from the very specific nature of my statement, that the Commissioner's interpolation, in making me to allude to "previous instructions," could have been designed in no other hope than that you would unsuspectingly adopt his artful misstatement of the point between us, and that he might thereby be enabled to dodge the specific official "recognition and sanction" of my course, upon which I had virtually placed the whole controversy. He hence essays to get off upon certain instructions which were transmitted, whilst he seems to have supposed the system of registering was still kept up, which instructions he interprets as having been adverse to that system, whilst it was actually before his eyes (in my letter to you) that that system had been abused and abandoned, and that it was a totally different one which had received his sanction and approval, because unconflicting with any of his "instructions." Fearing to meet that issue, he makes but an extract ("D.”) from his letter of the 12th of October last, and that extract, I feel sure, was in no sense pertinent to the point I had made against him, or he could never have obtained your sanction to the cancellation of my entries. I but add that, in my letter to the President, I set out the only extracts from that letter which are deemed pertinent to the issue between the Commissioner and myself, namely: his sanction and approval of the course of my predecessor in refusing to entertain just such applications as he alleges the one to have been by the parties from Pennsylvania.

Elsewhere in his report, as if afraid to skip a case entirely to which your attention had been so pointedly directed, he slurs it over by speaking of it as "a certain cited case, where an application was preferred at a time when it could not be reached in the regular order of business, and the office was closed, by instructions from the General Land Office, before the case could be reached." That this is utterly false, when applied to the case and the point to which he was replying, will be apparent by reading the whole of his letter of the 12th of October, and defying him to show that the office here was closed, by "instructions" or otherwise, as he alleges! Will you, nay, dare you longer permit him to thus abuse your confidence, and to trifle not only with those who have a right to all his candor, but to seek to shield himself against premeditated official robbery in one case, by the most daring falsification of another case?

It is not perceived of what avail he supposed it could be (except, perhaps, a little more to perplex and "tire you out" with the case) to state, as he does, that "the abstract of locations for the month of November shows that locations were made by other persons on the 18th, 19th, 21st, 24th, 25th, and 29th of November." If these were not locations by pre-emptors, they were either those of applicants who drew late turns at the September opening, and from the intervening press of pre-emptions, or other cause, could not be finally waited upon until after adjusting the new applications, received at the opening in November, (their warrants having been properly filled up and deposited, and the land marked as located accordingly,) or they were the locations of those who drew the first turns at the November opening-so that in neither point of view can such a reference to the abstracts illustrate or determine anything in respect to the merits of this case.

The original applications, yet on file in the office, will demonstrate that they were fair and regular sales, under the rules of the office, and thus forever stamp their validity in the court of last resort, if need be. So, also, of the allegation that the abstract for the month of March shows that the first location made in that month was on the 10th-three days after we acknowledged the receipt of the applications from his office-and that, therefore, our statement that the land in controversy (then, in fact, for the first time applied for) had been located on the second of that month, was untrue. This pretended "record evidence" was only referred to, and left unexplained by the Commissioner, in order to deceive you, and thus, in the end, obtain your sanction to the fraud he had predetermined to perpetrate. He knew, but had not the official candor to inform you, that as an incident or portion of the rule which had so long prevailed, all the locations which were made in virtue of applications received and adjusted as above stated, were necessarily heed to attach, and thus secure the land from the day of receiving and filing them; and, if you will direct him to send you our letter of the 3d of March last, and the pre-emption testimony it inclosed, and at the same time send you his concurrence in our opinion, dated on the 21st of April last, you will perceive that even up to that late day, and against an otherwise meritorious preemptor, he continued to recognize and uphold the rules he now seeks to repudiate!

That was a case where, at the opening on the 1st of September, Hardin had applied for a tract of land which the previous preparation and business of the office (just as at the other openings) did not permit him to enter until the 8th of September. The pre-emption settlement was proven to have been made on the 6th of September, and the Commissioner's letter will show that he concurred in our opinion adverse to the pre-emptor, "for the reason that it appears that the foundation of his dwelling house was not laid until the 6th of September, 1856, whereas the application to enter at private sale was made on the 1st of that month."

