To James Madison from James Monroe, [ca. 14 January 1814]
From James Monroe
[ca. 14 January 1814]
The enclosed was handed to me by Mr Swift, who informd me that he had recd. it from Mr Daschkoff, without being instructed to present it here.1
He read me an extract from Mr Ds letter stating that the passage in the message, giving information to Congress that the Russian mediation had been declind in the first instance, gave him the first intelligence of the fact.2
RC (DLC: Rives Collection, Madison Papers). Unsigned; undated. In James Monroe’s hand and addressed by him: “The President.” Later docketed by JM “Js. Monroe 1816”; docketed also by John Graham: “Correspondence with Mr Daschkoff.” Date reassigned based on internal evidence and the date of the enclosure (see n. 1).
1. Monroe enclosed a 14 Jan. 1814 note he had received from Russian minister Andrei Dashkov (DNA: RG 59, NFL, Russia; 4 pp.; in French, translated in Bashkina et al., The United States and Russia, 1039–40). Dashkov declared that he believed Alexander I would be pleased to learn that the United States and Great Britain had agreed to enter into peace negotiations, though he doubted the accuracy of JM’s remark in his 7 Dec. 1813 annual message that the Prince Regent had ‘declined’ or ‘rejected’ the Russian offer of mediation. Rather, he assumed that the reasons why the Prince Regent “did not place himself in a position of acting under the Russian mediation,” whilst unknown to him, “have been explained to the Imperial Government” and that it was unlikely that the Prince Regent, after refusing the Russian offer, had “requested the good offices of His Majesty the Emperor to facilitate a direct negotiation between the two belligerents.” John Swift, who conveyed Dashkov’s note, was an Alexandria merchant, who served as a consular agent for Russia (Bashkina et al., The United States and Russia, 1113–14).