Not until January 3, 1806, did the committee report, and then its report provided only for a “war posture,” and not for purchase. The House now proceeded in secret session to debate the message, and then at last Mr. Randolph flung his bomb into the midst of his friends and followers. Seizing with considerable dexterity, but with extravagant violence, the really weak point in Mr. Jefferson’s message, he assailed the Administration, or at least its foreign policy, with the fury of a madman. The whole Administration phalanx was thrown into disorder and embittered to exasperation; the whole effect proposed from the negotiation was destroyed in advance; but the government was obliged to go on, and at last its propositions, in spite of Randolph, were carried through Congress.
Although the actual struggle took place in secret session, Randolph lost no time in making his attack public, and it very soon became evident that the true object of his hostility was Mr. Madison. On the 5th March, in debating the non-importation policy, he began a violent assault by asserting that he had asked the Administration, “What is the opinion of the Cabinet?... My answer was (and from a Cabinet minister, too), ‘There is no longer any Cabinet.’” On the 15th, he developed this suggestion into a rhetorical panegyric upon Mr. Gallatin at the expense of Mr. Madison; he told how certain despatches from Europe had arrived at the State Department in December, and how Mr. Gallatin, in reply to an inquiry, had told him at a later time that the contents of these despatches had not yet been communicated to the Cabinet: “It was when I discovered that the head of the second department under the government did not know they were in existence, much less that his opinion on them had not been consulted, that I declared what I repeat, that there is no Cabinet. You have no Cabinet! What, the head of the Treasury Department,—a vigorous and commanding statesman, a practical statesman, the benefit of whose wisdom and experience the nation fondly believes it always obtained before the great measures of the government are taken,—unacquainted with and unconsulted on important despatches,—and yet talk of a Cabinet! Not merely unconsulted, but ignorant of the documents.... I have no hesitation in saying, there is no Cabinet, when I see a man second to none for vigorous understanding and practical good sense ousted from it.”
The movement was an insidious one, calculated to sow distrust between Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Madison; but to judge from the tone of Mr. Randolph’s letters, even as far back as June, 1803, it was an understood fact with him and with Mr. Gallatin that the Administration wanted cohesion and co-operation, and it appears clearly enough that at least so far as the Navy Department was concerned, Mr. Gallatin made this a subject of repeated remonstrance to the President himself, although he never made complaint against Mr. Madison, and, as his correspondence shows, he was fully in harmony with the foreign policy pursued.[70] That he agreed with Randolph in considering the President too lax in discipline seems certain.
Mr. Gallatin did what he could to correct the impression thus given, and Randolph was obliged ultimately to withdraw his assertion, or at least essentially to qualify it; but this seems to have irritated him into making another similar attack on the 7th April, immediately after withdrawing the former one: “I wish,” said he, “the heads of departments had seats on this floor. Were this the case, to one of them I would immediately propound this question: Did you or did you not, in your capacity of a public functionary, tell me, in my capacity of a public functionary, that France would not suffer Spain to settle her differences with us, that she wanted money, that we must give her money or take a Spanish or French war?... I would put this question to another head of department: Was or was not an application made to you for money to be conveyed to Europe to carry on any species of diplomatic negotiation there? I would listen to his answer, and if he put his hand on his heart and like a man of honor said, No! I would believe him, though it would require a great stretch of credulity. I would call into my aid faith, not reason, and believe where I was not convinced.”
At the moment this was said, Mr. Gallatin was on the floor of the House, and Mr. Jackson, of Virginia, at once asked him whether it was true that such an application was made. He replied that it was not, and explained how the mistake arose. Mr. Jackson immediately took the floor and repeated his words, characterizing the charge that Mr. Madison had attempted to draw money out of the Treasury without the authority of law, as “destitute of truth and foundation,—mark the expression; I say it is destitute of truth,” evidently courting a quarrel. He took care, however, to relieve Mr. Gallatin of responsibility for these words, while, in order to establish the fact of denial, he caused a resolution of inquiry to be adopted by the House, which produced a categorical reply from Mr. Gallatin, “that no ‘application has been made to draw money from the Treasury before an appropriation made by law for that purpose.’ The circumstances which may have produced an impression that such an application had been made, being unconnected with any matter pertaining to the duties of the office of Secretary of the Treasury, are not presumed to come within the scope of the information required from this Department by the House.”
Meanwhile Mr. Gallatin had already taken measures to correct at its source the error to which Mr. Randolph was giving currency.[71] It appears that in explaining the wishes of the government to two New York members, George Clinton, Jr., and Josiah Masters, Mr. Gallatin had found them sceptical in regard to the propriety of the proposed action of Congress, and, in order to convince them that the President and Cabinet were in earnest and really anxious for the appropriation, he said that so anxious were they as to have actually had a discussion in Cabinet, before Congress met, whether they might not promise in the negotiation to pay a sum down without waiting for action from Congress; so anxious were they that Mr. Madison, although the bill was not yet fairly passed, though certain to pass within less than a week, had already requested Mr. Gallatin to buy exchange.[72] This conversation, repeated by Mr. Masters, and coming to the ears of John Randolph, produced his solemn inquiry meant to imply that Mr. Madison had approached Mr. Gallatin with a proposition to take money illegally from the Treasury, and that Mr. Gallatin had repelled the idea. What made this notion more absurd was that the first proposition was not Mr. Madison’s, but came from Mr. Jefferson; only by jumbling the two facts together and recklessly disregarding every means of better informing himself, had Randolph succeeded in dragging Mr. Madison into the field at all.
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This official denial and private correction of the story, afterwards made public in the shape of a letter from the New York member to his constituents, seem to be sufficient for the satisfaction of all parties. Still, the innuendo of Randolph was compromising to Mr. Gallatin, and was made the theme of long-continued attacks upon him. Five years afterwards, when Mr. Madison was President and Gallatin was in sore need of support, Mr. Jefferson wrote to William Wirt a letter warmly defending him in this matter as in others. He said, in taking up one by one the charges that Mr. Gallatin had been a party to Randolph’s opposition: “But the story of the two millions; Mr. Gallatin satisfied us that this affirmation of J. R. was as unauthorized as the fact itself was false. It resolves itself, therefore, into his inexplicit letter to a committee of Congress. As to this, my own surmise was that Mr. Gallatin might have used some hypothetical expression in conversing on that subject, which J. R. made a positive one, and he being a duellist, and Mr. Gallatin with a wife and children depending on him for their daily subsistence, the latter might wish to avoid collision and insult from such a man.”
There are occasions when defence is worse than attack. If Mr. Jefferson thought that his Secretary of the Treasury wanted the moral courage to speak out at the risk of personal danger, there is no more to be said so far as concerns Mr. Jefferson; but in regard to Mr. Gallatin the suggestion seems to be completely set aside by two considerations: in the first place, the question put by Randolph was not founded, nor even alleged to be founded, on his own conversations with Mr. Gallatin,[73] and therefore not he, but Mr. Masters alone, had the right to call Mr. Gallatin to account; in the second place, Mr. Gallatin’s letter was very explicit on one point, and that to a duellist the essential one; it flatly and categorically contradicted Randolph’s charge, and there seems to be no reason why Mr. Randolph might not have founded a challenge on that contradiction as well as on any other had he felt that the occasion warranted a duel.
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