UNITED STATES, January 12, 1795.
Gentlemen of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:
I lay before Congress, for their consideration, the copy of a letter from the Secretary of War, accompanied by an extract from a memorandum of James Seagrove, agent of Indian affairs.[16]
Go. WASHINGTON.
[The following was transmitted with the message of January 4, 1796 (see Vol. I, pp. 189-190).]
[From American State Papers, Foreign Relations, Vol. I, pp. 527-528.]
PARIS, 30th Vendémiaire, Third Year of the French Republic, One and Indivisible (October 21, 1794).
The Representatives of the French People composing the Committee of Public Safety of the National Convention, charged by the law of the 7th Fructidor with the direction of foreign relations, to the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled.
CITIZENS REPRESENTATIVES: The connections which nature, reciprocal wants, and a happy concurrence of circumstances have formed between two free nations can not but be indissoluble. You have strengthened those sacred ties by the declarations which the minister plenipotentiary of the United States has made in your name to the National Convention and to the French people. They have been received with rapture by a nation who know how to appreciate every testimony which the United States have given to them of their affection. The colors of both nations, united in the center of the National Convention, will be an everlasting evidence of the part which the United States have taken in the success of the French Republic.
You were the first defenders of the rights of man in another hemisphere. Strengthened by your example and endowed with an invincible energy, the French people have vanquished that tyranny which during so many centuries of ignorance, superstition, and baseness had enchained a generous nation.