The Rhode Island American, And General Advertiser

FROM THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER.

[CONCLUDED.]

Mr. Russell's delivery of his duplicate at the Department of State was entirely spontaneous. It had not even been asked of him by Mr. Brent; and the inquiry which Mr. Brent had made of him, whether he could furnish a duplicate of the letter called for by the resolution of the House, if application should be made to him for it, had been without my knowledge, and Mr. Brent had told him so. Mr. Russell delivered his duplicate at the Department as a publick letter, and as if the original itself had been also publick. What then does Mr. Russell mean, when he says, he left it for my examination? What does he mean, by saying that I had the sole power to publish it or not, as I might judge proper and to consult my own feelings and interests, in forming my decision?

There was a resolution of the House of Representatives, calling upon the President to cause to be Communicated to them a letter specifically designated. The writer of that letter, after repeated expressions more than two months before to me and to Mr. Bailey, that he wished that letter might be communicated to the House, now brought to the Department a duplicate of it, and says I was at liberty to publish it or not, as it might suit my feelings and interests. Mr. Russell is not so ignorant of the duties of a Secretary of State as not to know, that, in the usual course of business, the resolution of the House was referred by the President to the Department of State for a report, and that when once his letter had been delivered by himself at the Department, it was my indispensable duty to report a copy of it to the President for communication to the House. Had it directly charged me with treason to my country, as it indirectly did with something as bad, my only and inflexible duty as Secretary of State was, to report it to the President for communication to the House. By the terms of the resolution of the House, the President indeed might have withheld it from the House, if in his judgment the communication would be injurious to the publick interest: but of that the President, and not I, was the judge. Suppose even that the President, in forming his judgment, had thought proper to consult my opinion upon it. With what face could I advise that it should be withheld? If the letter was not a tissue of misrepresentations, the Secretary of State, and the Minister of the United States in France, were men unfit to hold any station whatever in the service of their country; and that was the impression evidently intended to be produced by the letter, at least, throughout the largest and most growing section of the Union. Upon what pretence could I have advised the President to withhold the communication as injurious to the publick interest?—If there was truth in the letter, its contents could not be too soon known to Congress and to the nation. It was fitting that the conspirators against the peacefut and unoffending inhabitants of the western country, should be unmasked before the publick, and that the world of the west should be apprized of the whole extent of their obligations to the great confider in their valour and in God.

On receiving the paper, therefore my only duty was, to report a copy of it to the President, for communication to the House, in answer to their call. On perusal of it, I found it was marked duplicate, but not private, and that it bore date "Paris, 11th of February, 1822."

My first impression certainly was, that the errour of this date was in the time and not the place. I supposed an inadvertency, such as not unfrequently happens in copying papers of date other than the current year, which in the hurry of writing is substituted unconsciously for the date of the original. I did not then perceive that the word copy had been written close at the side of the word duplicate, and scraped out. The erasure had been made with a cautious and delicate hand: its attention to the texture of the paper, was not perceptible to an unsuspecting eye; and in the freshness of the ink when performed, must have appeared to be complete. In the progress of blackening, incident to ink after it has been some days written upon paper, the traces of the word soon became perceptible, and are now apparent upon its face. Both the words, the date, and the whole letter, are in the handwriting of Mr. Russell.

On reading the letter through, I found it had been composed with a view to be received and understood as if all written at Paris in February. 1815. Yet I was confident it had not all been so written. I was particularly struck with the following passages. "I will frankly avow, however, that my impressions were, and still are, that Great-Britain, calculating on the success of the powerfull expedition which she has sent against New-Orleans, confidently expected that she would have become the mistress of Louisiana, and all its waters; and that she did not, in this event, intend to abandon her conquest under the terms of the treaty of Ghent."

"If she be disappointed in her views on Louisiana, and I trust in God and the valour of the west that she will be, I shall not be surprised if, hereafter, she grants us the fishing privilege, which costs her absolutely nothing: without any extravagant equivalent whatever."

At any rate, we are still at liberty to negotiate for that privilege, and to offer for it an equivalent, fair in its comparative value and just in its relative effects.

"I trust in God she will be"—in a letter dated Paris, 11th February, 1822—signed Jonathan Russell—addressed to the Honourable James Monroe, Secretary of State—and delivered by Mr. Russell to be Communicated to the House of Representatives, in answer to a Call suggested by himself for a letter written by him in 1815! And Mr. Russell charges me with disingenuousness, for communicating this paper to the House! And Mr. Russell talks of respect for the Representatives of the people of the United States! I am in the judgment of my country, upon this state of facts.—But as for Mr. Russell, when he wrote that—"I trust in God, she will be"—and, came to the name of God—did not the pen drop from his hand?

I took the letter to the President, and expressing to him my suspicion, that the above passage particularly had never been written at Paris, requested him to cause search to be made among his private papers for the original letter, if there ever had been one. The search was accordingly made, and the letter was found. On comparing them together, I immediately perceived that the original was marked private; which the duplicate was not.