This pre-emption appeal having been prosecuted by Charles Ingles, esq., as attorney for the pre-emptor, he will scarcely feel that he has been very well dealt by, if, after sustaining Hardin's entry of the 8th, as of the 1st of September, in virtue of his application on that day, the equal validity of Ingle's own applications to locate a portion of the land now in controversy on the second of March, but the locations of which were not actually made, for the reasons stated, for several days afterwards, should be finally "shuffled out of," on the ground thus intimated by the same Commissioner! Pardon me, Mr. Secretary, if I seem to have fallen in any respect into that quiet derision of respect to the rulings and counter rulings of your Commissioner, which constitutes so much the staple of conversation everywhere in this country. He would, indeed, be "a perfect laugh" out here, or in your State, were it not believed by many that he is getting to be almost as dishonest a man as the clerk who fixes up his letters.

To return: Having demonstrated, by reference to the rulings of the Commissioner, in the case appealed by Birch on the 2d of September last, and the one by Ingles on the 3d of March last, that he has can

celled my locations of the land in controversy by trampling not only upon the right but upon his own previous and deliberate ADJUDICATIONS, under the same rules, I feel, of course, how safely I may confide the correction of so gross an outrage to yourself and the President, and would therefore add nothing to the exposition already given of the high CRIMES of your subordinate, were it not so convenient to expose, also, the meanness of feeling which he has betrayed in the close of his long, disingenuous and false "report."

After referring to his instructions against allowing "a monopoly of entries to any one person," he brings up the fact that my sons were permitted to locate 343 warrants in the course of a little upwards of five months, and adduces that as evidence that I had not obeyed his instructions. How much or how little the receiver may feel complimented by being "let off" in a matter which, from first to last, and in all its phases, our instructions have been joint, and in which we have of course jointly acted, is a question which would not be here alluded to, except as denoting the animus which has been apparent from the time the Commissioner addressed me singly, on the 19th of March last, the day preceding my removal, to the present period.

Respecting the reputed "monopoly" of my sons, I might ask, in the first place, why skip the precedent "monopoly," if it be such, which the abstract for January had shown was granted to Moffett and Jones, of Mississippi, who were permitted, when their turn came, to locate 185 warrants in five days, instead of five months! Why skip the case of Everett, of Iowa, whose turn came the day before that of one of my sons, and who located 89 warrants in a single day?

The object is but too pitiably apparent. To prejudice you against my action, at the same time he was imposing falsehoods upon you respecting his own, will be found to have constituted his entire design. Knowing the course of business in the office, upon which he had in fact previously adjudicated, your Commissioner should havereported to you that such locations, which were made upon turns, previously decided by lot, were, in fact, the aggregate of the applications which had (so to speak) been accumulating "in the hands of the applicants" from opening to opening-in the last case from November until March -and that they constituted no "monopoly" in the sense of his instructions; and to that extent have justified himself for having directed us, on the 6th of February last, to make the 152 locations that day applied for by the parties from Pennsylvania as soon as their application was received, without even waiting fort heir turn, and for finally directing the same thing to be done, as it is now being done, in virtue of an alleged application, on a single day, in November last.

Having thus adduced the Commissioner's own interpretation of his instructions respecting a "monopoly" of locations, I proceed to demonstrate, lastly, that not less completely is his own action, and his own language, turned against him in respect to the only legal view of the rights of his office clients from Pennsylvania. Speaking of Everett's case in the report which he made to you on the 14th of June last, he says that it was "decided against him for the reason that it was not shown that he filed a regular application, and tender of the consid

eration, in time to be reached, in its order, during the regular transaction of business in the official day."

