CHAPTER XVII
TRANSFER OF PARTY POLICIES
In predicting defeat as a result of the war measures, Randolph overlooked the facts of history. No party has ever failed to retain the affection of the people when making preparations for war; and the corollary is that no party has ever opposed war successfully. Reasons for this fact were advanced in describing the war scare of 1798. The Federalists, losing State after State during Jefferson's administration, had been temporarily revived in the New England opposition to his embargo. But the accusation of being unpatriotic, of placing commerce above love of country, and the suspicion of holding intercourse with the commercial enemy had driven many from their ranks. John Quincy Adams, the hope of his father's age, was not the only apostate of the day. A member from Kentucky taunted the remnant of Federalists in the House during the war debates with remembrance of New England patriotism. Said he,
"During embargo days, when our domestic enemies were encouraged by a proclamation under authority of the King of England, these minions of royalty, concentrating in the east, talked of the violations of the laws as virtue; they demoralized the community by raising the floodgates of civil disorder; they gave absolution to felons and invited the commission of crime by the omission of duty."
From time to time instances were not wanting to prove that the remnant of the Federalists was being forced by opposing the Administration into the former attitude of the Republicans. The most frequently cited case is that of Josiah Quincy, a Massachusetts member of the House of Representatives, who became so alarmed over the effect which the admission of the State of Louisiana would have on the political balance of the sections that he declared such action virtually dissolved the Union and freed the States from their moral obligations. Regardless of the past theories of his party, he declared the Union a partnership of States into which no new member could be admitted from territory outside the original domain. He declared the whole question was "whether the proprietors of the good old United States should manage their own affairs in their own way, or whether they and their constitution and their political rights should be trampled under foot by foreigners, introduced through a breach in the Constitution." The Federal opposition to the proposed War of 1812 has been described. It was a result of the "low, grovelling parsimony of the counting-room," as Clay denounced it.
The reversal of party position on both sides was due not to choice, but to interchange of situation. The very act of conducting the government on the one hand and of opposing it on the other brought this exchange. Jefferson, the former advocate of peace, from his retirement now urged a vigorous policy which involved retaliation on England, if she burned American cities, by hiring discontented workmen in London to burn British buildings, by conquering Canada, and, after dictating terms of peace with Britain, by making war upon Napoleon. The reversal of party brought consequent exchange of policy. Instead of Federal encroachment on individual rights, the Republicans must now become aggressors, and the Federalists protestants. Instead of the protests coming from Virginia and Kentucky they now emanated from the New England States. Instead of regarding the State Legislatures as the ultimate protectors of the States, the resistants now went beyond that agency and adopted the very expedient so frequently urged by Jefferson, and the one which Madison testified that he had contemplated in 1799—a convention of delegates from the States.
Some parts of the resolutions adopted by this convention of twenty-seven delegates from the five New England States which met at Hartford, Connecticut, in December, 1814, might easily be supposed to have been voiced by Virginia and Kentucky fifteen years before, so completely had parties and sections exchanged.
"It is as much a duty of the state authorities to watch over the rights reserved, as of the United States to exercise the powers which are delegated" was the voice of southern individualism speaking through a New England convention. "In cases of deliberate, dangerous, and palpable infractions of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of a state and the liberties of the people, it is not only the right, but the duty of such a state to interpose its authority for their protection."
Thus was the doctrine of "interposition" transferred from South to North, equalising sections, and conducing to the ultimate making of the nation.
But the means to be employed were not the same in each case. Resistance in the Union to unconstitutional acts had been the Republican plan of 1798; withdrawal from a Union, whose government had been grossly and corruptly administered ever since the first twelve years of prosperity and happiness, was the Federalist thought of 1814. "Even at this late hour," said the Hartford Convention report, "let government leave to New England the remnant of her resources and she is ready and able to defend her territory." The peaceful dissolution of the Union and the substitution of "a new form of confederacy among those states which shall intend to maintain a federal relation to each other" was declared to be a possibility. A severance of the Union by one or more States withdrawing against the will of the rest was justified only in case of absolute necessity. The immediate remedy was to perfect "an arrangement which may at once be consistent with the honor and interest of the national government and the security of the states." By the readjustment which they proposed to make between the States and the Union, the latter would practically withdraw from the Eastern States so far as revenue and defence, the two highest attributes of sovereignty, were concerned.