I turned immediately to the prophesies of the duplicate; in the original they were not. I looked to the passage in the duplicate, which represents the fishing privilege, not only as utterly insignificant, and trifling in value, but as having been proved to be so by the best information "we (the Plenipotentiaries at Ghent) could obtain on the subject." There was a whole system of misrepresentation in these words "we could obtain"—for they represented the incorrect estimate of the value of the fishing privilege which they introduced, as the result of information obtained by the whole mission at Ghent, as having been there discussed, and as aggravating the wrong of the majority, in offering so extravagant an equivalent, for what they knew, upon their own inquiries, to be of so little value. Knowing, as I did, that the information was all misinformation; that no information concerning the value of the privilege had been, or could have been, obtained by the joint mission; and that excepting some doubts as to its value, expressed, not by Mr. Russell, it had never been even a subject of conversation in the mission—I turned to the real letter from Paris, to see how the writer had expressed himself there, and found he had written, "according to the best information that I can obtain on the subject."

I saw immediately that all that tale about the obscurity and humidity of the atmosphere, in the high northern latitudes to degrade the value of the Labrador fishery, was not in the original even pretended to have been information sought or obtained by the joint mission; that the discovery which it disclosed was not pretended to have been ever made known to the mission; that the fogs, so pernicious to the curing of the fish, were in the original letter, if not merely the vapours of Mr. Russell's imagination, at least no more than the result of the best information that he could obtain.—And I instantly saw, too, the motives for the substitution of the words "we could" in the duplicate, for the words "I can," in the original.—As the original had been written, the bill of indictment which it virtually contained against the majority of the mission, left them at liberty to say, in their defence, that if they had overrated the value of the fishing liberty, it had been at least an honest error. It left them at liberty to inquire, why Mr. Russell, in their discussions upon the fishery question, had not revealed to them this great discovery of obscurity and humidity and incessant fogs, which lessened so much the value of the fishing liberty. The "we could" of the duplicate took from them all such means of defence. it represented them as having wilfully sinned against their better knowledge; as having sought information of the value of the fishing liberty—as having obtained proof of its worthlessness—and yet as having persisted in offering for it an equivalent which was to let in British smugglers, British emissaries, and all the horrours of an Indian warfare, upon the unoffending inhabitants of the west. Was this one of those corrections which Mr. Russell believed himself permitted to make, which appeared to his mind proper, to exhibit his case most advantageously before the tribunal of the publick?

Proceeding in the comparison between the two papers, when I came to that sublime panegyric upon the fishermen to atone for the absolute surrender and eager sacrifice of their liberties;—to that cheering cup of consolation doled out to them as a peace offering for the extinguishment, as far as Mr. Russell's labours could avail, of their means of subsistence—“that the essential security and prosperity of the many, must be preferred to the convenience and minor interests of the few;” to that swelling peal of self applause, for early prepossessions silenced, and local predilections subdued—all substituted in the duplicate, for a mere postscripted trust, in the original, that his argument to demonstrate the abrogation of the treaty of 1783, by the war, and the consequent discontinuance of the fishing privilege, would not be ascribed to any hostility to those interested in it—the mingled emotions at the bottom of the soul of the writer, betrayed by these self-accusing and self-extolling variations from his letter as it had been originally written, excited in my mind a sentiment too much cheered with merriment, and too much mitigated by compassion, for anger to have in it any part. But when, in place of a paragraph in the original letter, expressly declaring that he had believed with the majority that the propositions relative to the navigation of the Mississippi and the fisheries "violated in no way our instructions," I found foisted into the duplicate a paragraph, accusing the majority not only of the violation of their instructions, but of a wilful and wanton violation of them, as understood by themselves: and to support this interpolated charge, a cancelled paragraph of instructions solemnly cited, of which he had, within two months, obtained from the archives of the Department two successive copies—let me candidly confess that the sentiment uppermost in my mind was indignation.

Mr. Russell comments upon the infirmities of my temper, and says, that when afterwards I pointed out to him, face to face, these palterings of his own band-writing, and gave him proof, from the records of the Department, that the instructions cited by him in support of his charge against his colleagues, had been cancelled at the time to which the charge applied, I was not in a humour to listen to him even with civility. This I deny. I did listen to him with civility. The reason that he assigned to me for the variance between his original and his duplicate was, that the whole of the original draft, for which he had sent to Mendon, had not been found, and that he had been obliged to make up the two last leaves from memory. He said, too, that there was no material variation of effects, as represented in the two papers. He said, as he says in the Boston Statesman, that he had felt himself at liberty to alter the paper to make his case better for the publick eye. He said he had never written against me anonymously in the newspapers, and intimated that, in the year 1816, when I was in Europe, there had appeared in the Boston Centinel a paragraph, charging him with having been willing, at Ghent, to give up the fisheries—a thing of which I had never before heard. He assured me that, in bringing his letter before the publick, his motive had not been to combine with my enemies to ruin my reputation.—To all this I did listen with perfect civility and composure; and the last words with which I parted from him, however painful to him and myself, were not wanting in civility. They are clearly impressed upon my memory, and I trust they are upon his. He is at liberty to publish them if he thinks fit, as they were spoken. I should not have alluded to them here but for his charge of incivility, which is as groundless as all the other charges of which he has been the willing bearer against me.

