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The practice, hence, is so far from affecting British subjects alone, that under the pretexts of searching for these, thousands of American citizens under the safeguard of public law, and of their national flag, have been torn from their country, and from every thing dear to them; have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation, and exposed under the severities of their discipline, to be exiled to the most distant and deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors, and to be the melancholy instruments of taking away those of their own brethren.

Against this crying enormity, which Great Britain would be so prompt to avenge if committed against herself, the United States have in vain exhausted remonstrances and expostulations; and that no proof might be wanting of their conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for a continuance of the practice, the British government was formally assured of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements, such as could not be rejected, if the recovery of British subjects were the real and sole object. The communication passed without effect.

British cruisers have been in the practice also of violating the rights and the peace of our coasts. They hover over and harass our entering and departing commerce. To the most insulting pretensions, they have added the most lawless proceedings in our very harbors; and have wantonly spilt American blood within the sanctuary of our territorial jurisdiction. The principles and rules enforced by that nation when a neutral nation against armed vessels of belligerents hovering near her coasts and disturbing her commerce, are well known. When called on, nevertheless, by the United States, to punish the greater offences committed by her own vessels, her government has bestowed on their commanders additional marks of honour and confidence.

Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate force, and sometimes without the practicability of applying one, our commerce has been plundered in every sea; the great staples of our country have been cut off from their legitimate markets; and a destructive blow aimed at our agricultural and maritime interests. In aggravation of these predatory measures, they have been considered as in force from the dates of their notification; a retrospective effect being thus added, as has been done in other important cases, to the unlawfulness of the course pursued. And to render the outrage the more signal, these mock blockades have been reiterated and enforced in the face of official communications

from the British government, declaring, as the true definition of a legal blockade, "that particular ports must be actually invested, and previous warning given to vessels bound to them, not to enter."

Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our neutral trade, the cabinet of Great Britain resorted, at length, to the sweeping system of blockades, under the name of orders in council; which has been moulded and managed as might best suit its political views, its commercial jealousies, or the avidity of British cruisers.

To our remonstrances against the complicated and transcendant injustice of this innovation, the first reply was, that the orders were reluctantly adopted by Great Britain, as a necessary retaliation on decrees of her enemy, proclaiming a general blockade of the British isles, at a time when the naval force of that enemy dared not to issue from his own ports. She was reminded without effect, that her own prior blockades, unsupported by an adequate naval force actually applied and continued, were a bar to this plea: that executed edicts against millions of our property could not be retaliation on edicts, confessedly impossible to be executed: that retaliation, to be just, should fall on the party setting the guilty example, not on an innocent party, which was not even chargeable with an acquiescence in it.

When deprived of this flimsy veil for a prohibition of our trade with her enemy, by the repeal of his prohibition of our trade with Great Britain, her cabinet, instead of a corresponding repeal, or a practical discontinuance of its orders, formally avowed a determination to persist in them against the United States, until the markets of her enemy should be laid open to British products; thus asserting an obligation on a neutral power to require one belligerent to encourage, by its internal regulations, the trade of another belligerent; contradicting her own practice towards all nations, in peace as well as in war; and betraying the insincerity of those professions which inculcated a belief, that having resorted to her orders with regret, she was anxious to find an occasion for putting an end to them.

Abandoning, still more, all respect for the neutral rights of the United States and for its own consistency, the British government now demands, as pre-requisites to a repeal of its orders as they relate to the United States, that a formality should be observed in the repeal of the French decrees, no wise necessary to their termination, nor exemplified by British usage: and that the French repeal, besides including that

portion of the decrees which operate within a territorial jurisdiction, as well as that which operates on the high seas, against the commerce of the United States, should not be a single and special repeal in relation to the United States, but should be extended to whatever other neutral nations, unconnected with them, may be effected by those decrees. And, as an additional insult, they are called on for a formal disavowal of conditions and pretensions advanced by the French government, for which the United States are so far from having made themselves responsible, that in official explanations which have been published to the world, and in a correspondence of the American minister at London with the British minister for foreign affairs, such a responsibility was explicitly and emphatically disclaimed.

It has become, indeed, sufficiently certain, that the commerce of the United States is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with the belligerent right of Great Britain; not as supplying the wants of her enemies, which she herself supplies; but, as interfering with the monopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation. She carries on a war against the lawful commerce of a friend, that she may the better carry on a commerce with an enemy; a commerce polluted by the forgeries and perjuries, which are, for the most part, the only passports by which it can succeed.

