the committee entered into free conversation, and observed, that although the Senate could not, in form, recommend any extraordinary mission, yet that as individuals, there was but one sentiment among them on the measure, and they pressed it.  I was so much averse to it, and gave them so hard an answer, that they felt it, and spoke of it.  But it did not end here.  The members of the other House took up the subject, and set upon me individually, and these the best friends to you, as well as myself, and represented the responsibility which a failure to obtain redress would throw on us both, pursuing a conduct in opposition to the opinion of nearly every member of the legislature.  I found it necessary, at length, to yield my own opinion, to the general sense of the national council, and it really seemed to produce a jubilee among them; not from any want of confidence in you, but from a belief in the effect which an extraordinary mission would have on the British mind, by demonstrating the degree of importance which this country attached to the rights which we considered as infracted.

2.  You complain of the manner in which the treaty was received.  But what was that manner?  I cannot suppose you to have given a moment’s credit to the stuff which was crowded in all sorts of forms into the public papers, or to the thousand speeches they put into my mouth, not a word of which I had ever uttered.  I was not insensible at the time of the views to mischief, with which these lies were fabricated.  But my confidence was firm, that neither yourself nor the British government, equally outraged by them, would believe me capable of making the editors of newspapers the confidants of my speeches or opinions.  The fact was this.  The treaty was communicated to us by Mr. Erskine on the day Congress was to rise.  Two of the Senators inquired of me in the evening, whether it was my purpose to detain them on account of the treaty.  My answer was, ’that it was not:  that the treaty containing no provision against the impressment of our seamen, and being accompanied by a kind of protestation of the British ministers, which would leave that government free to consider it as a treaty or no treaty, according to their own convenience, I should not give them the trouble of deliberating on it.’  This was substantially, and almost verbally, what I said whenever spoken to about it, and I never failed when the occasion would admit of it, to justify yourself and Mr. Pinckney, by expressing my conviction, that it was all that could be obtained from the British government; that you had told their commissioners that your government could not be pledged to ratify, because it was contrary to their instructions; of course, that it should be considered but as a projet; and in this light I stated it publicly in my message to Congress on the opening of the session.  Not a single article of the treaty was ever made known beyond the members of the administration, nor would an article of it be known at this day, but