says to the President:—
“I am satisfied, sir, that you will acknowledge one piece of justice on this occasion, which is, that until an inquiry can be made, the affair shall continue in secrecy under your injunction.”
But after his return from Rhode-Island, knowing that the President could not lay an injunction for the time past, and knowing also that a copy of the dreadful dispatch was in the hands of Mr. Bond, Ref 046 on whom the President could lay no injunction at all, he suspected the affair had got abroad, which was indeed the case; it was then, and not before, that, making a virtue of necessity, he informed the public, by publishing a letter he had written to the President, that he would prepare a vindication of his conduct.
After this he suffered the matter to rest for some time, and then published an extract from another letter to the President, dated the 8th of October, in the following words:—
“You must be sensible, sir, that I am inevitably driven into the discussion of many confidential and delicate points. I could with safety immediately appeal to the people of the United States, who can be of no party. But I shall wait for your answer to this letter, so far as it respects the paper desired, before I forward to you my general letter, which is delayed for no other cause. I shall also rely that you will consent to the whole of this affair, howsoever confidential and delicate, being exhibited to the world. At the same time, I prescribe to myself this condition, not to mingle any thing which I do not sincerely conceive to belong to the subject.”
By this stroke, our vindicator imagined he had reduced the President to a dilemma from which he would be unable to extricate him. He thought that the President’s circumspect disposition would lead him to refuse the communication of the paper demanded; and in that case he would have impressed on the public mind an idea of its containing something at once capable of acquitting himself, and of criminating the President. And should the paper be granted, he hoped that he should be able to make such comments on it as would at least render the chief of the executive as odious as himself.
The President did not balance a moment on the course he should take.
“It is not difficult,” says he in the answer, “to perceive what your objects are; but that you may have no cause to complain of the withholding any paper (however private and confidential) which you shall think necessary in a case of so serious a nature, I have directed that you should have the inspection of my letter of the 22nd of July, agreeably to your request; and you are at full liberty to publish, without reserve, any and every private and confidential letter I ever wrote you; nay, more, every word I ever uttered to or in your presence, from whence you can derive any advantage in your justification.”
I am sorry that the bounds within which I propose to confine myself do not permit me to give the reader the whole of this noble letter; here, however, is sufficient to prove the generous deportment of the writer. These extracts most eminently depict the minds of the parties: in one we hear the bold, the undaunted language of conscious integrity, and in the other the faltering accents of guilt.
Baffled in this project of recrimination, the vindicator had recourse to others, if possible, still more unmanly. A paragraph appeared in the public papers, as extracted from a Carolina gazette, telling us a shocking tale about Mr. Randolph having been ill-treated by the President, who had been worked up by a wicked British faction to accuse him of having his price, and that in consequence poor Mr. Randolph had been sacrificed, merely because he had advised the President not to sign the treaty with Great Britain.
After an infinity of other subterfuges and precautions, the Vindication itself comes forth; not in the face of the day, like the honest, innocent man from his peaceful dwelling, but like the thief from his hiding-place, preceded by his skulking precursors. These numerous tricks and artifices have, however, all failed: the public has had the candour to prejudge nothing: the thunder has been reserved for the day of judgment.
Should the vindicator be able to find some quibble to excuse these preliminary manœuvres, how will he justify the sale of his pretended Vindication? If it be not necessary to the justification of his conduct while in the service of the public, why is it published? and if it be, how dares he attempt to make them pay for it? He every where boasts of his pure republicanism, and fawningly courts the favour of the people by calling on them to judge between him and his patron, the President. He pretends to have held his office from them, though every one knows that he held it from the President, at whose pleasure he was removeable, and to whom alone he was in this case accountable. But allow him to hold his office from the people, it is to them he owes an account of his behaviour therein, and that gratis too.
Having dismissed these circumstances, which, though but trifles, if compared with many others that we shall meet with, were too glaring to pass unnoticed, I now come to the Vindication itself.
Mr. Randolph begins by a “statement of facts,” and in this I shall imitate him; but as to the manner of doing this we shall differ widely. He has endeavoured to lose us in a maze of letters and answers, and extracts and conversations, and notes and memorials and certificates; but as it is not my intention to render what I have to say unintelligible, not to weary my readers’ patience with a roundabout story, I shall endeavour to be as concise as possible consistent with perspicuity.
On the 31st of October, 1794, citizen Fauchet, the then French minister at Philadelphia, dispatched a letter to the committee of the government in France, informing them, among other things, of the rise and progress of the insurrection in the Western counties of Pennsylvania. This letter was put on board the Jean Bart, a French corvette, which sailed directly afterwards for France, and on her passage took an English merchant vessel. When the corvette arrived in the British channel, she was brought to by a frigate of the enemy. As soon as the commander of the former saw that it was impossible to escape, he brought the dispatches, and citizen Fauchet’s letter among the rest, upon the deck, and threw them overboard. But unfortunately for Mr. Randolph and some other patriots that we shall see mentioned by-and-by, there was a man on board who had the presence of mind and the courage to jump into the sea and save them. The reader will not be astonished at this heroic act, at this proof of unfeigned and unbought patriotism, when I tell him that the man was no sans-culotte citizen, but a British tar. It was indeed no other than the captain of the English vessel that the corvette had taken on her passage. This good fellow and the dispatches he had so gallantly preserved were taken up by the frigate’s boat; the dispatches were, of course, sent to the British government, by whom citizen Fauchet’s letter was, through Mr. Hammond, communicated to the President of the United States. The President showed it to Mr. Randolph, desiring him to make such explanations as he chose; and Mr. Randolph tells us that it was in consequence of what passed at this interview that he give in the resignation, of which he has since published a vindication.
Although this extraordinary performance is called “A Vindication of Mr. Randolph’s Resignation,” people naturally look upon it as an attempt to vindicate his conduct previous to that resignation. The people had heard about corruption, about thousands of dollars, and about the pretended patriots of America having their prices; these were the points the people wanted to see cleared up. They could not conceive that exposing to the whole world, and consequently to the enemies of this country, their President’s private letters of July 1795, relative to the treaty, could possibly tend to invalidate the charges of treason contained in the French minister’s letter, written in the month of October, 1794. But Mr. Randolph, it appears, saw the matter in another light. He has thought proper to attempt to balance the crime laid to his charge against another supposed crime which he imputes to the President, concerning the ratification of the treaty.
Hence it follows that the Vindicator labours at two principal objects: to wash away the stain on his own reputation, and to represent the President of the United States as ratifying the treaty under the influence of a British faction. That the latter of these can, as I have already observed, have no sort of relation to the great and
