CHAPTER IX.
The President’s Annual Message, read November 29 before Congress, threw no light on the situation. If Madison’s fame as a statesman rested on what he wrote as President, he would be thought not only among the weakest of Executives, but also among the dullest of men, whose liveliest sally of feeling exhausted itself in an epithet, and whose keenest sympathy centred in the tobacco crop; but no statesman suffered more than Madison from the constraints of official dress. The Message of 1809 hinted that England had no right to disavow her minister’s engagement, and that Jackson’s instructions as well as his conduct betrayed a settled intent to prevent an understanding; but these complaints led to no corrective measures. The President professed himself still willing to listen with ready attention to communications from the British government through any new channel, and he seemed to fall back on Jefferson’s “painful alternatives” of the year before, rather than on any settled plan of his own:—
“In the state which has been presented of our affairs with the parties to a disastrous and protracted war, carried on in a mode equally injurious and unjust to the United States as a neutral nation, the wisdom of the national Legislature will be again summoned to the important decision on the alternatives before them. That these will be met in a spirit worthy of the councils of a nation conscious both of its rectitude and of its rights, and careful as well of its honor as of its peace, I have an entire confidence. And that the result will be stamped by a unanimity becoming the occasion, and be supported by every portion of our citizens with a patriotism enlightened and invigorated by experience, ought as little to be doubted.”
Such political formulas, conventional as a Chinese compliment, probably had value, since they were current in every government known to man; but that President Madison felt entire confidence in the spirit of the Eleventh Congress could not be wholly believed. John Randolph best described Madison’s paper in a letter to Judge Nicholson, a few days afterward:[139]
“I have glanced over the President’s Message, and to say the truth it is more to my taste than Jefferson’s productions on the same occasions. There is some cant to be sure; but politicians, priests, and even judges, saving your honor’s presence, must cant, ‘more or less.’”
Probably the colorless character of the Message was intended to disarm criticism, and to prevent Randolph and the Federalists from rousing again the passions of 1808; but sooner or later some policy must be adopted, and although the Message suggested no opinion as to the proper course, it warned Congress that the crisis was at hand: “The insecurity of our commerce and the consequent diminution of the public revenue will probably produce a deficiency in the receipts of the ensuing year.” The moment when a Republican administration should begin to borrow money for ordinary expenses in time of peace would mark a revolution in the public mind.
Upon Gallatin, as usual, the brunt of unpopular responsibility fell. His annual Report, sent to the House December 8, announced that a loan, probably of four million dollars, would be required for the service of 1810; that the Non-intercourse Law, as it stood, was “inefficient and altogether inapplicable to existing circumstances;” and finally that “either the system of restriction, partially abandoned, must be reinstated in all its parts, and with all the provisions necessary for its strict and complete execution, or all the restrictions, so far at least as they affect the commerce and navigation of citizens of the United States, ought to be removed.” This subject, said Gallatin, required immediate attention; but in regard to the wider question of war or peace he contented himself with a reference to his two preceding reports.
Congress showed more than usual unwillingness to face its difficulties. The episodes of Erskine and Jackson supplied excuse for long and purposeless debates. In the Senate, December 5, Giles reported from a special committee the draft of a Resolution denouncing Jackson’s conduct as indecorous, insolent, affronting, insidious, false, outrageous, and premeditated,—epithets which seemed to make superfluous the approval of Madison’s course or the pledge of support with which the Resolution ended. Giles reviewed the conduct of Jackson and Canning, entreating the Senate to banish irritation and to restore harmony and mutual good-will, “the most fervent prayer of one who in the present delicate, interesting crisis of the nation feels a devotion for his country beyond everything else on this side of heaven.”[140] The experience of many years warranted Giles’s hearers in suspecting that when he professed a wish for harmony, the hope of harmony must be desperate, for his genius lay in quite another direction; and when he laid aside partisanship, his party had reason to look for some motive still narrower. His course quickly proved the sense in which he understood these phrases.
