“If your minds are resolved on war,” continued the speaker, “you are consistent, you are right, you are still Republican; but if you are not resolved, pause and reflect, for should this Resolution pass and you then become faint-hearted, remember that you have abandoned your old principles and trod in the paths of your predecessors.”
Thus, according to Grundy, from the moment a party intended in earnest to make war against a foreign enemy, armies, loans, patronage, taxes, and every following corruption, with all the perils of European practice, became Republican. Only when armies were to be raised for domestic purposes were they unrepublican. The Administration of 1798 would gladly have accepted this test, had the Republicans then been willing to permit armaments on any terms.
Grundy weakened the argument further by attempting to show that in the present case, unlike that of 1798, sufficient cause for war existed: “It is the right of exporting the productions of our own soil and industry to foreign markets.” The statement, considering Grundy’s reputation, was not skilfully made. The blockades maintained by England in 1811 were less hostile to American products and industry than were the decrees of Napoleon, or the French Decrees of 1798, which confiscated every American ship laden in whole or in part with goods of English origin, and closed France to every American ship that entered an English port. Grundy still maintained that the decrees of 1798 had not justified the Federalist armaments; he could hardly maintain that the British blockades of 1811 alone gave cause for armaments of the same kind,—yet this he did. “What are we now called on to decide?” he asked. “It is whether we will resist by force the attempt ... to subject our maritime rights to the arbitrary and capricious rule of her will.”
Grundy spoke of impressments as an outrage which called loudly for the interposition of the government, but he did not allege them as in themselves a sufficient cause for war. He laid more weight on the influence of England in turning the minds of the northwestern Indians toward hostilities. “War is not to commence by land or sea; it is already begun,” he said, alluding to the battle of Tippecanoe, fought a month before; yet if ever a war was aggressive, it was the war which Harrison had begun for no other object than to win the valley of the Wabash, and England had interfered neither directly nor indirectly to produce the outbreak of these hostilities.
Grundy’s next argument was still less convincing. The pledge given to France, he said, made necessary the Non-importation Law against England; but this act was an intolerable burden to the United States:—
“Ask the Northern man, and he will tell you that any state of things is better than the present. Inquire of the Western people why their crops are not equal to what they were in former years, they will answer that industry has no stimulus left, since their surplus products have no markets. Notwithstanding these objections to the present restrictive system, we are bound to retain it; this, and our plighted faith to the French government have tied the Gordian knot. We cannot untie it. We can cut it with the sword.”
Reasoning like this was dear to John Randolph, never so happy as when he had such a slip to expose. In defiance of remonstrance, the President and Congress had insisted upon imposing the non-importation, on the ground that they had entered into a contract with France; and no sooner had they done so, than, in order to free themselves from their contract with France, they insisted upon war with England. On the same reasoning their only means of rendering the contract void was by annexing themselves to the empire of Napoleon.
Finally Grundy appealed to an argument wholly new:—
“This war, if carried on successfully, will have its advantages. We shall drive the British from our continent.... I am willing to receive the Canadians as adopted brethren. It will have beneficial political effects; it will preserve the equilibrium of the government. When Louisiana shall be fully peopled, the Northern States will lose their power; they will be at the discretion of others; they can be depressed at pleasure, and then this Union might be endangered. I therefore feel anxious not only to add the Floridas to the South, but the Canadas to the North of this empire.”
Grundy was the first of Southern statesmen to express publicly the Southern belief that when Louisiana and Florida should be peopled, the Northern States would lose their power and be at the discretion of others, to be depressed at pleasure. Such was the theory of the time, and the political history of the United States seemed to support it; but the Republican party in 1798 would have looked on any of its representatives as insane who had proposed to make war on England in order to give more power to the Northern States.