The President cannot conceive how you should have been led to adventure upon such a statement as this.  It is but a tissue of mistakes.  England did not urge the United States to enter into this conventional arrangement.  The United States yielded to no application from England.  The proposition for abolishing the slave-trade, as it stands in the treaty, was an American proposition; it originated with the executive government of the United States, which cheerfully assumes all its responsibility.  It stands upon it as its own mode of fulfilling its duties, and accomplishing its objects.  Nor have the United States departed, in this treaty, in the slightest degree, from their former principles of avoiding European combinations upon subjects not American, because the abolition of the African slave-trade is an American subject as emphatically as it is a European subject; and indeed more so, inasmuch as the government of the United States took the first great steps in declaring that trade unlawful, and in attempting its extinction.  The abolition of this traffic is an object of the highest interest to the American people and the American government; and you seem strangely to have overlooked altogether the important fact, that nearly thirty years ago, by the treaty of Ghent, the United States bound themselves by solemn compact with England, to continue “their efforts to promote its entire abolition,” both parties pledging themselves by that treaty to use their best endeavors to accomplish so desirable an object.

Again, you speak of an important concession made to the renewed application of England.  But the treaty, let it be repeated, makes no concession to England whatever.  It complies with no demand, grants no application, conforms to no request.  All these statements, thus by you made, and which are so exceedingly erroneous, seem calculated to hold up the idea, that in this treaty your government has been acting a subordinate, or even a complying part.

The President is not a little startled that you should make such totally groundless assumptions of fact, and then leave a discreditable inference to be drawn from them.  He directs me not only to repel this inference as it ought to be repelled, but also to bring to your serious consideration and reflection the propriety of such an assumed narration of facts as your despatch, in this respect, puts forth.

Having informed the department that a copy of the letter of the 24th of August, addressed by me to you, had been delivered to M. Guizot, you proceed to say:  “In executing this duty, I felt too well what was due to my government and country to intimate my regret to a foreign power that some declaration had not preceded the treaty, or some stipulation accompanied it, by which the extraordinary pretension of Great Britain to search our ships at all times and in all places, first put forth to the world by Lord Palmerston on the 27th of August, 1841, and on the 13th of October