essment, the
extradition of fugitive criminals, or any thing else embraced in the
treaty or in the correspondence, and then have converted these
inferences of your own into so many facts. And it is upon conjectures
like these, it is upon such inferences of your own, that you make the
direct and formal statement in your letter of the 3d of October, that
"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. Until 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 was well warranted, therefore, in requesting your serious
reconsideration and review of that statement.

Suppose your letter to go before the public unanswered and
uncontradicted; suppose it to mingle itself with the general political
history of the country, as an official letter among the archives of the
Department of State, would not the general mass of readers understand
you as reciting facts, rather than as drawing your own conclusions? as
stating history, rather than as presenting an argument? It is of an
incorrect narrative that the President complains. It is that, in your
hotel at Paris, you should undertake to write a history of a very
delicate part of a negotiation carried on at Washington, with which you
had nothing to do, and of the history of which you had no authentic
information; and which history, as you narrate it, reflects not a little
on the independence, wisdom, and public spirit of the administration.

As of the history of this part of the negotiation you were not well
informed, the President cannot but think it would have been more just in
you to have refrained from any attempt to give an account of it.

You observe, further: "I never mentioned in my despatch to you, nor in
any manner whatever, that our government had conceded to that of England
the right to search our ships. That idea, however, pervades your letter,
and is very apparent in that part of it which brings to my observation
the possible effect of my views upon the English government. But in this
you do me, though I am sure unintentionally, great injustice. I
repea