id="pgepubid00008"/> into effect—full and complete effect, which I should have supposed ought to have glutted the envious and vengeful disposition of your heart; but I deny that the nation has approved of that sentence, and as an appeal appears likely to be made to them, I am willing to submit the question. The part you took on that occasion, it was totally unnecessary, I assure you, "to revive in my recollection;" it is indelibly imprinted on my mind, and can never, while I have life, be erased. You acknowledge you were present at the Court of Inquiry in my case, "heard the evidence for and against me, and had, therefore, formed and expressed an opinion unfavorable to me," and yet, your conscience was made of such pliable materials, that, because the then "honorable Secretary of the Navy was pleased to insist on your serving as a member of the Court Martial, and because I did not protest against it," you conceive that "duty constrained you, however unpleasant, to take your seat as a member," although you were to act under the solemn sanction of an oath, to render me impartial justice upon the very testimony which had been delivered in your hearing before the Court of Inquiry, and from which you "drew an opinion, altogether unfavorable to me." How such conduct can be reconciled with the principles of common honor and justice, is to me inexplicable. Under such circumstances, no consideration, no power or authority on earth, could, or ought to, have forced any liberal high minded man to sit in a case which he had prejudged, and, to retort upon you your own expressions, you must have been "incapable of seeing the glaring impropriety of your conduct, for which, although you do not conceive yourself in any way accountable to me," I hope you will be able to account for it with your God, and your conscience.

You say, between you and myself, there never has been a personal difference, "and you disclaim all personal enmity towards me." If every step you have taken—every word you have uttered, and every line you have written, in relation to me—if your own admission of the very frequent and free conversations you have had respecting me, and my conduct, "since the affair of the Chesapeake," bear not the plainest stamp of personal hostility, I know not the meaning of such terms; were you not under the influence of feelings of this sort, why not, in your official capacity, call me, or have me brought, before a proper tribunal, to answer the charges you have preferred against me, and thereby giving me a chance of defending myself? Why speak injuriously of me to junior officers, "which you do not deny?" Why the "many frequent and free conversations respecting me and my conduct," which you have taken so much pains to underscore? Why use the insulting expression, that you "entertained, and still do entertain, the opinion that my conduct, as an officer, since that 'affair' has been such as ought forever to bar my readmission into the service," and that, in endeavoring to prevent it, "you conceive you were performing a duty you owe to the service, and were contributing to its respectability?" Why the threat, that if I continued the "efforts" you say I have been making, to be "re-employed" you "certainly should be constrained to continue the expression of those opinions?"

Does not all this, together with the whole tenor and tendency of your letter, manifest the most marked personal animosity against me, which an honorable man, acting under a sense of public duty by which you profess to "have been hitherto actuated," would disdain even to shew, much more to feel?

I shall now, sir, take up the specific charges you have alleged against me, and shall notice them in the order in which they stand. The first is one of a very heinous character. It is, that "I proceeded in a merchant brig to Pernambuco." Could I, sir, during the period of my suspension, have gone any where in a national vessel? Could I, with what was due to my family, have remained idle? The sentence of the Court deprived them of the principal means of subsistence. I was therefore compelled to resort to that description of employment with which I was best acquainted; and on this subject you should have been silent. But you add, that the late Captain Lewis, of the Navy, who had it from a Mr. Goodwin, who heard it from Mr. Lyon, the British Consul at Pernambuco, with whom you undertake to say I lived, represented me as stating, "that, if the Chesapeake had been prepared for action, I would not have resisted the attack of the Leopard; assigning, as a reason, that I knew, as also did our government, that there were deserters on board the Chesapeake; and that I said to Mr. Lyon, further, that the President of the United States knew there were deserters on board, and of the intention of the British ship to take them, and that the ship was ordered out under these circumstances, with a view to bring about a contest which might embroil the two nations in a war."

The whole of this, Sir, I pronounce to be a falsehood, a ridiculous, malicious, absurd, improbable falsehood, which can never be credited by any man that does not feel a disposition to impress on the opinion of the public that I am an idiot. That I should two years after the affair of the Chesapeake, make such a declaration, when every proof that could be required of a contrary disposition on the part of the Chief Magistrate had been given, cannot receive credit from any one, but those that are disposed to consider me such a character as you would represent me to be. I did not live with Mr. Lyon, nor did I ever hold a conversation with him so indelicate as the one stated in captain Lewis' letter would have been. And with what object could I have made such a communication? Mr. Lyon would naturally have felt a contempt for a man that would have suffered himself to have been made a tool of in so disgraceful an affair. I found Mr. Lyon transacting business in Pernambuco: he produced to me a letter from Mr. Hill, the American consul in that country, recommending him as entitled to the confidence of his countrymen, every one of whom, in that port, put their business into his hands. I did the same, and thus commenced our acquaintance; he was kind and friendly to me, but never in any respect indelicate, as would have been, in a high degree, such conversation between us. Of Mr. Goodwin I know nothing. I have never seen him in all my life, nor do I conceive that his hearsay evidence can ever be of any kind of consequence against me; I was the first that informed the President, and the Secretary of the Navy, that such a letter was in the Department, even before I had seen it; and, again, if the mere oral testimony of a British agent was to be considered as evidence sufficient to arraign an American officer, I think the navy would quickly be in such a state, as it might be desirable for their nation to place it in. As to the impressions made upon the mind of captain Lewis, from this information, and the "strong remarks" he made upon the subject, which you have thought proper to quote, they by no means establish the correctness of that information; but only go to shew the effect it produced upon the mind of an individual, who seems to have imbibed a prejudice against me, no otherwise to be accounted for, except your acquaintance with him. He is now in his grave, and I am perfectly disposed there to let him rest; you must, however, have been hard pressed indeed, to be compelled to resort to such flimsy grounds as those, a degree weaker than even second handed testimony, to support your charges against me. These communications, you observe, are now in the archives of the Navy Department. Of this fact, Sir, I had long been apprized; and had you, when searching the records of that Department for documents to injure my character, looked a little further back, you