and, in the following message to the
senate, nominated Mr. Jay for the mission:--

"_Gentlemen of the Senate:_--The communications which I have made
to you during the present session, from the despatches of our
minister in London, contain a serious aspect of our affairs with
Great Britain. But, as peace ought to be pursued with unremitted
zeal before the last resource, which has so often been the scourge
of nations, and can not fail to check the advancing prosperity of
the United States, is contemplated, I have thought proper to
nominate, and do hereby nominate, John Jay as envoy extraordinary
of the United States to his Britannic majesty.

"My confidence in our minister plenipotentiary in London continues
undiminished. But a mission like this, while it corresponds with
the solemnity of the occasion, will announce to the world a
solicitude for a friendly adjustment of our complaints, and a
reluctance to hostility. Going immediately from the United States,
such an envoy will carry with him a full knowledge of the existing
temper and sensibility of our country, and will thus be taught to
vindicate our rights with firmness, and to cultivate peace with
sincerity."

Mr. Jay had recently arrived in Philadelphia from New York, and
consented to accept the nomination. It was confirmed by the senate on
Saturday, the nineteenth of April, by a majority of eighteen to eight;
Aaron Burr being among the few who opposed it, it being his practice to
dissent from every measure proposed by Washington.

Conscious of the urgency of his mission, Mr. Jay made immediate
preparations for his departure; and on the twelfth of May he embarked at
New York, with Colonel John Trumbull, the artist, as his secretary. He
was accompanied to the ship by about a thousand of his fellow-citizens,
who desired thus to testify their personal respect and their interest in
his mission of peace. A few days preceding, the Democratic Society of
Philadelphia issued a most inflammatory denunciation of the mission and
the minister; and the opposition in the lower house of Congress
succeeded in adopting a resolution to cut off all intercourse with Great
Britain. It was lost in the senate by the casting vote of
Vice-President Adams; "not," as Washington remarked in a letter to
Tobias Lear on the sixth of May, "as it is said and generally believed,
from a disinclination to the ul