We therefore do enact, and be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia, that all citizens of this Commonwealth, and persons and authorities within the same, shall pay full obedience at all times to the acts which may be passed by the Congress of the United States, the object of which shall be the construction of post-roads, making canals of navigation, and maintaining the same, in any part of the United States, in like manner as if the said acts were, totidem verbis, passed by the legislature of this Commonwealth.

LETTER CLXXXVII.—­TO WILLIAM B. GILES, December 25, 1825

TO WILLIAM B. GILES.

Monticello, December 25, 1825.

Dear Sir,

Your favor of the 15th was received four days ago.  It found me engaged in what I could not lay aside till this day.

Far advanced in my eighty-third year, worn down with infirmities which have confined me almost entirely to the house for seven or eight months past, it afflicts me much to receive appeals to my memory for transactions so far back as that which is the subject of your letter.  My memory is indeed become almost a blank, of which no better proof can probably be given you than by my solemn protestation, that I have not the least recollection of your intervention between Mr. John Q. Adams and myself, in what passed on the subject of the embargo.  Not the slightest trace of it remains in my mind.  Yet I have no doubt of the exactitude of the statement in your letter.  And the less, as I recollect the interview with Mr. Adams, to which the previous communications which had passed between him and yourself were probably and naturally the preliminary.  That interview I remember well; not indeed in the very words which passed between us, but in their substance, which was of a character too awful, too deeply engraved in my mind, and influencing too materially the course I had to pursue, ever to be forgotten.  Mr. Adams called on me pending the embargo, and while endeavors were making to obtain its repeal.  He made some apologies for the call, on the ground of our not being then in the habit of confidential communications, but that that which he had then to make, involved too seriously the interest of our country not to overrule all other considerations with him, and make it his duty to reveal it to myself particularly.  I assured him there was no occasion for any apology for his visit; that, on the contrary, his communications would be thankfully received, and would add a confirmation the more to my entire confidence in the rectitude and patriotism of his conduct and principles.  He spoke then of the dissatisfaction of the eastern portion of our confederacy with the restraints of the embargo then existing, and their restlessness under it.  That there was nothing which might not be attempted, to rid themselves of it.  That he had information of the most unquestionable certainty, that certain citizens of the Eastern States