I but add that, retiring thus from a responsible and laborious public employment, complicated and rendered difficult of satisfactory explication by excessive and loose legislation, and the wearying and almost transforming nature of which but few could appreciate, neither my friends nor myself could desire a more irrefutable and enduring triumph over the last of my official caluminators, and that I take leave of those who for years have magnified circumstances which they could not comprehend, and disappoinments which the unyielding press of constant official duties left me no time to explain, contributing them to swell the more sinister clamor of thwarted schemers and baffled speculators, with the sustaining consciousness, now and hereafter, here and elsewhere, that I have discharged all my duties with an eye single to JUSTICE, the LAWS, and INSTRUCTIONS. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, SIR: It is trusted that the accompanying communication will sufficiently vindicate its own claims to proper official consideration. If I thought otherwise, I might, perhaps, feel permitted to refer to General Cass and to Governors Floyd and Cobb, who might probably be brought to remember enough of me to introduce me in cabinet or elsewhere. As already intimated, however, the letter is in itself so nearly a record of official delinquency or corruption, as to leave no doubt of the inquiries it will suggest, the investigations it will elicit, and the judgment the whole case will ultimately receive. Having to apologize for the hindrances which have prevented me from making the copy I originally intended, I but add that, in view of a pending engagement in Kansas, I am compelled, at a late hour of the night, to transmit the original through your office, leaving it to be disposed of in such manner as may be deemed most just and proper. If it be possible that the Commissioner may be excused compatibly with what is due to the dignity and integrity of the public service, I trust I need not add that no person will rejoice more to be informed of it than the citizen who has written under the impression that such a thing was impossible. In respect to the appointment of my successor, I have nothing to add to the letter which I addressed to Major Phelps by the last mail, but which may probably, in the absence of Major P., have been handed you by our mutual friend Dr. Frailey. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, Hon. JACOB THOMPSON, Secretary of the Interior, Washington. JAMES H. BIRCH. No. 13. PRAIRIE PARK, April 21, 1857. SIR: Buried, as I am, with private affairs long neglected, were I less a friend to the administration than I am, I might be tempted to forego the duty which I feel to be devolved upon me, by the extraordinary inconsideration which seems to have seized upon the administration of the General Land Office. Whether this be the fault of the Commissioner, in neglecting the proper supervision and investigation himself, and in consequently giving up the business (as it were) to his clerks, will be for him and them to answer, in view of the fact that between them they are bringing the rulings and decisions of the office into such humiliating disrepute that the head of the service, and the administration itself, must correspondingly suffer, unless the proper investigations be made and the necessary remedy applied. Differing with the receiver, who remarked, when showing me the letter, yesterday, that, as he was not going to continue in the service, he would not bother himself about it, I deem my duty to be as above stated, and shall, consequently, bring the subject to your consideration as well as I can; my key continuing in the possession of the receiver, and my objections to re-enter my office, or touch a paper it contains, until I can do so under the eye of my successor, being rendered additionally insuperable by the tenor of the Commissioner's letter of the 1st instant, alluded to in the first line of this paragraph. (As to the exclamatory insinuation it contains, with respect to the delay of the letter and warrants therein alluded to, it will, of course, not unbecome me to say, in a letter to you, that Mr. Thompson, the agent of the parties, was present at the opening of the mail and the delivery of the letter and package.) For the reason above intimated, I am unable to refer to the dates of the office correspondence bearing upon the question under considera. tion, but it will nevertheless show that for more than a year past it has been known and acted upon by the Commissioner, that the demands upon the office here so greatly exceeded its ability as to leave it several months in arrear, and without the hope of "catching up" so long as the attractive land remained undisposed of. In this exigency, the method of registering names for entry, assigning to each his prospective day, in regular turn, was resorted to, until it began to be so abused as to cause us to substitute in its stead the plan of receiving all applications on a given day, (of which there was public and general notice,) and declining all intermediate ones, as conflicting with the time necessary to make entry and returns of the applications on hand. This latter plan, which was adopted by my predecessor last summer, was found to be so just to all, and so little liable to abuse, in comparison with the previous system of registry, that it has not only been continued ever since, but, what will doubtless astonish you, with the express recognition and approval of the same Commissioner who signed the letter of the 1st instant! That letter, it will be seen, is not only in direct conflict with the regulation he had thus previously sanctioned, but looks to the cancellation of about 20,000 acres of sales made under that sanction, and upon grounds which will give to other applicants here the right to fall back upon previous applications and tenders, and to similarly cancel and secure to themselves, at a moderate estimate, at least 100,000 acres of land, some of it now covered with farms. It will be to me no mitigation of so reckless and unjust a proceedure that two of the parties to this contingent speculation are my own sons, who formally applied for about 40,000 acres, in June last, tendering to the receiver their money and their warrants, as others did, and the refusal of which, properly endorsed on their rejected applications, was subsequently expressly sanctioned in Everett's cases, which were sent up in order to test the propriety and legality of the course adopted by the office. Nor was this case of one of the speculators in question the only test to which the office regulation now repudiated by the Commissioner was subjected. As the attorney for a party who wanted but a small tract to settle on, James H. Birch, jr., tendered his application, his warrant, and the fees, the receipt for which, along with the refusal of the receiver and my predecessor to entertain the application thus made whilst the office was working up the applications it had received at the day of opening shortly previous, was all sent up, on appeal, to the Commissioner, by whom the course of the office was sustained and approved, and Mr. Birch and his client very properly directed to conform to the regulations which had been adopted in order to do justice alike to all. My best recollection is, that the approval in Birch's appeal was received in October or November last, and in Everett's cases shortly previous. Of course I cannot be held to exact accuracy in a communication thus made; but I am morally certain that if the Commissioner's