Why did it take them so long to do this? Had you been there, you could have cleared it up immediately!
I don’t know how long it took for the matter to be appealed to the Madison/ Monroe, or what else was on their plate at the time. Except I do know war was brewing with England.
In any event, we have a good idea of when it became a real public issue: October of 1811, because that’s when the letter to the newspaper was written.
And we know when the Madison administration responded: Novemeber of 1811.
Doesn’t sound like a terrible response to me.
Oh, by the way, I think you (or someone on this thread) claimed that McClure was detained by the French in 1807. Like so many other birther things, that’s not true. He was detained in the spring of 1810.
Birthers have claimed Publius must’ve been Madison. Well, anybody in the entire country could’ve used that pseudonym, and Madison’s administration declared McClure a citizen, on the basis of his birth in the United States.
Whoeve Publius was, he didn’t even know what he was talkign about. He couldn’t even keep his dates straight. If you look at the dates he gave, his letter has Armstrong responding to the matter before McClure was even arrested.
Probably what happened is the order to arrest McClure was given in April 1810 and he wasn’t arrested until early 1811. Then Armstrong probably responded to a plea for help in March of 1811 (mistakenly printed as 1810 in the letter).
So in that case, the appeal above Armstrong took place in spring or summer of 1811. It took weeks just to get a message across the ocean. So it looks like it didn’t take the Madison administration very long to respond to the matter at all.