If Pitt should retaliate, Gregg would go further; he would confiscate all the private property belonging to British subjects on which he could lay his hands, treaty stipulations to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Pennsylvanian contented himself with pacific measures, and his oratory had the merit of consistency with his party doctrines and principles; but the democracy of Massachusetts, which would never understand or obey the theories of Virginia and Pennsylvania, could not rest content with Gregg’s Quaker ideas.
“After the course we are now taking,” said Crowninshield, “should Britain persist in her captures and in her oppressive treatment of our seamen, and refuse to give them up, I would not hesitate to meet her in war. But, as I observed before, I do not believe Great Britain will go to war. Our trade is too valuable to her. She knows, too, that in such an event she will lose her eastern provinces; the States of Vermont and Massachusetts will ask no other assistance than their own militia to take Canada and Nova Scotia. Some of her West Indian islands will also fall. She knows also other things. Her subjects own sixteen millions of the old public debt of the United States, eight millions of the Louisiana stock, and three or four millions bank stock, and have private debts to the amount of ten or twelve millions,—amounting in the whole to nearly forty millions of dollars. Will Great Britain, by going to war, risk her provinces and this large amount of property? I think she will not put so much to hazard.”
When Crowninshield sat down, John Randolph took the floor. In Randolph’s long career of oratorical triumphs, no such moment had offered itself before, or was to occur again. Still in Virginian eyes the truest and ablest Republican in Congress, the representative of power and principle, the man of the future, Randolph stood with the halo of youth, courage, and genius round his head,—a sort of Virginian Saint Michael, almost terrible in his contempt for whatever seemed to him base or untrue. He began by saying that he entered on the subject “manacled, handcuffed, and tongue-tied;” his lips were sealed; he could but “hobble over the subject as well as his fettered limbs and palsied tongue would enable him to do it;” and with this preamble he fell upon Gregg and Crowninshield:[127]—
“It is mere waste of time to reason with such persons; they do not deserve anything like serious refutation. The proper arguments for such statesmen are a strait-waistcoat, a dark room, water-gruel, and depletion.”
The proposed confiscation of British property called out a sneer at Crowninshield:—
“God help you if these are your ways and means for carrying on war! if your finances are in the hands of such a chancellor of the exchequer! Because a man can take an observation and keep a log-book and a reckoning, can navigate a cock-boat to the West Indies or the East, shall he aspire to navigate the great vessel of State, to stand at the helm of public councils? Ne sutor ultra crepidam!”
Again and again he turned aside to express contempt for the Northern democrats:—
“Shall this great mammoth of the American forest leave his native element and plunge into the water in a mad contest with the shark? Let him stay on shore, and not be excited by the muscles and periwinkles on the strand!”
On the point of policy Randolph took ground which, if not warlike, was at least consistent,—the ground which all Southern Republicans of the Jefferson school would have taken, if shame had not withheld them. Even if determined in the end to submit, the President and Secretary wished to keep up the form of resistance. Randolph declared that the form was absurd; he would do nothing to protect “this mushroom, this fungus of war,”—a carrying-trade which at the first moment of peace would no longer exist:—