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 would perhaps have found others calculated to produce a very different effect. Of my desire to return to the United States, during the late war, there are certificates in the Navy Department of the first respectability, which, if you had been disposed to find and quote, are perhaps laying on the same shelf from whence you took those, that you appear so anxious to bring to public view; I mean my letter applying for service, as soon as an opportunity offered, after the term of my suspension expired; and one letter, above all, _you_ should not have passed over unnoticed, that which you received from my hand of May, 1803, addressed to the Secretary of the Navy, which was one of the principal causes of your obtaining the first command that you were ever honored with, and as you may have forgotten it, I will remind you, on this occasion, that, but little more than one month previous to the date of that letter, I by my advice and arguments, saved you from resigning the service of your country in a pet, because you were removed from the first lieutenancy of the New York, to that of second of the Chesapeake; but all this and much more is now forgotten by _you_, yet there are others that recollect those circumstances, and the history of your conduct to me will outlive you, let my fate be what it may. The affair of the Chesapeake did certainly "excite," and ought to have excited, the indignant feeling of the nation towards Great Britain; but, however it may have justified a declaration of war against that power, it was not, as you assert "every one admits," one of the principal causes of the late war. That it did not take place, sir, until _five years_ after,