Clearly this would not do; and Gallatin undertook to set the matter right.
“The apparent difficulty in framing the Resolutions,” he wrote to the President,[97] “arises from the attempt to blend the three objects together. The same reasons which have induced the President to send two distinct messages render it necessary that the public Resolutions of Congress should be distinct from the private ones; that those which relate to the war posture of the Spanish affairs, which are intended to express the national sense on that subject, and to enable the President to take the steps which appear immediately necessary on the frontier, should not be mixed with those proceedings calculated only to effect an accommodation.”
The Secretary of the Treasury frequently corrected his chief, and still more frequently hinted a correction. Only a few days had passed since Jefferson had spoken to Gallatin of the “strong language toward Spain” as “meant to produce an effect at the Tuileries.” Gallatin ignored this object, and spoke of the strong language toward Spain as intended to express the national sense, and as restricted in its bearing to the steps immediately necessary for protecting the frontier. The difference was worth noting. Evidently Gallatin felt no great confidence in producing an effect on the Tuileries.
“The course now recommended,” he continued, “is precisely that which was followed in the Louisiana business when the deposit was withdrawn. A public Resolution ... was moved by Randolph, and adopted by the House. A committee in the mean while brought in a confidential report sufficient to support and justify the President in the purchase he was going to attempt, and to this an appropriation law in very general terms was added. To follow a similar course appears not only best, but will also, as founded on precedent, be the smoothest mode of doing the business in Congress.”
The President adopted Gallatin’s suggestions.[98] The double messages breathing war and peace were prepared. The double answers were sketched out. Congress had only to act with the same quickness and secrecy which it had shown in the Louisiana business; and of its readiness to do so, no one in the Cabinet seemed to doubt.
Yet nations could not so readily as individuals swing about on a course opposite to that which they had been led to expect. The American public had been wrought to anger against Spain. Of the negotiations little was publicly known. Monroe had come, and gone; the Marquis Yrujo had remonstrated, and had written in newspapers; but the rights and wrongs of the Spanish dispute remained a mystery to the public at large, which knew only that Spain had rejected all the offers made by the United States, had resumed her depredations on American commerce, and had taken a menacing attitude at Mobile and on the Sabine. Throughout the year the Republican press had followed hints from the Government at Washington, all looking toward a rupture with Spain. The same newspapers had shown at first a wish to make light of the late British seizures,—a course which misled the Federalist press into denunciations of England such as would never have been risked had the party in power not seemed disposed to apologize for England’s conduct. The country at large was prepared to hear the President advise a rupture with Spain, and upon that rupture to found his hope of success in negotiating with Pitt. The warlike tone of the Annual Message was certain to give additional strength to this expectation; and Jefferson might have foreseen that the sudden secret change of tone to be taken immediately afterward in the special message on Spanish affairs would produce bewilderment among his followers.
No one could doubt where the confusion would first appear. The last session had ended in a series of quarrels, in which party distinctions had been almost forgotten. The summer had done nothing to reunite the factions; on the contrary, it had done much to widen the breach. Already the “Aurora” announced that the Yazoo question was to determine “the relations, the principles, the characters, and the strength of parties in the next session of Congress;” and the public knew that the Yazoo question had passed beyond the stage of rational argument, and had become the test of personal devotion, the stepping-stone to favor or proscription with the next President. Three years before the election of 1808 Congress was already torn by a Virginia feud,—a struggle for power between John Randolph and James Madison.
As though to hurry and prolong this struggle, Jefferson announced, after his second inauguration, that he should retire at the close of his term, March 4, 1809. Without expressly recommending Madison as his successor, his strong personal attachment insured to the Secretary of State the whole weight of Executive influence. The whole weight was needed. The secretary, with all his amiable qualities, was very far from controlling the voice of Virginia. His strength lay rather among the Northern democrats, semi-Federalists, or “Yazoo men,” as they were called, who leaned toward him because he, of all the prominent Virginians, was least Virginian. His diplomatic triumph in buying Louisiana had given him an easy advantage over his rivals; but even his reputation might sink with the failure of the Spanish treaty and the aggression of England.
No one who knew the men, or who had followed the course of President Jefferson’s first Administration, could feel surprise that Madison’s character should act on John Randolph as an irritant. Madison was cautious, if not timid; Randolph was always in extremes. Madison was apt to be on both sides of the same question, as when he wrote the “Federalist” and the Virginia Resolutions of 1798; Randolph pardoned dalliance with Federalism in no one but himself. Madison was in person small, retiring, modest, with quiet malice in his humor, and with marked taste for closet politics and delicate management; Randolph was tall in stature, abrupt in manner, self-asserting in temper, sarcastic, with a pronounced taste for publicity, and a vehement contempt for those silent influences which more practical politicians called legitimate and necessary, but which Randolph, when he could not control them, called corrupt. Jefferson soon remarked, in regard to what Randolph denounced as back-stairs influence, “We never heard this while the declaimer was himself a back-stairs man.”[99] Just as the criticism was, no one could deny that Randolph seemed much out of place on the back-stairs of the White House, whereas Madison seemed to him in place nowhere else. The Spanish papers, which Randolph must read, were not likely to increase his respect for the Secretary of State; while Madison’s candidacy made a counter-movement necessary for those Virginians who would not be dragged at the heels of the Northern democracy.
Long before the month of December Randolph foresaw the coming trouble. The Yazoo men in the Ninth Congress were more numerous than ever; and they were credited with the wish to eject Speaker Macon from the chair, and to put some Northern democrat in Randolph’s place at the head of the Committee of Ways and Means. Oct. 25, 1805, Randolph wrote to Gallatin from Bizarre:—