proposing three or four very slight alterations which he sug gested should be made to my remarks upon Russell's letters ; all of which I immediately made. They were merely harsh expressions, which in the hurry of writing, and the indignation at the baseness of Russell's conduct in this attack upon my character and reputation, had escaped me. The President had not himself read my paper, the pressure of other business being so great ; but Mr. G. Hay had read it, as he told me, very at tentively, having already perused both Russell's letters, the real and the spurious one. He had marked the passages which the President proposed to me to alter, the whole not amounting to six lines. He said my paper was so unanswerable in sub stance, that the less there was of severity in the manner the more powerful would be its effect. For, setting aside entirely Russell's misconduct through the whole business, on the mere discussion of the public question at issue my paper was, both for fact and argument, the most overwhelming thing that he had ever read.

I told him that I only wished he had marked more passages for alteration, and that if there had been time I had intended to have requested him to examine the paper deliberately and vigorously, with a view to expunging or altering any objec tionable passage. At the Capitol we found Mr. Crawford and Mr. Thompson. And the President remained there till past eleven at night, examining and signing between fifty and sixty bills. At intervals of time I went into the hall of the House of Representatives, where they were in the usual state of dis solution of the last evening of a session. We left the two Houses still sitting, and the President took me home in his carriage.

8th. Close of the first session of the Seventeenth Congress. The House of Representatives adjourned to meet this morning at six o'clock, but they could not form a quorum; and the Senate had adjourned to meet at ten. I called before that hour at the President's, and found him somewhat concerned at a statement which appeared in the last evening's Washington City Gazette, importing, though in equivocal terms, that Mr. Fuller's resolution calling for Russell's letter, &c., had been

rejected by the House. The President said he had sent the message and papers on the certified copy of the resolution left with him by Mr. Fuller; and it was singular that the Clerk of the House had not yet furnished him the official copy of it. I told him that the statement in the Gazette was erroneous, and asked him if he had the National Intelligencer of this morning. He sent for it, and found it stated that Mr. Fuller's resolution had been adopted by the House, after a conver sation between Mr. Fuller, Mr. Floyd, and Mr. Cocke on the propriety of calling again for a paper which the President had already once declined to send.

The President remarked that this statement was incorrect. He had not declined to send the letter, but referred it to the House to decide whether upon a view of all the circumstances they would choose to call for it.

After some detention at my office, I went to the Capitol. The President was there — as were Messrs. Crawford, Calhoun, and Thompson. By the new joint rule of the two Houses, no bill can be presented to the President for his signature on the last day of the session. But this was not understood to include bills which passed last evening after he left the Capitol. The Senate were chiefly engaged upon Executive business — passing upon nominations to office. There was in circulation a copy of a letter from Mr. Jefferson to Mr. Ruggles, the Senator from Ohio, railing at .the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Cohens. G. Hay at first thought it not genuine, and afterwards said it was unworthy of Mr. Jef ferson. Thompson said every word in it contained a volume of meaning. Crawford avoided giving an opinion upon it, but spoke of another argumentative letter of Mr. Jefferson's on the same subject, and said he could agree with the doctrine con tained in it, according to such construction as he should, give to certain passages in it. Calhoun said it was a most extraor dinary letter. Every one of these gentlemen spoke with sideglances towards popular prejudices. Calhoun spoke to me with great bitterness of the proceedings of both Houses of Congress at the present session, and especially of the conduct of the Speaker. I said to him, " Mr. Calhoun, you may thank

yourself for it all. You, and you alone, made Mr. Barbour Speaker ; and I trust you have not forgotten how earnestly I entreated you merely not to prevent the re-election of Taylor, who had offered friendship and good will to the Administra tion, and who would have kept his word." He said he remem bered it, and he now believed Taylor would have been friendly. But he had been much otherwise before. " Well," said I, " you succeeded in turning him out, and you have got one ten times worse in his stead." He said there had never been such a state of things in this Government before. I did not pursue the conversation.

