Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 3.djvu/128

116 and ostensible policy; the real one was to be expressed in a secret message, announced in advance. To this coming message the President next turned his attention; but he found himself quickly involved in complications of his own creating. He had not only to recommend a double series of measures to Congress, but he had to frame a double series of replies which Congress was to return to him. He tried at first to combine the two answers in one. After writing a secret message asking for money to buy Florida, he drafted a series of Resolutions which Congress was to adopt in reply to both messages at once, and in which "the citizens of the United States, by their Senate and Representatives in Congress assembled, do pledge their lives and fortunes" to maintain the line of the Sabine and the free navigation of the Mobile, pending negotiations, while the President should be authorized to take whatever unappropriated moneys might lie in the Treasury in order to carry these Resolutions into effect.

Clearly this would not do; and Gallatin undertook to set the matter right.


 * "The apparent difficulty in framing the Resolutions," he wrote to the President, "arises from the attempt to blend the three objects together. The same reasons which have induced the President to send two distinct