1. Lee probably enclosed an account of the meeting of citizens held at Richmond on 30 May that had been printed in the Richmond Enquirer on 2 June 1812. The chairman and secretary of the meeting had already forwarded a copy of these proceedings to the president (see Inhabitants of Richmond, Manchester, and Vicinity to JM, 30 May 1812).

2. Lee alluded here to Lord Castlereagh’s instruction no. 8, sent to Augustus Foster under the dateline of 10 Apr. 1812, which contained a lengthy statement of Great Britain’s conditions for the repeal of the orders in council. Castlereagh had authorized Foster “to communicate the whole, or any part of this Dispatch to the American Government trusting, that they will trace in it, the sincere desire, which animates the Councils of Great Britain, to conciliate America as far as may be consistent with the principles, [on] which the Preservation of the Power and Independence of the British Monarchy is held essentially to depend” (see Mayo, Instructions to British Ministers description begins Bernard Mayo, ed., Instructions to British Ministers to the United States, 1791–1812, Annual Report of the American Historical Association of the Year 1936, vol. 3 (Washington, 1941). description ends , p. 363). After Foster had shown Monroe the instruction, the secretary of state, on 3 June, questioned whether the British minister had stated the position of his government correctly with respect to removing the orders in council in his 30 May letter. JM did not release a copy of Castlereagh’s instruction, but he did send the Foster-Monroe correspondence regarding its contents to Congress (see JM to Congress, 4 June 1812, and n. 1).

3. See the second resolution approved by the Richmond meeting on 30 May, which explicitly rejected the British conditions for the repeal of the orders in council.