MESSAGE

FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES TO CONGRESS. JAN. 30, 1809.

I TRANSMIT to Congress a letter recently received from our minister at the court of St. James's, covering one to him from the British secretary of state, with his reply. These are communicated, as forming a sequel to the correspondence which accompanied my message to both houses, of the 17th instant.

TH: JEFFERSON.

Mr. Pinkney to Mr. Madison. London, November 25,

1808.

SIR, I have the honour to send enclosed a copy of a letter received last night from Mr. Canning, in answer to my letter to him of the 10th of last month.

The tone of this letter renders it impossible to reply to it with a view to a discussion of what it contains; although it is not without farther inadvertences as to facts, and many of the observations are open to exception. I intend, however, to combine, with an acknowledgment of the receipt of it, two short explanations. The first will relate to the new and extraordinary conjecture which it intimates, that my authority was contingent; and the second will remind Mr. Canning that my letter of the 10th of October does. not, as he imagines, leave unexplained the remark, that "the provisional nature of my offer to make my proposal in writing, arose out of circumstances;" but on the contrary, that the explanation immediately follows the remark

The Union is not yet returned from France. Lieut. Gibbon arrived in London more than three weeks ago, and delivered your letter of the 9th of September, with duplicates of papers in the case of the Little William, and copies of letters which lately passed between the department of state and Mr. Erskine.

I have the honour to be, with the highest consideration, &c.

WM. PINKNEY.

The Hon. James Madison, &c. &c. &c.

Mr. Canning to Mr. Pinkney. Foreign Office, November 22, 1808.

SIR, I regret exceedingly that an unusual and unintermitting pressure of official business has prevented me from finding an earlier opportunity to reply to your letter of the 10th of last month.

The observations which I have to offer upon some parts of that letter, are not, indeed, of such a nature as to make it matter of any great importance whether you receive them a week sooner or later; as they refer less to any point of publick interest to our two governments, than to what has passed personally between ourselves.

But I should have been much mortified if you could have been led to believe me deficient in attention to you; the manner, as well as the substance of the communication which I have had the honour to receive from you, entitling it to the most prompt and candid consideration.

Your understanding of the motives, which induced me to accompany my official note of the 23d of September, with my letter of the same date, is so far imperfect, as that you seem to imagine that the wish to guard against misrepresentation, was the only motive which induced me to write that letter, and that, from that motive alone, I should in any case have troubled you with it; whereas I must have expressed myself very incorrectly indeed, if I did not convey to you the assurance, that, if what had passed between us in conversation had not been referred to by you in your official letter of the 23d August, I certainly should not have thought it necessary or proper to preserve any written record of your verbal communications, which I understood at the time to be confidential, and which I certainly was so far from attempting or intending to "discountenance," that I have no doubt but I expressed myself (as you say I did) in favour of the "course which you adopted as well suited to the occasion." But you state at the same time most correctly, that it was as a "preparatory course that I understood and encouraged this verbal and confidential communication." I never did nor could understand it as being intended to supersede or supply the place of an official overture. I never did nor could' supe that the overture of your government, and the answer

pose

of the British government to it were intended to be intrusted solely to our respective recollections. Accordingly when the period arrived at which you appeared to be prepared to bring forward an official proposal, I did, no doubt, express my expectation that I should receive that proposal in writing.

It is highly probable that I did not (as you say I did not) assign to you as the motive of the wish which I then expressed, my persuasion that written communications are less liable to mistake than verbal ones: because that consideration is sufficiently obvious, and because the whole course and practice of office is in that respect so established and invariable, that I really could not have supposed the assignment of any specifick motive to be necessary, to account for my requiring a written statement of your proposals previous to my returning an official answer to them.

I had taken for granted all along that such would, and such must be, the ultimate proceeding on your part; however you might wish to prepare the way for it by preliminary conversations.

