citizens on the part of France.

All those claims which the French Government was willing to admit were
carefully provided for elsewhere in the convention, and the declaration
of the First Consul, which was appended in his additional note, had no
other application than to the claims which had been mutually made by the
Governments, but on which they had never approximated to an adjustment.
In confirmation of the fact that our Government did not intend to cease
from the prosecution of the just claims of our citizens against France,
reference is here made to the annual message of President Jefferson of
December 8, 1801, which opens with expressions of his gratification at
the restoration of peace among sister nations; and, after speaking of
the assurances received from all nations with whom we had principal
relations and of the confidence thus inspired that our peace with them
would not have been disturbed if they had continued at war with each
other, he proceeds to say:

But a cessation of irregularities which had affected the commerce of
neutral nations, and of the irritations and injuries produced by them,
can not but add to this confidence, and strengthens at the same time the
hope that wrongs committed on unoffending friends under a pressure of
circumstances will now be reviewed with candor, and will be considered
as founding just claims of retribution for the past and new assurance
for the future.

The zeal and diligence with which the claims of our citizens against
France were prosecuted appear in the diplomatic correspondence of the
three years next succeeding the convention of 1800, and the effect of
these efforts is made manifest in the convention of 1803, in which
provision was made for payment of a class of cases the consideration of
which France had at all previous periods refused to entertain, and which
are of that very class which it has been often assumed were released by
striking out the second article of the convention of 1800. This is shown
by reference to the preamble and to the fourth and fifth articles of the
convention of 1803, by which were admitted among the debts due by France
to citizens of the United States the amounts chargeable for "prizes made
at sea in which the appeal has been properly lodged within the time
mentioned in the said convention of the 30th of September, 1800;" and
this class was further defined to be only "captures of which the council
of prizes shall have o