.

L E T T E R

ANNOUNCING

HIS PURPOSE TO RESIGN HIS SEAT IN CONGRESS.

WASHINGTON, JUNE 27, 1854.

To My Constituents :

My nomination to Congress alarmed me greatly, because I believed, that it would result in my election. To separate myself from my large private business, for so long a time; and to war for so long a time, against the strong habits formed in my deeply secluded life, seemed to be well-nigh impossible.

My election having taken place, I concluded, that I must serve you, during the first session of my term. Not to speak of other reasons for such service, there was, at least, so much due to you, in requital for your generous forgetfulness of party obligations, in electing

I could not do less, and, yet, make a decent return for the respect and partiality you had shown

me.

me.

a

I did not, until within a few weeks, fully decide not to return to Congress, at the next session. I could not

know, but that something unforeseen might demand
such return. I, now, feel at liberty to announce my
purpose to resign my seat in Congress, at the close of
the present session. Why I make the annunciation so
early is, that you may have ample time to look around
you
for

my successor.
I resign my seat the more freely, because I do not
thereby impose any tax upon your time. You will fill
the vacancy, at the General Election. Indeed, I should
have been entirely unwilling to put you to the pains
of holding a special election.

GERRIT SMITH.

SECOND SPEECH

ON THE

RICHARD W. MEADE BILL.

JULY 1, 18 5 4.

MR. JONES, of Tennessee. I will withdraw the motion to strike out the enacting clause of the bill.

Mr. SMITH, having moved to strike out all after the enacting clause, and supply its place with the provision to pay $250,000 in full satisfaction of the claim, said, that the speech of the honorable gentleman from Tennessee, [Mr. Jones,] brought to his mind a passage of the Bible: "He that is first in his own cause, seemeth just, but his neighbor cometh and searcheth him.” Now, I am the neighbor of this gentleman, (Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith sit near each other,) and I have come to search him. (Laughter.)

The gentleman from Tennessee finds fault with my speech on this subject a couple of months ago. I confess, that I did say he had read from one paper,

it turned out, that he had read from another. But my mistake was of no consequence to the argument Another of my faults was, that I did not read to the

I end of the paragraph, of which I read a part. The closing lines of the paragraph upset, as he holds, the interpretation which I put upon the lines preceding them. Let us look into this. In those preceding lines Mr. Adams scouts the idea, that the Meade debt is not among the claims which our Government had assumed and "agreed to compound :" and in these immediately following and closing lines, he scouts the idea, that a certain "order" is a claim on our Government.

And yet the gentleman from Tennessee regards the debt and the order as identical, the one with the other! and concludes, that, although Mr. Adams said, in one breath, that the debt is among the claims against Government, he said in the next, that it is not! I offer a simple explanation to the gentleman's mind. It is the same that I offered before. There was an unliquidated claim of Meade, and also a liquidated one.

The former, I held, was binding upon our Government. The latter, I admitted, was not. This is the distinction insisted on by Mr. Adams. e did not agree, certainly not in the treaty of 1819, to pay whatever sum Spain might admit she owed Meade, but the sum (or a pro rato, allowance thereon) which she actually owed Meade.

The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Giddings] who replied to my former speech on this subject, said, that