It was early autumn when the first letters from him were received over the
mountains. All these had relation to Mount Vernon and his business there.
To the Transylvania Library Committee he wrote that the President had mad a
liberal subscription for the buying of books and that the Vice-President and
other public men would be likely to contribute.
His sonorous, pompous letter to a member of the Democratic Society was much
longer and in part as follows: "When I made know to the President who I was and where I came from, he
regarded me with a look at once so stern and so benign, that I felt like one
of my school-boys overtaken in some small rascality and was almost of a mind
to march straight to a corner of the room and stand with my face to the
wall. If he had seized me by the coat collar and trounced me well, I should
somehow have felt that he had the right. From the conversations that
followed I am led to believe that he knows the name of every prominent
member of the Democratic Society of Lexington, and that he understands
Kentucky affairs with regard to national and international complications as
no other living man.
While questioning me on the subject, he had the manner
of one who, from conscientiousness, would further verify facts which he had
already tested. But what impressed me even more than his knowledge was his
justice; in illustration of which I shall never forget his saying, that the
part which Kentucky had taken, or had wished to take, in the Spanish and
French conspiracies had caused him greater solicitude than any other single
event since the foundation of the National Government; but that nowhere else
in America had the struggle for immediate self-government been so necessary
and so difficult, and that nowhere else were the mistakes of patriotic and
able men more natural or more to be judged with mildness.
"I think I can quote his very words when he spoke of the foolish jealousies
and heartburnings, due to misrepresentations, that have influenced Kentucky
against the East as a section and against the Government as favouring it:
'The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and
comfort; and what is perhaps of still greater consequence, it must of
necessity owe the secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its own
production to the weight, influence, and future maritime strength of the
Atlantic side of the Union, directed by an indissoluble community of
interest, as One Nation.' "Memorable to me likewise was the language in which he proceeded to show
that this was true: "'The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on
this head. They have seen in the negotiations by the Executive, and in the
unanimous ratification by the Senate of the treaty with Spain, and in the
universal satisfaction of that event throughout the United States, a
decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a
policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to
their interests in regard to the Mississippi. . . . Will they not henceforth
be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from
their Brethren and connect them with Aliens?' "I am frank to declare that, having enjoyed the high privilege of these
interviews with the President and been brought to judge rightly what through
ignorance I had judged amiss, I feel myself in honour bound to renounce my
past political convictions and to resign my membership in the Lexington
Democratic Society. Nor shall I join the Democratic Society of Philadelphia,
as had been my ardent purpose; and it will not be possible for me on
reaching that city to act as the emissary of the Kentucky Clubs. But I shall
lay before the Society the despatches of which I am the bearer. And will you
lay before yours the papers herewith enclosed, containing my formal
resignation with the grounds thereof carefully stated?"