GENTLEMEN: Your letter of the 16th was duly handed me, and I lose
no time in responding to the feelings and sentiments which you have
expressed for yourselves and those you represent, and which you have
correctly ascribed to me in regard to the lamented death of the late
President. As a citizen I respected him; as a patriot I honored him;
as a friend he was near and dear to me. That the people of Cincinnati
should desire to keep watch over his remains by entombing them near
their city is both natural and becoming; that the entire West, where so
many evidences of his public usefulness are to be found, should unite in
the same wish was to have been expected; and that the surviving soldiers
of his many battles, led on by him to victory and to glory, should sigh
to perform the last melancholy duties to the remains of their old
commander is fully in consonance with the promptings of a noble and
generous sympathy. I could not, if I was authorized to do so, oppose
myself to their wishes. I might find something to urge on behalf of his
native State in my knowledge of his continued attachment to her through
the whole period of his useful life; in the claims of his relatives
there, whose desire it would be that the mortal remains of the
illustrious son should sleep under the same turf with those of his
distinguished father, one of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence; in the wish of the citizens of his native county to claim
all that is now left of him for whom they so lately cast their almost
unanimous suffrage; to say nothing of my own feelings, allied as I am
by blood to many of his near relatives, and with our names so closely
associated in much connected with the late exciting political contest.
These considerations might present some reasonable ground for opposing
your wishes; but the assent which has been given by his respected widow
and nearest relatives to the request of the people of Cincinnati admits
of no opposition on my part, neither in my individual nor official
character.
I shall feel it to be my duty, however, to submit our correspondence to
the two Houses of Congress, now in session, but anticipating no effort
from that quarter to thwart the wishes expressed by yourselves in
consonance with those of the widow and nearest relatives of the late
President. I readily promise you my cooperation toward enabling you to
fulfill the sacred trust which brought you to this city.