I salute you with friendship, and assure you of my high respect and consideration.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER XXXVI.—­TO W. A. BURWELL, September 17, 1806

TO W. A. BURWELL.

Monticello, September 17, 1806.

Dear Sir,

Yours of August the 7th, from Liberty, never got to my hands till the 9th instant.  About the same time, I received the Enquirer in which Decius was so judiciously answered.  The writer of that paper observed, that the matter of Decius consisted, first of facts; secondly, of inferences from these facts:  that he was not well enough informed to affirm or deny his facts, and he therefore examines his inferences, and in a very masterly manner shows that even were his facts true, the reasonable inferences from them are very different from those drawn by Decius.  But his facts are far from truth, and should be corrected.  It happened that Mr. Madison and General Dearborn were here when I received your letter.  I therefore, with them, took up Decius and read him deliberately; and our memories aided one another in correcting his bold and unauthorized assertions.  I shall note the most material of them in the order of the paper.

1.  It is grossly false that our ministers, as is said in a note, had proposed to surrender our claims to compensation for Spanish spoliations, or even for French.  Their instructions were to make no treaty in which Spanish spoliations were not provided for; and although they were permitted to be silent as to French spoliations carried into Spanish ports, they were not expressly to abandon even them. 2.  It is not true that our ministers, in agreeing to establish the Colorado as our western boundary, had been obliged to exceed the authority of their instructions.  Although we considered our title good as far as the Rio Bravo, yet in proportion to what they could obtain east of the Mississippi, they were to relinquish to the westward, and successive sacrifices were marked out, of which even the Colorado was not the last. 3.  It is not true that the Louisiana treaty was antedated, lest Great Britain should consider our supplying her enemies with money as a breach of neutrality.  After the very words of the treaty were finally agreed to, it took some time, perhaps some days, to make out all the copies in the very splendid manner of Bonaparte’s treaties.  Whether the 30th of April, 1803, the date expressed, was the day of the actual compact, or that on which it was signed, our memories do not enable us to say.  If the former, then it is strictly conformable to the day of the compact; if the latter, then it was postdated, instead of being antedated.  The motive assigned, too, is as incorrect as the fact.  It was so far from being thought, by any party, a breach of neutrality, that the British minister congratulated Mr. King on the acquisition, and declared that the King had learned it with great pleasure:  and when