“Whenever our national legislature,” he said, “is led to overleap the prescribed bounds of their constitutional powers, on the State legislatures in great emergencies devolves the arduous task,—it is their right, it becomes their duty,—to interpose their protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people and the assumed power of the general government.”
If Madison was not by that time weary of his own words,—if the Resolutions of 1798 and the fatal “interpose” of Virginia had not become hateful to his ears,—he might have found some amusement in the irony with which Trumbull flung the familiar phrases of Virginia back into her face; but serious as such conduct was, the mere defiance carried less alarm than was warranted by the signs of secret concert with England which the Federalists willingly betrayed. Trumbull and Hillhouse, Pickering and Otis, were not necessarily masters of the situation, even when at the head of all New England; but when they pointed significantly at the fleets and armies of Great Britain behind them, they carried terror to the heart of the Union. So little did they hide their attitude toward the British government that their organ, the “New England Palladium,” published, January 6, Canning’s personal letter of Sept. 23, 1808, to Pinkney, which Madison had suppressed. How it had been obtained, no one knew. The British Foreign Office seemed to stand in direct communication with Boston, while the Boston Federalists exulted in a chance to swell what they thought the triumph of George Canning over their own Federalist friend, William Pinkney.
Tactics like these, unscrupulous though they might be, were effective. Jefferson and Madison had the best reason to know the force of such factiousness, for only ten years before, on less provocation, they had themselves led in Virginia and Kentucky a movement with a similar purpose; but although their history as leaders of an opposition implied agreement in principle with the doings of Massachusetts and Connecticut, their dignity and interest as Presidents of the United States required them to carry out the laws they had advised and approved. Whatever might be the personal wishes of a few men like Pickering, the great mass of Federalists wished at heart no more harm to the country than to overthrow and humiliate Jefferson, and to cripple Madison from the start; while the Administration, on its side, in struggling to escape a personal humiliation, was obliged to adopt any course that offered the best hope of success even though it should sacrifice the national character. As the last weeks of President Jefferson’s Administration approached, this personal conflict—the bitterness of sixteen years—concentrated its virulence upon a single point, but that point vital to Jefferson’s fame and popularity,—the embargo.
Rarely in American history has been seen a struggle more furious or less ennobling than that which took place at Washington in the months of January and February, 1809. With a bold face, but with small confidence, Madison and Gallatin pressed their measures. After passing the Enforcement Act on the morning of January 6, Congress turned at once to a matter even more serious. January 7 a Resolution was offered in the House providing for an early meeting of the next Congress, and in the short debate that followed, a distinct line began for the first time to divide the advocates of war from the partisans of peace. The extra session was avowedly to be called for the purpose of declaring war. Simultaneously a bill was introduced to raise, arm, and equip fifty thousand volunteers to serve for the term of two years; while the Senate sent down another bill ordering all the frigates and gunboats to be “fitted out, officered, manned, and employed as soon as may be.” The fourth Monday in May was the date proposed for the extra session, and Congress at last found itself face to face with the naked issue of war.
The effect of the crisis upon Congress was immediate. Doubt, defiance, dismay, and disgust took possession of the Legislature, which swayed backward and forward from day to day, as courage or fear prevailed. The old Republicans, who could not yield their faith in the embargo, begged almost piteously for delay.
“A large portion of the people, the South almost unanimously,” urged David R. Williams of South Carolina, “have expressed a wish that the Government should adhere to the embargo till it produces an effect, or the capacity to produce the effect be disproved. You are like to be driven out of the embargo by war? Why, sir, look at the sensation in New England and New York, and talk about going to war when you cannot maintain an embargo!... If you do not adopt war before the fourth Monday in May, will the nation be ruined if you postpone it still further?”[362]
Macon declared that the embargo was still the people’s choice:—
“As to the people being tired of the embargo, whenever they want war in preference to it they will send their petitions here to that effect.... Let each man put the question to his neighbor whether he will have war or embargo, and there is no doubt but he will answer in favor of the latter.”
Such reasoning, honest and true as it was in the mouths of men like Macon and Williams, gave a tone of weakness and irresolution to the debate, while it acted on the Federalists with the force of defiance, and drew from Josiah Quincy a speech which long remained famous, and which no Republican ever forgot or forgave.
That this strong, self-asserting Boston gentleman, gifted, ambitious, the embodiment of Massachusetts traditions and British prejudices, should feel deep contempt for the moral courage and the understanding of men whose motives were beyond the range of his sympathies and experience, was natural; for Josiah Quincy belonged to a class of Americans who cared so intensely for their own convictions that they could not care for a nation which did not represent them; and in his eyes Jefferson was a transparent fraud, his followers were dupes or ruffians, and the nation was hastening to a fatal crisis. Yet with all this to excuse him, his language still passed the bounds of license. He began by reaffirming that deception had been practised on the House when the President induced it to adopt the embargo without alluding to its coercive purpose:—