“The course advocated in that Report is in my opinion loathsome,” he said; “the spirit it breathes disgraceful; the temper it is likely to inspire neither calculated to regain the rights we have lost, nor to preserve those which remain to us.”
Assuming that the Report was made in the interest of embargo, and that it foreshadowed the permanence of the anti-commercial system, he met it by threats of insurrection and civil war, expressed in the same breath with which they were disavowed:—
“Good Heavens! Mr. Chairman, are men mad? Is this House touched with that insanity which is the never-failing precursor of the intention of Heaven to destroy? The people of New England, after eleven months’ deprivation of the ocean, to be commanded still longer to abandon it! for an undefined period to hold their unalienable rights at the tenure of the will of Britain or of Bonaparte!... I am lost in astonishment, Mr. Chairman. I have not words to express the matchless absurdity of this attempt. I have no tongue to express the swift and headlong destruction which a blind perseverance in such a system must bring upon this nation.... This embargo must be repealed. You cannot enforce it for any important period of time longer. When I speak of your inability to enforce this law, let not gentlemen misunderstand me. I mean not to intimate insurrection or open defiance of them; although it is impossible to foresee in what acts that oppression will finally terminate which, we are told, makes wise men mad.” Nature gave the ocean to New England, “and among a people thus situated, thus educated, thus numerous, laws prohibiting them from the exercise of their natural rights will have a binding effect not one moment longer than the public sentiment supports them.”
Always assuming that the talk of war covered the plan of retaining the embargo, Quincy allowed himself to encourage warlike ideas much more recklessly than suited some of his party friends. He ventured to goad the majority toward a decision which of all possible results was most disliked by the Federalists of New England:—
“Take no counsel of fears. Your strength will increase with the trial, and prove greater than you are now aware. But I shall be told this may lead to war. I ask, Are we now at peace? Certainly not, unless retiring from insult be peace, unless shrinking under the lash be peace. The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it. The idea that nothing on earth is so dreadful as war is inculcated too studiously among us. Disgrace is worse. Abandonment of essential rights is worse.”
Whatever Quincy might have been willing to accept, the party to which he belonged wanted no war except with France, while the Republicans were opposed to war in any shape. John Randolph did indeed hint at the use of force, but Randolph’s opinion was never for two days the same. Philip Barton Key of Maryland, as vehement a Federalist as Quincy, also advised a policy which could lead only to war:—
“I would let our vessels go out armed for resistance, and if they were interfered with I would make the dernier appeal. We are able and willing to resist; and when the moment arrives, there will be but one heart and one hand throughout the Union.”
The sentiment was patriotic; but as though expressly to prove how little it could be trusted, Barent Gardenier rose to say, in emphatic and unqualified terms, that England was wholly in the right, and that from the first the American government had aimed at provoking war.[323] Gardenier’s views were those of a majority of Federalists, and in the end were adopted by the party. Quincy’s blindness to the serious danger of war cost him the confidence of more cautious conservatives.
On the opposite side, the Republicans seemed for the most part fairly cowed by the vigor with which the Federalists defied the embargo and war at once. Nothing in American history offered a more interesting illustration of the first stage of the national character than the open avowals by Congress in 1808 of motives closely akin to fear. America as a nation could run no serious military peril, even though she declared war on England and France at once. The worst military disaster that could happen would be a bombardment or temporary occupation of some seaboard city; the most terrible punishment within the range of possibility was the burning of a few small wooden towns which could be rebuilt in three months, and whose destruction implied no necessary loss of life. Neither England nor France had armies to spare for permanent conquest in America; but so thoroughly had the theory of peaceable coercion taken possession of the national character that men of courage appealed to motives such as in a private dispute they would have thought degrading.
“The gentleman talked of resistance, and resistance on sea,” said Willis Alston of North Carolina, in reply to Quincy.[324] “Did any one believe that he seriously meant meeting the powerful navy of Great Britain on the sea,—of that Britain who had been emphatically styled ‘the mistress of the ocean,’ and who was ‘fighting for the liberties of the world and of mankind’? No, sir; nothing of the kind is meant. Submission to her orders would be the inevitable consequence of the gentleman’s resistance, and finally a loss of everything dear to the American character,—a loss of our liberty and independence as a free people.”