foundation was laid of incurable animosity and division between the States on each side of that great natural boundary, the river Ohio. Not only their masters, but the very slaves themselves, for whose benefit this regulation was made, were sacrificed by it. Dispersion is to them a bettering of their present condition, and of their chance for emancipation. It is only when this can be done without danger and without ruinous individual loss that it will be done at all. But what is common sense to a political Quixote?

That country was ours by a double title, by charter and by conquest. George Rogers Clark, the American Hannibal, at the head of the State troops, by the reduction of Post Vincennes, obtained the lakes for our northern boundary at the peace of Paris. The march of that great man and his brave companions in arms across the drowned lands of the Wabash, does not shrink from a comparison with the passage of the Thrasimene marsh. Without meaning any thing like an invidious distinction, I have not heard of any cession from Massachusetts of her vast wilds; and Connecticut has had the address, out of our grant to the firm, to obtain, on her own private account, some millions of acres: whilst we, yes we, I blush to say it, have descended to beg for a pittance, out of the property once our own, for the brave men by whose valor it had been won, and whom heedless profusion had disabled us to recompense. We met the just fate of the prodigal. We were spurned from the door, where once we were master, with derision and scorn; and yet we hear of undue Virginian influence. This fund yielded the Government, when I had connection with it, from half a million to eight hundred thousand dollars, annually. It would have preserved us from the imposition of State taxes, founded schools, built bridges and made roads and canals throughout Virginia. It was squandered away in a single donative at the instance of Mr. Madison. For the sake of concord with our neighbors, by the same generous but misguided policy, we ceded to Pennsylvania Fort Pitt, a most important commercial and military position, and a vast domain around it, as much Virginia as the city of Richmond and the county of Henrico. To Kentucky, the eldest daughter of the Union, the Virginia of the west, we have yielded on a question of boundary, from a similar consideration. Actuated by the same magnanimous spirit at the instance of other States (with the exception of New-York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island), we accepted, in 1783, the present Constitution. It was repugnant to our judgment, and fraught, as we feared, with danger to our liberties. The awful voice of our ablest and soundest statesmen, of Patrick Henry, and of George Mason, never before or since disregarded, warned us of the consequences. Neither was their counsel entirely unheeded, for it led to important subsequent amendments of that instrument. I have always believed this

disinterested spirit, so often manifested by us, to be one of the chief causes of the influence which we have exercised over the other States. Eight States having made that Constitution their own, we submitted to the yoke for the sake of union. Our attachment to the Union is not an empty profession. It is demonstrated by our practice at home. No sooner was the Convention of 1788 dissolved, than the feuds of federalism and anti-federalism disappeared. I speak of their effects on our councils. For the sake of union, we submitted to the lowest state of degradation; the administration of John Adams. The name of this man calls up contempt and derision, wheresoever it is pronounced. To the fantastic vanity of this political_ Malvolio may be distinctly traced our present unhappy condition. I will not be so ungenerous as to remind you that this personage (of whom and his addresses, and his answers, I defy you to think without a bitter smile) was not a Virginian, but I must in justice to ourselves, insist in making him a set-off against Mr. Madison. They are of such equal weight, that the trembling balance reminds us of that passage of Pope, where Jove "weighs the beau's wits agains the lady's hair.

"The doubtful beam long nods from side to side,

At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside."

Intoxicated not more by the fulsome adulation with which he was plied, than by the fumes of his own vanity, this poor old gentleman saw a visionary coronet suspended over his brow, and an airdrawn sceptre "the handle towards his hand," which attempting to clutch, he lost his balance, and disappeared never to rise again. He it was, who "enacting" Nat. Lee's Alexander, raved about the people of Virginia as "a faction to be humbled in dust and ashes," when the sackcloth already was prepared for his own back.