Ultimately the convention hoped for certain amendments to the Constitution, Jefferson's remedy again, "to strengthen and if possible to perpetuate the union of the states," and, incidentally, to curb the national strength of their opponents. To this end, the two-fifths negro representation which the slave States had been given in the Constitution was to be abolished; the extension of Southern power by creating more States from the Louisiana Purchase was to be curbed by requiring a two-thirds vote in each House for the admission of a new State into the Union; Northern commerce was to be protected from future annihilation by limiting embargoes to sixty days; a two-thirds vote of both Houses was to be required to declare war or non-intercourse with a nation; the pro-French element in national politics was to be curbed by forbidding naturalised persons to hold national office; future eight-year Jeffersons and Madisons were to be prevented, and the Virginia presidential trust broken by making a President ineligible for a second term, and by prohibiting two consecutive Presidents to be elected from the same State. A complete transition of the fear of presidential usurpation had been wrought by the burden of war falling more heavily on one section than the other.
[Illustration: DISLOYALTY OF NEW ENGLAND DURING THE WAR OF 1812. This cartoon represents Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island contemplating jumping into the arms of John Bull, while Maine prays below for guidance. The King says "Oh 'tis my Yankee boys, jump in, my fine fellows, plenty molasses and codfish, plenty of goods to smuggle, honours, titles, and nobility into the bargain." Massachusetts, nearest the King, says "What a dangerous leap! but we must jump, Brother Conn." Connecticut, in the middle, says "I cannot, Brother Mass. Let me pray and fast some little longer Little Rhode Island will jump the first." Rhode Island says "Poor little I! What will become of me? This leap is of a frightful size. I sink into despondency.">[
National finances were seriously impaired by the war. The lending section refused to support the Administration. Of the loan authorised in 1814, less than one-half was taken and that at a discount of twenty per cent. During the same year, the Government defaulted on the interest due on the national debt. Moneyed men claimed that business had been so impaired by the embargo and war as to prevent their coming to the relief of the nation. Unfortunately, strict-construction theory had cut off the bank which might otherwise have been a source of supply. A glance at a table of statistics of the commerce and financial standing of the United States during the embargo and war period will show the effects of a maritime war and explain the causes of the complaints of commercial New England. The following sums are in round numbers of millions of dollars.
Exports Imports National Debt 1807……….. 108……….. 138……….. 69 1808……….. 22……….. 56……….. 65 1811……….. 61……….. 53……….. 48 1812……….. 38……….. 77……….. 77 1813……….. 27……….. 22……….. 55 1814……….. 16……….. 12……….. 81 1815……….. 52……….. 113……….. 99 1816……….. 81……….. 147……….. 127
Almost annihilated by the embargo of 1808 and the War of 1812-15, the exports and imports, when relieved from such incumbrances, leaped to figures which caused anger and rebellion when contemplated. The prospect of wiping out the national debt was indefinitely postponed. Increased burdens of national taxation brought as loud a protest from the Federalists in 1814 as came from the Republicans in 1798.
Yet the chief grievance voiced by the Hartford Convention was neither the loss of commerce nor increased national debt. A question had arisen in the course of the war which brought out the old contention between the right of the State and the nation, although with parties and sections exactly reversed. Fear of the abuse of the military power in the hands of the central authority, which prompted the framers of the Constitution to limit all appropriation for the army to two years' duration, had also persuaded them to restrict the national use of the State militia to three emergencies, viz., to execute the national laws, to suppress insurrection, and to repel invasion. Test had been made of the first two uses in suppressing the excise rebellion. The War of 1812 brought out the third. The contemplated invasion of Canada was the result of no one of these conditions. Objection to using the militia in carrying on a foreign war had been raised frequently in Congress during the debates on the war measures. A kindred dispute had arisen over the right of the national authorities to appoint officers of the State militia when called into national use. The old Revolutionary State jealousies over this question seemed to have come to life again. Among the Federalists, now grown to be sticklers for State rights, was a representative in Congress from New York, who cried out in debate:
"If it shall come to that, that militia officers are appointed by the President, I am a militia officer—I will never surrender the state's rights—I would not be commanded by them—and I say, so help me God, if I do. Militia were never intended for the United States, but for individual states, to defend their states' rights."
