That Jackson should be angry was natural, and if he was abusive, he received an ample equivalent in abuse; but his merits as a diplomatist were supposed to be his courage and his truth, and these he could not afford to compromise. He had neither said nor done more than stood in his express orders. Canning’s instructions charged Madison with fraud: “The American government cannot have believed that such an arrangement as Mr. Erskine consented to accept was conformable to his instructions.... They cannot by possibility have believed that without any new motive, and without any apparent change in the dispositions of the enemy, the British government could have been disposed at once and unconditionally to give up the system on which they had been acting.” This ground Jackson had been ordered to take in any “preliminary discussion” which might “in all probability” arise before he could enter on the details of his negotiation. In obedience to these instructions, and well within their limits, Jackson had gone as near as he dared to telling the President that he alone was to blame for the disavowal of Erskine, because Erskine’s instructions “were at the time in substance made known” to him. In subsequently affirming that he made no insinuation which he could not substantiate, Jackson still kept to what he believed the truth; and he reiterated in private what he insinuated officially, that Erskine had been “duped” by the American government. November 16 he wrote officially to the Foreign Office that without the slightest doubt the President had full and entire knowledge of Erskine’s instruction No. 2.[119] These views were consistent and not unreasonable, but no man could suppose them to be complimentary to President Madison; yet November 13 Jackson caused his secretary, Oakeley, to send in his name an official note to the Secretary of State, complaining of the rupture and rehearsing the charges, with the conclusion that “in stating these facts, and in adhering to them, as his duty imperiously enjoined him to do, Mr. Jackson could not imagine that offence would be taken at it by the American government, as most certainly none could be intended on his part.”[120] He then addressed the same counter-statement as a circular to the various British consuls in the United States, and caused it to be printed in the newspapers,[121]--thus making an appeal to the people against their own Government, not unlike the more famous appeal which the French Minister Genet made in 1793 against President Washington. In extremely bad temper Jackson quitted the capital. His wife wrote to her friends in joy at the prospect of shortening her stay in a country which could offer her only the tribute of ignorant admiration; but even she showed a degree of bitterness in her pleasure, and her comments on American society had more value than many official documents in explaining the attitude of England toward the United States:--