After the Senate, at the close of the 7th Congress, postponed the question of ratification of the convention with spain, Madison instructed Pinckney to “avail yourself of the opportunity” to persuade the Spanish government of “the reasonableness and the sound policy of remodelling the Convention in such a manner as to do full justice” by allowing claims for condemnations by French consuls in Spain’s ports. The Senate turned to the convention again on 25 Nov. with the appointment of Stephen R. Bradley, Abraham Baldwin, and James Jackson as a committee to inquire if further action was needed. Lewis Harvie delivered TJ’s message and the accompanying papers to the Senate on 21 Dec. In executive session on 9 Jan. 1804, the Senate ratified the convention by a vote of 21 to 7 (Madison, Papers description begins William T. Hutchinson, Robert A. Rutland, J. C. A. Stagg, and others, eds., The Papers of James Madison, Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962- , 37 vols.: Sec. of State Ser., 1986- , 10 vols.; Pres. Ser., 1984- , 8 vols.; Ret. Ser., 2009- , 2 vols. description ends , Sec. of State Ser., 4:400; JEP description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States … to the Termination of the Nineteenth Congress, Washington, D.C., 1828, 3 vols. description ends , 1:459, 461-2; Vol. 39:316-17).

now communicate what has since passed: John Quincy Adams noted in his diary that the Senate clerks’ reading aloud of the papers that came with TJ’s message of 21 Dec. “took more than two hours.” On the 22d, Bradley reported for his committee that the president’s message “gave the Senate all the information within their power to obtain,” and the Senate discharged the committee. Bradley then presented a resolution to refer the message and documents to a select committee that would report on whether “further proceedings ought to be had by the Senate” in regard to “disclosures” in the papers. According to William Plumer, in his journal of the Senate’s proceedings, and to Adams in his diary, it was clear that the purpose of Bradley’s resolution was to initiate prosecution under the Logan Act of the attorneys who had answered the “Abstract Question” posed to them by the Spanish government. Bradley, Plumer asserted, considered Rawle to be the author of the Logan Act and wanted to see him held accountable under his own law (although Plumer understood from Roger Griswold that the act had been Griswold’s creation, not Rawle’s). Following the vote to ratify the convention on 9 Jan., the Senate agreed to Bradley’s resolution and named him, Baldwin, and Jackson as the select committee. In a report presented on 24 Feb., the committee found that “certain unauthorised acts and doings of individuals contrary to law, and highly prejudicial to the rights and sovereignty of the United States, tending to defeat the measures of the government thereof,” had occurred—that Ingersoll, Rawle, McKean, Du Ponceau, and Livingston, by corresponding with agents of the government of Spain about a matter in dispute between that country and the United States, had gone against the Logan Act. Declaring that those violations would go unpunished “without the aid of the executive,” the committee proposed a resolution that would ask the president to obtain an opinion from the attorney general, and if Lincoln found that the law had been broken, the president should order “the proper law officer” to undertake prosecution. The Senate ordered a limited printing of the report under injunction of secrecy. Not until the evening of 27 Mch. did the Senate return to the committee’s report. Samuel White proposed a resolution that the body “take no further order” on the report, senators “not considering it within the province of their duty to do so,” and that the injunction of secrecy be lifted. The Senate postponed action on the resolution until Congress reconvened in the fall. Madison expressed the administration’s view of the matter in a letter to Pinckney on 6 Feb.: “It was probably unknown to the Spanish Government that the lawyers in giving the opinion to which it attaches so much value, violated a positive statute of their own Country forbidding communications of any sort with foreign Governments or Agents on subjects to which their own Government is a party; that one of them being in a public trust under his own Government”—Edward Livingston, who when the American lawyers gave their opinion was a U.S. district attorney—“violated his official duty, and that another being allied by affinity to the Minister of His Catholic Majesty here”—Joseph B. McKean, brother-in-law of Carlos Martínez de Irujo—“would have consulted his personal delicacy more by withholding, than by adding his name to the rescript” (Adams, diary 27 [1 Jan. 1803 to 4 Aug. 1809], 57, 61, in MHi: Adams Family Papers; Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803-1807 [London, 1923], 94-5; Report of the Select Committee of the Senate of the United States, Appointed on the 9th January, 1804, to Consider & Report Whether Any, and What Further Proceedings Ought to be had by the Senate, in Relation to the Message and Documents Communicated by the President of the United States, on the 21st December Last [Washington, D.C., 1804; MS of report in DNA: RG 46, EPFR, filed with the message of 21 Dec.; Madison, Papers description begins William T. Hutchinson, Robert A. Rutland, J. C. A. Stagg, and others, eds., The Papers of James Madison, Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962- , 37 vols.: Sec. of State Ser., 1986- , 10 vols.; Pres. Ser., 1984- , 8 vols.; Ret. Ser., 2009- , 2 vols. description ends , Sec. of State Ser., 6:440, 441n; JEP description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States … to the Termination of the Nineteenth Congress, Washington, D.C., 1828, 3 vols. description ends , 1:461, 463, 464-5, 468-70).