etermined not to fall into the same error.

FROM THE MEMOIRS

JANUARY 14TH, 1831.--I received a letter from John C. Calhoun, now
Vice-President of the United States, relating to his present controversy
with President Jackson and William H. Crawford. He questions me
concerning the letter of General Jackson to Mr. Monroe which Crawford
alleges to have been produced at the Cabinet meetings on the Seminole
War, and asks for copies, if I think proper to give them, of Crawford's
letter to me which I received last summer, and of my answer. I answered
Mr. Calhoun's letter immediately, rigorously confining myself to the
direct object of his inquiries. This is a new bursting out of the old
and rancorous feud between Crawford and Calhoun, both parties to which,
after suspending their animosities and combining together to effect my
ruin, are appealing to me for testimony to sustain themselves each
against the other. This is one of the occasions upon which I shall
eminently need the direction of a higher power to guide me in every step
of my conduct. I see my duty to discard all consideration of their
treatment of me; to adhere, in everything that I shall say or write, to
the truth; to assert nothing positively of which I am not absolutely
certain; to deny nothing upon which there remains a scruple of doubt
upon my memory; to conceal nothing which it may be lawful to divulge,
and which may promote truth and justice between the parties. With these
principles, I see further the necessity for caution and prudence in the
course I shall take. The bitter enmity of all three of the
parties--Jackson, Calhoun, and Crawford--against me, an enmity the more
virulent because kindled by their own ingratitude and injustice to me;
the interest which every one of them, and all their partisans, have in
keeping up that load of obloquy and public odium which their foul
calumnies have brought down upon me; and the disfavor in which I stand
before a majority of the people, excited against me by their
artifices;--their demerits to me are proportioned to the obligations to
me--Jackson's the greatest, Crawford's the next, Calhoun's the least of
positive obligation, but darkened by his double-faced setting himself up
as a candidate for the Presidency against me in 1821, his prevarications
between Jackson and me in 1824, and his icy-hearted dereliction of all
the decencies of social intercourse with me, solely from the terror of
Jackson, since the 4th of M