No. 18. GENERAL LAND OFFICE, GENTLEMEN: On the 11th of April last a letter was addressed by this office to the register and receiver at Plattsburg, Missouri, enclosing a copy of a statement made under oath by Messrs. McLaughlin & Felix, of Reading, Pennsylvania, in relation to their application to locate 152 military bounty land warrants on certain tracts of land in that district, and directing the land officers to give notice to Messrs. McLaughlin & Felix, through the Honorable J. Glancy Jones, and to all adverse claimants, that on a certain day and hour, to be named in said notice, they would be prepared to take testimony in the case. Since then, Mr. Birch has made communications to the department presenting his side of the case, and designed as exculpatory of the proceedings had at the local land office in regard to the withholding of lands, without authority of law or instructions, when applications were made, and afterwards opening them to sale to other persons in disregard of the previous applications. The case thus presented by Mr. Birch has been fully considered, in connexion with the official abstract or returns by the register and receiver, and record evidence is there exhibited, in connexion with the matter, by which the erroneousness and illegality of the subsequent entries, in disregard of the previous application of Messrs. McLaughlin & Felix, is fully established, thereby rendering any further proceedings for the purpose of a hearing and decision, as advised on the 11th of April last, unnecessary. You will, therefore, upon being furnished by Messrs. McLaughlin & Felix, or their attorney, with a descriptive list of the tracts applied for by them on the 26th of November, 1856, permit them to locate the 152 warrants above mentioned thereon, provided they furnish you with such list, and appear either in person or by attorney fully prepared to consummate such locations within one month from the receipt by you of these instructions. You will then notify the adverse claimants that their locations will be cancelled by this office, and that the warrants will be returned to them upon the surrender of the outstanding duplicate certificates of location. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, REGISTER AND RECEIVER, Plattsburg, Missouri. THOS. A. HENDRICKS, Commissioner. No. 19. READING, June 12, 1857. DEAR SIR: Enclosed we forward three plats upon which it was originally intended to enter those land warrants. They were mailed at St. Joseph's, in Missouri, on the 20th of December last, and only arrived here on the 10th instant. In the intervening time we received the map of Nodaway county, designating the same lands upon which we entered the warrants on the 5th of February last. It appears to us that by comparing the description list of Birch's son with lands marked vacant on these plats, you can arrive at some conclusion whether he entered the same lands which we entered at Washington city. Your most obedient servants, Hon. THOMAS A. HENDRICKS. MCLAUGHLIN & FELIX. No. 20. GENERAL LAND OFFICE, SIR In my letter of the 14th ultimo, in relation to the conduct of the late register of the land office at Plattsburg, Missouri, James H. Birch, in permitting his sons, J. H. Birch, jr., and C. C. Birch, and others, to locate military bounty land warrants upon certain tracts of lands previously applied for by Messrs. McLaughlin & Felix, of Reading, Pennsylvania, I had the honor to state that the final action of this office in the case would form the subject of a further communication. I have now the honor to enclose a copy of a letter addressed to the present land officers at Plattsburg, Missouri, on the 10th instant, instructing them to permit Messrs. McLaughlin & Felix to locate 152 bounty land warrants alluded to upon the tracts applied for by them on the 26th of November, 1856, and to notify the adverse claimants that their locations would be cancelled; their warrants returned to them upon the surrender of the outstanding duplicate certificates of location. I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant, Hon. JACOB THOMPSON, Secretary of the Interior. THOMAS A. HENDRICKS, No. 21. PRAIRIE PARK, August 4, 1857. SIR: It becomes my reluctant duty to bring to your consideration the mal-administration of my late official superior, in the hope that such consideration may be given to his case as to constitute a guaranty that similar ones will not be overlooked in other branches of the public service with which you are charged, and over which you have plenary and sworn control. My previous correspondence with and through the Secretary of the Interior will render unnecessary any further disclaimer for the real or imaginary injustice of the past; that being a matter with which the accidental representative from this district and myself will not further trouble your excellency, but permit to take its course and receive its solution, at the proper time, by the rightful authority at home. Looking solely, therefore, to the integrity of the public service, with which my name is necessarily connected, I write purely because it is my duty to do so, but shall of course refrain to make it and my previous letters public, except as a last and only resource against the seeming official conspiracy, of which I may otherwise become the destined victim. Should that have to be done, it is believed that I may not only repose thereafter upon the instinctive integrity of the public judgment in the specific instances wherein it has been thought most available to place me under the ban of official arraignment, but in all others which either my congressional accuser at home, or his ally at Washington, (whose grievances are similar,) may design or dare to put in a shape to be investigated. Without unnecessary preliminary, therefore, I will proceed to the exposition which is demanded of me, adding only, in this connexion, as explanatory of the reason why I appear to have been both in and out of office during the last year of the administration of your predecessor; that having, under a contingent pledge to political friends, resigned my office early in the summer in order to take a more prominent part in the canvass which resulted in your election, I was restored to it in the fall. To a proper understanding of the case, to which I shall limit this communication, it is necessary to remark, that to the complication and consequent additional labor, with which the swamp act, the railroad reserves, the graduation law, and other legislation invested the administration of the land system, there was an impetus imparted to speculation, with warrants and money, which created a demand, at my office, that it was impossible for any register to currently supply. That I struggled with it as long as any other man would or could have done, will doubtless be sufficiently apparent in the fact that, although availing myself of all the clerical assistance of which the system was susceptible, I have scarce yet recovered the tone of feeling or of mind so desirable in a communication of this nature. In praying your excellency to excuse me accordingly, I but crave that indulgence from the President of the people, which the people themselves awarded me under the trying circumstances alluded to. Having thus denoted the reasons which concurred, at length, to