your approval.  But it has been my fortune to be the object of a malice which I have not striven to appease because I was conscious that it rested upon no injury or injustice inflicted by me.  The land swarms with Presidential candidates, announced by their agents or their friends, or by themselves, as the mode most available for preventing too zealous and partial friends from putting them in nomination.  To these it was the source of unfounded apprehension, that I went to the coast of New England, instead of returning to Mississippi.  If any of them had known the necessity which kept me from home, it is fair to suppose the aspirant for such distinction could not have been guilty of the meanness of suppressing that fact, and allowing misrepresentation to do its work in my absence.

For the wretch who is doomed to go through the world bearing a personal jealousy or a personal malignity, which renders him incapable of doing justice, and studious of misrepresentation, I can only feel pity, and were it possible to feel revengeful, could consign him to no worse punishment than that of his own tormentors, the vipers nursed in his own breast.

But long have I delayed what is my chief purpose, to speak to my friends, the men whose good opinion is to me of importance only second to the approval of my own conscience.  So far as they have misunderstood me, it is a pleasure to set forth the true meaning of both my words and my deeds.  To my traducers I have no explanations to offer and no apologies for any one.  If State Rights men in the excess of their zeal have censured me, I have no reproaches for them, but cheerfully bear the burden which may be imposed upon me by zeal in the cause to which my political life has been devoted, and in imitation of Job, would bless the State Rights Democracy of Mississippi, even if the object of its vengeance:  “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.”

If I had been asked what interpretation might possibly be put upon the published sketch of the remarks made by me at sea on the Fourth of July last, speculation would have been exhausted before it would have occurred to me that my State Rights friends would consider themselves described under the head of “trifling politicians,” who could not believe that the country would remain united to repel insult to our flag as it had recently been on the occasion of the attempt to exercise visit and search in the Gulf of Mexico, under the pretext of checking the African slave trade.  The publisher of that sketch has already announced that it was not a report, and that for its language I could not justly be considered responsible.  To this it is needless that I should add any thing.  But I have treated it, and will treat it in the view necessarily taken by those who construed it before such denial was made.