But I am spinning out this letter to too great a length. What is your object-PEACE? Can this be attained on any terms, whilst England sees a prospect of disuniting that confederacy, which has already given so deep a blow to her maritime pride, and threatens at no very distant day to dispute with her the empire of the ocean? The wound which our gallant tars have inflicted on her tenderest point, has maddened her to rage. Cursed as we are with a weak and wicked administration, she can no longer despise us. Already she begins to hate us; and she seeks to glut a revenge as impotent as it is rancorous, by inroads that would have disgraced the buccaneers, and bulletins that would only not disgrace the sovereign of Elba. She already is compelled to confess in her heart, what her lips deny, that if English bull-dogs and game-cocks degenerate on our soil, English MEN do not-and should (which God forbid) our brethren of the East desert us in this contest for all that is precious to man, we will maintain it, so long as our proud and insulting foe shall refuse to accede to equitable terms of peace. The Government will then pass

into proper hands-the talents of the country will be called forth, and the schemes of moon-struck philosophers and their disciples pass away and "leave not a rack behind."

You know how steady and persevering I endeavored, for eight years, to counteract the artful and insidious plans of our rulers to embroil us with the country of our ancestors, and the odium which I have thereby drawn upon myself. Believing it to be my duty to soften, as much as possible, the asperities which subsisted between the two countries, and which were leading to a ruinous war, I put to hazard, nay, exposed to almost certain destruction, an influence such as no man, perhaps, in this country, at the same age, had ever before attained. (The popularity that dreads exposure is too delicate for public service. It is a bastard species: the true sort will stand the hardest frosts. Is it my fault (as Mr. Burke complained of the crowned heads of Europe) that England will no longer suffer me to find palliatives for her conduct? No man admired more than I did her magnanimous stand against the tyrant, before whom all the rest of Christendom at one time bowed: No man, not even her own Wilberforce and Perceval, put up more sincere prayers for her deliverance. In the remotest isle of Australasia, my sympathy would have been enlisted, in such a contest, for the descendants of Alfred and Bacon, and Shakspeare, and Milton, and Locke, on whom I love to look back as my illustrious countrymen-in any contest I should have taken side with liberty; but on this depended (as I believed and do still believe) all that made my own country dear in my sight. It is past-and unmindful of the mercy of that protecting Providence which has carried her through the valley of the shadow of death, England "feels power and forgets right." I am not one of the whining set of people who cry out against mine adversary for the force of his blow. England has, unquestionably, as good a right to conquer us, as we have to conquer Canada; the same right that we have to conquer England, and with about as good prospect of success. But let not her orators declaim against the enormity of French principles, when she permits herself to arm and discipline our slaves, and to lead them into the field against their masters, in the hope of exciting by the example a general insurrection, and thus render Virginia another St. Domingo. And does she talk of jacobinism! What is this but jacobinism? and of the vilest stamp? Is this the country that has abolished the slave trade? that has made that infamous, inhuman traffic a felony? that feeds with the bread of life all who hunger after it, and even those who, but for her, would never have known their perishing condition? Drunk with the cup of the abominations of Moloch, they have been roused from the sleep of death, like some benighted traveller perishing in the snows, and warmed into life by the beams of the only true religion. Is this the country of Wilber

force and Howard? It is;-but, like my own, my native land, it has fallen into the hands of evil men, who pour out its treasure and its blood at the shrine of their own guilty ambition. And this impious sacrifice they celebrate amidst the applauses of the deluded people, and even of the victims themselves.