In framing your note I did not pretend to anticipate how much of what had been stated by you in our several conferences you would think it proper to repeat in writ ing. But whatever the tenour of your note had been, I should have felt it right to conform strictly to it in the official answer; avoiding any reference to any part of your verbal communications, except such as, by repeating them in writing, I should see that it was your intention to record as official.

I confess, however, I was not prepared for the mixed course which you actually did adopt, I am persuaded (I am sincerely persuaded) without any intention of creating embarrassment; that of referring generally to what had passed in our conferences, as illustrative of your official proposition, and as tending to support and recommend it, but without specifying the particular points to which such reference was intended to apply; à course, which appeared at first sight to leave me no choice, except between the two alternatives of either recapitulating the whole of what you had stated in conversation, for the purpose of comprehending it in the answer, or of confining myself to your written note, at the hazard of being

suspected of suppressing the most material part of your

statement.

The expedient to which I had recourse, of accompanying

official note with a separate letter, stating, to the best of my recollection, the substance of what I had heard from you in conversation, appeared to me, after much deliberation, to be the most respectful to you.

Such having been the motives which dictated my letter, I cannot regret that it was written, since it has produced, at a period so little distant from the transaction itself, an opportunity of comparing the impressions left on our minds, respectively, of what passed in our several conferences, and of correcting any erroneous impressions on either side.

There are two points in which our recollections do appear to differ in some degree.

The first relates to the authority which you had, and that which I understood you to state yourself to have, at the time of our first conference, for bringing forward a direct overture, in the name of your government; the second, to the expectation, which I stated myself to have entertained, "more than once," of your opening an official correspondence on the subject of the orders in council.

With respect to the first point, you will give me credit. when I assure you that my understanding of what was said by you, not only in the first, but in our second conference, was precisely what I stated it to be in my letter; and you will (I hope) forgive me, if, after the most attentive perusal of your letter of the 10th of October, and after a careful comparison of different passages in it, while I am compelled by your assurance to acknowledge that I must have misapprehended you, I find grounds in your statement to excuse, if not to account for, my misapprehension.

According to your recollection you told me explicitly in our first conference," that the substance of what you then suggested, that is to say, that our orders being repealed as to the United States, the United States would suspend the embargo as to Great Britain, was from your government; that the manner of conducting and illustrating the subject (upon which you had no precise orders) was your own;"

and you even quoted part of your instructions to me which was to that effect.

In a subsequent paragraph you state, that "nothing can be more correct than my apprehension that you did not make, nor profess to intend making, an overture, in writing, before you had endeavoured to prepare for it such a reception as you felt it deserved, and before you could ascertain what shape it would be most proper to give to that overture, and how it would be met by the British government."

And in another part of your letter you admit, that when you expressed your readiness to make your proposal in writing, it was, (as I have stated) provisionally: and you inform me, that "the provisional nature of your offer arose out of circumstances," the nature of which circumstances you do not explain, nor have I any right to require such an explanation.

But, comparing these several statements together, seeing that, in our first interview, you declared no intention of making a proposal in writing, that in our second interview (a month or six weeks afterwards) you described that intention as "provisional" and contingent, and protesting at the same time (as I do in the most solemn manner) that I cannot find any trace in my memory of any communication whatever of any part of your instructions communicated to me as such; seeing also, that whatever might be the nature and extent of your instructions from the President of the United States, as to the substance of the overture to be made to the British government, the manner, the time, and the conditions of that overture were evidently considered by you as left to your own discretion, it surely may be pardonable in me to have mistaken (as I most unquestionably must have done) the precise limits, at which the authority of your government ended, and your own discretion began, and to have imagined (which I very innocently did) that a proposition over which you appeared to have a power so nearly absolute, was a proposition in a great measure of your own suggestion. I do not mean that I supposed you to bring forward such a measure without reference to the knowledge which you must of course have had of the general feeling, disposition, and intentions of your government, but without its specifick instructions for that purpose at that time.