1811. CONDITION OF FINANCES. 319 operations will presently appear. Meantime the condition of the Treasury having improved with the partial revival of commerce, receipts once more exceeded current expenses. But appropriations were large, and the revenue precarious; and to cover all deficiencies a new loan of $5,000,000 had to be sanctioned. March 3. With discussions so absorbing over leading measures the midnight of March 2d was reached before Congress had finished its work. The last day of the session was Sunday; and both houses met morning and evening, quietly dispatched a number of routine bills, which were lying on the table, with very little debate, and then, after the usual formalities, adjourned sine die,—many of its members, both Federal and Republican, never more to appear in their familiar places. SECTION II. PERIOD OF TWELFTH CONGRESS. MARCH 4, 1811-MARCH 3, 1813. Principles preserve the wholesomeness of a sect or party, notwithstanding schisms appear and leaders degenerate. Names have a later magic, and the habit of association. It is not until some new and irresistible element enters into combination with the old ones that the precipitate of new parties can be cast. Nevertheless, decomposition may have long preceded the final reaction. Republicanism had been slowly turning to its own substance by a sort of digestive process what was best among the shattered fragments of the old Federalist party. But of late the Republican party had begun to feel the ill effects of a torpid policy, mediocre statesmanship, and inharmonious counsels. When it stood still, admiration ceased. For, like a painted toy, the political top appears bright and clean while rapidly spinning, and the soiled and battered edges come into view only when it rolls off on one side with its momentum spent. New parties were as yet impossible for want of well-defined issues; yet had it not been for that crisis to which the European war now hurried us, the gradual dissolution of the old Jefferson and Hamilton parties would now probably have been wrought, which Monroe's administration saw realized some ten years later. Schisms appeared, political feuds, unseemly brawls, the collision of rival ambitions. Lyon, the first victim of the sedition law, now lost his hold on a Western constituency by becoming a "submission man." Edward Livingston sued Jefferson for an official act in ousting him from a batture in New Orleans, claimed by the United States under a defective title. Cooper, whose harsh persecution in 1800 had won from McKean the bestowal of a judicial appointment in Pennsylvania, was just removed by the legislature of that State for precisely the same sort of arbitrary display on the bench that made the Chase circuit so offensive. Eppes had invaded John Randolph's district to run him out of Congress; a design which he later succeeded in accomplishing, but on this first trial procuring his own banishment from the national councils. The factious spirit had crept into the highest places of government, where scandal already announced that Madison was only President de jure. From a Cabinet but lately the perfection of harmony the force that bound them had departed; men and circumstances were no longer suited to one another. The "invisibles," so called, whose poles were Smith the prime minister, and Smith the senator, had neutralized Gallatin's influence, as they meant to, and their disrespect reached the Chief Magistrate himself. Navigation bills, the bank charter, measures for strengthening the army, whatever Gallatin, and, presumably, the administration, favored, had struck on some hidden rock in the Senate and sunk. Foreign appointments were opposed. Justice Cushing's death left a vacancy on the supreme bench, to which the President, after Levi Lincoln had declined, appointed Alexander Wolcott, of Connecticut; but, to his mortification, the Smith faction joined the Federalists of the Senate, and defeated the selection. John Quincy Adams was then appointed and confirmed; whose refusal, however, of the honorable commission, when it reached him in Russia, gave Massachusetts the double felicity of raising 1811. SECRETARY SMITH RESIGNS. 321 Story to judicial honors and keeping a second Adams in training for the Presidency. Convinced, when the national bank failed, that his usefulness as a Cabinet officer was exhausted, Gallatin tendered his resignation of the Treasury immediately after the adjournment of Congress. This brought Madison, who was pondering upon sound advice from other quarters, to a painful sense of his own humiliating position; and, not to be sacrificed like the second Chief Magistrate, by intriguing subordinates, he took, though tardily, Gallatin's part. The Secretary of State was summoned to the Executive presence, and offered the mission to Russia. But Robert Smith, not disinclined to go abroad, marked the President's embarrassment; and hearing, through friends, that his portfolio was already disposed of, resigned in anger; and, resigning, he considered himself free to lodge his complaint with the public. In truth, however, the public were quite unconcerned at his resignation. His published address to the people only confirmed the common rumor that the premier, not personally unamiable, was weak, heedless of the fidelity his post of confidence demanded, and in league with senators by no means honorable in their course; that Madison wrote his best dispatches; and that, a dabster in objections, he was a dunce at originating.