January 3, 1810, the President recommended by message the enlistment for a short period of a volunteer force of twenty thousand men, and a reorganization of the militia; adding that it would rest with Congress also “to determine how far further provision may be expedient for putting into actual service, if necessary, any part of the naval armament not now employed.” No one knew what this language meant. Crawford of Georgia, with his usual bluntness, said:[141] “This Message, in point of obscurity, comes nearer my ideas of a Delphic oracle than any state paper which has come under my inspection. It is so cautiously expressed that every man puts what construction on it he pleases.” Giles pleased to put upon it a warlike construction. January 10 he reported a bill for fitting out the frigates; January 13 he supported this bill in a speech which surprised Federalists and Republicans alike, if they could be still surprised at the varieties of Giles’s political philosophy.
“The visionary theory of energy,” said he, “was the fatal error of the Federal party, and that error deprived it of the power of the nation. The government being thus placed in the hands of the Republicans, while heated by the zeal of opposition to the Federal doctrines and flushed with their recent triumph, it was natural for them, with the best intentions, to run into the opposite extreme; to go too far in the relaxations of the powers of the government, and to indulge themselves in the delightful visions of extending the range of individual liberty.... It was natural that in the vibration of the political pendulum, it should go from one extreme to another; and that this has been too much the case with the Republican administration, he regretted to say, he feared would be demonstrated by a very superficial review of the events of the last two or three years.”
Energy was a fatal mistake in the Federalists; relaxation was an equally fatal mistake in the Republicans,—and the remedy was a show of energy where energy did not exist. Giles won no confidence by thus trimming between party principles; but when Samuel Smith argued for Giles’s bill on grounds of economy, friends of the Administration felt little doubt of the motives that guided both senators. Had they declared for war, or for peace; had they proposed to build more frigates or ships-of-the-line, or to lay up those in active service,—had they committed themselves to a decided policy of any kind, their motives would have offered some explanation consistent with a public interest; but they proposed merely to fit out the frigates while giving them nothing to do, and the Republican party, as a whole, drew the inference that they wished to waste the public money, either for the personal motive of driving Madison and Gallatin from office, or for the public advantage of aiding the Federalists to weaken the Treasury and paralyze the nation.
Crawford replied to Giles with some asperity; but although Crawford was known to represent the Treasury, so completely had the Senate fallen under the control of the various cabals represented by Vice-President Clinton, Giles, Smith, and Michael Leib of Pennsylvania, with their Federalist associates, that Crawford found himself almost alone. Twenty-five senators supported the bill; only six voted against it.
Giles impressed the least agreeable qualities of his peculiar character on this Senate,—a body of men easily impressed by such traits. By a vote of twenty-four to four, they passed the Resolution in which Giles showed energy in throwing epithets at the British government, as they passed the bill for employing frigates to pretend energy that was not in their intentions. No episode in the national history was less encouraging than the conduct of Congress in regard to Giles’s Resolution. From December 18 to January 4, the House wasted its time and strength in proving the helplessness of Executive, Congress, parties, and people in the grasp of Europe. With painful iteration every Republican proved that the nation had been insulted by the British minister; while every Federalist protested his inability to discern the insult, and his conviction that no insult was intended. Except as preliminary to measures of force, Giles’s Resolution showed neither dignity nor object; yet the Republicans embarrassed themselves with denials of the Federalist charge that such language toward a foreign government must have a warlike motive, while the Federalists insisted that their interests required peace.
If the Resolution[142] was correct in affirming as it did that the United States had suffered “outrageous and premeditated insults” from Jackson, Congress could not improve the situation by affirming the insult without showing even the wish to resent it by means that would prevent its repetition; but the majority saw the matter in another light, and when the Federalists resorted to technical delays, the Republicans after a session of nineteen hours passed the Resolution by a vote of seventy-two to forty-one. Macon, Stanford, and the old Republicans voted with the Federalists in the minority, while Randolph was ill and absent throughout the debate.
The Resolution marked the highest energy reached by the Eleventh Congress. Giles’s bill for fitting out the frigates was allowed to slumber in committee; and a bill for taking forty thousand volunteers for one year into government service never came to a vote in the Senate. Congress was influenced by news from England to lay aside measures mischievous except as a prelude to hostilities. The change of Administration in London opened the way to new negotiations, and every fresh negotiation consumed a fresh year.
