[RUSH TO BUCHANAN.]
Sydenham, near Philadelphia, August 18,1845.
My Dear Sir:—
I have to pray your excuse for the trouble of this letter.
I wish to have all the documents respecting Oregon that accompanied the President’s message to the Senate of the 21st of July. They were given in the Union, which I take, but so often miss, through one bad chance or other at the post office, that I have not these documents; and as they are generally published in the pamphlet form, I would feel greatly indebted to you if (having a copy to spare) you would have the goodness to direct it to me, as I know not where else to seek it. Sometimes I am meditating one more volume on our relations with England, the Oregon question closing the list of the historical ones growing out of our revolution; and I desire at any rate to gather up the authentic documents bearing on that question which seem to me, with the facts they furnish, to supply the materials perhaps of some reflections also, at this new and remarkable epoch in our affairs. On the whole, I think you made a wise settlement of that long pending difficulty. My own impression was ever very strong, that England was ready to appeal to the sword, unless she got territory and advantages south of 49°; and I will candidly own to you that she took up with fewer at last than I supposed she would have done. This I ascribe to the energy and whole course of our Government since Mr. Polk came in, at which I was a little startled at first; but it came out nobly, and what a fine prospect the settlement now offers to us of intercourse with England, in connection with our new tariff.
On this latter head, will not England now do something for our tobacco, and become wholly liberal in the arrangements of her West India trade with us? Our new tariff may well justify us in urging her on these and other points in which she is still much behind the liberality of our own system.
I am sincerely glad that your services are retained in the Department of State. If I might claim to speak, I should say that it is due both to your country and yourself, that, having accomplished so much of good in that station already, you should continue in it to do more.
How ill-judged, I would almost say criminal, in the Senate, to have refused the President the small sum he asked towards the executive plans with Mexico! Reading lately a life of Mirabeau, I was much struck with a remark quoted from Madame de Sévigné, that “there is nothing so expensive as want of money.” What may be the executive plans precisely in regard to Mexico, I of course know not; but I can conceive that to have given the President those two millions in hand he asked for, might have saved the ultimate expenditure of fifty or a hundred millions.
I remain, my dear sir, with sincere respect, very faithfully yours,
Richard Rush.