Equally obscure was the conduct of Madison. Cadore’s letter of August 5 announcing that the French Decrees were withdrawn, on the understanding that the United States should by November 1 enforce their rights against England, reached Washington September 25, but not in official form. Nothing is known of the impression it produced on the Cabinet; nothing remains of any discussions that ensued. If Gallatin was consulted, he left no trace of his opinion. Hamilton and Eustis had little weight in deciding foreign questions. Robert Smith within a year afterward publicly attacked the President for the course pursued, and gave the impression that it was taken on Madison’s sole judgment. The President’s only authority to act at all without consulting Congress depended on the words of the law of May 1: “In case either Great Britain or France shall, before the third day of March next, so revoke or modify her edicts as that they shall cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States, which fact the President of the United States shall proclaim by proclamation,” the non-intercourse of March 1, 1809, should at the end of three months revive against the nation which had not revoked its edicts. Under this authority, President Madison was required by Cadore’s letter to proclaim that France had revoked or modified her edicts so that they ceased to violate the neutral commerce of the United States. Madison was doubtless a man of veracity; but how was it possible that any man of veracity could proclaim that France had revoked or modified her edicts so that they ceased to violate the neutral commerce of the United States when he had every reason to think that at least the Bayonne Decree, barely six months old, would not be revoked, and when within a few weeks he had officially declared that the revocation of the Bayonne Decree was “an indispensable evidence of the just purpose of France” preliminary to a non-intercourse with England? If the President in June and July thought that provision indispensable to the true intent of the law which he aided in framing, he would assume something more than royal dispensing power by setting the indispensable provision aside in November.