With high respect, we are, your friends and fellow-citizens,
J. BURNET.
J.C. WRIGHT.
[AND 10 OTHERS.]
WASHINGTON, June 17, 1841.
J. BURNET, J.C. WRIGHT, AND OTHERS OF THE COMMITTEE.
GENTLEMEN: Your letter of the 16th was duly handed me, and I lose no time in responding to the feelings and sentiments which you have expressed for yourselves and those you represent, and which you have correctly ascribed to me in regard to the lamented death of the late President. As a citizen I respected him; as a patriot I honored him; as a friend he was near and dear to me. That the people of Cincinnati should desire to keep watch over his remains by entombing them near their city is both natural and becoming; that the entire West, where so many evidences of his public usefulness are to be found, should unite in the same wish was to have been expected; and that the surviving soldiers of his many battles, led on by him to victory and to glory, should sigh to perform the last melancholy duties to the remains of their old commander is fully in consonance with the promptings of a noble and generous sympathy. I could not, if I was authorized to do so, oppose myself to their wishes. I might find something to urge on behalf of his native State in my knowledge of his continued attachment to her through the whole period of his useful life; in the claims of his relatives there, whose desire it would be that the mortal remains of the illustrious son should sleep under the same turf with those of his distinguished father, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; in the wish of the citizens of his native county to claim all that is now left of him for whom they so lately cast their almost unanimous suffrage; to say nothing of my own feelings, allied as I am by blood to many of his near relatives, and with our names so closely associated in much connected with the late exciting political contest. These considerations might present some reasonable ground for opposing your wishes; but the assent which has been given by his respected widow and nearest relatives to the request of the people of Cincinnati admits of no opposition on my part, neither in my individual nor official character.
I shall feel it to be my duty, however, to submit our correspondence to the two Houses of Congress, now in session, but anticipating no effort from that quarter to thwart the wishes expressed by yourselves in consonance with those of the widow and nearest relatives of the late President. I readily promise you my cooperation toward enabling you to fulfill the sacred trust which brought you to this city.
I tender to each of you, gentlemen, my cordial salutations.
JOHN TYLER.
[NOTE.—The remains of the late President of the United States were removed from Washington to North Bend, Ohio, June 26, 1841.]
WASHINGTON, June 29, 1841.