COLUMBIAN CENTINEL, Boston, March 28, 1798

• The XYZ Affair
• France relations
• John Adams message

Page 2 has the "President's Message" to Congress indicating that the negotiations with France by the U.S. envoys have failed. In the message the President states in part: "...I perceive no ground of expectation, that the objects of their mission, can be accomplished, on terms compatible, the safety, honor, or the essential interests of the nation...", signed in script type: John Adams.
This was an important message relative to the famous XYZ Affair.
Page 3 has a brief note of an appointment by the President of John Quincy Adams as ambassador to Prussia.
Four pages, never-trimmed margins, very nice condition.

Background: In this pivotal March 19, 1798 message to Congress—reprinted nine days later in the Columbian Centinel—President John Adams officially announced the collapse of American diplomatic efforts in Paris without yet disclosing the bribery demands that defined the XYZ Affair. Following months of French privateers seizing American merchant ships, Adams informed the legislature that envoys Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry could achieve no resolution "compatible with the safety, the honor, or the essential interests of the nation." While maintaining executive restraint by withholding the envoys' actual dispatches to prevent immediate war fever, Adams urged Congress to bolster national defenses, enact naval preparations, and allow merchant vessels to arm themselves. This cautious declaration sparked fierce partisan debate, with opposition Democratic-Republicans accusing Adams of warmongering—a backlash that ultimately forced the President to release the full XYZ dispatches in April 1798, igniting widespread public outrage and launching the United States into the Quasi-War with France.