A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 3, part 1: Andrew Jackson (Second Term)
History
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 3, part 1: Andrew Jackson (Second Term)
Jackson, Andrew, 1767-1845; Presidents -- United States; United States -- History -- Sources; United States -- Politics and government
Hon. EDWARD LIVINGSTON, etc.
SIR: You have well comprehended the nature of the impressions produced
upon the King's Government by the message which His Excellency President
Jackson addressed on the 1st of December to the Congress of the United
States. Nothing certainly could have prepared us for it. Even though
the complaints expressed in it had been as just as they are in reality
unjust, we should still have had a right to be astonished on receiving
the first communication of them in such a form.
In the explanations which I am now about to make I can not enter upon
the consideration of any facts other than those occurring subsequently
to the vote by which the last Chamber of Deputies refused the
appropriation necessary for the payment stipulated in the treaty of July
4. However this vote may have been regarded by the Government of the
United States, it is evident that by accepting (_accueillant_) the
promise of the King's Government to bring on a second deliberation
before the new legislature it had in fact postponed all discussion and
all recrimination on the subject of this first refusal until another
decision should have either repealed or confirmed it. This postponement
therefore sets aside for the time all difficulties arising either justly
or unjustly from the rejection of the treaty or from the delay by which
it had been preceded; and although the message begins by enumerating
them, I think proper, in order to confine myself to the matter in
question, only to reply to the imputations made on account of subsequent
occurrences.
The reproaches which President Jackson considers himself authorized to
address to France may be summed up in a few words. The King's Government
promised to present the treaty of July 4 again to the Chambers as soon
as they could be assembled. They were assembled on the 31st of July, and
the treaty has not yet been presented to them. Such is exactly the whole
substance of the President's argumentation, and nothing can be easier
than to refute it.
I may first observe that the assembling of the Chambers on the 31st of
July, in obedience to a legal prescription that they should be called
together within a stated period after a dissolution of the Chamber of
Deputies, was nothing more than a piece of formality, and if President
Jackson had attended to the internal mechanism of our administrative
system he would have been convinced that the session of 1835 could not
have really commenced at that session of 1834. Everyone knew beforehand
that after a fortnight spent in the forms of installation it would be
adjourned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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