Foster’s story was probably true; for although Ezekiel Bacon, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, wrote as early as Dec. 9, 1811, to the secretary for advice, the secretary delayed his answer until January 10, the day when Congress agreed to pass the Army Bill. The letter was read to the House January 20, and proved, as had been foreseen, a serious discouragement to the war spirit. Yet Gallatin made an under-estimate of financial difficulties; for while he assumed the fixed charges at $9,600,000, and estimated the receipts from customs under the existing duties at only $2,500,000 during war, he assumed also the committee’s estimate of $10,000,000 as the annual loan that would be required to meet the expense of war. In order to pay the fixed charges of government, the customs revenue must be raised to $6,000,000; and for this purpose he asked Congress not only to double the existing duties, but also to reimpose the old duty on salt. To meet the remaining charge of $3,600,000 and the accruing interest on new loans, he asked for internal taxes to the amount of $5,000,000.
Unfortunately Gallatin had carelessly said, in his annual report of November, that a revenue of nine millions would, with the aid of loans, answer the purposes of war; while his letter of January 10 required, as was proper, that the interest of each new loan should be added annually to the nine millions. The difference amounted to $600,000 for the first year alone, and in each successive year increased taxation by at least an equal sum. Gallatin himself was in a defiant mood, as he well might be, since he saw Congress in a position where it must either submit or take the responsibility of bankrupting the Treasury; and he did not content himself with demanding unpopular taxes, but read Congress a lecture on its own conduct that had made these taxes necessary. He recalled his promise of 1808 that “no internal taxes, either direct or indirect, were contemplated even in the case of hostilities carried on against the two great belligerent powers;” and he showed that since 1808 Congress had thrown away his actual or expected balance of twenty millions, had refused to accept twenty millions that might have been obtained from the Bank, and had thus made internal taxes necessary, while making loans more difficult to obtain even on harder terms.
The sting of this reproof came at the end of the secretary’s letter, where he named the objects of internal taxation. These were spirits, refined sugar, licenses to retailers, auctions, stamps, and carriages for conveyance of persons. Here was the whole armory of Federalism, that had once already roused rebellion, and after causing the grievances which brought the Republicans into power, appeared again threatening to ruin them as it had ruined their predecessors. Standing army of thirty-five thousand men, loans, protective duties, stamps, tax on distillation,—nothing but a Sedition Law was wanting; and the previous question, as a means of suppressing discussion, was not an unfair equivalent for the Sedition Law.
Gallatin’s letter caused no little excitement in the House. Congress recoiled, and for more than a month left the subject untouched. The chance that England might still give way, or that something might at the last prevent actual war, made every member anxious to avoid committing himself on matters of taxation. The number of representatives who favored war was supposed not to exceed forty or fifty in a House of one hundred and forty-one,—as many more would vote for war only in case they must; but the war men and the peace men united in private to fall upon Gallatin,—the first, because he had chilled the national spirit by saying that taxes must be laid; the last, because he had not said it earlier, and had not chilled the national spirit once for all.
Laying aside the question of taxes, Congress took up two other subjects of pressing importance. Every one doubted the possibility of raising a regular army, and those persons who knew best the character of the people were convinced that the war must be waged by militia on land, and by privateers on the ocean.
The House began with the militia. December 26 Porter brought in a bill authorizing the President “to accept of any company or companies of volunteers, either of artillery, cavalry, or infantry, who may associate and offer themselves for the service, not exceeding fifty thousand,” officered according to the law of the State to which the companies belonged, and liable to service for one year, with the pay of regular troops. Evidently these volunteers were State militia, and were subject to be used only for purposes defined in the Constitution. In 1798 the attempt to raise such a corps had been denounced as unconstitutional, a device to separate a part of the State militia in order to put it under the President’s power in a manner expressly forbidden by the Constitution and peculiarly dangerous to the public liberties; and although the device of 1798 was made more evident, as its efficiency was made more certain, by the provision that these corps should be officered by the President, the device of 1812 was not less offensive to men who held that Congress had no power to call out the State militia except “to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions,” of course only within the limits of the United States. The chief service desired from these volunteer corps was the conquest of Canada and the occupation of Florida; but every principle of the Republican party would be outraged by placing the militia at the President’s orders, to serve on foreign soil.
Porter, who wanted express legislation to overcome this difficulty, stated his dilemma to the House; and the debate began quietly on the assumption that these volunteers were not to serve in Canada or Florida without their own consent, when, January 11, Langdon Cheves, with much seriousness and even solemnity of manner and language, informed the House that the Republican party had hitherto taken a wrong view of the subject. The distinguished South Carolinian affirmed doctrines that had never before been heard from Republican lips:—
“The power of declaring and making war is a great sovereign power, whose limits and extent have long been understood and well established. It has its attributes and incidental powers, which are in the same degree less equivocal than those of other powers as it excels those powers in its importance. Do you ask then for the right of Congress to employ the militia in war? It is found among the attributes of the sovereign power which Congress has to make war. Do you ask for the limits to which this employment may extend? They are coextensive with the objects of the war.”
The President himself, added Cheves, was understood to hold this opinion, and ought to be left to act under the high responsibility attached to his office. Anxious as the party was to support the President, Cheves’s speech met with protest after protest, until Henry Clay came to his support and adopted his argument. On the other hand, the Federalists, although consistency required them to take the same view, and even war Republicans, like Porter and Grundy, rejected the idea of an unlimited war power, and declared that the volunteers must be retained within the national boundaries. The point was left unsettled; January 17 the House passed the bill by a vote of eighty-seven to twenty-three, leaving the decision in the President’s hands, or, what was worst of all, in the hands of the volunteers. In the Senate, Giles made an interesting speech against the bill, avoiding the constitutional question, but arguing that the volunteer force would prove inefficient, and that a regular army could alone serve the purposes of war. He had no difficulty in proving the correctness of his view and the fatal folly of short enlistments; but he could not explain how the ranks of the regular army were to be filled, and his objections took no practical form. The bill passed without a division, and February 6 was approved by the President.
In this matter Congress, without absolutely rejecting Cheves’s doctrine, evaded a decision; but another subject remained which was not so gently treated. From the first, the Republican party had opposed a navy. The United States owned five or six frigates, but not one ship-of-the-line; New York or Philadelphia might be blockaded, perhaps ransomed, at any time by a single seventy-four with a frigate or two in company. To seafaring men, the idea of fighting England without ships seemed absurd, but the Republican party was pledged by every line of its history not to create a navy. The dilemma was singular. Either the Republican party must recant its deepest convictions, or the war must be fought without ships except privateers, and England must be left with no anxiety but the defence of Canada.