package being noted at the post office by several witnesses, before which time, through the week, the land had been applied for and disposed of to various conflicting parties, settlers, and speculators. All this having been properly reported to the Commissioner in the joint letter of the receiver and myself on the evening of the same day, it will be perceived, by an inspection and analysis of the papers in the case, that the next step in the transaction was to abandon the application which had been made through the Commissioner, and to set up a claim for the first time under an application alleged to have been made at my office on the 26th day of the preceding November. I use the term "alleged to have been made," for although the Commissioner everywhere places his defence of this wholly unmitigated enormity on the ground that the party applied to locate these warrants on the land in controversy, and that I refused him permission on the 26th of November last, yet the very warrants themselves, which the Commissioner says in his letter directing their location he had fully examined, these very warrants, now in the office of the receiver, and examined only five or six days ago in the presence of that officer and the new register, disclose the fact that a large number of them were not even assigned until long after the alleged application to locate them, and that several of them were not even issued from the Pension Office until during the following months of December and January.

The respect which I entertain for the dignity and intelligence of the officer I am addressing forbids me to say more in this connexion than that this most reckless falsehood is purely official-it not being pretended by the parties, in their affidavit, that they had any such warrants when they were here in November, and the fact having come to light through their agent in this country that they had not. Leaving, therefore, this false foundation of the whole subsequent structure to be adjusted between the Commissioner and the clerk who prepared his letter, it is but proper to add, in this connexion, that from the manner in which Mr. Felix wrote to the receiver, from Reading, on the 7th of February, concerning the still subsequent agency which that clerk would have in transmitting the warrants, it is scarce left to inference alone that that clerk had such an agency in procuring such warrants as were even lacking when the parties went to Washington, and such an interest in the final success of the swindle as to constitute the cause of all this trouble.

Coming next to the letter of the 11th of April, which inclosed the affidavit that had been made by the parties in Pennsylvania, (“in compliance with the instructions of the Commissioner of the General Land Office,'') it need only be stated that, as it ordered an investigation of the matter, the new register very properly issued his notice, appointing "a day and hour" accordingly. That day, however, is destined to be "indefinitely postponed.' The sun will rise and set upon the Plattsburg land office as usual. The hospitalities which we had in store for the honorable J. Glancey Jones, the new attorney in the case, will be but "constructive," or intended, as was the case in respect to the application of his clients, to locate land warrants several months before they had them-for the Union," which announces his arrival in Washington on the 9th, is followed by the

Commissioner's letter of the 10th ultimo, "confiscating my entries," as the people say here, "without even the promised formality of an investigation!"

I render to Mr. Jones such homage as is due to that professional prescience which inclined him to cast his case more confidingly upon the flexibility of the judge than upon the proposed enlargement of If, however, the giving way of the Commissioner before this high the record. His clients owe him all-the previous bungler nothing. official influence was pitiable, it will be shown that the grounds upon which he permitted the agent-clerk to place it in the letter prepared for his signature were absolutely base and dishonorable. Reiterating "the previous application of Messrs. McLaughlin and Felix," the register and receiver are directed to "permit them to locate the 152 warrants" upon "the tracts applied for by them on the 26th of November, 1856," and to notify the persons who regularly purchased the land, (a number of whom are said to be living upon it,) that their entries will be cancelled!

It is obvious that the agent-clerk had great difficulty in arranging the phraseology of this final letter for the signature of even such a Commissioner. It is, nevertheless, comparatively bold and "knifelike"-so that, if I yet knew a judge, as I once did, who was mean enough to unblushingly falsify his own record, in order to justify his decision, I would commend to his association and partnership the author of the letter in question. The only point here necessary to extract from it is, that certain communications which I made to the department after the investigation was ordered, in connexion with the official abstracts or returns from the office here, not only disclose the illegality of my regular sales, but render it unnecessary to "investigate" whether (if that were even true) the land should or should not be sold to McLaughlin and Felix and all this he dignified as resulting from "record evidence!"

