by you, it may be
proper to take notice of what you say upon the course of the
negotiation. In regard to this, having observed that the national
dignity of the United States had not been compromised down to the time
of the President's message to the last session of Congress, you proceed
to say: "But England then urged the United States to enter into a
conventional arrangement, by which we might be pledged to concur with
her in measures for the suppression of the slave-trade. Till then we had
executed our own laws in our own way. But, yielding to this application,
and departing from our former principle of avoiding European
combinations upon subjects not American, we stipulated in a solemn
treaty, that we would carry into effect our own laws, and fixed the
minimum force we would employ for that purpose."

The President cannot conceive how you should have been led to adventure
upon such a statement as this. It is but a tissue of mistakes. England
did not urge the United States to enter into this conventional
arrangement. The United States yielded to no application from England.
The proposition for abolishing the slave-trade, as it stands in the
treaty, was an American proposition; it originated with the executive
government of the United States, which cheerfully assumes all its
responsibility. It stands upon it as its own mode of fulfilling its
duties, and accomplishing its objects. Nor have the United States
departed, in this treaty, in the slightest degree, from their former
principles of avoiding European combinations upon subjects not American,
because the abolition of the African slave-trade is an American subject
as emphatically as it is a European subject; and indeed more so,
inasmuch as the government of the United States took the first great
steps in declaring that trade unlawful, and in attempting its
extinction. The abolition of this traffic is an object of the highest
interest to the American people and the American government; and you
seem strangely to have overlooked altogether the important fact, that
nearly thirty years ago, by the treaty of Ghent, the United States bound
themselves by solemn compact with England, to continue "their efforts to
promote its entire abolition," both parties pledging themselves by that
treaty to use their best endeavors to accomplish so desirable an object.

Again, you speak of an important concession made to the renewed
application of England. But the treaty, let it be repeat