Gentlemen of the Senate: I nominate General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, of South Carolina, Francis Dana, chief justice of the State of Massachusetts, and General John Marshall, of Virginia, to be jointly and severally envoys extraordinary and ministers plenipotentiary to the French Republic.

For if she would take no personal step toward conciliation, she yet held no code by which the intercession of a monarch might seem to lessen her dignity; and the coming of so princely an envoy as the Cardinal di Gioiosa was celebrated with fêtes meet to grace the reception of so high a dignitary of the Church of Rome.