It may become necessary hereafter to publish your letter, in connection with other correspondence of the mission; and although it is not to be presumed that you looked to such publication, because such a presumption would impute to you a claim to put forth your private opinions upon the conduct of the President and Senate, in a transaction finished and concluded, through the imposing form of a public despatch, yet, if published, it cannot be foreseen how far England might hereafter rely on your authority for a construction favorable to her own pretensions, and inconsistent with the interest and honor of the United States. It is certain that you would most sedulously desire to avoid any such attitude. You would be slow to express opinions, in a solemn and official form, favorable to another government, and on the authority of which opinions that other government might hereafter found new claims or set up new pretensions. It is for this reason, as well as others, that the President feels so much regret at your desire of placing your construction of the provisions of the treaty, and your objections to those provisions, according to your construction, upon the records of the government.

Before examining the several objections suggested by you, it may be proper to take notice of what you say upon the course of the negotiation. In regard to this, having observed that the national dignity of the United States had not been compromised down to the time of the President's message to the last session of Congress, you proceed to say: "But England then urged the United States to enter into a conventional arrangement, by which we might be pledged to concur with her in measures for the suppression of the slave-trade. Till then we had executed our own laws in our own way. But, yielding to this application, and departing from our former principle of avoiding European combinations upon subjects not American, we stipulated in a solemn treaty, that we would carry into effect our own laws, and fixed the minimum force we would employ for that purpose."

The President cannot conceive how you should have been led to adventure upon such a statement as this. It is but a tissue of mistakes. England did not urge the United States to enter into this conventional arrangement. The United States yielded to no application from England. The proposition for abolishing the slave-trade, as it stands in the treaty, was an American proposition; it originated with the executive government of the United States, which cheerfully assumes all its responsibility. It stands upon it as its own mode of fulfilling its duties, and accomplishing its objects. Nor have the United States departed, in this treaty, in the slightest degree, from their former principles of avoiding European combinations upon subjects not American, because the abolition of the African slave-trade is an American subject as emphatically as it is a European subject; and indeed more so, inasmuch as the government of the United States took the first great steps in declaring that trade unlawful, and in attempting its extinction. The abolition of this traffic is an object of the highest interest to the American people and the American government; and you seem strangely to have overlooked altogether the important fact, that nearly thirty years ago, by the treaty of Ghent, the United States bound themselves by solemn compact with England, to continue "their efforts to promote its entire abolition," both parties pledging themselves by that treaty to use their best endeavors to accomplish so desirable an object.

Again, you speak of an important concession made to the renewed application of England. But the treaty, let it be repeated, makes no concession to England whatever. It complies with no demand, grants no application, conforms to no request. All these statements, thus by you made, and which are so exceedingly erroneous, seem calculated to hold up the idea, that in this treaty your government has been acting a subordinate, or even a complying part.

The President is not a little startled that you should make such totally groundless assumptions of fact, and then leave a discreditable inference to be drawn from them. He directs me not only to repel this inference as it ought to be repelled, but also to bring to your serious consideration and reflection the propriety of such an assumed narration of facts as your despatch, in this respect, puts forth.

Having informed the department that a copy of the letter of the 24th of August, addressed by me to you, had been delivered to M. Guizot, you proceed to say: "In executing this duty, I felt too well what was due to my government and country to intimate my regret to a foreign power that some declaration had not preceded the treaty, or some stipulation accompanied it, by which the extraordinary pretension of Great Britain to search our ships at all times and in all places, first put forth to the world by Lord Palmerston on the 27th of August, 1841, and on the 13th of October following again peremptorily claimed as a right by Lord Aberdeen, would have been abrogated, as equally incompatible with the laws of nations and with the independence of the United States. I confined myself, therefore, to a simple communication of your letter." It may be true that the British pretension leads necessarily to consequences as broad and general as your statement. But it is no more than fair to state that pretension in the words of the British government itself, and then it becomes matter of consideration and argument how broad and extensive it really is. The last statement of this pretension, or claim, by the British government, is contained in Lord Aberdeen's note to Mr. Stevenson of the 13th of October, 1841. It is in these words:—

"The undersigned readily admits, that to visit and search American vessels in time of peace, when that right of search is not granted by treaty, would be an infraction of public law, and a violation of national dignity and independence. But no such right is asserted. We sincerely desire to respect the vessels of the United States, but we may reasonably expect to know what it really is that we respect. Doubtless the flag is prima facie evidence of the nationality of the vessel; and, if this evidence were in its nature conclusive and irrefragable, it ought to preclude all further inquiry. But it is sufficiently notorious that the flags of all nations are liable to be assumed by those who have no right or title to bear them. Mr. Stevenson himself fully admits the extent to which the American flag has been employed for the purpose of covering this infamous traffic. The undersigned joins with Mr. Stevenson in deeply lamenting the evil; and he agrees with him in thinking that the United States ought not to be considered responsible for this abuse of their flag. But if all inquiry be resisted, even when carried no further than to ascertain the nationality of the vessel, and impunity be claimed for the most lawless and desperate of mankind, in the commission of this fraud, the undersigned greatly fears that it may be regarded as something like an assumption of that responsibility which has been deprecated by Mr. Stevenson….

"The undersigned renounces all pretension on the part of the British government to visit and search American vessels in time of peace. Nor is it as American that such vessels are ever visited; but, it has been the invariable practice of the British navy, and, as the undersigned believes, of all navies in the world, to ascertain by visit the real nationality of merchant-vessels met with on the high seas, if there be good reason to apprehend their illegal character….

"The undersigned admits, that, if the British cruiser should possess a knowledge of the American character of any vessel, his visitation of such vessel would be entirely unjustifiable. He further admits, that so much respect and honor are due to the American flag, that no vessel bearing it ought to be visited by a British cruiser, except under the most grave suspicions and well-founded doubts of the genuineness of its character.

"The undersigned, although with pain, must add, that if such visit should lead to the proof of the American origin of the vessel, and that she was avowedly engaged in the slave-trade, exhibiting to view the manacles, fetters, and other usual implements of torture, or had even a number of these unfortunate beings on board, no British officer could interfere further. He might give information to the cruisers of the United States, but it could not be in his own power to arrest or impede the prosecution of the voyage and the success of the undertaking.