w the honor to fill. I felt all its
responsibilities; but I must say, that, with whatever attention I had
considered the general questions of finance, I felt more competent and
willing to undertake the duties of an office which did not involve the
daily drudgery of the treasury.

I was not disappointed, Gentlemen, in the exigency which then existed in
our foreign relations. I was not unaware of all the difficulties which
hung over us; for although the whole of the danger was not at that
moment developed, the cause of it was known, and it seemed as if an
outbreak was inevitable. I allude now to that occurrence on the frontier
of which the chairman has already spoken, which took place in the winter
of 1841 the case of Alexander McLeod.

A year or two before, the Canadian government had seen fit to authorize
a military incursion, for a particular purpose, within the territory of
the United States. That purpose was to destroy a steamboat, charged with
being employed for hostile purposes against its forces and the
peaceable subjects of the crown. The act was avowed by the British
government at home as a public act. Alexander McLeod, a person who
individually could claim no regard or sympathy, happened to be one of
the agents who, in a military character, performed the act of their
sovereign. Coming into the United States some years after, he was
arrested under a charge of homicide committed in this act, and was held
to trial as for a private felony.

According to my apprehensions, a proceeding of this kind was directly
adverse to the well-settled doctrines of the public law. It could not
but be received with lively indignation, not only by the British
government, but among the people of England. It would be so received
among us. If a citizen of the United States should as a military man
receive an order of his government and obey it, (and he must either obey
it or be hanged,) and should afterwards, in the territory of another
power, which by that act he had offended, be tried for a violation of
its law, as for a crime, and threatened with individual punishment,
there is not a man in the United States who would not cry out for
redress and for vengeance. Any elevated government, in a case like this,
where one of its citizens, in the performance of his duty, incurs such
menaces and danger, assumes the responsibility; any elevated government
says, "The act was mine,--I am the man";--"Adsum qui feci, in me
convertite ferrum."