The Secretary of the Treasury had only a month before officially asserted the contrary; but any excuse for avoiding war seemed to satisfy the House. From the beginning to the end of this long and ardent debate not one member from any quarter of the Union ventured to say—what every man in the United States would have said ten years later—that after the formal and fixed decisions of France and England war existed in fact and should be declared in form.
With all John Randolph’s waywardness and extravagance, he alone shone among this mass of mediocrities, and like the water-snakes in Coleridge’s silent ocean his every track was a flash of golden fire. At moments he struck passionately at his own favorite companions—at Macon and Williams—as he struck at Jefferson. The steady decline of public spirit stung his pride. “It was in that fatal session of 1805-1806 that the policy of yielding to anything that might come in the shape of insult and aggression was commenced. The result was then foretold. It has happened.”[328] Speaker after speaker revelled in narrating the long list of insults and outrages which America had endured in patience.
“The House will pardon me,” said Randolph,[329] “if I forbear a minute recapitulation of the wrongs which we have received not only from the two great belligerents of Europe, but from the little belligerents also. I cannot, like Shylock, take a pleasure in saying, ‘On such a day you called me dog; on such a day you spit upon my gabardine.’”
Yet Randolph himself fell naturally into the habits at which he sneered; and his wit alone raised him above the common level of Congressmen. However happily he might ridicule the timidity and awkwardness of others, he never advanced a positive opinion of his own without repudiating it the moment he was taken at his word. “I would scuffle for commerce,” he said;[330] and the phrase was itself unworthy of a proud people like the Virginians; but when Campbell tried to force from him a pledge to stand by the Government in asserting the national rights, Randolph declined to gratify him.
Of all the speakers, George Washington Campbell—the reputed author of the Report—alone took a tone which might almost be called courageous; but even Campbell thought more of tactics than of dignity. He admitted that the object of his Report was to unite the party on common ground; but he dared not say whether this common ground was to be embargo or war; he did not even say—what must have been in his mind—that the Government had exhausted alternatives. His chief effort seemed rather to be directed toward making a dilemma for the Federalists:—
“Are they determined to vindicate the rights and independence of their country? If they are, we wish to know in what manner. If they are not willing to pursue the measures of resistance we propose, of a total interdiction of intercourse with those Powers, will they assume a higher ground? Will they prefer war? If they do, this is one of the alternatives presented in the Report. We wish to know what measures they are willing to adopt for the safety of the nation. The crisis is awful. The time has come to unite the people of America. We join issue with the gentlemen as to a temporizing policy. We have not,—we will not now temporize. We say there is no middle course. We are in the first place for cutting off all intercourse with those Powers who trample on our rights. If that will not prove effectual, we say take the last alternative, war, with all its calamities, rather than submission or national degradation.”
The most interesting part of Campbell’s speech was his awkward admission that peaceable coercion had failed. Such an admission was equivalent to avowing that the Republican party had failed, but Campbell stumbled as he best could through this mortifying confession.
“We could not foresee,” he said,[331] “that the Governments of those Powers would not regard the distress and sufferings of their own people; that France would suffer her West Indian colonies to be almost desolated with famine, and to be compelled to apply to their inveterate enemy to save them from actual starvation rather than revoke her decrees; nor could we know that the Government of Great Britain would be regardless of the complaints and representations of her manufacturers and a respectable portion of her merchants; that it would lend a deaf ear to the hungry cries of the starving mechanics, and silence their just and loud complaints with the thunder of their murdering guns, and quench their hunger with a shower of balls instead of bread. We cannot be culpable for not anticipating such events.”
Yet for twenty years the Federalists had wearied the country with prophecies of these disappointments which Campbell and his Republican friends said they could not be expected to foresee. Jefferson had persisted in acting on the theory that he could enforce national rights by peaceable means; had staked his reputation, after long and varied experience, on the soundness of this doctrine which his political opponents denied; and suddenly, on its failure, his followers pleaded that they could not be held culpable for failing to anticipate what their political opponents had steadily foretold. The confession of such an oversight was more fatal than all the sneers of Randolph and the taunts of Quincy.
There Congress for the moment stopped. The debate—which began November 28 and lasted till December 17—ended in the adoption of Campbell’s first Resolution by a vote of one hundred and eighteen to two; of the second by eighty-four to thirty; and of the third without opposition. Nothing was decided; and the year closed leaving Congress, as Gallatin told his friend Nicholson, in “great confusion and perplexity.”