r 11,1821,

Dear Sir,

Your letter of December the 19th places me under a dilemma, which I
cannot solve but by an exposition of the naked truth. I would have
wished this rather to have remained as hitherto, without inquiry; but
your inquiries have a right to be answered. I will do it as exactly
as the great lapse of time and a waning memory will enable me. I may
misremember indifferent circumstances, but can be right in substance.

At the time when the republicans of our country were so much alarmed at
the proceedings of the federal ascendancy in Congress, in the
executive and the judiciary departments, it became a matter of serious
consideration how head could be made against their enterprises on the
constitution. The leading republicans in Congress found themselves of
no use there, browbeaten, as they were, by a bold and overwhelming
majority. They concluded to retire from that field, take a stand in the
State legislatures, and endeavor there to arrest their progress. The
alien and sedition laws furnished the particular occasion. The sympathy
between Virginia and Kentucky was more cordial, and more intimately
confidential, than between any other two States of republican policy.
Mr. Madison came into the Virginia legislature. 1 was then in the
Vice-Presidency, and could not leave my station. But your father,
Colonel W. C. Nicholas, and myself happening to be together, the
engaging the co-operation of Kentucky in an energetic protestation
against the constitutionality of those laws, became a subject of
consultation. Those gentlemen pressed me strongly to sketch resolutions
for that purpose, your father undertaking to introduce them to that
legislature, with a solemn assurance, which I strictly required, that
it should not be known from what quarter they came. I drew and delivered
them to him, and, in keeping their origin secret, he fulfilled his
pledge of honor. Some years after this, Colonel Nicholas asked me if
I would have any objection to its being known that I had drawn them.
I pointedly enjoined that it should not. Whether he had unguardedly
intimated it before to any one, I know not: but I afterwards observed in
the papers repeated imputations of them to me; on which, as has been my
practice on all occasions of imputation, I have observed entire silence.
The question, indeed, has never before been put to me, nor should I
answer it to any other than yourself; seeing no good end to be proposed
by it, and the des