“The pretensions of the United States arose out of the spoliations, under color of French authority, in contravention to law and existing treaties. Those of France sprung from the Treaty of Alliance of the 6th February, 1778, the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of the same date, and the Convention of the 14th of November, 1788. Whatever obligations or indemnities from those sources either party had a right to demand were respectively waived and abandoned, and the consideration which induced one party to renounce his pretensions was that of the renunciation by the other party of his pretensions. What was the value of the obligations and indemnities so reciprocally renounced can only be matter of speculation.”[212]
Mr. Clay concludes by declaring that the Senate, to which his report is addressed, was most competent to determine how far the appropriation of the indemnities due to American citizens was “a public use of private property, within the spirit of the Constitution, and whether equitable considerations do not require some compensation to be made to the claimants.”
There is one other authority, of commanding character, not to be forgotten. It is Hon. Edward Livingston, jurist, statesman, and diplomatist, who, though not engaged in the negotiations, knew them as contemporary, and afterward, as Senator, made a report, accepted ever since as an authentic statement of the whole case, in which he says:—
“The Committee think it is sufficiently shown that the claim for indemnities was surrendered as an equivalent for the discharge of the United States from its heavy national obligations, and for the damages that were due for their preceding non-performance of them. If so, can there be a doubt, independent of the constitutional provision, that the sufferers are entitled to indemnity? Under that provision is not this right converted into one that we are under the most solemn obligation to satisfy? … To lessen the public expenditure is a great legislative duty; to lessen it at the expense of justice, public faith, and constitutional right would be a crime. Conceiving that all these require that relief should be granted to the petitioners, they pray leave to bring in a bill for that purpose.”[213]
This list of authorities may be closed with that of the Emperor Napoleon, who, at St. Helena, dictated to Gourgaud the following testimony:—
“The suppression of this article [2d of the Convention] at once put an end to the privileges which France had possessed by the Treaty of 1778, and annulled the just claims which America might have made for injuries done in time of peace. This was exactly what the First Consul had proposed to himself, in fixing these two points as equiponderating each other.”[214]
Thus the head of the French Government at the time of the Convention unites with the statesmen of our own country in attaching value to these claims.
To all this array of argument and authority the Committee see no answer. They follow its teaching, when they adopt the conclusion, in which so many previous committees have already joined, that these individual claims were originally just, and that the Government of the United States, having appropriated them for a “national” purpose, was substituted for France as debtor.