No course would have pleased Congress so much as to do nothing at all; but this wish could not be fully gratified. The Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, was to expire by limitation with the actual session. As early as December 1 the House referred the matter to a committee with Macon for its head. Macon probably went to the Treasury for instructions. A plan drawn by Gallatin, and accepted without opposition by the Cabinet, was reported December 19 to the House in the form of a bill which had less the character of a Non-intercourse than of a Navigation Act; for while it closed American ports to every British or French vessel public and private, it admitted British and French merchandise when imported directly from their place of origin in vessels wholly American. The measure was as mild a protest as human skill could devise if compared with the outrages it retaliated, but it had the merit of striking at the British shipping interest which was chiefly to blame for the conduct of the British government. Under the provisions of the bill, American shipping would gain a monopoly of American trade. Not a British vessel of any kind could enter an American port.
Macon’s bill came before the House Jan. 8, 1810, for discussion, which lasted three weeks. The opposition objected to the new policy for the double reason that it was too strong and too weak. St. Loe Livermore, a Massachusetts Federalist, began by treating the measure as so extreme that England and France would resent it by shutting their ports to all American ships; while Sawyer of North Carolina denounced it as evaporating the national spirit in mere commercial regulations, when no measure short of war would meet the evil. According as commerce or passion weighed with the reasoners, the bill was too violent or disgracefully feeble. Throughout the winter, these contradictory arguments were pressed in alternation by speaker after speaker. Macon reflected only the views of Madison and Gallatin when he replied that if England and France should retaliate by excluding American shipping from their ports, they would do what America wanted; for they must then enforce the non-intercourse which the United States had found impossible to enforce without their aid. He agreed with the war-members that the bill showed none too much energy, but he argued that the nation was less prepared for war than in 1808 and 1809; while as for Jackson’s quarrels, he declined to admit that they changed the affair one iota.
Although the two extremes still stood so far apart that their arguments bore no relation to each other, the violence of temper which marked the embargo dispute, and which was to mark any step toward actual measures of force, did not appear at this session. Indeed, the Federalists themselves were not unanimous; some of the most extreme, like Barent Gardenier and Philip Barton Key, supported Macon’s plan, while some of the extremists on the other side, like Troup of Georgia, voted against it. January 29, by a vote of seventy-three to fifty-two, the House passed the bill. The Senate soon afterward took it up; and then, as was to be expected, the factions broke loose. February 21, at the motion of Senator Samuel Smith, by a vote of sixteen to eleven the Senate struck everything from the bill except the enacting clause and the exclusion of belligerent war-vessels from United States’ harbors.
An Administration measure could not without rousing angry feelings be so abruptly mutilated by a knot of Administration senators. Samuel Smith’s motives, given in his own words, were entitled to proper attention; but President Madison’s opinion on the subject, whether correct or mistaken, had even more effect on what was to follow. Madison believed that the rejection of the bill was an intrigue of the Smiths for selfish or personal objects. He recorded the language which he felt himself obliged to use on the subject, twelve months afterward, to Robert Smith’s face:[143]—
“For examples in which he had counteracted what he had not himself disapproved in the Cabinet, I referred to the bills called Macon’s bills, and the Non-intercourse Bill, on the consultation on which he appeared to concur in their expediency; that he well knew the former, in its outline at least, had originated in the difficulty of finding measures that would prevent what Congress had solemnly protested against,—to wit, a complete submission to the belligerent edicts; that the measure was considered as better than nothing, which seemed to be the alternative, and as part only of whatever else might in the progress of the business be found attainable; and that he neither objected to what was done in the Cabinet (the time and place for the purpose), nor offered anything in the place of it, yet it was well understood that his conversations and conduct out of doors had been entirely of a counteracting nature; that it was generally believed that he was in an unfriendly disposition personally and officially; and that although in conversations with different individuals he might not hold the same unfavorable language, yet with those of a certain temper it was no secret that he was very free in the use of it, and had gone so far as to avow a disapprobation of the whole policy of commercial restrictions from the embargo throughout.”
Robert Smith, doubtless believing that all his actions had been above question or reproach, protested warmly against these charges of unfriendliness and intrigue; but Madison, with a feminine faculty for pressing a sensitive point, insinuated that in his opinion both the Smiths were little better than they should be. “With respect to his motives for dissatisfaction I acknowledged that I had been, for the reasons given by him, much puzzled to divine any natural ones without looking deeper into human nature than I was willing to do.” The meaning of the innuendo was explained by Joel Barlow the following year in the “National Intelligencer,” where he acted as Madison’s mouthpiece in defending the Administration from Robert Smith’s attacks. One of Smith’s complaints rested upon Macon’s bill. Barlow asked, “What gives Mr. Smith a right at this day to proclaim himself in opposition to that bill? Was it ever laid before the Cabinet and opinions taken? Did he there oppose it? Did he not rather approve it, and give his vote for every article? Did he ever utter a syllable against it till his more acute brother discovered the commercial bearing that it would have upon the house [of Smith and Buchanan], and concluded that their interest required its rejection?”
