tion, paid fifty thousand dollars. On March 9 he sent them to
Congress with a message, and on the same day, in a letter to Jefferson,
alludes to them as "this discovery, or rather formal proof of the
cooperation between the Eastern Junto and the British cabinet." In the
message he intimates that this secret agent was sent directly by the
British government to Massachusetts to foment disaffection, to intrigue
"with the disaffected for the purpose of bringing about resistance to
the laws, and eventually, in concert with a British force, of destroying
the Union" and reannexing the Eastern States to England. In the war
message of June 1 these charges are repeated as among the reasons for an
appeal to arms. Mr. Calhoun's committee followed this lead and improved
upon it in the report recommending an immediate declaration of war. The
Henry affair was declared an "act of still greater malignity" than any
of the other outrages against the United States of which Great Britain
had been guilty, and that which "excited the greatest horror." The
incident was seized upon, apparently, to answer a temporary purpose, and
then, so far as Mr. Madison was concerned, was permitted to sink into
oblivion. In the hundreds of pages of his published letters, written in
later life, in which he reviews and explains so many of the events of
his public career, there is no allusion whatever to the Henry
disclosures, which in 1812 were held, with the ruin of American commerce
and the impressment of thousands of American citizens, as an equally
just cause for war. In truth there was nothing whatever in these
disclosures, for which was paid an amount equal to the salary of half a
presidential term, to warrant the assumptions of either Mr. Madison's
messages or Mr. Calhoun's report. The man had been sent, at his own
suggestion, early in 1809, by the governor of Canada to Massachusetts to
learn the state of affairs there and observe the drift of public
opinion. His national proclivity--he was an Irishman--to conspiracy and
revolution had led him to see in the dissatisfaction with the embargo a
determination in the New England people to destroy the Union, reannex
themselves to England, and return to the flesh-pots of the colonial
period. To learn how far gone they were in these designs, to put himself
in intimate relations with the leading conspirators and to bring them
into communication with Sir James Craig, the governor-general of Canada,
that sufficient