r Excellency will concur with this State in relation to the
rightfulness and the necessity of the measure proposed, as well as to
all the remedies to be adopted for restoring to Maine the invaluable
rights from which she has so long been debarred.

I have the honor to be, with high consideration, your obedient servant,

ROBERT P. DUNLAP.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE,

_Washington, August 17, 1837_.

His Excellency ROBERT P. DUNLAP,

_Governor of the State of Maine_.

SIR: Your letter of the 28th ultimo to the President was duly received.
It has been referred to this Department with instructions to make a
suitable reply.

Your excellency is of opinion that the Federal Government has for a
series of years failed to protect the State of Maine in the exercise of
her jurisdictional rights to the extent of her boundary, and complains
that these rights have been in consequence thereof subverted, the lands
of the State ravaged of their most valuable productions, and her
citizens subjected to imprisonment in a foreign jail. Your excellency
particularly objects to the course of the Federal Government for having,
without the knowledge of the State, put entirely at hazard the title of
Maine, admitted by the Government of the United States to be perfect,
to the territory in question by the resort to diplomatic discussions,
treaty arrangements, and foreign arbitration in which Maine was not
permitted to speak; for having entered into a stipulation without her
consent purporting to preclude the State from retaining her rightful
jurisdiction pending a negotiation, and for the continuance of it
after that negotiation was supposed to have been concluded, and for
an omission on the part of the Executive of the United States to comply
with an application of the State made through her legislature to
have the boundary line between Maine and the British North American
possessions explored, surveyed, and monuments erected thereon in
pursuance of the authority conferred on the President by Congress and
of a request made by your excellency, which is now renewed.

The views which your excellency has been pleased to take of the subject
at this time embrace measures some of which have long since ceased to be
operative and reach back to the propriety of the stipulations entered
into by the treaty of Ghent, also of the subsequent negotiation designed
to bring those stipulations to a satisfactory result in the mode
prescribed by that treaty--th