The letter arrived July 19. Wilkinson dared not again disobey, although he might be right in thinking that the risks of removal were greater than those of remaining. Every resource of the army and navy was put at Wilkinson’s command, and every man at Terre aux Boeufs was eager to escape; yet week after week passed without movement. The orders which arrived July 19 were not made public till the end of August, and only September 14 was the camp evacuated. The effective force was then about six hundred men in charge of nine hundred invalids. The strength of all had been reduced, until they were unequal to the fatigues of travel. Only one hundred and twenty-seven men died at Terre aux Boeufs between June 10 and September 14; but two hundred and fifty died on their way up the river, before October 31, and altogether seven hundred and sixty-four, out of two thousand soldiers sent to New Orleans, died within their first year of service. The total loss by death and desertion was nine hundred and thirty-one. Wilkinson himself was attacked by fever in passing New Orleans, September 19, and on proceeding to Natchez soon received a summons to Washington to answer for his conduct. Brigadier-General Wade Hampton succeeded him in command of what troops were still alive at New Orleans. The misfortune was compensated only by the advantage of affording one more chance to relieve the army and the government of a general who brought nothing but disaster. With the four departments of Executive government in this state of helplessness, President Madison met Congress, the least efficient body of all. CHAPTER IX. THE President’s Annual Message, read November 29 before Congress, threw no light on the situation. If Madison’s fame as a statesman rested on what he wrote as President, he would be thought not only among the weakest of Executives, but also among the dullest of men, whose liveliest sally of feeling exhausted itself in an epithet, and whose keenest sympathy centred in the tobacco crop; but no statesman suffered more than Madison from the constraints of official dress. The Message of 1809 hinted that England had no right to disavow her minister’s engagement, and that Jackson’s instructions as well as his conduct betrayed a settled intent to prevent an understanding; but these complaints led to no corrective measures. The President professed himself still willing to listen with ready attention to communications from the British government through any new channel, and he seemed to fall back on Jefferson’s “painful alternatives” of the year before, rather than on any settled plan of his own:--