A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 1, part 4: James Madison
History
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 1, part 4: James Madison
Madison, James, 1751-1836; Presidents -- United States; United States -- History -- Sources; United States -- Politics and government
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 and special repeal in relation to the
United 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 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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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