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of the case furnished in my letter above alluded to, I should not have ventured to approach the subject again if some passages in your dispatch did not compel me, at the risk of repeating former arguments, to revert to some points, which I was under the impression had been satisfactorily disposed of.
In my previous letter I considered it necessary to give as full and comprehensive an account of the whole occurrence as circumstances would admit, which was done not merely to argue the legal bearing of the case as far as it concerned the Government of the Colony, as this was almost impossible without at the same time touching on other seemingly irrelevant points, but principally with the object to state the reasons by which the Commander of the Elbe had been activated in arriving at the decision adopted by him with the concurrence of the undersigned, to enable His Excellency to form a correct appreciation of the motives which have guided him throughout, and to exculpate the Commander's conduct and my own in face of the charges brought against him and me.
The reasons then on which this decision was based were: The established fact that the man was a deserter from His Prussian Majesty's Service previous engagement to his...
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