* A newspaper war ensued, in which Joel Barlow, lately appointed to France in Armstrong's place, defended with the National Intelligencer, the President's action in discarding Smith; while the Aurora opened its broadsides against Madison and Gallatin with such reckless blackguardism that Jefferson himself was fain to expostulate and write the passionate Duane that he had gone too far in his strictures.† * See Adams's Gallatin; Robert Smith's published Address, June 7, 1811; National Intelligencer, June-September, 1811. Supra, p. 296. Madison made a memorandum concerning Robert Smith in April, 1811, in which he affirmed that the brother's opposition in the Senate was not his reason for displacing the Secretary; but the latter's outside criticisms of the President, and an inefficiency in managing his department, which threw additional work on the President's shoulders. Madison's Writings. † See Madison's Writings, May, June, 1811; Jefferson's Works, March, April, 1811. VOL. II.-27 Nervous as Madison felt while thus under fire, he had taken the surest means of fortifying himself by putting a far better man than Smith in the department of State. This man was no other than his lately discomfited Presidential rival. Monroe, aground as often before, had worked off patiently again, and was once more in full public activity. An inferior office, procured from the President, through Jefferson's influence, in 1809, he had positively declined.* Chosen in 1810 to the legislature of Virginia, to the joy of his many friends, he was elected by 1811 to the governorship, with the further prospect of succeeding Giles in the national Senate. Fixed upon for Smith's place, Monroe was now approached in confidence through Senator Brent, of Virginia. Monroe signiMar. 22-31. fied his willingness to accept if our foreign policy was not irrevocably fixed already. A personal letter from the President came in response, so fair, frank, and satisfactory, that Monroe decided favorably, and set out for Washington.† Monroe's accession at this time was fortunate for the administration in more respects than one. It reunited the party strength by drawing over that intelligent element, which, irrespective of old party ties, had for the last three years advocated more vigor and less policy in foreign dealings. Nearly as Monroe approached the milder Federalists in these ideas, he had prepossessed even the harsher school in his favor by negotiating the British treaty Jefferson and Madison had disapproved. Monroe had youthful ardor, ability, and an ambition to excel, and at the same time a sense of honor which forbade intrigue; and, accepting Madison at last for a chief, he ceased to be his rival. Jefferson was always lenient towards Duane, whom he considered a very honest and sincere Republican, but more passionate than prudent, and nourishing personal and general antipathies which rendered him very intolerant. Jefferson's Works, May 3, 1811. The Adams family, with good provocation, judged Duane far more harshly. See 5 J. Q. Adams's Diary, 112; Adams's Gallatin, 437-442. * See Jefferson's Works, November 30, 109. He would never act, Monroe said, in a national office where he should be subordinate to any. body but the President himself. † Monroe Correspondence (in which the letters of Brent and Madison appear); Adams's Gallatin. 1811. APPROACH OF WAR. Nov. 323 Barlow sailed in the summer for France. Gabriel Duval, of Maryland, took the next gown after Story, Chase having died in June. Rodney, of Delaware, resigned the Attorney-Generalship, and was succeeded by William Pinkney. Dec. We were now sweeping rapidly into a war. The new pledge of the national legislature was to bring Great Britain to terms, or force her to retaliate. The hour of paralysis had passed. For American citizens it was growing to be a simple question of resistance or non-resistance. Each party, therefore, had begun to desert its favorite paradox: the one, that bold remonstrance was desirable without warlike force; the other, that warlike force was desirable without bold remonstrance. Federalism appreciated the crisis clearly, and made desperate effort to break down the administration and its new policy; the strength and the weakness of this party consisting in its concentration at the northeast corner of the Union. Scarcely had Congress dispersed before Pickering, Quincy, the younger Otis, all the residue of conservatism, were at work stirring Boston pride against the national policy. The downfall of the Bank, for which those Southern lordlings were responsible, their project of new States to be composed of French jacobins and monarchists, their war on Spain by invading her territories, but most of all their revival of non-importation against Great Britain at Napoleon's behest, were loudly denounced. Pickering occupied the Boston Centinel with a series of inflammatory letters. The old spirit was invoked, not, however, of 1776 but of 1796,-the old animosities against France, not England. Gerry and Gore were again opposed for the Massachusetts governorship, and the young men of leading families in the chief towns organized Washington associations on behalf of the latter candidate, and marched to the polls on election day bearing Washington's portrait and farewell address as emblems. At the usual Boston caucus, held at Faneuil Hall the Sunday evening before election, violent res- Mar. 31. olutions against the administration were adopted.* * See Boston Centinel, April 3d, 1811. These resolutions claim that the Berlin Decree was the first flagrant violation of our neutral rights; |