In the twenty years of peace administration, this question of employing the militia in a foreign war had never arisen. If the National Government in 1812 had been ready for war, either in force or finance; if the war had been favoured in the commercial States where the available wealth of the country was accumulated; or if the administration had not been embarrassed constantly by lack of soldiers and revenue, the resistance of New England to the Federal attempts to control her militia, to recruit her young men, and even to contemplate drafting her able-bodied citizens might never have arisen. But if the test had not come, the governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut would not have put themselves on record as resisting the call of the President for their quota of militia to serve both inside and outside the State, and the section would have missed committing itself to the former ground of its opponent. The creation of a "Federal army" out of the State militia was now criticised as violently in New England as it had been in the Southern States during the suppression of the whiskey insurrection a score of years before.
This refusal of the thickly populated Eastern States, which had been largely the source of supply in the Revolutionary War, to furnish their share of soldiery, threw the brunt of the Canadian expeditions upon the south-western sections, and thus contributed to the Union in another and less evident manner. The volunteers from those trans-Allegheny regions would never forget the hardships of their journeys through the roadless North-west. Frontier militiamen, who hewed their way through pathless woods and subsisted on roots and berries because there were no roads on which to bring supplies; officers, who guided their commands to streams and found them too small in midsummer, when most needed, to transport their troops; artificers, who built boats on the Great Lakes and could not get armaments to them,—these men were unlikely to allow constitutional objections to lie in the way of future improvements in the Western Territories. They placed the blame for the failure of the campaigns in those parts to lack of means of communication. The freshly cut military roads were strewn with the ruins of flour-barrels, cordage, and various equipment, abandoned in transit. Fully two-thirds of the flour put down at Fort Meigs could not be used. The flour on the Harrison campaign cost the Government not less than eight dollars a barrel. Government commissaries claimed to have been ruined in their contracts by lack of roadways. Only eight hundred pack-horses survived of four thousand employed in the Detroit campaign. The extra expense of one of the northern campaigns would have built a good road to the inaccessible portion if the need could have been foreseen. The experience in the war demanded immediate action for the future public defence, regardless of party interpretation of powers. Provision for necessary means of communication in the older portions might safely be left to the States; but for the more recently settled regions, especially the Territories, only the States united could provide highways and waterways. The fact that the Union had charge of the Indians in the Territories made the permission easier to grant. Also, during the war, many military roads had been constructed, whose constitutionality no one had time to question. During the intermissions of warfare, soldiers had been employed in constructing military roads between various posts on the frontier. John Randolph had several times aroused the wrath of the war- hawks in Congress by suggesting that the volunteer troops be employed, when not on campaigns, in building highways and digging canals. He thought the land forces would make some return in this way for the vast sum to be expended on them. After the close of hostilities, the regular troops continued to be employed in such work, receiving extra pay. In various parts of the United States one may still trace the old "military roads," many of them having been made into modern highways. As may be imagined, they were of great aid in extending another function of national activity —the postal system.
Waterways were as abundant in the western region during the War of 1812 as they were at any later time. That they were not more frequently employed as means of transportation was due to the fact that nature, in the process of time, had placed so many obstacles in them that they were practically useless. Sand-bars, sunken logs, accumulated driftwood, and hidden snags made water travel impossible except for light canoes. During the summer season, when the campaigns were waged most vigorously, many of the streams were dried up and valueless for transportation purposes. But small imagination was required to see how man with proper resources could dredge channels, remove obstacles, and construct dams which would render these waterways useful during the larger part of the year. Boats propelled by poles might be guided up the tedious channels, but the use of steam was impossible until improvements had been made.
Fulton and Livingston made a success of steam navigation on the majestic Hudson in 1807. Only five years later, hardy spirits were not wanting at Pittsburg to equip a vessel with steam and venture down the tortuous Ohio to New Orleans. But impediments to navigation made such attempts simply experiments. Three years after the close of the war, the Walk in the Water was launched on Lake Erie near Buffalo and eventually reached distant Mackinaw. The ship-building industry had been established on Lake Erie during the war and needed only the construction of harbours and placing of lights to open a vast inland commerce.
