ted States, and
offered his traitorous letters to the American Government for $50,000,
which he obtained, paid out of the United States Secret Service
Fund.[182] President Madison, instead of laying the correspondence
before the British Government for explanation and satisfaction,
communicated it to Congress, as a discovery and illustration of a
conspiracy by the British Government to subvert the Constitution and
Government of the United States, and by his message inflamed the
Congress to the highest pitch of excitement, in the climax of which he
got a vote in favour of a declaration of war against Great Britain. The
President, in his message to Congress, referring to the Henry documents
said: "They prove that at a recent period, while the United States,
notwithstanding the wrongs sustained by them, ceased not to observe the
laws of neutrality towards Great Britain, and in the midst of amicable
professions and negotiations on the part of the British Government
through its public Minister here [Mr. Erskine], a _secret agent of that
Government_ was employed in certain States--more especially at the seat
of government in Massachusetts--in fomenting disaffection to the
constituted authorities of the nation, and in intrigues 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 forming the eastern part thereof into a political connection
with England."

Two days before the transmission of President Madison's message of
accusation against England, the British Minister at Washington declared
in the public prints his entire ignorance of any transaction of the
kind, and asked the United States Government to consider the character
of the individual who had made these disclosures,[183] and to "suspend
any further judgment on its merits until the circumstances shall have
been made known to his Majesty's Government." But such fairness to
England did not answer President Madison's purpose to get himself
re-elected President, by exciting hostility and declaring war against
England.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 176: "The war party in the United States was not very strong,
numerically speaking, and it was not composed of the most respectable
portions of the community; but what it lacked in these two requisites it
made up in loud and demonstrative clamour, and the more serious-minded
and important portions of the people were being forced