Anxious to make every experiment, short of the last resort of injured nations, the United States have withheld from Great Britain, under successive modifications, the benefits of a free intercourse with their market, the loss of which could not but outweigh the profits accruing from her restrictions of our commerce with other nations. And to entitle these experiments to the more favourable consideration, they were so framed as to enable her to place her adversary under the exclusive operation of them. To these appeals her government has been equally inflexible, as if willing to make sacrifices of every sort, rather than yield to the claims of justice, or renounce the errors of a false pride. Nay, so far were the attempts carried to overcome the attachment of the British cabinet to its unjust edicts, that it received every encouragement within the competency of the executive branch of our government, to expect that a repeal of them would be followed by a war between the United States and France, unless the French edicts should also be repealed. Even this communication, although silencing for ever the plea of a disposition in the United States to acquiesce in those edicts, originally the sole plea for them, received no attention.

If no other proof existed of a predetermination of the British government against a repeal of its orders, it might be found in the correspondence of the minister plenipotentiary of the United States at London and the British secretary for foreign affairs, in 1810, on the question whether the blockade of May, 1806, was considered as in force, or as not in force. It had been ascertained that the French government, which urged this blockade as the ground of its Berlin decree, was willing, in the event of its removal, to repeal that decree; which being followed by alternate repeals of the other offensive edicts, might abolish the whole system on both sides. This inviting opportunity for accomplishing an object so important to the United States, and professed so often to be the desire of both the belligerents, was made known to the British government. As that government admits that an actual application of an adequate force is necessary to the existence of a legal blockade, and it was notorious, that if such a force had ever been applied, its long discontinuance had annulled the blockade in question, there could be no sufficient objection on the part of Great Britain to a formal revocation of it; and no imaginable objection to a declaration of the fact, that the blockade did not exist. The declaration would have been consistent with her avowed principles of blockade; and would have enabled the United States to demand from France the pledged repeal of her decrees; either with success, in which case the way would have been opened for a general repeal of the belligerent edicts; or without success, in which case the United States would have been justified in turning their measures exclusively against France. The British government would, however, neither rescind the blockade, nor declare its non-existence; nor permit its non-existence to be inferred and affirmed by the American plenipotentiary. On the contrary, by representing the blockade to be comprehended in the orders in council, the United States were compelled so to regard it in their subsequent proceedings.

There was a period when a favourable change in the policy of the British cabinet was justly considered as established. The minister plenipotentiary of his Britannic majesty here, proposed an adjustment of the differences more immediately endangering the harmony of the two countries. The proposition was accepted with the promptitude and cordiality, corresponding with the invariable professions of this government. A foundation appeared to be laid for a sincere and lasting reconcilation. The prospect however quickly vanished. The whole proceeding was disavowed by the British government without any explanations, which could, at that time, repress

cause of his Britannic majesty, be suffered to continue that horrible species of warfare which they have heretofore practised against our troops, and those still more horrible depredations upon the peaceable inhabitants of our frontiers? I have sufficient evidence to show that even the latter have not always been perpetrated by small parties of vagrant Indians, acting at a distance from the British army. Some of the most atrocious instances have occurred under the eyes of the British commander and the head of the Indian department. I shall pass by the tragedy of the river Raisin, and that equally well known which was acted on the Miami river after the defeat of colonel Dudley-and select three other instances of savage barbarity committed under the auspices of general Proctor.-In the beginning of June, a small party of Indians, conducted by an Ottowa chief, who I believe is now with the British army under your command, left Malden in bark canoes, in which they coasted Lake Erie to the mouth of Portage river; the canoes were taken across the Portage to the Sandusky bay, over which the party proceeded to the mouth of Cold creek, and from thence by land to the settlements upon that river, where they captured three families, consisting of one man and twelve women and children. After taking the prisoners some distance, one of the women was discovered to be unable to keep up with them, in consequence of her advanced state of pregnancy. She was immediately tomahawked, stripped naked, her womb ripped open, and the child taken out. Three or four of the children were successively butchered as they discovered their inability to keep up with the party. Upon the arrival of the Indians at Malden, two or three of the prisoners were ransomed by colonel Elliott, and the others by the citizens of Detroit, where they remained until they were taken off by their friends upon the recovery of that place by our army. I have been informed that the savage chief received from colonel Elliott a repri mand for his cruelty.

"On the 29th or 30th of the same month, a large party of Indians were sent from Malden on a war expedition to Lower Sandusky. At a farm house near that place, they murdered the whole family, consisting of a man, his wife, son, and daughter.

"During the last attack upon Fort Meigs by general Proctor, a party headed by a Seneca, an intimate friend of Tecumseh's, was sent to endeavour to detach from our interest the Shawanese of Wapockanata. In their way thither they murdered several men, and one woman who was working in her cornfield.

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