Fortunately, Mr. President, I have before me the original draft of the communication referred to, it being my letter to the Secretary of the Interior of the 21st of April last, to which you are respectfully referred. It need scarcely be said that it addresses nothing to the Secretary in respect to the manner of conducting the business of my office, of which the Commissioner had not been previously and repeatedly advised in the current correspondence and business of the office; yet it contained much in relation to the ruinous door which the portended repudiation of the Commissioner would open up to old and wary speculators, concluding that branch of the subject in these words:

"Some of them (alluding to the speculators) are consequently rather felicitating themselves than otherwise, in the hope that the Commissioner may finally repudiate the course of business which he has all along previously sanctioned, one of them having remarked, in my presence, that he would give $20,000 to be thus permitted to come in upon his old tenders, some of which, being precedent to the Pennsylvania applications, cover large portions of the same land.”

Of course, the term "application," in the above, was used in the sense in which the Commissioner had seemed determined to regard

what was done by the parties from Pennsylvania, and not in the sense enforced in all our instructions, and affirmed with such technical significancy in Everett's case about the 20th of August last. From those instructions, and from that decision, whatever may have been intended by the visit to, and conversation in, my office (where the alleged applicants say I was present) in November last, it will be but too ridiculously apparent that their alleged application had not sufficient seemingness to commend it even as a good "sham."

But, Mr. President, in the last lines of the sentence I have copied from my letter to the Secretary of the Interior will be read, by every man of sense, the real reason why this "investigation" was abandoned, and why the Commissioner, under cover of a loose official falsehood, was made to rob the rightful owners of a vast estate in the public land, under circumstances which you must see would not stand a moment in any court of law and justice. Fortunately, without distrusting your ultimate action in respect to the patenting of this land— fortunately, nevertheless, we have such courts in Missouri who hold that where the government, by its officers, has sold the same piece of land more than once, it is their province to decide whether the first sale or the last one shall stand. Could such courts be brought to concur with the Commissioner in repudiating the old and steady rule of the office, upon which there has probably been sold more than a million of acres of the land in this district? And were such a concurrence even possible, could any court be brought to decide in favor of the alleged applications from Pennsylvania, and especially against precedent applications of the same character, and lastly against those, also precedent, which had been REGULARLY made, as in the case of Birch's appeal? Impossible, Mr. President, IMPOSSIBLE! The only effect, therefore, of allowing this disgraceful proceeding to linger longer at the land office will be but to contribute to cloud the titles, and therefore force them into the courts, for the parties here will not compromise their unquestionable rights. It is understood, on the contrary, that they will proceed, without loss of time, to the perpetuation of such testimony as has been denied them, by smothering the "investigation" which was originally ordered, with a view to the ultimate decision of the case in every legal point of view.

A single additional reflection, and I will close a communication so unpleasant as this has been, and in which I have but touched upon the more prominent points, which might be almost indefinitely elaborated against the action of your Commissioner.

Will you retain him in his place, and thus ostensibly encourage the official piracy into which he has been willingly or unwittingly committed? Whilst it becomes not one so humble to obtrude advice upon another whom he contributed to place so high, he may nevertheless be permitted to refer to the contest of 1840, in which the mal-administration of this very department formed by far the most effective element of opposition in the western States, and in which it will be remembered, by the men of that period, that the counsel of the namesake and reputed kinsman of the present Commissioner-"better let it be!"-was made to shake every election ground in the valley of the Mississippi. If delinquencies and mal-practices of the nature thus exposed ar

allowed to go unpunished, or if the Commissioner is permitted, in the usual manner, to take his time to simply perplex and darken it with a wordy and false report," they will necessarily grow worse and multiply until another congressional committee, with power to send for persons and papers, may at last have to drag to light such a mass of iniquity, as resulting from a faithful inquisition of this bureau alone, that even the democracy cannot bear up against it in the great contest of 1860.

That the steps of your administration may be otherwise ordered, and that you may leave the public service even purer than you found it, will continue the ardent prayer of your very faithful and obedient servant,

The PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

JAMES H. BIRCH.

No. 22.

PRAIRIE PARK, August 6, 1857.