Perhaps this explanation, however offensive to the Smiths, injured them less than the other suspicion which had as much vogue as the first,—that their conduct toward Macon’s bill was a part of their feud against Gallatin, and proved their determination to oppose everything he suggested. At the moment when Samuel Smith revolted against Macon’s measure, Washington was filled with tales of quarrels in the Cabinet. In truth, these reports were greatly exaggerated. Robert Smith had not the capacity to develop or to pursue a difficult line of argument even without opposition. Against Gallatin he could not, and as Madison testified did not, open his mouth, nor did Gallatin or Madison ever complain except of Smith’s silence in the Cabinet; but he talked freely in society, and every one heard of battles supposed to be raging. Walter Jones, one of the most respectable Virginia members, wrote to Jefferson, February 19, imploring him to intervene:[144]—
“Before you quitted this place you knew that causes of dissension subsisted in the Executive departments. So ominous an event has not failed to be an object of my continued and anxious attention, and I am now fully persuaded that these unfriendly feelings are fast approaching to a degree of animosity that must end in open rupture, with its very injurious consequences to the Republican cause.... This break of harmony in the Executive departments, added to the extreme points of difference in opinion among the majority in Congress in relation to the great questions of peace and war, renders the apathy and inaction of the Republicans here extremely mortifying. I never knew them more disconnected in sentiment and system, as probably may have been made manifest to you by the desultory and inconclusive work of nearly three months.... You will recollect that at the close of the last Congress the appearance of umbrage was confined to Mr. Gallatin and Mr. R. Smith; indeed, excepting themselves there were no other secretaries effectively in office. It is now supposed, and I believe with truth, that the former stands alone against the more or less unfriendly dispositions of all the rest. Their main abettors of last spring have abated nothing of their strong and indecent zeal.”
Upon feelings so irritable and at a moment when schism was imminent, as Walter Jones described, the action of Samuel Smith and Michael Leib with six or eight more Republican senators, in emasculating Macon’s bill, left small chance of reconciliation. Giles, having declared himself in favor of energy, did not vote at all. The debate being for the most part not reported, the arguments of the dissenting senators have been lost. One speaker alone broke the monotony of the discussion by an address that marked the beginning of an epoch.
Henry Clay had been barely two weeks a senator, when, February 22, he rose to move that the bill as amended by Samuel Smith be recommitted; and this motion he supported by a war speech of no great length, but full of Western patriotism.
“The conquest of Canada is in your power,” he said. “I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state that I verily believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.... The withered arm and wrinkled brow of the illustrious founders of our freedom are melancholy indications that they will shortly be removed from us. Their deeds of glory and renown will then be felt only through the cold medium of the historic page; we shall want the presence and living example of a new race of heroes to supply their places, and to animate us to preserve inviolate what they achieved.... I call upon the members of this House to maintain its character for vigor. I beseech them not to forfeit the esteem of the country. Will you set the base example to the other House of an ignominious surrender of our rights after they have been reproached for imbecility and you extolled for your energy! But, sir, if we could be so forgetful of ourselves, I trust we shall spare you [Vice-President George Clinton] the disgrace of signing, with those hands so instrumental in the Revolution, a bill abandoning some of the most precious rights which it then secured.”
