and subject to all the customhouse regulations.

The question in relation to the Mississippi, can never be revived. That spectre is forever laid. Great Britain has not only disavowed the claim to it which we would have admitted as valid, she has abandoned that upon which she herself exclusively rested it. Of its value, in confirmation of the opinions which I have expressed, I have given extracts from the debates in parliament, on the peace of 1782, which show how it was estimated by her greatest statesmen at that time. Those estimates had been confirmed by an experience of thirty years. The slumbers of the unoffending citizens of the Western Country, can, therefore, never more be, if they ever were, disquieted by the visits of this apparition to the glimpses of the moon. But the day may come, though I trust it is far remote, when the title to our fishing liberties may again be in peril as imminent as it was at the negotiation of Ghent. And if, in that day, the American statesmen who may be charged with the defence and support of the rights, liberties, and interests of their country, should deem it among the qualifications for their office to possess some knowledge of the laws of nations, some acquaintance with the history of their country, and some patriotism more comprehensive than party spirit or sectional prejudice ever gave or ever can give, I trust in God that their proficiency will 'have led them to the discovery, that all treaties, and all articles of treaties, and all liberties recognised in treaties, are not abrogated by war; that our fishing liberties were neither before nor since the Revolutionary war, held at the mere pleasure of the British crown; and that the lawful interests and possessions of one section of the Union are not to be sacrified for the imaginary profit of another, either by disparaging their value, or by casting them away as the interests of a disaffected part of the country.

APPENDIX.

1. Western Commentaries.

In the remarks upon Mr. Russell's letter and duplicate, which were submitted to the House of Representatives, I expressed the most unqualified confidence in the justice of the West, and my entire conviction that however justly the inhabitants of that portion of the Union might have been incensed against the majority of the Ghent mission, upon the statements and representations of those letters, yet that when the plain unvarnished tale of real fact should be laid before them, they would not only acquit the majority of any intended sacrifice of their interests, but would find in the measure itself, distinctly disclosed to them in its own nature, nothing to disapprove. In every part of this Union, when the whole truth can once be exhibited to the people, there is a rectitude of public opinion which neither individual enmity, local prejudices, nor party rancour can withstand or control. Upon this public virtue of my country I have ever relied, nor has it now, nor ever disappointed me. I have the satisfaction of knowing from various sources of information, public and private, that the general sentiment of the Western Country, wherever the Remarks as well as the Letters have been read, has done justice to the intentions of the majority, as well as to the motives of Mr. Russell.

Yet, since the communication of his Letters to the House of Representatives, the uses for which it was supposed the production of them was intended, and to which they were adapted, have not been altogether abandoned in some parts of the Western Country. The St. Louis Enquirer has pursued this purpose, in the simplest form, by publishing the message of the President of the United States to the House of Representatives of 7th May; and Mr. Russell's Private letter, and by suppressing the Duplicate and the Remarks.

In the Kentucky Reporter, published in Lexington, and in the Argus of Western America, published at Frankfort, various publications have appeared, exhibiting similar views of the subject, representing the proposition made to the British plenipotentiaries, on the 1st of December, 1814, as a very grievous offence, and ascribing it exclusively to me. The subject has, however, been

presented in a manner more impartial, in the Louisville Public Advertiser, where, among other things, it has been inquired how, if the proposal was so very exceptionable it could, under any circumstances have received the sanction or signature of Mr. Clay?

The following editorial article in the Frankfort Argus, of 18th July, seems intended to answer that question, and although containing some severe strictures upon "the Secretary," mingles with them some candid admissions, in a spirit upon which I would with equal candour animadvert.

From the Argus of Western America, Frankfort, Kentucky, 18th July, 1822. THE GHENT MISSION.

"Mr. Penn does not understand the circumstances attending the Ghent negotiation, or he wilfully conceals the truth.

"The first instructions given to our commissioners were, that they should not agree to any stipulation by which the pre-existing right of British subjects to trade with the Indians living within our territories, should be revived. The object of this instruction was to cut off the means of British influence among the Indians, which we had felt so fatally in that war.

"While acting under these instructions, it was proposed by Mr. Gallatin to offer the British the free navigation of the Mississippi, with access to it through our territories, on condition that the liberty to take and cure fish on the coast within the exclusive jurisdiction of the British colonies, should be continued to the citizens of the United States. This proposition was strenuously opposed by Mr. Clay, on the ground that it would give the British those very means of influence over the Indians of which it was the object of the government to deprive them, as evinced by their instructions. At first Gallatin, Adams, and Bayard, were favourable to the proposition, and Clay and Russell against it. In the end, however, Bayard changed sides, and it was rejected. Of course, no such proposition was made at that time.

"Subsequently, however, the overthrow of Napoleon having left us to contend single-handed with the undivided power of Great Britain, our government thought proper to change the terms offered to the British government, and accordingly sent additional instructions to Ghent, directing our commissioners to make a peace if practicable, upon the simple condition, that each party should be placed in the same situation in which the war found them.

"At the commencement of the war, the British had a right by treaty, not only to navigate the Mississippi, but to trade with all our western Indians. Of course our commissioners were instructed to consent to the continuance of this right, if no better terms could be procured. Under these instructions a proposition relative to the Mississippi and the fisheries, similar to that which had been rejected, was again. presented, adopted, and sent to the British commissioners. But it did not restore the right to navigate the