As Mr. Everett is another of the fifteen or twenty gentlemen who regularly applied for and located, each for himself, portions of the land in question, it may be as well to state that his application, above rejected, which was made for other and more valuable lands in June last, was at least in writing, and couched in direct and appropriate terms, as its preservation on the files of the office in town will continue to demonstrate. It was at least, therefore, that much more regular than the indefinite and verbal one that was made (if any was made, even in my hearing,) by the parties from Pennsylvania, and as neither of the parties tendered either "the consideration" or "the fees" to the receiver, may I not ask that you cause him to come and stand up before you, (if he can stand, after reviewing the hurried exposition of his treachery which the purely accidental discovery of his "report" has enabled me to throw together,) and answer why he disallowed Everett's written and specific application in June, and allows the unspecific and pretended one of McLaughlin and Felix in November? Is it "shown," except in his own unsupported, and never to be supported, official FALSEHOOD, that the application of McLaughlin and Felix (if what they swear they did can be dignified into an "application" at all) was even half as "regular" as the one made by Everett? or that it was presented to me "in time to be reached, in its order, during the regular transaction of business in the official day," when the applications yet on file in the office will show that, on that day I had at least eighty days of hard and incessant labor already "booked" and waiting to be finally disposed of, in their turn, before the next opening or that he presented these warrants to the receiver, (as his instructions direct,) or to any one else, and paid or tendered the fees for their location?

Unless he can show these several impossibilities, can this fraud be permitted to go on without permitting Everett and others to go back upon their older and better applications, (many of them, indeed, regular in every respect,) and rip up the whole sales of the office for the last nine or ten months of my incumbency?

On the other hand, need it be brought to the consideration of a lawyer from a new State, the head of the land committee whilst in Congress, and now the head of the service in the cabinet? that whilst the very impossibility of giving to the local officers plain and specific instructions, adapted to all exigencies and all circumstances, suggests the discretion which from time they all have to exercise, the courts of the country invariably uphold as a matter of policy, no less than justice, even the casual irregularities of their action if untainted by fraud. If this be so in respect to third parties generally, what should have been the action of your commissioner in respect to such third parties as those who have relied on him to put them through, not only the land office, but the courts in addition, as was very innocently enunciated by one of them, after concluding the locations in question and taking copies of the affidavits of Colonel Thompson and myself this day?

Apologizing again, sir, if but a just and natural indignation has betrayed me into any language unfit for me to write or you to read. I remain, with great respect, your obedient servant,

Hon. JACOB THOMPSON,

Secretary of the Interior.

JAMES H. BIRCH.

No. 23.

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,
September 4, 1857.

SIR: The letter of James H. Birch, late the register at Plattsburg, Missouri, of 2d ultimo, was referred by you to the Interior Department, with a request that a thorough investigation should be made into the charges contained in said letter, and a report upon the same should be communicated to you. In compliance with that request, I have given to the subject a personal and, I believe, a thorough examination.

Prior to the receipt of this letter of complaint to you, similar communications had been addressed to me, and I had referred them to the Commissioner of the General Land Office for a report. His reply was made June 14, 1857, and I must refer you to that letter for an explanation of the instructions given by the Commissioner at different times to the register at Plattsburg land office.

The charge of official conspiracy against him, (Mr. Birch,) so far as it implicates the Commissioner of the General Land Office, is wholly untrue. Mr. Birch was removed on the decisive recommendation of the Missouri delegation in Congress without any consultation with the Commissioner.

The material facts involved in the charge that the Commissioner of the General Land Office had ordered the cancellation of 150 entries made by Mr. Birch, and the sale of the same lands to certain parties in Pennsylvania, are as follows:

On the 5th of February last, Messrs. McLaughlin and Felix, gentlemen from Pennsylvania, representing, as they alleged, a large number of citizens of that State who desired to emigrate to the State of Missouri, and therefore wished to buy lands for settlement, appeared at the General Land Office in this city with 152 land warrants, and, under the law of 28th September, 1850, (Laws United States, vol. 9, p. 521,) made application to the Commissioner to locate them upon certain lands in the Plattsburg land district, State of Missouri. The warrants were examined, and found to be regular in their issuance and assignment. The particular lands on which the parties wished to locate them were designated, and upon examination it was found, so far as anything appeared on the books of the office, that the lands applied for were vacant.

The Commissioner received the application and the warrants, as it was his duty to do, and, on 6th of February, inclosed the warrants,