I spoke to Dougherty, the Clerk of the House of Repre sentatives, about the resolution of the House calling for Rus sell's letter, &c., of which I told him the President had not received the official copy. He had forgotten it, but sent one in the course of the morning. I told Gales that his reporter had stated incorrectly the conversation upon the passage of Mr. Fuller's resolution — which he did not admit, and said he had happened to take the minutes of that whole debate himself, and should publish it entire. I said that was precisely what I wished ; but, in the mean time, the statement in this morning's paper was incorrect. Fuller himself also spoke to Gales about it, and he promised to rectify the error. I was some time in the House, which was in a manner breaking up. They ad journed from twelve till two o'clock, and in the interval Mr. R. King and Mr. Macon, of the Senate, and M. L. Hill, one of the three committee-men from the House, came with the usual message to the President, that the two Houses were ready to adjourn if he had no further communications to make to them — which he said he had not. The President then immediately went home, and I returned to my office.

9th. I went first to my office, where D. P. Cook, member from Illinois, called and took leave ; he was proceeding on his way homeward. He told me that he had heard that during the latter part of the session of Congress Governor Edwards, the Senator from Illinois, had ranged himself among the parti sans of Mr. Calhoun for the succession to the Presidency. He said he had spoken to Mr. Edwards about it ; he had denied

the fact, but Cook intimated that he nevertheless believed it to be true. But he said that as to the vote of the State, Mr. Edwards well knew it would not be for Mr. Calhoun, nor for any Southern man. Cook last summer married Edwards's daughter. Until this session of Congress Edwards has con stantly held himself out to me as peculiarly and earnestly my friend. He has this session sought no occasion of conversing with me, and, I have no doubt, has chained himself to the car of Calhoun. As the time of that election approaches, it be comes daily more apparent that the election will be a contest between two factions in Congress, which is now an open market for the purchase of votes. The two Houses of Congress are the praetorian guards, who will in substance, if not in form, set up the empire at auction. It has been nearly so once before. Were it consistent with my principles to work for my own ad vancement any otherwise than by public service, it is now too late for me to commence bidding for the Presidency. Neither have I any faculty at driving such bargains. I told Cook that I thought it impossible the present Executive Administration should hold together through another session of Congress. It is now nothing but a system of mining and countermining between Crawford and Calhoun to blow up each other, and a continual underhanded working of both, jointly, against me, which has been the more effective because I have neither creature nor champion in either House of Congress. At this game Crawford is a much superior artist to Calhoun, whose hurried ambition will probably ruin himself and secure the tri umph of Crawford. Such is the present prospect.

nth. Mr. Gales, senior editor of the National Intelligencer, was this morning at my office with a first proof-sheet, of the Congressional document containing the President's two mes sages to the House concerning Russell's letters, the letters themselves, and my remarks upon them. He came to consult me about the manner of printing them, but chiefly, I believe, to tell me that he had lost his notes (which, he said, had never happened to him but once before) of the debate or conversa tion upon Russell's letters, on Euller's resolution to call for them. So that Gales cannot perform his promise of publishing

that debate " in extenso." The remarkable part of it was that Floyd, who had first moved for the residue of the Ghent nego tiation papers, and then specially for Russell's letter, and who but a few days since manifested great impatience to get the letter, now opposed the call for it. Upon his first motion for the Ghent papers, he had pretended to want them to ascertain whether there was anything in them that bore upon his pro jected settlement at the mouth of Columbia River. He did not make the same pretence in moving for Russell's letter, because it was evident from the short letter of 25th December from Russell, communicated with the Ghent documents, and upon the hint of which Floyd moved his second call, that Rus sell's letter from Paris could have no possible bearing upon the Columbia River settlement. But now, when Fuller moved that the call should be repeated, Mr. Floyd objected to it, saying that he found from the President's message that the letter had no relation to his purposed settlement at the mouth of the Columbia River; and Mr. Cocke said the President had declined sending it on the ground of its leading to a misunderstanding between the Envoys. This change of tone and tactics on the part of the movers of the mischief is a signal incident in the course of these transactions, and I wished it might have been duly recorded by an authentic report of the debate.

1 2th. In the National Gazette of Friday, the loth, is pub lished Jonathan Russell's letter to Mr. Monroe of nth Feb ruary, 1815, with editorial remarks assenting to its doctrines, vouching for the authenticity of the copy published, extenu ating and justifying Russell's conduct in writing the letter, but professing a willingness to hear what we have to say against it. The letter itself is garbled ; not to the same extent as the duplicate delivered by Russell at the Department of State, but sufficiently to let in the charge of a direct violation of in structions ; and with it the extract from the instructions of I5th April, 1813, upon which he founds the pretended charge. It is apparent on the face of all these papers that they were fur nished for publication by Mr. Russell himself. And the pecu liar profligacy of it is, that he