The strict constructionists were destined to spend many unpleasant hours over this question of inland commerce. That the Union had control of ocean or foreign commerce, no one denied. The ocean is common to all. But fresh water lies inland, among the States. Strict construction would not allow the central authority to undertake a public work in an individual State. Clearing waterways and constructing harbours might have been left to the respective States, if each stream and each lake had been located entirely within the confines of some State. Interstate commerce thus began early to play a part in making the Union. In former days, Congress had granted requests of Rhode Island, Maryland, and Georgia to be allowed to retain part of their imposts for completing their public works on rivers and harbours. The privilege was extended to other State at various times, the expenditures being withheld from the national revenues. The system was bad and produced frequent delay and abuse. It was really the Federal Government making the improvements indirectly. Evidently the work could be carried on more uniformly and systematically under central management.
Precedent had been established under the compulsion of war. The Carondelet canal was a private enterprise connecting Lake Pontchartrain with the city of New Orleans. Congress appropriated a sum of money, as the war came on, for making the canal navigable for the gunboats in order to protect New Orleans. Several similar instances might be cited during the progress of the war. Under such conditions, it was an easy matter to include in the Army Appropriation bill of 1819 a sum for making a complete survey of all watercourses tributary to the Mississippi on its western side, and on its eastern side north of the Ohio. There was in the same bill an appropriation for making surveys with maps and charts of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, from the Falls of the Ohio to New Orleans, "for facilitating and ascertaining the most practical mode of improving the navigation of those rivers." No promise was made, but the ultimate purpose was to have the individual States or the Union improve the navigation of all these waterways. So insidiously was necessity making the Republicans commit themselves to the policies of their predecessors, that no one realised they were preparing by these actions to inaugurate the vast work of public improvement in the interior of the continent which characterised the middle period of American history.
Advocates of these national enterprises were encouraged by a clause in the Bank bill of 1816. In order to compel the State banks to resume specie payment and to rearrange the national finances after the war, the Republicans had been compelled to resort to the infamous Hamiltonian remedy of chartering a United States bank. Only financial desperation could warrant the adoption of a suggestion which the party had rejected five years before. Unconstitutionally scarcely had a mention in the debates on the bill. Republican speakers and writers advocated a bank as eagerly as they had opposed one in 1791 and 1811. Calhoun was in favour of a new bank and Webster was opposed to it.
This second bank was chartered, like the first, for twenty years. It had a similar plan of organisation, although with a larger capital. It differed most in offering to the National Government, not only a share of stock, but a "bonus," or gift, of a million and a half dollars for the privilege of the charter. Visions of internal improvements made possible by such a handsome gift immediately arose in the minds of some, although suspicion was the strongest feeling in the minds of others. The proposition was precisely along the Federalist idea of invested interests purchasing a monopoly from the Government, and was viewed in that light by old Republicans. It was denounced as a bribe similar to that given Parliament by the East India Company. Such scruples were overcome by comparing the "bonus" to the fee paid the National Government for a patent, which gave to the holder a monopoly, or to the free passage granted troops over toll bridges in payment for a State charter. Undoubtedly the desire to use this money for public improvements aided in securing the passage of the Bank bill.
These hopes assumed shape in the next session in "An act to set apart and pledge certain funds for internal improvements," which pledged the proceeds of the "bonus" for constructing roads and canals, and improving the navigation of watercourses. It was passed by a close vote in each branch of Congress, after a long debate in the House upon the powers of the General Government. This debate showed Calhoun, the future spokesman of State rights, in favour of extended expenditures in the various States without constitutional restriction, and Timothy Pickering, former member of John Adams's Cabinet, in the attitude of denying the right of the National Government under the implied powers to expend a dollar without the consent of the State in which the improvement lay. Neither would he admit that the regulation of commerce included more than waterways. It was an additional evidence of the reversal of parties.
