Page:The Judicial Capacity of the General Convention Exemplified.djvu/26

24 then making oath to its correctness? Especially as he declares, and the truth of his declaration is well known to all acquainted with the parties, that he was at this time just as friendly to Mr. Wilks as he was to Mr. Barrett. What had Mr. M. to gain by writing me such a tissue of falsehoods in regard to Mr. Wilks, as the supposition of Mr. W.'s "innocence" implies that he did? I think the Convention is in duty bound to show the existence of some motive which might have induced Mr. M. to commit so great iniquity. I have never heard any adequate motive suggested; nor can I possibly conceive of any.

2. In the second place, I have known Mr. Miller intimately for seyen years, and can truly say that I never knew a more sincere, conscientious, truthful, and scrupulously just person in my life than he. I never heard but one individual doubt Mr. M.'s veracity, and that was Mr. John L Jewett, whose testimony, it is presumed, was mainly relied on by the Convention to invalidate that of Mr. Miller. But I have now in my possession a long communication—too long to publish here—detailing the circumstances of a personal difficulty between Mr. Jewett and Mr. Miller, which occurred subsequent to this Wilks affair; the substance of which communication is also susceptible of proof, and shows Mr. Jewett to have been chiefly—I should say altogether—in the wrong. Besides, I have a private letter from Mr. Jewett himself, dated Oct. 31, 1848—about three tnonths after Mr. Miller’s first letter to me,—in which he expresses his unbiassed opinion of Mr. Miller’s conduct in this case—an opinion all the more valuable from the fact that it was expressed before his personal difficulty with Mr. Miller. It will also be seen that Mr. J ewett speaks in this letter of another gentleman very differently from what he has been known to speak of him Since he has been the agent of the General Convention, and in intimate alliance with some of its chief rulers. Referring in his letter to the Wilks calumny, he says:—

(No. VI.)

"I feel very sensibly the injury done you by the gross slander that has been fabricated against you. A more malicious and fiendish thing I cannot well imagine. I am not surprised that it has given you great pain, and that you feel impelled to do yourself justice by all justifiable means. Of one thing, however, I can assure you, that, for the sake of all your friends here, and, in fact, of all who know you—for your full justification and freedom from all suspicion of having ever thought of so mean and wicked a thing as that imputed to you—in their minds—you need not take another step. There is nobody here that ever believed the slander, from the first; and if there was any one who was disposed to think you might possibly have given some occasion for it, your letter