to publish his promised narrative, I shall, if yet living, be ready with equal cheerfulness to acknowledge indicated error and to vindicate contested truth.

But as by the adjournment of that publication to a period 'more propitious than the present to calm and dispassionate consideration, and when there can be no misinterpretation of motives," it may chance to be postponed until both of us shall have been summoned to account for all our errors before a higher tribunal than that of our country, I feel myself now called upon to say that let the appropriate dispositions, when and how they will, expose the open day and secret night of the transactions at Ghent, the statements both of fact and opinion, in the papers which I have written and published in relation to this controversy, will in every particular, essential or important to the interest of the nation or to the character of Mr. Clay, be found to abide unshaken. the test of human scrutiny of talents and of time.1 WASHINGTON 18th December, 1822.

TO THE FREEHOLDERS OF WASHINGTON, WYTHE, GRAYSON, RUSSELL, TAZEWELL, LEE AND SCOTT COUNTIES, VIRGINIA 2

FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS:

By these titles I presume to address you, though personally known to few of you, because my character has been arraigned

1 "The insinuations of Mr. Clay are manfully met by Mr. Adams; and I am mistaken if in public opinion Mr. Clay is not placed in a situation that may be found a little embarrassing. The Kentucky Candidate should have strictly adhered to his game; agere non scribere was his course, and he has been off his guard to depart from it." Rufus King to Charles King, December 19, 1822. Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, VI. 488. See Clay's reasons for his position in Colton, Life, Correspondence and Speeches of Clay, IV. 70, 72.

2 This letter appeared in the Richmond Enquirer, January 4, 1823, and was after

before you by your representative in Congress in a printed handbill, soliciting your suffrages for re-election, who seems to have considered his first claim to the continuance of your favor to consist in the bitterness with which he could censure me. I shall never solicit your suffrages, nor those of your representative for anything; but I value your good opinion and wish to show you that I have not deserved to lose it.

He says that if you will elect him once more, he shall have served during the whole administration of Mr. Monroe, an administration upon which he passes a high panegyric, and which, he adds, he has found it agreeable to his judgment generally to support. While in the exercise of my natural right of self-defense I come to repel the charges of General Smyth, I pray you to understand, that it is neither for the purpose of moving you to withhold your vote from him, nor to induce the General himself to reconsider his opinion or his intentions as they personally concern me. He offers himself a candidate for your votes, as having been generally hitherto a supporter of the administration of Mr. Monroe. On that ground and upon the reasonable expectation that he will continue his support to it, he has my sincere and warm wishes for his success. But as to his opinion of me, you will permit me to be indifferent to the opinion of a man capable of forming his judgment of character from such premises as he has alleged in support of his estimate of mine.

His mode of proof is this. He has ransacked the Journals of the Senate during the five years that I had the honor of a seat in that body, a period, the expiration of which is nearly fifteen years distant; and whenever he has found in the list of yeas and nays my name recorded to a vote, which he disapproves, he has imputed it, without knowing any of the grounds upon which it was given, to the worst of motives, for the purpose of ascribing them to me. Is

wards published by Gales and Seaton in a pamphlet, Letter of the Hon. John Quincy Adams in Reply to a Letter of the Hon. Alexander Smyth to his Constituents. Also the Speech of Mr. Adams on the Louisiana Treaty, and a Letter from Mr. Jefferson to Mr. Dunbar relative to the cession of Louisiana.

this fair? Is it candid? Is it just? Where is the man who ever served in a legislative capacity in your council, whose character could stand a test like this? The General once petitioned the members of a former Congress "to be mindfull of the rule of justice to others do, what to thyself thou wishest to be done." But it is to his charges against me that I would turn your attention. And first of that which he says he passes over, but does not pass over: my relation to my father. If the General could have found any of my votes upon the public journals during the administration of my father, he might perhaps have used them as he has those of a later date. But during the whole of my father's administration I was absent from the country. For how much of my father's acts I am accountable, I leave to your sense of justice to determine; as I leave to the filial affection and piety of every one of you to estimate the temper of the reproach that I have never been the reviler of them.

