[160] See Writings, vol. ii. p. 324.
[161] Vol. i. p. 216.
[162] The objectionable passages in Mr. Van Buren’s instructions to Mr. McLane were the following:
“In reviewing the events which have preceded and more or less contributed to a result so much to be regretted, there will be found three grounds upon which we are most assailable. 1st. In our too long and too tenaciously resisting the right of Great Britain to impose protecting duties in her colonies. 2d. In not relieving her vessels from the restriction of returning direct from the United States, after permission had been given by Great Britain to our vessels to clear out from the colonies to any other than a British port; and, 3d. In omitting to accept the terms offered by the Act of Parliament of July, 1825, after the subject had been brought before Congress and deliberately acted upon by our government. It is, without doubt, to the combined operation of these (three) causes that we are to attribute the British interdict; you will therefore see the propriety of possessing yourself fully of all the explanatory and mitigating circumstances connected with them, that you may be able to obviate, as far as practicable, the unfavorable impression which they have produced.
“The opportunities which you have derived from a participation in our public counsels, as well as other sources of information, will enable you to speak with confidence (as far as you may deem it proper and useful so to do) of the respective parts taken by those to whom the administration of this government is now committed, in relation to the course heretofore pursued upon the subject of the colonial trade. Their views upon that point have been submitted to the people of the United States; and the counsels by which your conduct is now directed are the result of the judgment expressed by the only earthly tribunal to which the late Administration was amenable for its acts. It should be sufficient that the claims set up by them, and which caused the interruption of the trade in question, have been explicitly abandoned by those who first asserted them, and are not revived by their successors. If Great Britain deems it adverse to her interests to allow us to participate in the trade with her colonies, and finds nothing in the extension of it to others to induce her to apply the same rule to us, she will, we hope, be sensible of the propriety of placing her refusal on those grounds. To set up the acts of the late Administration as the cause of forfeiture of privileges which would otherwise be extended to the people of the United States, would, under existing circumstances, be unjust in itself, and could not fail to excite their deepest sensibility. The tone of feeling which a course so unwise and untenable is calculated to produce would doubtless be greatly aggravated by the consciousness that Great Britain has, by order in council, opened her colonial ports to Russia and France, notwithstanding a similar omission on their part to accept the terms offered by the Act of July, 1825. You cannot press this view of the subject too earnestly upon the consideration of the British ministry. It has bearings and relations that reach beyond the immediate question under discussion.
“I will add nothing as to the impropriety of suffering any feelings that find their origin in the past pretensions of this government to have an adverse influence upon the present conduct of Great Britain.”
[163] Writings, vol. ii. p. 327.
[164] Gallatin’s Writings, ii. 364.
[165] See Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson, vol. iii. chap. xvii.
[166] Reprinted in Gallatin’s Writings, vol. iii.