Other members both of the House and of the Senate had made war speeches, and in Clay’s harangue no idea could be called original; yet apart from the energy and courage which showed a new and needed habit of command, these sentences of Clay’s maiden speech marked the appearance of a school which was for fifty years to express the national ideals of statesmanship, drawing elevation of character from confidence in itself, and from devotion to ideas of nationality and union, which redeemed every mistake committed in their names. In Clay’s speech almost for the first time the two rhetorical marks of his generation made their appearance, and during the next half century the Union and the Fathers were rarely omitted from any popular harangue. The ideas became in the end fetiches and phrases; but they were at least more easily understood than the fetiches and phrases of Jeffersonian republicanism which preceded them. Federalists used the name of Washington in the same rhetorical manner, but they used it for party purposes to rebuke Washington’s successors. The Union and the Fathers belonged to no party, and might be used with equal advantage by orators of every section. Clay enjoyed almost alone for years the advantage of winning popularity by this simple means; but in 1810, at least along the Atlantic coast, such appeals had little popular success. Least of all had they weight in the Senate, which listened unmoved to Clay’s oratory, and replied to it immediately on the same day by passing the “ignominious surrender” of national rights by a vote of twenty-six to seven. Giles did not vote. Samuel Smith, Leib, and even Crawford were in the majority.
Macon’s bill came back to the House as a law for the exclusion of British and French war-vessels from American harbors. The House resented the treatment, and after another long debate, March 5, refused to concur in the Senate’s amendments. By a vote of sixty-seven to forty-seven the bill was sent back to the Senate in its original form. A long wrangle ensued; a committee of conference failed to agree, and March 16 the Senate was obliged to decide whether it would yield to the House, or allow the bill to fail.
On that question Samuel Smith made a speech,[145] which he afterward printed, and which demanded attention because it forced President Madison into a course that exposed him to severe and perhaps deserved criticism. The Senate was equally balanced. Samuel Smith’s voice and vote decided the result. His reasons were such as no one could misunderstand.
“I found in it,” said he, criticising Macon’s bill, “or believed I did, that which would be ruinous to the commerce of the United States, and therefore felt myself bound by the duty I owe to my constituents to remove the veil and leave the measure open to public view.... Is there no danger, Mr. President, to be apprehended from the Emperor if the bill should pass with this provision [that any British or French ship hereafter arriving in an American harbor should with its cargo be seized and condemned]? His character for decision is well known. Might we not fear that he would retort our own measure upon us by causing all the property of our merchants now under sequestration (amounting to at least three millions of dollars) to be condemned?... But what will England do should this law pass? Will the King and Council retaliate our measure? I confess, Mr. President, that I think they will.... What will be the consequence? Ruin to your merchants and destruction to the party which now governs this country.... But I have been told that if England should retaliate, her retaliation would operate as a complete non-intercourse between the two countries, and in a way that would be effectual; and that as I had always approved those measures, this view of the subject must meet my approbation,—that it would precisely create that which I have said was a powerful measure against Great Britain: to wit, an embargo. I never will agree, Mr. President, in this side-way to carry into execution a great national measure.”
The speech excited surprise that Samuel Smith, a man accounted shrewd, should suppose such arguments to be decent, much less convincing. From Federalists, who conscientiously wished submission to British policy, Smith’s reasoning would have seemed natural; but Smith protested against submission, and favored arming merchant-ships and providing them with convoy,—a measure useless except to bring on war in a “side-way.” Congress preferred to choose its own time for fighting, and declined listening to Smith’s advice, although the Senate sustained him in rejecting Macon’s bill. On this occasion Giles appeared, and voted with the Administration; but sixteen senators followed Smith, while only fifteen could be found to act in concert with the House and the Executive.
After the Senate had thus put an end to Macon’s bill, the House after much hesitation, March 31, put an end to Smith’s bill. After five months of discussion Congress found itself, April 1, where it had been in the previous November.
Rather than resume friendly relations with both belligerents without even expressing a wish for the recovery of national self-respect, the House made one more effort. April 7 Macon reported a new bill, which was naturally nicknamed Macon’s bill No. 2. This measure also seems to have had the assent of the Cabinet, but Macon himself neither framed nor favored it. “I am at a loss to guess what we shall do on the subject of foreign relations,” he wrote to his friend Judge Nicholson, three days later.[146] “The bill in the enclosed paper, called Macon’s No. 2, is not really Macon’s, though he reports it as chairman. It is in truth Taylor’s. This I only mention to you, because when it comes to be debated I shall not act the part of a father, but of a step-father.” The Taylor who took this responsibility was a member from South Carolina, whose career offered no other great distinction than the measure which produced a war with England.
