Perhaps a better economy would have covered the ocean with cruisers, and have used the army only for defence; but although in any case the military result would probably have been what it was, the party which undertook to wage a great war by a government not at all equipped for the purpose, without experience and with narrow resources, proved wisdom in proportion as it showed caution. The President evidently held this opinion. Senator Anderson of Tennessee, acting probably on Executive advice, moved to amend the bill with a view of returning to the original plan of ten or twelve thousand additional troops; and on this motion, December 17, Giles made a speech that could not have been more mischievous had he aimed only to destroy public trust in the Government. He avowed the difference between himself and the Secretary of War in regard to the number of troops needed, and he showed only too easily that the force he proposed was not more than competent to the objects of the Government; but not content with proving himself wiser than the President and the Secretary of War, he went out of his way to attack the Secretary of the Treasury with virulence that surprised the Federalists themselves.
The decrepit state of the Treasury, said Giles, was the tenderest part of the discussion; but instead of dealing tenderly with it, he denounced Gallatin, whose financial reputation, he declared, was made to his hand by others, and was founded less on facts than on anticipation. “If reliance can be placed on his splendid financial talents, only give them scope for action, apply them to the national ability and will, let them perform the simple task of pointing out the true modus operandi, and what reason have we to despair of the republic? What reason have we to doubt of the abundance of the Treasury supplies? Until now the honorable secretary has had no scope for the demonstration of his splendid financial talents.” He went so far as to assert that during the last three years all the measures that had dishonored the nation were, in a great degree, attributable to the unwillingness of Jefferson and Madison to disturb Gallatin’s popularity and repose; that the repeal of the salt tax, the failure of the embargo, the refusal to issue letters of marque, were all due to Gallatin’s influence; and that it would have been infinitely better to leave the national debt untouched, than to pay it by surrendering the smallest attribute of national sovereignty.
Giles had long been in open opposition to the President, he had intrigued with every other factious spirit to embarrass the Government, and had scandalized his own State by the bitterness of his personal hatreds; but he had not before shown himself ready to sacrifice the nation to his animosities. Every one knew that had he expected to give the Administration the splendid success of a military triumph, he would never have thrust upon it an army competent to the purpose. Every one believed that he hoped to ruin President Madison by the war that was threatened, and wished to hasten the ruin before the next autumn election. Those who had watched Giles closely knew how successfully he had exerted himself to cripple the Treasury,—how he had guided the attacks on its resources; had by his single vote destroyed Gallatin’s only efficient instrument, the Bank; had again by his single vote repealed the salt tax against Gallatin’s wishes; and how he had himself introduced and supported that repeal of the embargo which broke the influence of Gallatin and went far to ruin Madison’s Administration before it was fairly in office. So notorious was his conduct that Senator Anderson of Tennessee and his colleague G. W. Campbell, in replying, went to the verge of the rules in charging Giles with motives of the blackest kind. Campbell pointed out that Giles’s army would frustrate its own objects; would be unable to act against Canada as quickly as would be necessary, and would cause needless financial difficulty. “I trust,” continued Campbell, “it is not the intention of any one by raising so large a regular force, thereby incurring so great an expenditure beyond what it is believed is necessary, to drain your treasury, embarrass your fiscal concerns, and paralyze the best concerted measures of government. If, however, such are the objects intended, a more effectual mode to accomplish them could not be adopted.” Giles’s speech offered an example, unparalleled in American history, of what Campbell described as “the malignity of the human mind;” but although his object was evident, only twelve senators supported Madison, while twenty-one voted for Giles’s army. As though to prove the true motive of the decision, every Federalist senator voted with Giles, and their votes gave him a majority.
Giles’s bill passed the Senate December 19, and was referred at once to the House Committee on Foreign Relations, which amended it by cutting down the number of troops from twenty-five thousand to fifteen thousand men; but when this amendment was proposed to the House, it met, in the words of Peter B. Porter, with a gust of zeal and passion. Henry Clay and the ardent war democrats combined with the Federalists to force the larger army on the President, although more than one sound Democrat invoked past experience and ordinary common-sense to prove that twenty-five thousand men—or even half that number—could not be found in the United States willing to enlist in the regular army and submit for five years to the arbitrary will of officers whom they did not know and with whom they had nothing in common. The House voted to raise Giles’s army, but still took the precaution of requiring that the officers of six regiments only should be commissioned, until three fourths of the privates for these six regiments should have been enlisted. Another amendment was proposed giving the President discretion to raise only these six regiments, if he thought circumstances rendered the larger force unnecessary; but Grundy defeated this effort of caution by the argument that too much power had formerly been given to the Executive, and therefore Congress must insist on leaving him no discretion, but obliging him to take twice the army and double the patronage he had asked or could use. More than twenty Federalists supported Grundy, and gave him a majority of sixty-six to fifty-seven. Calhoun came to Grundy’s assistance with a more reasonable argument. Delay was becoming dangerous; the New Year had arrived; the public began to doubt whether Congress meant to act; he would vote to prevent delay.
