em and respect.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER LXXI.--TO DOCTOR JAMES BROWN, October 27, 1808

TO DOCTOR JAMES BROWN.

Washington, October 27, 1808.

Dear Sir,

You will wonder that your letter of June the 3rd should not be
acknowledged till this date. I never received it till September the
12th, and coming soon after to this place, the accumulation of business
I found here has prevented my taking it up till now. That you ever
participated in any plan for a division of the Union, I never for one
moment believed. I knew your Americanism too well. But as the enterprise
against Mexico was of a very different character, I had supposed what I
heard on that subject to be possible. You disavow it; that is enough for
me, and I for ever dismiss the idea. I wish it were possible to extend
my belief of innocence to a very different description of men in New
Orleans; but I think there is sufficient evidence of there being there a
set of foreign adventurers, and native malcontents, who would concur
in any enterprise to separate that country from this. I did wish to
see these people get what they deserved; and under the maxim of the law
itself, that _inter arma silent leges_, that in an encampment expecting
daily attack from a powerful enemy, self-preservation is paramount to
all law, I expected that instead of invoking the forms of the law to
cover traitors, all good citizens would have concurred in securing them.
Should we have ever gained our Revolution, if we had bound our hands by
manacles of the law, not only in the beginning, but in any part of the
revolutionary conflict? There are extreme cases where the laws become
inadequate even to their own preservation, and where the universal
resource is a dictator, or martial law. Was New Orleans in that
situation? Although we knew here that the force destined against it was
suppressed on the Ohio, yet we supposed this unknown at New Orleans at
the time that Burr's accomplices were calling in the aid of the law to
enable them to perpetrate its suppression, and that it was reasonable,
according to the state of information there, to act on the expectation
of a daily attack. Of this you are the best judge.

Burr is in London, and is giving out to his friends that that government
offers him two millions of dollars the moment he can raise an ensign of
rebellion as big as an handkerchief. Some of his partisans will believe
this, because they wish it. But those who know him best will