The Senate concurred in the appointment of a joint committee on their part, agreeably to the resolution last mentioned; and Messrs. Anderson and Gaillard were appointed the committee.
The Senate then adjourned.
Tuesday, November 5.
Richard Brent, from the State of Virginia, attended.
Annual Message.
The following Message was received from the President of the United States:
Fellow-citizens of the Senate
and House of Representatives:
In calling you together sooner than a separation from your homes would otherwise have been required, I yielded to considerations drawn from the posture of our foreign affairs; and in fixing the present, for the time of your meeting, regard was had to the probability of further developments of the policy of the belligerent powers towards this country, which might the more unite the National Councils in the measures to be pursued.
At the close of the last session of Congress, it was hoped that the successive confirmations of the extinction of the French decrees, so far as they violated our neutral commerce, would have induced the Government of Great Britain to repeal its Orders in Council, and thereby authorize a removal of the existing obstructions to her commerce with the United States.
Instead of this reasonable step towards satisfaction and friendship between the two nations, the Orders were, at a moment when least to have been expected, put into more rigorous execution; and it was communicated through the British Envoy just arrived, that, whilst the revocation of the edicts of France, as officially made known to the British Government, was denied to have taken place, it was an indispensable condition of the repeal of the British Orders that commerce should be restored to a footing that would admit the productions and manufactures of Great Britain, when owned by neutrals, into markets shut against them by her enemy; the United States being given to understand that, in the mean time, a continuance of their non-importation act would lead to measures of retaliation.