ur, or thirty-two pounders,
sufficient in the smallest harbors to repel the predatory attacks of
privateers or single armed ships, and proportioned in the larger harbors
to such more serious attacks as they may probably be exposed to. All
these were nearly completed, and their gunboats in readiness, when
I retired from the government. The works of New York and New Orleans
alone, being on a much larger scale, are not yet completed. The former
will be finished this summer, mounting four hundred and thirty-eight
guns, and, with the aid of from fifty to one hundred gunboats, will
be adequate to the resistance of any fleet which will ever be trusted
across the Atlantic. The works for New Orleans are less advanced. These
are our preparations. They are very different from what you will be told
by newspapers, and travellers, even Americans. But it is not to them
the government communicates the public condition. Ask one of them if
he knows the exact state of any particular harbor, and you will find
probably that he does not know even that of the one he comes from. You
will ask, perhaps, where are the proofs of these preparations for
one who cannot go and see them. I answer, in the acts of Congress,
authorizing such preparations, and in your knowledge of me, that, if
authorized, they would be executed.

Two measures have not been adopted which I pressed on Congress
repeatedly at their meetings. The one, to settle the whole ungranted
territory of Orleans, by donations of land to able bodied young men, to
be engaged and carried there at the public expense, who would constitute
a force always ready on the spot to defend New Orleans. The other was,
to class the militia according to the years of their birth, and make all
those from twenty to twenty-five liable to be trained and called into
service at a moment's warning. This would have given us a force of three
hundred thousand young men, prepared, by proper training, for service in
any part of the United States; while those who had passed through that
period would remain at home, liable to be used in their own or adjacent
States. These two measures would have completed what I deemed necessary
for the entire security of our country. They would have given me, on
my retirement from the government of the nation, the consolatory
reflection, that having found, when I was called to it, not a single
sea-port town in a condition to repel a levy of contribution by a single
privateer or pirate,