He arraigns me on two grounds, my actions, and my motives.  The very actions, however, which he arraigns, have been such as the great majority of my fellow-citizens have approved.  The approbation of Mr. Pickering, and of those who thought with him, I had no right to expect.  My motives he chooses to ascribe to hypocrisy, to ambition, and a passion for popularity.  Of these the world must judge between us.  It is no office of his or mine.  To that tribunal I have ever submitted my actions and motives, without ransacking the Union for certificates, letters, journals, and gossiping tales, to justify myself and weary them.  Nor shall I do this on the present occasion, but leave still to them these antiquated party diatribes, now newly revamped and paraded, as if they had not been already a thousand times repeated, refuted, and adjudged against him, by the nation itself.  If no action is to be deemed virtuous for which malice can imagine a sinister motive, then there never was a virtuous action; no, not even in the life of our Savior himself.  But he has taught us to judge the tree by its fruit, and to leave motives to him who can alone see into them.

But whilst I leave to its fate the libel of Mr. Pickering, with the thousands of others like it, to which I have given no other answer than a steady course of similar action, there are two facts or fancies of his which I must set to rights.  The one respects Mr. Adams, the other myself.  He observes, that my letter of October the 12th, 1823, acknowledges the receipt of one from Mr. Adams, of September the 18th, which, having been written a few days after Cunningham’s publication, he says was no doubt written to apologize to me for the pointed reproaches he had uttered against me in his confidential letters to Cunningham.  And thus having ‘no doubt’ of his conjecture, he considers it as proven, goes on to suppose the contents of the letter (19, 22), makes it place Mr. Adams at my feet suing for pardon, and continues to rant upon it, as an undoubted fact.  Now I do most solemnly declare, that so far from being a letter of apology, as Mr. Pickering so undoubtingly assumes, there was not a word or allusion in it respecting Cunningham’s publication.

The other allegation respecting myself, is equally false.  In page 34, he quotes Doctor Stuart, as having, twenty years ago, informed him that General Washington, ‘when he became a private citizen,’ called me to account for expressions in a letter to Mazzei, requiring, in a tone of unusual severity, an explanation of that letter.  He adds of himself, ’in what manner the latter humbled himself, and appeased the just resentment of Washington, will never be known, as some time after his death, the correspondence was not to be found, and a diary for an important period of his Presidency was also missing.’  The diary being of transactions during his Presidency, the letter to Mazzei not known here until some time after he became a private citizen, and the pretended