At length, January 6, the bill passed the House by a vote of ninety-four to thirty-four. Six or eight Federalists, including Josiah Quincy, voted with the majority; six or eight Republicans, including Macon, Randolph, and Stanford, voted with the minority. The bill returned to the Senate, where the amendments were immediately and almost unanimously struck out. The House, in no kind temper, was obliged to discuss the subject once more. Even the most zealous advocates of war were staggered at the thought that all the officers of thirteen new regiments in the regular army must be at once appointed, when no one felt confident that the ranks of these regiments could ever be filled. The support given by the Federalists to every extravagant measure increased the uneasiness of Republicans; and John Randolph’s ridicule, founded as it was on truth, did not tend to calm it.
“After you have raised these twenty-five thousand men,” said Randolph, “if I may reason on an impossibility,—for it has, I think, been demonstrated that these men cannot be raised, it will be an army on paper only,—shall we form a Committee of Public Safety, or shall we depute the power to the Speaker—I should not wish it in safer hands—to carry on the war? Shall we declare that the Executive, not being capable of discerning the public interest, or not having spirit to pursue it, we have appointed a committee to take the President and Cabinet into custody?... You have an agent to execute certain business; he asks from you a certain amount for effecting the business on hand; you give him double,—you force it upon him, you compel him to waste it!”
Again the Federalists decided the result. Half of the Federalist members voted with the extreme war Republicans. The House, by sixty-seven votes to sixty, abandoned its amendments; the bill passed, as Giles had framed it, and January 11 received the President’s signature.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Army Bill was understood to decide not so much the war as the change in domestic politics. That the party of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, and Monroe should establish a standing army of thirty-five thousand troops in time of peace, when no foreign nation threatened attack, and should do this avowedly for purposes of conquest, passed the bounds of inconsistency and proclaimed a revolution. This radical change was no longer disguised. Clay, Calhoun, Grundy, Lowndes, and Cheves made only a bare pretence of respecting the traditions of their party; while Giles, with a quality peculiar to himself, excused his assaults on Madison by doing public penance for his ancient errors in maligning Washington. “Further information and reflection,” he said, “and practical experience of more than twenty years, have completely convinced me of the superiority of the talent of this great man as a statesman as well as a soldier, and have also admonished me of my former errors.” If in America any politician could be found to whose public character such an admission was fatal, Giles might be regarded as the person; but conduct that ruined Giles’s character only raised the reputations of Clay, Lowndes, and Calhoun. These younger men were not responsible for what had been said and done ten or fifteen years before; they had been concerned in no conspiracy to nullify the laws, or to offer armed resistance to the government; they had never rested their characters as statesmen on the chance of success in governing without armaments, and in coercing Napoleon and Pitt by peaceable means; they had no past to defend or excuse, and as yet no philosophical theories to preach,—but they were obliged to remove from their path the system their party had established, and they worked at this task with more energy and with much more success than they showed in conducting foreign war. Even a return to Washington’s system would not answer their purpose, for they were obliged to restore the extreme practices of 1798, and to re-enact the laws which had then been denounced and discarded as the essence of monarchy.
Bitterly as all good Republicans regretted to create a standing army, that vote was easy compared with other votes it made necessary. Doubtless an army was an evil, but the effects of the evil were likely to appear chiefly in the form of taxes; and the stanchest war Republicans flinched at taxation. The British minister, who saw so much of these difficulties that he could not believe in the possibility of war, reported to his Government a story which showed how uneasily the Administration balanced itself between the two bodies of its supporters. In December, during the debate on the Army Bill, the Committee of Ways and Means was repeatedly urged to produce a scheme of war-finance, but failed to do so. Foster reported, on what he called good authority, that when the chairman of that committee went to Gallatin for information to meet questions in the House, the secretary declined giving estimates until the Army Bill should be disposed of; and he explained that if he submitted a plan of taxes, the Government would be charged with wanting to damp the ardor of Congress.[129] Every one knew that the ardor of Congress feared nothing so much as damping; but every one who knew Gallatin was persuaded that as long as he remained Secretary of the Treasury, taxes must proportionally increase with debt.