Meanwhile, out of doors the fight was being waged with spirit. In Boston, the ‘Centinel,’ organ of the Federalists, was making scurrilous attacks on Madison. He had been the counselor and abettor of Genêt—a corrupt tool of France since the embassy of Gerard.[880] He was the agent of France,[881] the tool of anarchists,[882] and he could have learned nothing about commerce in Virginia ‘where no other commerce is transacted than buying and selling of negroes.’[883]
To these attacks the Jeffersonians responded with a call for a town meeting to act on the Madison Resolutions. Before a great crowd at the Old South Church a dramatic forensic scene was staged, the eloquent Jarvis leading for the Resolutions, the brilliant young Harrison Gray Otis for the opposition, until darkness forced an adjournment till the morrow when it was renewed until afternoon, when the question was indefinitely postponed. Otis had won the only victory possible in successfully filibustering against a vote.[884] At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a mass meeting at the State House endorsed the Resolutions,[885] and to the astonishment of Madison a meeting was held in New York City at the instance of the Jeffersonians.[886] In Philadelphia, with Hamilton looking on from the wings, the merchants met to denounce the Resolutions, but after a demonstration in their favor the attempt to get a vote upon them was abandoned.[887]
But it was in Charleston that the rage of the populace over the pro-English utterances of Smith and Ames assumed the most virulent form. Men cursed them in the streets, denounced them in resolutions, burned them both in effigy. Bache, then the leading Jeffersonian editor, deprecated the burning. ‘Sorry I am to see these English fashions adopted by free-born Americans.’[888] The cynical Ames’s sense of humor left him unscorched by the flames. ‘I am willing to have it believed,’ he wrote, ‘that as I come out of the fire undiminished in weight, I am pure gold.’[889] But it was more serious to Smith, for it was his constituents who consigned him to the fire. The publication and circulation of the speech he had not written had deepened the resentment. How much hotter might have been the flames had the mob foreseen the printing of an English edition with the boastful prefatory statement that it had driven the author of the Declaration of Independence from office![890] Indeed, the fortunes of the fight had turned, and the Hamiltonians, lately jubilant over Jefferson’s embarrassment with Genêt, had troubles of their own. Wolcott was complaining that Hammond, the British Minister, was ‘weak, vain and impudent,’[891] and even Ames was alarmed because he ‘rails against the conduct of our Government, not ore rotundo, but with a gabble that his feelings render doubly unintelligible.’[892] By their speeches against Madison’s Resolutions, the Federalists had inextricably entangled themselves with British policies, and it was the chatter of the streets and the gossip of the press.
‘From the speechification of Sedgwick and Ames
Some might think that they both had drank deep of the Thames,
For “our dear Mother Country,” the former stands forth
In strains that were worthy a pupil of North.’[893]
It was in this state of public opinion, and with Ames wailing that England was ‘driving us to the wall,’ that the news from the West Indies aroused the people to a white heat of fury and put them on the march.
II
In compliance with an Order in Council, the British had seized more than a hundred vessels and held them for condemnation. So appalling were the possibilities that even Bache made the announcement in terms of measured moderation.[894] Ames no longer mentioned the ‘amicable disposition’ of the British, or inquired with a childlike innocence what England had done to offend the Americans. With war seemingly inevitable, the Hamiltonians were driven to the simulation of a warlike mood. The spirit of ‘76 burst into flames.
Under such conditions the debate on the Madison Resolutions was resumed. When the sneer of Ames and Parker that they bore ‘the French stamp’ was loudly hissed by enraged visitors in the galleries, the Federalists took to cover.[895] Extreme provocative measures were introduced and pressed. The demand for the sequestration of British debts led to vitriolic exchanges. ‘That king of sea robbers!’ That ‘Leviathan which aims at swallowing up all that floats upon the ocean!’ Boudinot, Hamiltonian, pleaded for ‘calmness.’[896] Dexter denounced the proposal as the counsel of dishonor. ‘English tool!’ roared the raging streets.
Then came the Non-Intercourse Act, with the Federalists, off their high horse, literally begging for ‘calm deliberation.’ Even Sedgwick was in an importunate mood; but the measure was pushed with all the more determination and passed with most of the Hamiltonians against it.[897] Even when Fitzsimons fell into line, he was trounced by the press with the open charge that he had held out until his own brig ‘had departed to our good English friends at Kingston ... with a cargo of flour.’[898] Clearly the Hamiltonians had to conciliate the public in some way, and Sedgwick came forward with a plan for an army; and Madison denounced it as ‘the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government.’[899]
Out in the streets the people were on a rampage. Phineas Bond, the British Consul in Philadelphia, reported to Grenville that the Americans even resented the Orders in Council.[900] Worse still, he and Hammond the Minister could not even walk the streets without being subjected to ‘menaces from knots of street politicians.’ The consul in Baltimore had been forced by threats of violence to take refuge in the capital.[901]