Monday, March 9, the President sent Henry’s papers to Congress, with a message which said nothing as to the manner of acquiring them, but charged the British government with employing a secret agent “in fomenting disaffection to the constituted authorities of the nation, and in intrigues with the disaffected for the purpose of bringing about resistance to the laws, and eventually, in concert with a British force, of destroying the Union and forming the eastern part thereof into a political connection with Great Britain.” Serurier reported that the Administration had great hopes through this discovery of deciding the result, inflaming the nation, and throwing it enthusiastically into the war:-- “The American people recalls to me the son of Ulysses on the rock of Calypso’s isle; uncertain, irresolute, he knows not to which of his passions to yield, when Minerva, flinging him into the sea, fixes his fate, leaving him no other choice than to overcome by his courage and strength the terrible elements she gives him for an enemy.” When John Henry’s letters were read in Congress, March 9, 1812, the Federalists for a moment felt real alarm, for they knew not what Henry might have reported; but a few minutes of examination showed them that, as far as they were concerned, Henry had taken care to report nothing of consequence. That he came to Boston as a British agent was hitherto unknown to the Federalists themselves, and the papers showed that he never revealed his secret character to them. His letters were hardly more compromising than letters, essays, and leading articles, sermons, orations, and addresses that had been printed again and again in every Federalist paper in Boston and New York. Here and there they contained rows of mysterious asterisks, but no other sign of acquaintance with facts worth concealing. The Federalists naturally suspected, what is evident on comparison of the papers bought by Madison with the originals in the Record Office at London, that Henry intended to sell as little as possible at the highest price he could exact. His revelations told nothing of his first visit to Boston in 1808, nor was one of the letters published which had been written in that year, although his documents incidentally alluded to information then sent; but what was more singular and fatal to his credit, the letters which he sold as his own were not copies but paraphrases of the originals; the mysterious asterisks were introduced merely to excite curiosity; and except the original instructions of Sir James Craig and the recent letter from Lord Liverpool’s secretary, showing that in view of an expected war Henry had been employed as a secret agent to obtain political information by the governor-general, and that his reports had been sent to the Colonial Office, nothing in these papers compromised any one except Henry himself. As for the British government, since war was to be waged with it in any case for other reasons, these papers