Another charge which the General brings against me, while professing to pass it over, is that I have written against the Rights of Man; not only, he says, against the work thus entitled, but against the rights themselves. This is a mistake. I wrote a series of papers containing an examination of some of the doctrines in Thomas Paine's pamphlet entitled the Rights of Man. I believed many of its doctrines unsound. I think I have not seen either the pamphlet or my examination of it for more than thirty years. In that time I claim not more indulgence for changes of opinion with regard to the principles of government and to the French Revolution than may be fairly claimed by any man. Far from having written against the rights of man, I appealed, in the papers alluded to, from what I deemed the inflammatory principles of Paine to the sober and correct principles of our own declaration of independence. My opinion of Paine and his writings was not then very exalted. They have not since that time risen in my esteem. As occasional addresses to popular passions, I see in all his works the flashes of a powerful genuis. Acknowledging the service of his Common Sense and some other of his writings during our revolu

tionary war, all his subsequent publications, political, religious, and personal, are in my opinion worse than worthless. The two parts of his Rights of Man are characteristic of the same mind, and indicative of the same soul, as the two parts of his Age of Reason, and all proceeded from the same heart as his letter to Washington. The last three of these pamphlets I am sure few of you would now read with any other sentiments than those of abhorrence and disgust. They are rapidly passing into oblivion, and the sooner they are forgotten, the more propitious will it be to the cause of virtue. The world will lose nothing should the two others be forgotten with them. In entertaining these sentiments it is certainly with all the regard and veneration due from me to Mr. Jefferson, as to one of the men to whom the nation owes its deepest debt of gratitude. I am charged by General Smyth with an attempt to ridicule Mr. Jefferson. An expression, distorted and misrepresented in the kennel newspapers of the present day, is the support which the General has for this accusation. Of that expression and of the cause from which it proceeded, I will not now speak. If the animosities of political contention are not to be eternal, it is time to consign that subject to silence. But I address you in the face of our common country, and I hope and trust this paper will pass under the eye of Mr. Jefferson himself. I say, without fear of being disavowed by him, that he will not approve of the use of his name by any one for the purpose of casting odium upon me. And I take this opportunity to add that I deprecate with equal earnestness the unauthorized use by any one of his name to obtain favor of any kind for me.

But advancing from these skirmishes of the General's wit to meet him in his main army. He objects to me that I am "no statesman." To this you will not expect me to reply. But he adds, "that the pernicious passions warp my judgment, and do not leave my mind in a proper state to decide on the interest of a nation and to adopt an enlarged and liberal system of 'policy."" This is a serious charge. But the votes upon which General Smyth has passed so severe sentence upon my character, were all given

in the interval between October, 1803, when I first took my seat in the Senate, and December, 1805. At a distance of seventeen or eighteen years it can scarcely be expected that I should be able to recollect, and still less to prove the motives or the reasons upon which every one of those votes was given; but I will show to your satisfaction that all of them were founded upon reasons very different from any which could originate in the motive charged upon me. And after assigning those reasons I will leave it to your candor to determine, whether they were of so weak a texture that they can be attributed to no other than factious motives.

The first was on the 26th of October, 1803, upon a bill enabling the President to take possession of Louisiana, against which General Smyth says, I voted in a minority of six. Upon recurring to a private minute of my own made at the time, I find the following remark: "The objection was to the second section as unconstitutional." 1

To enable you to judge of the sincerity with which I voted upon that principle against the bill, I beg leave to submit to your meditations the section against which the objection was taken.

And be it further enacted, that until the expiration of the present session of Congress, unless provision for the temporary government of the said territories be sooner made by Congress, all the military, civil and judicial powers exercised by the officers of the existing government of the same shall be vested in such person and persons, and shall be exercised in such manner, as the President of the United States shall direct, for maintaining and protecting the inhabitants of Louisiana in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and religion.

Let me ask you before we proceed further to stop here, to reflect well upon the extent and consequences of the power conferred in this section by the Congress upon the President of the United States, and point out to me the article, section, and paragraph of that instrument, which authorize the Congress to confer upon the President of the United States this tremendous power. If you 1 Adams, Memoirs, October 26, 1803.