letter-book be referred to his action in these cases will demonstrate the inconsistency and consequent injustice of the course he has marked out in respect to the locations and entries which conflict with the case he is so inconsiderately nursing from Pennsylvania. That case cannot even be sworn into a better shape than the official one in which parties have been putting their speculations for almost a year, rendering the excuse to the receiver and myself for the trouble they put us to in endorsing our refusal on their applications and tenders, "that there was no telling what the Commissioner and his clerks might ultimately decide." Some of these gentlemen are consequently rather elated than otherwise with the possibility that the Commissioner may finally repudiate the course of business which he has all along previously sanctioned; one of them having remarked in presence of the receiver, yesterday, that he would give $20,000 to be thus permitted to come in upon his old tenders, some of which, being even precedent to the Pennsylvania applications, (?) cover large portions of the same land! And this brings me to the question-if, indeed, it be a questionwhether an application made through the General Land Office can in any respect control or take precedence of the current and usual mode of business found necessary at the district offices? It had seemed to me that in the very nature of things it ought not to have; that no such conflict and consequent inequality between purchasers ought to be encouraged; but, actuated alike by courtesy and by duty, I corresponded with the Commissioner perhaps a year ago on this very subject, which came up in respect to a warrant which he sent me at the instance of Mr. Faulkner, of Virginia, to be specifically located for one of his constituents. His answer was that a warrant thus sent had no precedence, and it was consequently located when it came round to its turn, it having happened that no person having the previous right to enter land wanted that piece. I but add, sir, with the greatest respect and deference, that if either your chief clerk or yourself can spare time sufficient to go into the land office and look through and reflect upon this subject, until you feel that you have mastered the various questions and considerations which connect themselves with it, it must result in good to a branch of the service of such all-embracing and every day importance; and this, whether the present Commissioner and the clerks who wrote his letters of the 19th of March and the 1st of April be continued in their places or superseded by others more vigilant and attentive, if not more upright. I remain, sir, with great respect, your obedient servant, Hon. JACOB THOMPSON, Secretary of the Interior, Washington. No. 14. GENERAL LAND OFFICE, SIR: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt, through the department, of a letter from James H. Birch, late register at Plattsburg, Missouri, to this office, dated April 15, 1857, accompanied by two letters addressed by him to you, and dated respectively April 16 and 21, 1857. The letter of the 15th of April addressed to this office appears to he in reply to one addressed to him on the 23d of the previous month, advising him of the appointment of his successor in office. He also acknowledges in the same letter the receipt of telegraphic instructions addressed by this office to the receiver of public moneys, directing him to "close the register's office" "until Col. Birch's successor is qualified;" and takes occasion gratuitously to assume that his removal was effected by some unfair or underhand connivance on the part of this office with a Mr. Craig, who is up to this time entirely unknown to this office, though personally known to me. In this connexion the register comments on the disadvantage resulting to the government from his removal at a time when he had considerably overearned" his maximum of commissions for the whole year, and consequently would have had to serve the government without further compensation for the succeeding ten months of that year. As I propose to take up the points made by the register somewhat in the order in which he presents them, I will refer you here to the enclosed statement, marked A, from which you will perceive that by quite a novel proceeding adopted by the late register in resigning his commission in favor of his son, C. Č. Birch, and procuring the resignation at a convenient time of that son's commission and his own reappointment, first as a temporary appointment during the recess of the Senate, and subsequently a full appointment for four years with the advice and consent of the Senate, the late register and his son have succeeded in obtaining for their own use and profit between the 1st of April, 1856, and the 7th of April, 1857, the very respectable compensation for their service, in the shape of commissions alone, of $10,000, instead of $2,500, as intended and contemplated by Congress in the passage of the act fixing the maximum of such compensation for one year at that amount. The $10,000, it will be observed, is independent of the $500 per annum to which the register is entitled by law, as salary, and the fees accruing to him for the examination and adjudication of pre-emption claims. In the next paragraph of the same letter the late register refers to and comments upon a letter addressed to him by this office on the 19th of March, 1857, a copy of which letter, with an explanatory statement attached, is also enclosed, and is marked B. This letter of the 19th of March, and its accompanying explanatory statement, appears to me so clear as to require no further comment from me, so far as the register's reply to what he calls the first charge in that letter is concerned. The late register then takes up what he terms the second ground of reprehension contained in the letter of the 19th of March, 1857, and quotes from it as follows: You say that "when a tract of land is put up between two parties who have made simultaneous applications for the same and sold to the highest bidder, such purchaser cannot locate a warrant on said land, paying the difference in cash, but the whole of the land so purchased must be paid for in cash." The late register, in order to refute this plain and necessary instruction, arising under the 5th section of the bounty land act of March 3, 1855, Statutes at Large, vol. -, but which may be more conveniently found on pages 14 and 15 of the enclosed copy of the circular of May 3, 1855, quotes from a letter on file in his office, dated July 13, 1853, very nearly two years prior to the passage of the act which rendered those instructions not only proper, but necessary; further comment on that point is therefore unnecessary. He then closes his letter of the 15th of April with an inquiry as to why it was that similar locations made by himself and others were not objected to, but were overlooked and not complained of until the day preceding his removal. To this it is only necessary to reply that they are not overlooked, and that the proper remedy will be applied when the cases are reached in the regular order of business in this office. Having thus disposed of the letter of the 15th of April, I turn to that of the following day, addressed to you; but finding nothing in it beyond an apology for transmitting the original letter of the 15th, instead of a copy, I pass on to that of the 21st of April, 1857. In the letter of the 21st the late register alludes to a letter addresssd to him on the 1st of April, 1857, and complains that the instructions con |