When Congress adjourned, May 2, 1810, the result attained during five months passed in continuous labor amounted to little more than the constitutional necessities of government,—the appropriation bills; a loan for five million dollars; an Act for taking a census of persons; an Act appropriating sixty thousand dollars toward making the Cumberland Road; an appropriation of five thousand dollars for experiments on Fulton’s torpedoes; in regard to foreign affairs, Giles’s Resolution blaming the conduct of the British minister, and Macon’s or Taylor’s Act, which condoned that conduct. The old Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, expired by limitation with the expiring Congress May 1, 1810.
“We adjourned last night,” wrote Randolph to Nicholson the next day,[153] “a little after twelve, having terminated a session of more than five months by authorizing a loan of as many millions, and—all is told. The incapacity of Government has long ceased to be a laughing matter. The Cabinet is all to pieces, and the two Houses have tumbled about their own ears.”
With all Randolph’s faults, he had more of the qualities, training, and insight of a statesman than were to be found elsewhere among the representatives in the Eleventh Congress; and although himself largely the cause of the chaos he described, he felt its disgraces and dangers. Society in general troubled itself little about them. The commercial class, pleased to be freed from restraints, and the agricultural class, consoled by the fair prices of their produce, thought as little as possible about their failure in government; what was called good society for the most part drew a bitter pleasure from it. Yet beneath the general physical contentment almost equally general moral disgust existed and made itself felt. President Madison, who was in the best position to gauge popular opinion, began to suspect the hardly perceptible movement of a coming tide. After the adjournment he wrote to William Pinkney at London:[154]—
“Among the inducements to the experiment of an unrestricted commerce now made were two which contributed essentially to the majority of votes in its favor,—first, a general hope, favored by daily accounts from England, that an adjustment of differences there, and thence in France, would render the measure safe and proper; second, a willingness in not a few to teach the advocates for an open trade the folly as well as degradation of their policy.... It will not be wonderful, therefore, if the passive spirit which marked the late session of Congress should at the next meeting be roused to the opposite point, more especially as the tone of the nation has never been so low as that of its representatives.”
Madison still held to his favorite doctrine, and meant no more by his warning than that the Eleventh Congress might be expected to reimpose measures of commercial restriction:—
“The experiment [of free commerce] about to be made will probably open too late the eyes of the people to the expediency and efficacy of the means [the embargo] which they have suffered to be taken out of the hands of the Government and to be incapacitated for future use.”[155]
This condolence with Jefferson over the fate of their experiment showed the direction toward which Madison’s eyes were still turned; but, though a firm believer in his own theory of peaceable coercion, he was ready and had always been ready to accept and carry out any stronger scheme that Congress might prefer. He had no definite plan of his own; he clung to the idea that England and France could be brought by patience to respect neutral claims of right; but he felt that the actual submission made by Congress was apparent rather than real, and might be followed within a year by renewed resistance.
Meanwhile nothing could be more dangerous to the Americans than the loss of self-respect. The habit of denouncing themselves as cowards and of hearing themselves denounced as a race that cared only for money tended to produce the qualities imputed. Americans of 1810 were persuaded that they could not meet Englishmen or Frenchmen on equal terms, man against man, or stand in battle against the veterans of Napoleon or Nelson. The sense of national and personal inferiority sank astonishingly deep. Reasonable enough as regarded the immense superiority of Europe in organization, it passed bounds when it condemned everything American as contemptible, or when the Federalist gentry refused to admit the Democrats of Pennsylvania or the Republicans of Virginia or the Government at Washington into the circle of civilized life. Social self-abasement never went so far as in its efforts to prove to Francis James Jackson, the British minister, that he was right in treating the national government with contempt. Englishman as Jackson was, and ready to assume without question every claim of superiority that might be made for his country or his class, he was surprised at the force of American allegiance to himself. As he travelled northward, after his dismissal from Washington, his private letters gave a strange idea of the chaos in American society. He wrote from Philadelphia,—
“The tide has turned completely in our favor. At Washington they are in a state of the most animated confusion, the Cabinet divided, and the Democratic party going various ways.... Their foreign politics embarrass them even more than home ones. One moment they want another embargo; the next, to take off the restrictions; then, to arm their merchantmen; and next, to declare war. In short, they do not know what to be at.... Notwithstanding all that has passed,—which would fill volumes to relate in full,—and the Government being at open war with me, ‘the respectability’ has been both here and at Baltimore so anxious to show that they did not share the sentiments of the Democrats that we have had throngs of visitors and innumerable invitations that we could not accept, though we have dined at home but twice during the month we have been here. To prevent this, the savages have threatened in one of their papers to tar and feather every man who should ask me to his house.”[156]
Pleased with his social success at Baltimore and Philadelphia, Jackson found New York and New England fairly delightful. His vogue in Baltimore and Philadelphia meant little more than curiosity to see his wife and her toilettes; but as he approached New England he became a personage in politics, and received attentions such as he could hardly have expected even from those European courts whose civility lingered in his mind. February 25 he wrote from New York:[157]—