judgment in the person who drew up your
memorial. He has mistaken your case, and forgotten his own; and by
trying to court your applause has injured your pretensions. He has
written like a lawyer, straining every point that would please his
client, without studying his advantage. I find no fault with the
composition of the memorial, for it is well written; nor with the
principles of liberty it contains, considered in the abstract. The error
lies in the misapplication of them, and in assuming a ground they have
not a right to stand upon. Instead of their serving you as a ground of
reclamation against us, they change into a satire on yourselves. Why
did you not speak thus when you ought to have spoken it? We fought for
liberty when you stood quiet in slavery.

The author of the memorial injudiciously confounding two distinct
cases together, has spoken as if he was the memorialist of a body of
Americans, who, after sharing equally with us in all the dangers and
hardships of the revolutionary war, had retired to a distance and made
a settlement for themselves. If, in such a situation, Congress had
established a temporary government over them, in which they were not
personally consulted, they would have had a right to speak as the
memorial speaks. But your situation is different from what the situation
of such persons would be, and therefore their ground of reclamation
cannot of right become yours. You are arriving at freedom by the easiest
means that any people ever enjoyed it; without contest, without expense,
and even without any contrivance of your own. And you already so far
mistake principles, that under the name of _rights_ you ask for _powers;
power to import and enslave Africans_; and _to govern_ a territory that
_we have purchased_.

To give colour to your memorial, you refer to the treaty of cession, (in
which _you were not_ one of the contracting parties,) concluded at Paris
between the governments of the United States and France.

"The third article" you say "of the treaty lately concluded at
Paris declares, that the inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be
incorporated in the union of the United States, and admitted _as soon as
possible, according to the principles_ of the Federal Constitution, to
the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens
of the United States; and _in the mean time_, they shall be protected
in the enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the exercise of the