9 Fourthly. It is denied that 'the United States exchanged a release-of the claims for a release of the ancient treaties. We have seen that in form at least the treaty of 1800 was such an exchange of those equivalents. It was understood to be such an exchange, in effect, when made. Robert R. Livingston said : “ It will be well recollected by the distinguished c’ aracters who had the management of the negotiation, that the payment for illegal captures, with damages and indemnities, was demanded on the one side, and the renewal of the treaties of 1778 on the other; that they are considered as of equivalent value, and that they only formed the subject of the second article.”—Letter to Talleyrand, .April 17, 1802. Napoleon, at St. Helena, declared— “ That the suppression of the second article at once put an end to the privileges which France had possessed by the treaties of 1778, and annulled the just claims which America might have had for injuries done in time of peace.”—Conversation with Gourgand. Notwithstanding these and similar contemporaneous expositions, it has been insisted here by two of my very eminent predecessors, [Mr. Wright and Mr. Dix,] as well as by others, that this confessed form of the treaty was a mere diplomatic artifice ; that in fact it was not an exchange of equivalents ; and that the claims for spoliations were renounced because they could not be enforced, and not for an adequate and admitted consideration. Sir, did Oliver Ellsworth and his colleagues combine to practice a diplomatic fraud upon France ? Certainly not. Were they then circumvented ? If we should grant that they were, there would yet remain John Adams, President in 1800, and Thomas Jefferson, President in 1801, and the Senate of those years, all equally compromited. Who will impeach their intelligence or their directness ? Sir, upon whom shall we rely to vindicate our own less deserved and ephemeral fame, if we strike so rudely the monuments where these great names lie sleeping. If the United States can plead fraud in this or any other case, how shall creditors or allies, individuals or States, learn to distinguish between obligations which we admit to be valid and those which we claim a right to repudiate ? No, sir ; we cannot raise such a defence. Nor could it be maintained. No one questions the sincerity of the United States in prosecuting these claims. France was equally sincere in admitting them, and in preferring her own. Even in her piratical decrees, she pleaded an overpowering pressure, and promised reparation : “ Being informed that some French privateers have taken vessels belonging to the United States of America, I hasten to engage you to- take the most speedy and efficacious means to put a stop to this robbery.”—Monge, Minister of Marine, to the Ordonnateurs of France, March 30, 1793. Thus France was ingenuous even in her agony of social convulsion. “ Although it [the treaty of 1778] is reciprocal upon the whole, some provisions are more specially applicable to the fixed position of the United States, and others have allusion only to the eventual position of France. The latter has stipulated few advantages—advantages which do not in any respect injure the United States, and the lawfulness of which no foreign nation can contest. The French nation will never renounce them.”—M. Talleyrand to Mr. Gerry, January 18, 1798. The Convention of 1800 was then, in fact as well as in form, a treaty of equivalents. Can the United States impeach it now, on the ground of the inadequacy of the equivalent received ? Certainly not, sir. It is too late; the parties are changed. The merchants’ claims are just the same, whether
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