“The question was simply, Buy or fight! Both Houses by great majorities said, Buy! The manner of buying appears a little disagreeable. Politicians will believe it perfectly honest to induce France ‘by money’ to coerce Spain to sell that which she has absolutely declared was her own property, and from which she would not part. Mr. Randolph expects that this public explosion of our views and plans will render abortive this negotiation, and make the Executive and poor little Madison unpopular. Against this last he vents his spleen. However, he spares nobody, and by this conduct has compelled all to rally round the Executive for their own preservation. From the Potomac north and east, the members adhere to the President; south they fall daily from their allegiance.”
Thus, after four months of confusion, victory declared itself on the President’s side.[134] Randolph’s violence, even more than Jefferson’s dexterity, was fatal to the old Republican uprising. As early as April 1 discipline was restored, with Madison stronger than ever before. The few remaining days of the session only confirmed the result.
CHAPTER VIII.
The President’s triumph was decided as early as March 17, for on that day General Smith’s assault upon Armstrong was defeated in the Senate by Vice-President Clinton’s casting vote; and in the House, Randolph’s resistance to the non-importation policy against England ended in his discomfiture and withdrawal; but although even at that early moment no one could doubt Jefferson’s irresistible strength, yet no one who knew John Randolph could suppose that either the President or his Secretary of State was in future to sleep on roses.
The session ended April 21; and during the few weeks that intervened between Randolph’s defeat, March 17, and the adjournment, the exasperated Virginian developed a strange and unequalled genius. His position was new. The alternation of threat and entreaty, of lofty menace and reluctant obedience, which marked the conduct of the State Department in its dealings with France and England, had no real admirer in the United States. When Randolph denounced the change in Spanish policy, not a voice was raised in its defence, and the public wondered that so powerful a President should be left an unprotected victim to assaults so furious. In truth Madison himself must have been tongue-tied; no resource of logic could excuse his sudden abandonment of the determination “to extinguish in the French government every hope of turning our controversy with Spain into a French job, public or private.” Even had he succeeded in excusing himself, his success must have proved that Randolph’s crime consisted in maintaining the ground which had been taken and held by President, secretary, and plenipotentiaries down to the moment, Oct. 23, 1805, when without explanation the ground was abandoned. Silence and numbers were the only arguments in defence of such a change, and to these forms of logic the followers of the Administration at first resorted. “It is a matter of great astonishment to me,” wrote Wilson Cary Nicholas to Jefferson April 2, “that such a philippic as we have seen could have been uttered in Congress, and not one word said in justification of the Administration.”[135] Toward the end of the session this silence ceased; the majority made great efforts to answer Randolph; but the answers were weaker than the silence.
Besides this difficulty in the nature of the case, the majority felt more than ever the advantage enjoyed by Randolph in his vigor and quickness of mind. For two months he controlled the House by audacity and energy of will. The Crowninshields, Varnums, and Bidwells of New England, the Sloans, Smilies, and Findleys of the Middle States, could do nothing with him; but by the time he had done with them they were bruised and sore, mortified, angry, and ridiculous. The consciousness of this superiority, heightened to extreme arrogance by the need of brushing away every moment a swarm of flies which seemed never to know they were crushed, excited Randolph to madness. He set no bounds to the expression of his scorn not only for the Northern democrats, but for the House itself and for the whole government. At one member he shook his fist, and imperiously bade him sit down or to go down the back-stairs; another member he called an old toothless driveller, superannuated, and mumbling in second dotage.[136] He flung Madison’s pamphlet with violent contempt on the floor of the House; and he told the House itself that it could not maintain a decision two hours together against the Yazoo lobby.
Sloan of New Jersey, a sort of butt in the party, who could not forgive Randolph’s allusion to the “vegetable specific,” retorted that Randolph behaved like “a maniac in a strait-jacket accidentally broke out of his cell.” No doubt his conduct was open to the charge; but none the less the maniac gave great trouble and caused extreme confusion. Even after three fourths of the House came to share Sloan’s opinion, and began the attempt to control Randolph by every means in their power, they found the task beyond them.
The Non-importation Bill, framed on Nicholson’s Resolution, was quickly reported, and March 25 the House agreed to fix November 15 as the date on which the Act should go into operation. Randolph could not prevent its passage, but he could make it contemptible, if it was not so already; and he could encourage the Government and people of England to treat it with derision.
“Never in the course of my life,” he cried,[137] “have I witnessed such a scene of indignity and inefficiency as this measure holds forth to the world. What is it? A milk-and-water Bill! A dose of chicken-broth to be taken nine months hence!... It is too contemptible to be the object of consideration, or to excite the feelings of the pettiest State in Europe.”
The Bill immediately passed by a vote of ninety-three to thirty-two; but every man on the floor felt that Randolph was right, and every foreign minister at Washington adopted his tone.