The Representatives from the Eastern States generally wished to use the money to relieve the ordinary burdens of taxation, realising that the larger part of these improvements would lie beyond the Alleghenies and, presumably, of no benefit to them. Individual members may have held great expectations of the gratitude to be gained from their constituents by securing a share of the bank money. Madison rudely shattered these in the closing hours of his administration by vetoing the bill. It was a heroic duty. To such a distance had the party gone from the confines of strict construction, so resistless had been the hand of compulsion in the sixteen years of Republican administration, so powerfully had this internal improvement system affected the cupidity of the people, so careless had Congress grown of the difference between the reserved and expressed powers, that Madison felt it necessary to recall his party to its first principles. In his veto message, he spoke the almost forgotten language of the old days when he said that the power to regulate commerce did not extend to enterprises conducted within the several States; that the efforts of the Union should be confined to foreign commerce; that any expenditure of the bonus proceeds under the plea of the common defence would be to give Congress a general power of legislation. It was the first reaction after the compelling days of the war. It was not an agreeable or popular task, but it was done heroically. It was love's labour lost, because it was impossible for Madison or his successor long to hold in check the demands of the people for means of communication as they spread toward the West over the inviting public lands.
Partisan newspapers denied that Madison's action was inconsistent with prior recommendations of Presidents, with the report of Gallatin, and with the appropriations for the Cumberland Road. Gallatin's report, they said, was only a recommendation. The Cumberland National Road was the result of a bargain between the Federal Government and the State of Ohio and involved no violence to the Constitution. As for prior messages, Jefferson, in 1806, had suggested an amendment to cover internal improvements, and Madison had been careful in 1816 to locate his proposed national university inside the District of Columbia, which was entirely under national control. Internal improvements, he had said in two different messages, should be authorised by an amendment. At the same time, many of these papers lamented the fact that the hands of the Union were thus bound, while a few suggested that the obligation to "provide for the general welfare" would have been fulfilled better by building roads and canals than by creating a bank and placing upon the people the burdens of a protective tariff. Having engaged in the war, they must abide by the compulsion which the war produced.
The few conservative Republicans who clung to the old doctrines of the party realised with dismay that the financial adjustments following the war were bound to drag them still farther into the former field of the enemy. The Jeffersonian commercial war, which had begun with the embargo of eight years before, had practically cut off the United States from the European sources of supply. In a crude way her people began to set up manufactories to supply needed goods. The waterfalls distributed so abundantly over the Northern States were harnessed for this purpose. Unconsciously the United States was coming into a commercial independence even more valuable than the political or navigation right for which she had contended in two wars. The world's peace of 1815 released the carrying trade; European goods poured into America; and the infant manufactures were undersold and threatened with ruin. As many as twenty vessels arrived in New York during one day in 1815, hurrying British goods to the reopened American market.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPORARY RESIDENCE, 1815. This "octagon" house in Washington was occupied by President Madison while the White House was being rebuilt after being burned by the British in the War of 1812. It is now used as a club house.]
Instantly the public thought turned to a protective tariff, not only to save the manufactures, but as a retributive measure against England. "It is now a little more than a year," wrote a correspondent to Niles's Register, "since we closed a contest in arms with Great Britain in glory. A new struggle has already commenced with the same nation in the arts as connected with agriculture, commerce, and manufacture." Another contributor urged the necessity of protecting and cherishing the manufacture of everything—from a toothpick to a ship, from a needle to a cannon, a thread of yarn to a bale of cloth—unless we could exchange some commodity for them. "You spread too much canvas," was the reason reported to have been given an American by an Englishman for certain restrictive measures on American commerce.
"Americanism" showed itself in the press as well as in congressional debates. Writers contrasted the probable happiness of an imaginary "Anglo-American province," located on the Atlantic coast-plain, dependent upon the Old World for its straw hats, boot, shoes, cotton, linen, and cloth, with an "Economic Republic," located as far inland as the banks of the Ohio, and depending entirely on home industries. A rumour that the rebuilt Executive Mansion was to be furnished with articles from Europe brought an indignant denial from the Administration. Only porcelain, mirror plate, carpets, and a few minor articles, such as were not produced in the United States, had been imported. It was announced that President Monroe had given orders to use home manufactures as far as possible in furnishing all public buildings in Washington. The American Society for the Advancement of Domestic Manufactures was favoured by ex-Presidents Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, as well as by President Monroe. The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Domestic Industry issued addresses to the people.