Macon’s bill No. 2 was the last of the annual legislative measures taken by Congress to counteract by commercial interest the encroachments of France and Great Britain. The first was the Partial Non-intercourse Act of April, 1806; the second was the Embargo Act with its supplements, dating from Dec. 22, 1807; the third was the Total Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809; and the fourth was Macon’s bill No. 2. Each year produced a new experiment; but the difference could be easily remembered, for after the climax of the embargo each successive annual enactment showed weakening faith in the policy, until Macon’s bill No. 2 marked the last stage toward the admitted failure of commercial restrictions as a substitute for war. Abandoning the pretence of direct resistance to France and England, this measure repealed the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, leaving commercial relations with all the world as free as ever before, but authorizing the President “in case either Great Britain or France shall, before the 3d day of March next, so revoke or modify her edicts as that they shall cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States,” to prohibit intercourse with the nation which had not revoked its edicts.
The objections to the bill were overpowering, for its effect was equivalent to alliance with England. Had the United States taken active part in the war against France, they could have done Napoleon no greater injury than by the passage of this Act, which invited Great Britain to control American commerce for her military purposes. On the other hand the bill conferred on the President a discretion dangerous, unconstitutional, and unnecessary,—a power once before conferred by the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, and then resulting in the mistakes of Erskine’s arrangement, which seemed warning enough against repeating the same risk.
These objections were well understood and forcibly pointed out, while the arguments in support of the bill were melancholy in their admissions. The records of Congress could hardly parallel the disregard of dignity with which Taylor defended his bill in a tone that could have been endured only by an assembly lost to the habits of self-respect. His denunciation of war expressed party doctrine, and he harmed no one by repeating the time-worn moral drawn from Greece and Rome, the Persian millions, Philip of Macedon, Syracuse and Carthage,—as though the fate of warlike nations proved that they should have submitted to foreign outrage, or as though the world could show either arts or liberty except such as had sprung from the cradle of war; but feeling perhaps that classical authority proved too little or too much, he told the House frankly why those members who like himself opposed war found themselves unable to maintain the pledge of resistance they had given in imposing the embargo:—
“But concerning the breaking down of the embargo! Let the truth come out! Neither this plea nor the other miserable one of the fear of insurrections, and what not, will do.... The embargo repealed itself. The wants created by it to foreigners, and the accidental failure of crops in England had reduced the thing in one article to plain calculation. The vote of this House to repeal the law gave from four to five dollars rise on each barrel of flour. This was the weight that pulled us down.”
The admission could not inspire enthusiasm or raise the moral standard of Congress; but the House accepted it, and amended the bill only by adding fifty per cent to the existing duties on all products of Great Britain and France. The amendment was also a business speculation, for it was intended to protect and encourage American manufactures; but it did not come directly from the manufacturers. Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky moved the amendment. “Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the New England Republicans,” wrote Macon,[147] “are full of manufacturing. To these may be added some of the Virginia Republicans. This plan is said to be a Cabinet project; if so, it satisfies me that the Cabinet is hard pushed for a plan.”
April 19 the bill passed the House by a vote of sixty-one to forty. The Senate referred it to a select committee with Samuel Smith at its head,—a committee made for Smith to control. As before, he reported the measure with its only effective provision—the additional duty—struck out, and with the addition of a convoy-clause. The Senate, by nineteen votes to eight, sustained Smith; nor did one New England senator, Federalist or Republican, vote for the protection offered by Kentucky and Virginia. The bill went to a third reading by a vote of twenty-one to seven, and April 28, having passed the Senate as Smith reported it without a division, was sent back to the House for concurrence.
Irritated though the House was by the Senate’s hostility to every measure which had support from the Treasury or was calculated to give it support, the members were for the most part anxious only to see the session ended. No one cared greatly for Macon’s bill No. 2 in any shape. The House refused to accept the Senate’s amendments, and found itself May 1 within a few hours of adjournment, and within the same time of seeing the Non-intercourse Act expire, without having made provision for the commercial relations that were to follow. Perhaps Congress might have shown wisdom by doing nothing; but the instinct to do something was strong, and party feeling mixed with the sense of responsibility. At five o’clock in the afternoon committees of conference were appointed, and at the evening session, Samuel Smith having abandoned his convoy-clause, the House gave up its extra duties and the bill came to its passage. All the Federalists voted against it with Macon, Randolph, and Matthew Lyon,—a minority of twenty-seven. Sixty-four Republicans recorded themselves in its favor, and made the bill a law.