; not where I
am personally known, where their slanders would be instantly judged and
suppressed, from a general sense of their falsehood; but in the remote
parts of the Union, where the means of detection are not at hand, and
the trouble of an inquiry is greater than would suit the hearers to
undertake. I know that I might have filled the courts of the United
States with actions for these slanders, and have ruined perhaps many
persons who are not innocent. But this would be no equivalent to the
loss of character. I leave them, therefore, to the reproof of their own
consciences. If these do not condemn them, there will yet come a day
when the false witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his
slanders. If the reverend Cotton Mather Smith of Shena believed this as
firmly as I do, he would surely never have affirmed that 'I had obtained
my property by fraud and robbery; that in one instance I had defrauded
and robbed a widow and fatherless children of an estate to which I was
executor of ten thousand pounds sterling, by keeping the property and
paying them in money at the nominal rate, when it was worth no more than
forty for one: and that all this could be proved.' Every tittle of it
is fable; there not having existed a single circumstance of my life
to which any part of it can hang. I never was executor but in two
instances, both of which having taken place about the beginning of the
revolution, which withdrew me immediately from all private pursuits,
I never meddled in either executorship. In one of the cases only, were
there a widow and children. She was my sister. She retained and managed
the estate in her own hands, and no part of it was ever in mine. In the
other, I was a coparcener, and only received on a division the equal
portion allotted me. To neither of these executorships, therefore, could
Mr. Smith refer. Again, my property is all patrimonial except about
seven or eight hundred pounds' worth of lands, purchased by myself and
paid for, not to widows and orphans, but to the very gentleman from whom
I purchased. If Mr. Smith therefore, thinks the precepts of the Gospel
intended for those who preach them as well as for others, he will
doubtless some day feel the duties of repentance, and of acknowledgment
in such forms as to correct the wrong he has done. Perhaps he will have
to wait till the passions of the moment have passed away. All this is
left to his own conscience.

These, Sir, are facts, well kn