of such extensive concerns as that of the department of war, loaded, as it recently has been, with a vast increase of business, there ought to be talents and clerks, or secretaries, sufficient to transact all the ordinary business without the head of the department---leaving him at liberty to arrange, distribute, authenticate,and superintend the whole; and the bill is calculated for this arrangement of the business---it proposes to bring into the department an increase of talent, and a greater capacity for labor, to be employed under the direction of the head of the department.

Mr. Speaker---it has been alledged that the assistant secretaries are intended to act as a council to the principal officer of the department; and it is true he may consult the meanest clerk in his office, if he chooses so to de: but he is not obliged to consult them, or, having consulted, he may control their opinions---they are intended to act in a subordinate capacity, they are to be assistant secretaries, they are not to exercise co-ordinate powers with the head of the department. These assistants, as well as the principal officer of the department, are called secretaries; and from this it has been inferred, that their powers and functions are the same as his. I know no difference between secretary and clerk, taken in this sense, except that custom may have given the former appellation to one who acts in a public office, and the latter to one who acts for an individual or in a private office. But these are called assistant secretaries; they are intended to aid the head of the department, but cannot control him.

Mr. Speaker----Gentlemen have indulged themselves in conjectures, as to the object of the proposed appointments, and the manner in which the assistants are to be employed. They have been placed in the station of counsellors to the head of the department; one of them has been placed at the head of the southern concerns in the office, the other at the head of the northern concerns. The honorable gentleman from Connecticut, Mr. Tallmadge, who has thus disposed of them, may, I think, notwithstanding his general correctness, have fallen into some error on the subject. The bill is silent both as to the object of their appointment and the duties they are to perform; it goes no further than to appoint them "assistant secretaries in the department of war," they are to assist in transacting business, under the head of the department, and no doubt they will be employed by him, in such manner, as he may think best calculated for the despatch of business, and the promotion of the public good.

Mr. WRIGHT. Mr. Speaker---I feel every disposition to gratify the request of the President, in supplying the department of war with the proposed assistance, in order to the despatch of business of that department, which the president has informed us exceeds the physical powers of any individual. Its great accumulation must be obvious to us all; but, sir, the president requires two assistant secretaries at war; I presume, he meant clerks, to execute the orders of the secretary at war, and not co-secretaries, 19 advise and

direct him---this,sir, would be disrespect to the secretary at war, and would lessen the responsibility. I have no doubt, he, with zeal and industry, has endeavored to do his duty---he was a respectable offcer of the revolution, though I am not prepared to say he is master of the duties of a secretary at war. I recollect but a short time past, a general dissatisfaction seemed to pervade the House; I confess I felt it, and I believe it was felt in the proportion of our zeal for the progress of military preparations, to avenge the wrongs of our country---and I confess I am pleased to find, from so high authority, such an apology for him. I shall vote, however, for the bill, as it is, if it is not the pleasure of the House to make the two assistants clerks, which to me appears to have been the object of the president's message on the subject. It will be recollected, that General Washington was the president of the United States, when the present organization of that department was established, whose military experience ought, in my judgment, to secure its permanence; though I am, for one, determined to furnish the administration with such a supply of agents for the public service as they may think necessary; nor can I fear to trust them with such minor objects, to whom, by the American people, is committed the destinies of the nation.

[The bill was then read a third time and passed. It is since put to sleep in the Senate.]

CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER.

No. 36.] TWELFTH CONGRESS.... FIRST SESSION. [1811-12.

MESSAGE

TO THE

SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES.

I communicate to Congress certain documents, being a continuation of those heretofore laid before them, on the subject of our affairs with Great Britain.

Without going back beyond the renewal in 1803 of the war in which G. Britain is engaged, and omitting unrepaired wrongs of inferior magnitude, the conduct of her government presents a series of acts hostile to the U. S. as an independent and neutral nation.

British cruisers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it ; not in the exercise of a belligerent right, founded on the law of nations against an enemy, but of a municipal prerogative over British subjects. British jurisdiction is thus extended to neutral vessels in a situation where no laws can operate but the law of nations and the laws of the country to which the vessels belong; and a self redress is assumed, which, if British subjects were wrongfully detained and alone concerned, is that substitution of force for a resort to the responsible sovereign, which falls within the definition of war. Could the seizure of British subjects, in such cases, be regarded as within the exercise of a belligerent right, the acknowledged laws of war, which forbid an article of captured property to be adjudged, without a regular investigation before a competent tribunal, would imperiously demand the fairest trial where the sacred rights of persons were at issue. In place of such a trial, these rights are subjected to the will of every petty commander.

The practice, hence, is so far from affecting British subjects alone, that under the pretext 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 G. Britain would be so prompt to avenge if committed against herself, the U. States have

No. 36.

ia 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 govern. inent was formally assured of the readiness of the U.States to enter iato arrangements, such as could not be rejected, if the recovery of British subjects were the real and the 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 U. States to punish the greater offences committed by her own vessels, her government has bestowed on their commanders additional marks of honor and confidence.

Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate force, and sometimes without the practicability of applying one, cur 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 interest. 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 heen 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 one 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 transcendent 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 pica: that executed ediets against millions of our property could not be retaliation on édicts confessedly impossible to be exs

ecuted; that retaliation, to be just, should fall on the party setting the guilty example, not on an innocent party, which was not even chargable 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 prerequisites 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 nowise necessary to their termination, nor exemplified by British usage; and that the French repeal, besides including that portion of the decrees which operates 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 special repeal in relation to the U. States, but should be extended to whatever other neutral nations unconnected with them may be affected by those decrees. And as an additional insult, they are called on for a formal disavowal of conditions and pretentions 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 rights 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