ton, 'when he became a private citizen,' called me to
account for expressions in a letter to Mazzei, requiring, in a tone of
unusual severity, an explanation of that letter. He adds of himself, 'in
what manner the latter humbled himself, and appeased the just resentment
of Washington, will never be known, as some time after his death, the
correspondence was not to be found, and a diary for an important period
of his Presidency was also missing.' The diary being of transactions
during his Presidency, the letter to Mazzei not known here until some
time after he became a private citizen, and the pretended correspondence
of course after that, I know not why this lost diary and supposed
correspondence are brought together here, unless for insinuations worthy
of the letter itself. The correspondence could not be found, indeed,
because it had never existed. I do affirm, that there never passed
a word, written or verbal, directly or indirectly, between General
Washington and myself on the subject of that letter. He would never have
degraded himself so far as to take to himself the imputation in that
letter on the 'Samsons in combat.' The whole story is a fabrication, and
I defy the framers of it, and all mankind, to produce a scrip of a
pen between General Washington and myself on the subject, or any other
evidence more worthy of credit than the suspicions, suppositions, and
presumptions of the two persons here quoting and quoted for it. With
Doctor Stuart I had not much acquaintance. I supposed him to be an
honest man, knew him to be a very weak one, and, like Mr. Pickering,
very prone to antipathies, boiling with party passions, and, under the
dominion of these, readily welcoming fancies for facts. But, come the
story from whomsoever it might, it is an unqualified falsehood.

This letter to Mazzei has been a precious theme of crimination for
federal malice. It was a long letter of business, in which was inserted
a single paragraph only of political information as to the state of our
country. In this information there was not one word which would not
then have been, or would not now be approved by every republican in
the United States, looking back to those times, as you will see by a
faithful copy now enclosed of the whole of what that letter said on
the subject of the United States, or of its government. This paragraph,
extracted and translated, got into a Paris paper at a time when the
persons in power there were laboring un