But Mr. Russell did not say, that he had understood the application 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 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 publick? 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, authorised 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 shewed the date of it to Mr. Brent, to confirm the second correction. I only ask, how intense must be the pressure of that consciousness, 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' 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 of 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 publick. He had procured the original draft 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 likely 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, if not communicated, he desires that it may be returned to him. But to make its terrours 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 of April, 1813.

I had never wished for the Communication to the House or to the publick 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 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 accuser, 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. To 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 errour, and requested that the papers might not be communicated, I would have joined him in that request to the President.

Both the letters were communicated to the House; both were strictly within the call of their resolution, which was for "any letter which may have been received" from Jonathan Russell, in conformity with the indications contained in his letter of 25th of 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 that 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 publick."

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 publick document to a legislative body, tells the publick 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 prophesy, 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 duplicate at the Department of State, and especially after he knew that the original 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 publick, 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 19th 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 been found—that it had been marked private 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 these 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 February 11, 1815, from Paris, to Mr. Monroe—still differing from the original—differing also from the duplicate, which he had delivered at the Department, but satisfactorily proving 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 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 relating to the Mississippi, as construed by themselves, and the emphatical citation of the explicit and implicit cancelled instructions of the 15th of April, 1813. But it had retained the interpolation of "we directly violated our instructions," and the substitution of "we could" for "I can," in that luminous exposition of atmospherick 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 enjoined as an appendage to the publication, with an abundance of italics and pointed 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 the 4th of October, 1814, to the Commissioners, which had not, but that of the letter of the 19th of 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 complete 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 Statesman, 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 this as of virulence and acrimony, which he boasts of not having returned.—I virulence and acrimony had no other vehicle than harsh language, in which they could be disguised under professions of unfeigned respect. However cautiously Mr. Russell had abstained from them in his original letter from Paris, he had been much less observant of that decorum, in the duplicate, prepared with new relishes of crimination to suit the appetite of political hatred; and the publication in the Boston Statesman is by no means sparing either of virulence or acrimony against me. The whole tenour of his argument in the original letter, against his colleagues was sneering and sarcastick. In the Boston Statesman, besides direct charges against me, of disingenuousness of having made an unprincipled and unprovoked attack upon him, of disrespect to the House of Representatives, of infirmities of temper and taste, and of being a dreaming visionary he tries even the temper of his wit to assail me, and by a heavy joke upon an expression used in my remarks, indulges his own instinct of misquoting my words to make them appear ridiculous. If this be Mr. Russell's mildness and moderation, it looks very much like the virulence and acrimony of others. In the transactions of human society, there are deeds of which no adequate idea can be conveyed in the terms of courtesy and urbanity; yet I admit the obligation of a publick man to meet with coolness and self-command the vilest artifices, even of fraud and malignity, to rob him of the most precious of human possessions, his good name—“thrice happy they who master thus their blood." If in my former remarks upon Mr. Russell's Janus-faced letter, or in this refutation of his new and direct personal attack upon my reputation, I have, even in word, transgressed the rule of decency, which, under every provocation, it is still the duty of my station and of my character to observe, though unconscious myself of the offence, I submit to the impartial judgment of others, and throw myself upon the candour of my country for its forgiveness. This paper has been confined to a demonstration of the frailty or the pliability of Mr. Russell's memory, in relation to facts altogether recent. As, upon an issue of fact, I do not even now ask that my word alone should pass for conclusive. Statements of Mr. Brent and Mr. Bailey, relative to the production of Mr. Russell's letter before the House of Representatives and to the incidents from which Mr. Russell has attempted to extort a charge of disingenuousness against me, are subjoined. My only wish is, that they should be attentively compared with Mr. Russell's narrative,

In another paper I shall prove that Mr. Russell's reminiscences of the proceedings at Ghent, bear the same character of imagination substituted for memory; and that what he calls "the real history of the transaction' (the fishery and Mississippi navigation proposal contradictory to the statement which I had made in my remarks, is utterly destitute of foundation.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.
Washington, 13th July, 1822.

The following is the conclusion of an editorial article in the last Worcester Spy :

"But as to opposing Mr. Russell's election, now—the thing is out of the question: he will not be offered as a candidate. We rejoice at this prospect, because we have had no confidence in his political character. We rejoice, not that he has brought shame upon himself, but that he has so soon undeceived those who, if deceived, would never have yielded theirs confidence."