The usual reaction which follows general elections followed that of 1804, and the Administration escaped attack in the following session of 1804-05, which was chiefly devoted to the trial of Judge Chase. Whether Mr. Gallatin had anything to do with influencing the result of this trial is unknown. A curious mystery has always hung and probably always will hang over the share which Mr. Jefferson’s Administration had in affecting the decision of the Senate by which Judge Chase was acquitted. Probably, however, the schism which was taking place in Pennsylvania on this same point of impeachments had an immediate effect on the party at Washington and cooled its eagerness for conviction. Perhaps Mr. Gallatin’s feelings may be partly reflected in a letter from his friend Mr. Dallas, who was now acting as counsel for the impeached Pennsylvania judges. This letter, it will be noticed, was written while the trial of Judge Chase was going on, and only a few days before Mr. Dallas was called to Washington to give his testimony before the Senate.
A. J. DALLAS TO GALLATIN.
Lancaster, 16th January, 1805.
My dear Sir,—I thank you for your friendly letter, but I regret that it expresses a depression on public business which I have long felt. It is obvious to me that unless our Administration take decisive measures to discountenance the factious spirit that has appeared, unless some principle of political cohesion can be introduced into our public councils as well as at our elections, and unless men of character and talents can be drawn from professional and private pursuits into the legislative bodies of our governments, federal and State, the empire of Republicanism will moulder into anarchy, and the labor and hope of our lives will terminate in disappointment and wretchedness. Perhaps the crisis is arrived when some attempt should be made to rally the genuine Republicans round the standard of reason, order, and law. At present we are the slaves of men whose passions are the origin and whose interests are the object of all their actions,—I mean your Duanes, Cheethams, Leibs, &c. They have the press in their power, and, though we may have virtue to assert the liberty of the press, it is too plain that we have not spirit enough to resist the tyranny of the printers. We will talk of this matter when we meet.
... The argument on our impeachment will close to-day, and the decision will probably be given to-morrow or Monday. The Aurora man has been here during the trial, with all his audacity, intrigue, and malevolence. I think, however, he will fail. A cause more deserving of success than that of the judges never was discussed, and I am confident that there will be an acquittal....
The letter in which Mr. Gallatin expressed his depression is lost, but there was more than one cause to justify it. However annoying the condition of Pennsylvania politics might be, the greatest actual danger to be feared from it was that it might spread into national politics and find leaders in Congress. The conduct of John Randolph already suggested an alliance between him and Duane that might paralyze the Administration and ruin the Republican party. This alliance was foreshadowed not only by the fact that Randolph led the impeachment of Judge Chase in the spirit of Duane, but also by another still more extravagant display of Randolph’s temper which touched Mr. Gallatin personally. When the public lands came under Mr. Gallatin’s direction in 1801, he had been obliged to disentangle the State of Georgia, as well as he could, from a complication which she had herself created. One element in this tangle consisted in the corrupt sale by Georgia of certain lands, and her subsequent annulling these sales on the ground of her own corruption. The purchasers pressed their claims, and Mr. Gallatin with his fellow-commissioners, Madison and Lincoln, recommended a compromise by which five million acres were to be reserved in order to make a reasonable compensation for all claims, these as well as others; a proposition which was embodied by Congress in a law. To carry this compromise into effect was the work of ten years, during which time the subject was incessantly before Congress. When it came up in January, 1805, John Randolph astounded the House by a series of speeches violent beyond all precedent, outrageously and vindictively slanderous, and fatal to the harmony of the party and to all effective legislation. With the malignity of a bully he attacked Gideon Granger, the Postmaster-General, who could not answer him, and he only met his match in Matthew Lyon, whose old experience now, to the delight of the Federalists, enabled him to meet Randolph with a torrent of personal abuse, and to tell him that he was a jackal and a madman with the face of a monkey. All this was doubtless vexatious enough to Mr. Gallatin, who knew well that it boded no good to the Administration; but Randolph could not even stop here. He made a very serious reflection upon Mr. Gallatin himself and the report of the commissioners. “When I first read their report,” said he, “I was filled with unutterable astonishment; finding men in whom I had and still have the highest confidence, recommend a measure which all the facts and all the reasons which they had collected opposed and unequivocally condemned.” This speech was made on February 3, 1805, and the course taken by Randolph was warmly applauded by Duane.
Mr. Gallatin remained impassive and his relations with Randolph were undisturbed. Randolph himself either had no clear idea what he was doing, or was indifferent to its consequences. One of his letters to Mr. Gallatin, written in October, 1805, is so judicial in its tone and expresses such proper sentiments about divisions in the party as to appear quite out of keeping with its writer and to suggest dissimulation, which was not at all in his character. But on one point the two men had strong sympathies: their concurrence of opinion on the management of the navy was a bond of union.
The summer of 1805 brought matters to a crisis. Duane and his friends set up an opposition candidate to Governor McKean in the person of Simon Snyder, Speaker of the House, and carried the bulk of the party with them. Mr. Dallas and the conservative element were obliged to depend upon Federalist aid in order to carry the election of McKean. Mr. Jefferson and the Administration refrained from interference, and the result was to isolate Mr. Gallatin and to deprive him of that support in his own State, without which the position of a public man must always be precarious. The elements of future trouble were gathering into alarming consistency and needed only some national crisis to concentrate all their force against Mr. Gallatin.
A. J. DALLAS TO GALLATIN.
4th April, 1805.