Insurgent Privateers in Foreign Ports

Excerpt from Insurgent Privateers in Foreign Ports: Message From the President of the United States, in Answer to Resolution of the House of the 2th of February Last, in Regard to Insurgent Privateers in Foreign Ports Sir: At about one o'clock yesterday, being the 21st of November, I received a telegraphic communication from Captain Britten, the consul of the United States at Southampton, announcing the painful intelligence of the arrival at that port of the steamer Nashville, which had run the blockade at Charleston, and had brought in the captain, twenty-seven seamen, and one passenger of the United States merchant ship Harvey Birch, which it had forcibly seized on the high seas whilst on her voyage from Havre to New York, and had set on fire and burnt. I immediately sent a direction to Captain Britton carefully to collect all the facts in connexion with the affair, and to transmit them to me at as early a moment as practicable. At about five o'clock in the afternoon I received a visit from Captain Nelson, the master of the Harvey Birch, who had been sent up from Southampton to see me, and to communicate such information as he possessed. So important did the substance of it appear, that I requested him to perpetuate his testimony, in the form of a deposition regularly taken by Mr. Morse, the consul at London, in order that I might make it the basis of a formal application to the British government for its intervention. So great has been the delay in preparing the paper, which has not yet come to hand, that I find I shall not be able to mature all the necessary documents in season for the despatch bag which goes to Liverpool in about an hour from this time. I will, however, endeavor to get all the papers copied to go in the general mail to Queenstown to-morrow night. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.