Under the influence of the embargo the census of 1810 had been made to include a survey of American manufactures. It showed that nearly two hundred million dollars' worth of goods were manufactured annually in the United States. Undoubtedly this sum had been greatly increased during the two years of war. Newspapers printed accounts of the large output of woollen mills in New England, of the starting of glass and iron factories, of new methods for weaving, of looms to be operated by steam power, of the discovery of lead, copper, asbestos, and other mines. The frontier city of Cincinnati reported the establishment of manufactories of tools, implements, ground mustard, and castor oil. It was said in 1816 that not less than nineteen million dollars' worth of woollen goods alone were being produced in the United States, which must suffer from European competition unless protected. A steam vessel, so it was reported, built at New York, was about to attempt to cross the Atlantic to Russia, where Fulton had been given a monopoly of steam navigation for twenty-five years.
So completely had the New England States alienated themselves from the Administration by their conduct during the war that an appeal from them for protecting manufactures in which they were most largely interested would have had small influence, unless the general condition of the country had demanded action, as shown above. The Southern States, which dominated Government, could afford to be magnanimous. They had permanent protection in their cotton, tobacco, and sugar exports as the means of their commercial salvation. "Let us be charitable toward the Hartford conventionists; let us make them feel that they have a country," said a member of Congress, in discussing the impost bill of 1816, which partook somewhat of the nature of a tariff bill along Hamiltonian lines, although framed by Jeffersonians. Few speakers showed a tendency to discuss the proposition from a party standpoint. "The duty of a paternal government" was referred to as freely as if the Hamilton days had come again.
As usual in a tariff debate, expediency and self-interest ruled. The difficulty of reconciling the varied interests in a common measure seemed at times insurmountable. The South wanted a high duty upon sugars and a low duty upon coarse cloth. The New England delegates insisted upon the contrary.
"The order of the day seems to be to catch and keep and huckster sectional interests without regarding the nation as a whole," wrote a disgusted member to one of his constituents. "We can unite, as you have seen, from Maine to Louisiana in favor of voting money into our own pockets; but I despair of seeing a united vote in favor of our constituents."
This tariff measure of 1816, the first after the war, was a protective action in form rather than by intention. The Republicans looked on it as corrective of the many acts which during the war had almost doubled the duties to secure revenue. It was a kind of transition from the tariff policy of the Hamiltonians, nearly twenty years before, to that of Clay, ten years later. That tariff issues were not yet developed and sectional interests appreciated is evidenced by the fact that Calhoun was an earnest advocate of this measure and that Webster voted against it. A comparison of the votes in House and Senate indicated slightly the sectional tendency which was to characterise the tariff question when fully developed.
VOTES OF APRIL 8 AND APRIL 19, 1816, ON REGULATING DUTIES
House Senate
North of Mason and Dixon line /For…….63…….16
\Against…14……..2
South of Mason and Dixon line /For…….25……..9
\Against…40……..5
The measure was passed by the vote of the Eastern or manufacturing States, aided by the South-western States, who were expecting some kind of paternalistic benefit to their hemp or other products. In the Senate, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana voted solidly for the tariff, and in the House these three States furnished nine affirmative to four negative votes. The five New England States, already strong advocates for increasing protection, gave in the House seventeen votes in favour to two against the experiment. Virginia and South Carolina furnished twenty-seven of the negative votes in the House. Strange to say, South Carolina, the opposition leader of a later day, gave a majority for the bill in both branches of Congress.
It is scarcely just to call this tariff of 1816 a protective measure, since it was entitled "An act to regulate the duties on imports and tonnage." It was a natural result of the attitude of the "war-hawks," isolated from European influence and developing self-reliance and self-dependence. It was looked upon as reducing the tariff to a peace basis. The war duties on woollen and cotton goods, rating as high as thirty per cent., were to be gradually scaled down to half that amount. But the discrimination in favour of certain goods made easier the demand for a greater discrimination a few years later, and divided the party upon the old Hamiltonian policy of protection.