Macon’s bill came back to the House as a law for the exclusion of British and French war-vessels from American harbors. The House resented the treatment, and after another long debate, March 5, refused to concur in the Senate’s amendments. By a vote of sixty-seven to forty-seven the bill was sent back to the Senate in its original form. A long wrangle ensued; a committee of conference failed to agree, and March 16 the Senate was obliged to decide whether it would yield to the House, or allow the bill to fail.
On that question Samuel Smith made a speech,[145] which he afterward printed, and which demanded attention because it forced President Madison into a course that exposed him to severe and perhaps deserved criticism. The Senate was equally balanced. Samuel Smith’s voice and vote decided the result. His reasons were such as no one could misunderstand.
“I found in it,” said he, criticising Macon’s bill, “or believed I did, that which would be ruinous to the commerce of the United States, and therefore felt myself bound by the duty I owe to my constituents to remove the veil and leave the measure open to public view.... Is there no danger, Mr. President, to be apprehended from the Emperor if the bill should pass with this provision [that any British or French ship hereafter arriving in an American harbor should with its cargo be seized and condemned]? His character for decision is well known. Might we not fear that he would retort our own measure upon us by causing all the property of our merchants now under sequestration (amounting to at least three millions of dollars) to be condemned?... But what will England do should this law pass? Will the King and Council retaliate our measure? I confess, Mr. President, that I think they will.... What will be the consequence? Ruin to your merchants and destruction to the party which now governs this country.... But I have been told that if England should retaliate, her retaliation would operate as a complete non-intercourse between the two countries, and in a way that would be effectual; and that as I had always approved those measures, this view of the subject must meet my approbation,—that it would precisely create that which I have said was a powerful measure against Great Britain: to wit, an embargo. I never will agree, Mr. President, in this side-way to carry into execution a great national measure.”
The speech excited surprise that Samuel Smith, a man accounted shrewd, should suppose such arguments to be decent, much less convincing. From Federalists, who conscientiously wished submission to British policy, Smith’s reasoning would have seemed natural; but Smith protested against submission, and favored arming merchant-ships and providing them with convoy,—a measure useless except to bring on war in a “side-way.” Congress preferred to choose its own time for fighting, and declined listening to Smith’s advice, although the Senate sustained him in rejecting Macon’s bill. On this occasion Giles appeared, and voted with the Administration; but sixteen senators followed Smith, while only fifteen could be found to act in concert with the House and the Executive.
After the Senate had thus put an end to Macon’s bill, the House after much hesitation, March 31, put an end to Smith’s bill. After five months of discussion Congress found itself, April 1, where it had been in the previous November.
Rather than resume friendly relations with both belligerents without even expressing a wish for the recovery of national self-respect, the House made one more effort. April 7 Macon reported a new bill, which was naturally nicknamed Macon’s bill No. 2. This measure also seems to have had the assent of the Cabinet, but Macon himself neither framed nor favored it. “I am at a loss to guess what we shall do on the subject of foreign relations,” he wrote to his friend Judge Nicholson, three days later.[146] “The bill in the enclosed paper, called Macon’s No. 2, is not really Macon’s, though he reports it as chairman. It is in truth Taylor’s. This I only mention to you, because when it comes to be debated I shall not act the part of a father, but of a step-father.” The Taylor who took this responsibility was a member from South Carolina, whose career offered no other great distinction than the measure which produced a war with England.
Macon’s bill No. 2 was the last of the annual legislative measures taken by Congress to counteract by commercial interest the encroachments of France and Great Britain. The first was the Partial Non-intercourse Act of April, 1806; the second was the Embargo Act with its supplements, dating from Dec. 22, 1807; the third was the Total Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809; and the fourth was Macon’s bill No. 2. Each year produced a new experiment; but the difference could be easily remembered, for after the climax of the embargo each successive annual enactment showed weakening faith in the policy, until Macon’s bill No. 2 marked the last stage toward the admitted failure of commercial restrictions as a substitute for war. Abandoning the pretence of direct resistance to France and England, this measure repealed the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, leaving commercial relations with all the world as free as ever before, but authorizing the President “in case either Great Britain or France shall, before the 3d day of March next, so revoke or modify her edicts as that they shall cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States,” to prohibit intercourse with the nation which had not revoked its edicts.
The objections to the bill were overpowering, for its effect was equivalent to alliance with England. Had the United States taken active part in the war against France, they could have done Napoleon no greater injury than by the passage of this Act, which invited Great Britain to control American commerce for her military purposes. On the other hand the bill conferred on the President a discretion dangerous, unconstitutional, and unnecessary,—a power once before conferred by the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, and then resulting in the mistakes of Erskine’s arrangement, which seemed warning enough against repeating the same risk.
These objections were well understood and forcibly pointed out, while the arguments in support of the bill were melancholy in their admissions. The records of Congress could hardly parallel the disregard of dignity with which Taylor defended his bill in a tone that could have been endured only by an assembly lost to the habits of self-respect. His denunciation of war expressed party doctrine, and he harmed no one by repeating the time-worn moral drawn from Greece and Rome, the Persian millions, Philip of Macedon, Syracuse and Carthage,—as though the fate of warlike nations proved that they should have submitted to foreign outrage, or as though the world could show either arts or liberty except such as had sprung from the cradle of war; but feeling perhaps that classical authority proved too little or too much, he told the House frankly why those members who like himself opposed war found themselves unable to maintain the pledge of resistance they had given in imposing the embargo:—
“But concerning the breaking down of the embargo! Let the truth come out! Neither this plea nor the other miserable one of the fear of insurrections, and what not, will do.... The embargo repealed itself. The wants created by it to foreigners, and the accidental failure of crops in England had reduced the thing in one article to plain calculation. The vote of this House to repeal the law gave from four to five dollars rise on each barrel of flour. This was the weight that pulled us down.”