"as it urges the expediency of cultivating the disposition of the French government to take our side of the question."
The President came to Madison's relief. By a proclamation issued a few weeks afterward, reciting the terms of the Act of Congress in regard to the Bay and River of Mobile, he declared all these "shores, waters, inlets, creeks, and rivers, lying within the boundaries of the United States," to be a collection district, with Fort Stoddert for its port of entry.[1] The italics were a part of the proclamation, and suggested that such could not have been the intent of Congress, because no part of the shores or waters of Mobile Bay, or of the other bays east of Mobile, lay within the boundaries of the United States. The evasion was a divergence from the words of the Act unwarranted by anything in the context; and to give it authority, Jefferson, in spite of Gallatin's remonstrance, declared in his next Annual Message that the Mobile Act had been misunderstood on the part of Spain.[2]
