"'ALTO,' NEAR EDGE HILL, "KING GEORGE, VA., _Dec. 5, '76_.
"DEAR SIR,--Although I am confident if any one in the U. S. has the ability to cope with the rogues who are bent on cheating the people out of the hard-earned victory they have achieved, in the Presidential contest, it is yourself; yet, at the risk of being thought highly presumptuous, I venture on a few suggestions I have not observed thrown out by any one.
"That the Constitution does not provide for the extraordinary condition of things in which we are placed by the Congress, nor that any of its annotators furnish an apt construction, is certain; and for the same reason, I suppose, as that given by Bishop Warburton, why no allusion was made in the Pentateuch to a future state. The patriots of the Revolution, like the Patriarchs after the creation, no doubt thought the proposition so self-evident and the provisions so ample for pious and honest men that they did not dream of the world's being peopled by such a race of sinners and corruptionists.
"If precedent is to be weighed in counting the votes, let the spirit of the first example be wholly and rigidly observed. There is doubt, in the first election of Gl. Washington, the president of the Senate did perform that ministerial duty. But the order of the Senate, prepared by a committee, and signed by John Langdon, the prest. 'elected for that purpose,' expressly says 'the underwritten, appointed president of the Senate for the sole purpose of receiving, opening, and counting the votes of electors, did, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives,' etc., leaving it to be inferred (and no other conclusion will hold water) that in doing this his functions ceased. Subsequently, as you know, there were some variations from this practice, but all going to the mere ministerial agency of that officer.
"The bald attempt of McDonald, present chief clerk of the Senate, to cite a different practice, in the case of Harrison, when James W. Watson was president of the Senate, by construing his action in his (McDonald's) own language, as to imply judicial authority, does great violence to the truth of history and the greatest injustice to that astute and cautious statesman, who struggled all his life against the exercise of doubtful powers and was never known to practise one. This little incident on the part of McDonald is only a part of the well-laid scheme to revolutionize the government by seizure in the count of either of the returning boards in the subjugated States, should be conscience-stricken and obey the mandates of the Decalogue, rather than the tyrant's order, and cast the electoral vote for you, to whom all justly belong.