Congress showed more than usual unwillingness to face its difficulties. The episodes of Erskine and Jackson supplied excuse for long and purposeless debates. In the Senate, December 5, Giles reported from a special committee the draft of a Resolution denouncing Jackson’s conduct as indecorous, insolent, affronting, insidious, false, outrageous, and premeditated,—epithets which seemed to make superfluous the approval of Madison’s course or the pledge of support with which the Resolution ended. Giles reviewed the conduct of Jackson and Canning, entreating the Senate to banish irritation and to restore harmony and mutual good-will, “the most fervent prayer of one who in the present delicate, interesting crisis of the nation feels a devotion for his country beyond everything else on this side of heaven.”[140] The experience of many years warranted Giles’s hearers in suspecting that when he professed a wish for harmony, the hope of harmony must be desperate, for his genius lay in quite another direction; and when he laid aside partisanship, his party had reason to look for some motive still narrower. His course quickly proved the sense in which he understood these phrases.
January 3, 1810, the President recommended by message the enlistment for a short period of a volunteer force of twenty thousand men, and a reorganization of the militia; adding that it would rest with Congress also “to determine how far further provision may be expedient for putting into actual service, if necessary, any part of the naval armament not now employed.” No one knew what this language meant. Crawford of Georgia, with his usual bluntness, said:[141] “This Message, in point of obscurity, comes nearer my ideas of a Delphic oracle than any state paper which has come under my inspection. It is so cautiously expressed that every man puts what construction on it he pleases.” Giles pleased to put upon it a warlike construction. January 10 he reported a bill for fitting out the frigates; January 13 he supported this bill in a speech which surprised Federalists and Republicans alike, if they could be still surprised at the varieties of Giles’s political philosophy.
“The visionary theory of energy,” said he, “was the fatal error of the Federal party, and that error deprived it of the power of the nation. The government being thus placed in the hands of the Republicans, while heated by the zeal of opposition to the Federal doctrines and flushed with their recent triumph, it was natural for them, with the best intentions, to run into the opposite extreme; to go too far in the relaxations of the powers of the government, and to indulge themselves in the delightful visions of extending the range of individual liberty.... It was natural that in the vibration of the political pendulum, it should go from one extreme to another; and that this has been too much the case with the Republican administration, he regretted to say, he feared would be demonstrated by a very superficial review of the events of the last two or three years.”
Energy was a fatal mistake in the Federalists; relaxation was an equally fatal mistake in the Republicans,—and the remedy was a show of energy where energy did not exist. Giles won no confidence by thus trimming between party principles; but when Samuel Smith argued for Giles’s bill on grounds of economy, friends of the Administration felt little doubt of the motives that guided both senators. Had they declared for war, or for peace; had they proposed to build more frigates or ships-of-the-line, or to lay up those in active service,—had they committed themselves to a decided policy of any kind, their motives would have offered some explanation consistent with a public interest; but they proposed merely to fit out the frigates while giving them nothing to do, and the Republican party, as a whole, drew the inference that they wished to waste the public money, either for the personal motive of driving Madison and Gallatin from office, or for the public advantage of aiding the Federalists to weaken the Treasury and paralyze the nation.
Crawford replied to Giles with some asperity; but although Crawford was known to represent the Treasury, so completely had the Senate fallen under the control of the various cabals represented by Vice-President Clinton, Giles, Smith, and Michael Leib of Pennsylvania, with their Federalist associates, that Crawford found himself almost alone. Twenty-five senators supported the bill; only six voted against it.
Giles impressed the least agreeable qualities of his peculiar character on this Senate,—a body of men easily impressed by such traits. By a vote of twenty-four to four, they passed the Resolution in which Giles showed energy in throwing epithets at the British government, as they passed the bill for employing frigates to pretend energy that was not in their intentions. No episode in the national history was less encouraging than the conduct of Congress in regard to Giles’s Resolution. From December 18 to January 4, the House wasted its time and strength in proving the helplessness of Executive, Congress, parties, and people in the grasp of Europe. With painful iteration every Republican proved that the nation had been insulted by the British minister; while every Federalist protested his inability to discern the insult, and his conviction that no insult was intended. Except as preliminary to measures of force, Giles’s Resolution showed neither dignity nor object; yet the Republicans embarrassed themselves with denials of the Federalist charge that such language toward a foreign government must have a warlike motive, while the Federalists insisted that their interests required peace.
If the Resolution[142] was correct in affirming as it did that the United States had suffered “outrageous and premeditated insults” from Jackson, Congress could not improve the situation by affirming the insult without showing even the wish to resent it by means that would prevent its repetition; but the majority saw the matter in another light, and when the Federalists resorted to technical delays, the Republicans after a session of nineteen hours passed the Resolution by a vote of seventy-two to forty-one. Macon, Stanford, and the old Republicans voted with the Federalists in the minority, while Randolph was ill and absent throughout the debate.
The Resolution marked the highest energy reached by the Eleventh Congress. Giles’s bill for fitting out the frigates was allowed to slumber in committee; and a bill for taking forty thousand volunteers for one year into government service never came to a vote in the Senate. Congress was influenced by news from England to lay aside measures mischievous except as a prelude to hostilities. The change of Administration in London opened the way to new negotiations, and every fresh negotiation consumed a fresh year.
No course would have pleased Congress so much as to do nothing at all; but this wish could not be fully gratified. The Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, was to expire by limitation with the actual session. As early as December 1 the House referred the matter to a committee with Macon for its head. Macon probably went to the Treasury for instructions. A plan drawn by Gallatin, and accepted without opposition by the Cabinet, was reported December 19 to the House in the form of a bill which had less the character of a Non-intercourse than of a Navigation Act; for while it closed American ports to every British or French vessel public and private, it admitted British and French merchandise when imported directly from their place of origin in vessels wholly American. The measure was as mild a protest as human skill could devise if compared with the outrages it retaliated, but it had the merit of striking at the British shipping interest which was chiefly to blame for the conduct of the British government. Under the provisions of the bill, American shipping would gain a monopoly of American trade. Not a British vessel of any kind could enter an American port.
Macon’s bill came before the House Jan. 8, 1810, for discussion, which lasted three weeks. The opposition objected to the new policy for the double reason that it was too strong and too weak. St. Loe Livermore, a Massachusetts Federalist, began by treating the measure as so extreme that England and France would resent it by shutting their ports to all American ships; while Sawyer of North Carolina denounced it as evaporating the national spirit in mere commercial regulations, when no measure short of war would meet the evil. According as commerce or passion weighed with the reasoners, the bill was too violent or disgracefully feeble. Throughout the winter, these contradictory arguments were pressed in alternation by speaker after speaker. Macon reflected only the views of Madison and Gallatin when he replied that if England and France should retaliate by excluding American shipping from their ports, they would do what America wanted; for they must then enforce the non-intercourse which the United States had found impossible to enforce without their aid. He agreed with the war-members that the bill showed none too much energy, but he argued that the nation was less prepared for war than in 1808 and 1809; while as for Jackson’s quarrels, he declined to admit that they changed the affair one iota.