it would be well to consider this on your part as confidential, leaving to the government to retain or make it public, as the general good may require.  Had the Emperor gone further, and said that he condemned our vessels going voluntarily into his ports in breach of his municipal laws, we might have admitted it rigorously legal, though not friendly.  But his condemnation of vessels taken on the high seas by his privateers, and carried involuntarily into his ports, is justifiable by no law, is piracy, and this is the wrong we complain of against him.

Supposing that you may be still at Clermont, from whence your letter is dated, I avail myself of this circumstance to request your presenting my friendly respects to Chancellor Livingston.

I salute you with esteem and respect.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER LXXI.—­TO DOCTOR JAMES BROWN, October 27, 1808

TO DOCTOR JAMES BROWN.

Washington, October 27, 1808.

Dear Sir,

You will wonder that your letter of June the 3rd should not be acknowledged till this date.  I never received it till September the 12th, and coming soon after to this place, the accumulation of business I found here has prevented my taking it up till now.  That you ever participated in any plan for a division of the Union, I never for one moment believed.  I knew your Americanism too well.  But as the enterprise against Mexico was of a very different character, I had supposed what I heard on that subject to be possible.  You disavow it; that is enough for me, and I for ever dismiss the idea.  I wish it were possible to extend my belief of innocence to a very different description of men in New Orleans; but I think there is sufficient evidence of there being there a set of foreign adventurers, and native malcontents, who would concur in any enterprise to separate that country from this.  I did wish to see these people get what they deserved; and under the maxim of the law itself, that inter arma silent leges, that in an encampment expecting daily attack from a powerful enemy, self-preservation is paramount to all law, I expected that instead of invoking the forms of the law to cover traitors, all good citizens would have concurred in securing them.  Should we have ever gained our Revolution, if we had bound our hands by manacles of the law, not only in the beginning, but in any part of the revolutionary conflict?  There are extreme cases where the laws become inadequate even to their own preservation, and where the universal resource is a dictator, or martial law.  Was New Orleans in that situation?  Although we knew here that the force destined against it was suppressed on the Ohio, yet we supposed this unknown at New Orleans at the time that Burr’s accomplices were calling in the aid of the law to enable them to perpetrate its suppression, and that it was reasonable, according to the state of information there, to act on the expectation of a daily attack.  Of this you are the best judge.