CHAPTER I
THE PERIOD OF AMERICANIZATION
Great Britain is fighting our battles and the battles of mankind, and France is combating for the power to enslave and plunder us and all the world. (Fisher Ames.)
Though every one of these Bugbears is an empty Phantom, yet the People seem to believe every article of this bombastical Creed. Who shall touch these blind eyes. (John Adams.)
The object of England, long obvious, is to claim the ocean as her domain. (Jefferson.)
I am for resistance by the sword. (Henry Clay.)
Into the life of John Marshall war was strangely woven. His birth, his young manhood, his public services before he became Chief Justice, were coincident with, and affected by, war. It seemed to be the decree of Fate that his career should march side by side with armed conflict, and that the final phase of that career should open with a war—a war, too, which brought forth a National consciousness among the people and demonstrated a National strength hitherto unsuspected in their fundamental law.
Yet, while American Nationalism was Marshall's one and only great conception, and the fostering of it the purpose of his life, he was wholly out of sympathy with the National movement that led to our second conflict with Great Britain, and against the continuance of it. He heartily shared the opinion of the Federalist leaders that the War of 1812 was unnecessary, unwise, and unrighteous.
By the time France and England had renewed hostilities in 1803, the sympathies of these men had become wholly British. The excesses of the French Revolution had started them on this course of feeling and thinking. Their detestation of Jefferson, their abhorrence of Republican doctrines, their resentment of Virginia domination, all hastened their progress toward partisanship for Great Britain. They had, indeed, reverted to the colonial state of mind, and the old phrases, "the mother country," "the protection of the British fleet,"[1] were forever on their lips.
These Federalists passionately hated France; to them France was only the monstrous child of the terrible Revolution which, in the name of human rights, had attacked successfully every idea dear to their hearts—upset all order, endangered all property, overturned all respectability. They were sure that Napoleon intended to subjugate the world; and that Great Britain was our only bulwark against the aggressions of the Conqueror—that "varlet" whose "patron-saint [is] Beelzebub," as Gouverneur Morris referred to Napoleon.[2]