SIR: Before closing my letter of the 4th instant, to the President, I met with Mr. Felix, of Pennsylvania, who had come to the land office in town, under the authority and instructions of the Commissioner, to consummate the location of certain lands, against which my letter of the 21st of April last was intended as a remonstrance and a protest, and have, through his courtesy, been permitted to examine, for the first time, a copy of the report which it seems you but properly required of the Commissioner in respect to the subjects in controversy between us. Waiving, therefore, in this connexion, all inquiry as to the manner in which that gentleman happened to be furnished with a copy, whereby its official and even personal aspersions of my conduct had previously gotten into circulation at St. Joseph and elsewhere, I congratulate myself that even thus acccidentally I have been enabled to ascertain the nature and extent of the imposition which has been practiced upon you in order to obtain your concurrence in so gross a fraud as the one now enacting under the directions of your subordinate. Confining myself, therefore, to that portion of his "report" which bears most directly upon the proceedings now going forward at the office in town, I shall so expose and impale its author, from the real record of the case, as to leave it impossible (I doubt not) for you to continue to maintain official relations with one who has proven himself so presumptuously perfidious.

Presuming that I have but felt authorized to make such hasty extracts from his report as were deemed necessary for the purpose above indicated, I proceed in the first place to copy the material" points" which he represents as being exhibited in the history of the case, viz: "1. That two of the associates of Messrs. McLaughlin and Felix applied in person to the register, on the 26th of November, 1856, to locate the 152 land warrants which were then in their possession, and tendered the necessary amount of fees in gold, and were illegally

refused the permission to make the locations; the land being then vacant and subject to such location.

"2. That early in February, 1857, they applied in person at the General Land Office for aid in effecting the location of these warrants, on tracts they had already applied for to the register, on the 26th of November previous.

Having in my letter to the President, which will, of course, be referred to your department, demonstrated the absolute falsehood of the above official statement-gratuitously untrue from beginning to endby referring not only to the studied avoidance and ambiguity of the affidavit of the parties themselves, but to the fact of record here, and soon to be transmitted to the archives at Washington, that quite a number of the warrants thus alluded to were not even assigned until long after the date of the Commissioner's alleged application to locate them, and that several of them were not even issued from the Pension Office until during the following months of December and January. I shall inclose to you, in addition, the affidavit since furnished by Mr. Thompson, their original agent in the matter, and who is now in town helping Mr. Felix to "put through" the case under the Commissioner's decision; from which affidavit it will be seen that they did not even select these lands until after the time when your Commissioner alleges they tendered these warrants, and the fees in gold to locate them! and that, about a month afterwards, they purchased and sent him, from Philadelphia, about 17,000 acres of warrants only, that being as much of the land as they had even then concluded to take at the next opening for applications in March!

I forbear any further allusion to my own affidavit, which was also filed with the register yesterday, than to say that whilst admitting that what the parties themselves state in their affidavit may be true, (for I knew nothing about it,) it as emphatically denies that there is even a word of truth in the statement of the Commissioner, reported to you, concerning their application. Of course I need not add that this being untrue, the whole case falls with it.

Whilst it would be superfluous, if not indeed endless, to expose, as I might, the perfect tissue of insincerity and falsehood which pervades the whole tenor of a communication designed only to bewilder and mislead the official superior to whom it was addressed, I will but glance at a few more "points" in which that design can be rendered most clearly apparent. Thus, in referring to my letter of the 21st of April, instead of replying to my statement that he had " expressly recognized and sanctioned" the course of proceeding he was then seeking to repudiate, he disingenuously represents me as having alluded in that letter to "previous instructions, and leads you away from the true enquiry, thus:

"The previous instructions alluded to, as sanctioning the system adopted by his predecessor, are to be found in a letter addressed to him, August 19, 1856, enclosing copies of one addressed to the register and receiver at Council Bluffs, July 12, 1856, and one to the register at Fort Dodge, dated June 17, 1856, copies of which are here with enclosed, marked C. 1, C. 2, and C. 3."

If you will be pleased to send to him for my letter, it will be seen