There is a proneness in mankind to throw the blame of their sufferings on any one but themselves. In this manner, Virginia is regarded by some of her sister States; not adverting to the fact, that all (Connecticut and Delaware excepted) are responsible for the measures that have involved us in our present difficulties. Did we partition your State into those unequal and monstrous districts which have given birth to a new word in your language, of uncouth sound, calling up the most odious associations. Did we elect the jacobins whom you sent to both Houses of Congress-the Bidwells, and Gannetts, and Skinners,-to spur on the more moderate men from Virginia to excesses which they reluctantly gave into at the time, and have since been ashamed of? Who hurried the bill suspending the privilege of the writ of HABEAS CORPUS through a trembling servile Senate, in consequence, as he did not blush to state, of a verbal communication from the President? A Senator from Massachusetts, and professor in her venerable university. In short, have not your first statesmen (such I believe was the reputation of the gentleman in question at the time), your richest merchants, and the majority of your delegation in Congress vied in support of the men and the measures that have led to our present suffering and humiliated condition?

If you wished to separate yourselves from us, you had ample provocation in time of peace, in an embargo the most unconstitutional and oppressive; an engine of tyranny, fraud, and favoritism. Then was the time to resist (we did not desert England in a time of war), but you were then under the dominion of a faction among yourselves, yet a formidable minority, exhibiting no signs of diminution; and it is not the least of my apprehensions, from certain proceedings to the eastward, that they may be made the means of consigning you again, and for ever, to the same low, insolent domination. The reaction of your jacobins upon us (for although we have some in Virginia, they are few and insignificant) through the men at Washington, ("who must conciliate good republicans,") is dreadful. Pause, I beseech you, pause! You tread on the brink of destruction. Of all the Atlantic States you have the least cause to complain. Your manufactures, and the trade which the enemy has allowed you, have drained us of our last dollar. How then can we carry on the war? With men and steel-stout hearts, and willing hands-and these from the days of Darius and Xerxes, in defence of the household gods of free dom, have proved a match for gold. Can they not now encounter paper? We shall suffer much from this contest, it will cut deep;

but dismissing its authors from our confidence and councils for ever, (I speak of a few leaders and their immediate tools, not of the deluded, as well in as out of authority,) we shall pass, if it be the good pleasure of Him whose curses are tempered with mercies, through an agony and a bloody sweat, to peace and salvation; to that peace which is only to be found in a reconciliation with Him. "Atheists and madmen have been our lawgivers," and when I think on our past conduct I shudder at the chastisement that may await us. How has not Europe suffered for her sins! Will England not consider, that, like the man who but yesterday bestrode the narrow world, she is but an instrument in his hands, who breaketh the weapons of his chastisement, when the measure of his people's punishment is full?

When I exhort to further patience-to resort to constitutional means of redress only, I know that there is such a thing as tyranny as well as oppression; and that there is no government, however restricted in its power, that may not, by abuse, under pretext of exercise of its constitutional authority, drive its unhappy subjects to desperation. Our situation is indeed awful. The members of the Union in juxtaposition-held together by no common authority to which men can look up with confidence and respect. Smitten by the charms of Upper Canada, our President has abandoned the several States to shift for themselves as they can.-Congress is felo de se. In practice there is found little difference between a government of requisitions on the States, which these disregard, or a government of requisitions on the people, which the governors are afraid to make until the public faith is irretrievably ruined. Congress seemed barred by their own favorite act of limitations, from raising supplies; prescription runs against them. But let us not despair of the commonwealth. Some master-spirit may be kindled by the collision of the times, who will breathe his own soul into the councils and armies of the republic; and here indeed is our chiefest danger. The man who is credulous enough to believe that a constitution, with the skeleton of an establishment of 10,000 men, not 2,000 strong, (such was our army three years ago,) is the same as with an army of 60,000 men, may be a very amiable neighbor, but is utterly unfit for a statesman. Already our government is in fact changed. We are become a military people, of whom more than of any other it might have been said fortunatos sua si bona norint. If under such circumstances you ask me what you are to do, should a conscription of the model of Bonaparte be attempted? I will refer you to its reputed projector, Colonel Monroe. Ask him what he would have done, whilst governor of Virginia, and preparing to resist Federal usurpation, had such an attempt been made by Mr. Adams and his ministers; especially in 1800 He can give the answer.

But when you complain of the representation of three-fifths of