render it absolutely impossible to receive and act upon the applications which were tendered to purchase or locate the public land, and both the law and the instructions being at that time silent in respect to the course a register should pursue, I was left necessarily to adopt such regulations, from time to time, as seemed best calculated to meet the exigencies of the service, amidst the ever-shifting devices of agents and others to elude, or render ineffective, the purpose for which all such regulations were adopted, namely, that every man should have an open and an equal chance with every other man. Of all this, it need scarcely be added, the office at Washington was kept properly and constantly apprised, as its records, if preserved, will abundantly de monstrate. Of the agents alluded to, it happened that there were men of almost every shade of political opinion, lawyers, bankers, surveyors, old land officers, and others, several of them veterans in their vocation from other States, and combining an energy, acuteness, and decision of character before which any officer might have quailed had his purpose or his practice been in the slightest degree tortuous, unfair, or even ambiguous. It is, therefore, that to the total absence of remonstrance or complaint on the part of so large a body of intelligent and high spirited men, rivals in business for eighteen or twenty months, may be referred at least the strong presumption that all my regulations were adopted and carried out with rigid fairness and strict impartiality. Not so fortunate, it may be remarked in passing, was the late register at Warsaw, who fell before the remonstrance of a portion of the same men in a single month. I but add, in this connexion, that if the official fraud, of which I shall presently proceed to the specific exposition, shall be carried to patent under the seal of your excellency, it will be done in the face of the sworn testimony of one of the gentlemen alluded to, who was the accredited agent of the parties for whose benefit the wrong will be perpetrated. It is, of course, unnecessary, for any of the purposes of this communication, to raise or discuss the question whether the rule or regulation which was adopted and acted upon by my predecessor and myself was, in fact, the wisest or the best that could have been fallen upon under the circumstances which gave rise to it. It suffices for every legitimate view of the case, not merely that it seemed and seems yet to have the concurrence and approbation of those who were interested in the daily fairness of its operation, but that it was both tacitly and specifically acquiesced in by the same Commissioner who now seeks to repudiate it. In a case which was appealed from the decision of the then register, on the 2d day of September last, the Commissioner acknowledges the receipt of the letter and papers of the appealing party, and in his letter of the 12th of October last both states and decides the case as follows: "It appears from this letter that Martin W. Ridan and James D. White applied to locate warrant No. 38,173 on the above described tracts and were refused permission to locate the same, for the reason that under a rule adopted by a former register (myself) applications for about 100,000 acres had accumulated, and that the present register therefore refused to receive any further applications until those then on hand had been disposed of; and that the papers in this case are submitted for the purpose of ascertaining whether a register of a land office can properly refuse to receive an application to enter a tract of land which is vacant, and to the entry of which there can be no valid objection." "The fact that an applicant has tendered his application and conconsideration for the tract he desires to purchase or locate, at a time when the business before you would not permit you even to examine, much less to consummate, the entry or location, gives him no right o Rep. No. 289-7 make a subsequent entry or location of the tract in preference to one who may have made a proper application and tender for the same tract at a time when his application could be attended to and consummated. You will furnish Mr. Birch with a copy of this letter, if he desires it, and return him the warrant and other papers which are inclosed for that purpose. Return the warrant, application, and fee receipt of the receiver— the party has no "right" to locate it-was the response to the appeal which was prosecuted by one of my sons from the decision of his brother, who was then register; which decision had been predicated, as therein acknowledged, upon an old rule of my adoption, and which continued to be the rule after my restoration in the fall, without further question in any quarter during the whole period of my continuance in office. Yet it is precisely for adhering to the rule thus adopted and thus sustained that the same Commissioner has at last directed about 150 of my entries to be cancelled, and the land sold to certain parties in Pennsylvania, who would have had no right to it in virtue even of the application which it is alleged they made for it on the 26th of November last, that being a time, as every person here knows, and as the Commissioner knows, "when the business before me would not permit even the examination of their alleged applications." In this respect, however, it will become my duty, at the proper place, to demonstrate that the Commissioner knew the parties. had made no such application as he falsely alleges for them, but has lent himself to an official FALSEHOOD as the only hope of smothering and smuggling through an official FRAUD! This will be rendered apparent in the narrative of the case, after it reached the hands of those who managed it at the General Land Office, which I now proceed to give. The first step in it of which we have any record is the commissioner's letter of the 6th of February last, enclosing 152 land warrants, with directions to locate them on the lands set out in the application which had been made out for Messrs. McLaughlin and Felix on the previous day. Observe, they were then in Washington for the purpose of obtaining through the intervention of the Commissioner an advantage in the purchase of the public lands, which had been but properly denied to them (as to all others) under the old and recognized rule of my office. Yet the Commissioner in his letter breathes not even a hint of reprehension against the rule he had so long upheld; but as if to strengthen me in standing by it as a general regulation, adduces considerations having reference to the character and objects of the parties in Pennsylvania, as a reason for directing the receiver and myself to act upon their applications as soon as they were received. But for the delay of the mails, this letter would have reached us some ten or twelve days before our regular opening for new applications in March, and if its directions had been obeyed, the party thus officially favored would have swept away, without contest, a large body of land, for which all others had been waiting to take their chance under the rules which had been so long established and upheld amongst them. The application and letter, however, with the warrants, did not reach us until the afternoon of the 7th of March, the reception of the |