“You intimate,” said Mr. Monroe, “that the situation of the country is such as to leave me no alternative. I am aware that our public affairs are far from being in a tranquil and secure state. I may add that there is much reason to fear that a crisis is approaching of a very dangerous tendency; one which menaces the overthrow of the whole Republican party. Is the Administration impressed with this sentiment and prepared to act on it? Are things in such a state as to allow the Administration to take the whole subject into consideration and to provide for the safety of the country and of free government by such measures as circumstances may require and a comprehensive view of them suggest? Or are we pledged by what is already done to remain spectators of the interior movement in the expectation of some change abroad, as the ground on which we are to act? I have no doubt, from my knowledge of the President and Mr. Gallatin, with the former of whom I have been long and intimately connected in friendship, and for both of whom in great and leading points of character I have the highest consideration and respect, that if I came into the government the utmost cordiality would subsist between us, and that any opinions which I might entertain and express respecting our public affairs would receive, so far as circumstances would permit, all the attention to which they might be entitled. But if our course is fixed and the destiny of our country dependent on arrangements already made, on measures already taken, I do not perceive how it would be possible for me to render any service at this time in the general government.”

Mr. Monroe received the desired assurances, and assumed the new office on the 1st April, 1811. Mr. Robert Smith went out, and issued a manifesto against the government, in which, among numerous ill-digested and incongruous subjects of complaint, there were one or two which showed how serious a misfortune his incompetence had been. A newspaper war ensued, and curious readers may find in the National Intelligencer all the literature of the Smith controversy which they will need to satisfy their doubts. Mr. Smith had much the same fate as Colonel Pickering ten years before; he found that even his friends showed a certain unwillingness to fight his battles. Before the end of the summer it had become evident that Mr. Smith was reduced to insignificance, and it hardly needed the mild severity of Mr. Madison or the newspaper rhetoric of Joel Barlow to accomplish this; Mr. Smith’s own clerk was equal to the task.[105]

The change in the State Department was a great relief to the President, and perhaps he may have asked the question why he had ever allowed himself to be dragooned into the fatal appointment of Mr. Smith; but Monroe came too late to save Gallatin. To him the change brought only an increase of annoyance. Although, as between Mr. Madison and Mr. Smith in the controversy about the removal, the name of Gallatin was not mentioned, the public well knew that the dismissal of Mr. Smith was the work of the Secretary of the Treasury, and the chorus of newspapers, led by the Aurora, joined in a cry of savage hostility against him. His course in regard to the bank had necessarily thrown a considerable portion of the press and the party into antagonism; Pennsylvania had long since abandoned him; Virginia now threw him over. The confidence of Mr. Madison and his own supereminent qualities alone sustained him. All this was notorious, and was little calculated to diminish the zeal of personal enmity. Duane’s attacks were in themselves not formidable; his long articles of financial and political criticism were impressive only to the very ignorant; his colossal and audacious untruthfulness was evident to any intelligent reader, and had been evident ever since the Aurora had begun its existence; but nevertheless their effect was serious from the fact that they operated in a way perhaps not intended or fully understood by Duane himself. In discussing the next Presidential election, for example, the Aurora said:[106] “We are at present led into these considerations in consequence of the assertions of certain adherents of Mr. Gallatin, namely, ‘that this gentleman possesses more talents than all the other officers in the Administration put together, including Mr. Madison himself; that Mr. Madison could not stand, nor the executive functions of the government be performed, without him.’ This is verbatim the language that is held forth at present. Now, what do these assertions amount to? Why, clearly, that Mr. Gallatin is, to all intents and purposes, the President, and even more than President of the United States.” “This comes from the particular friends of the Secretary of the Treasury,—can it be true? It is a fact that the people of the United States, in nominally electing Mr. Madison President, have in reality placed Mr. Gallatin in that high station.... It is said Mr. Gallatin aspires to the Presidency himself, but that we do not believe; no man knows better the impracticability of such a desire than himself; but if those assertions of Mr. Gallatin’s friends are true, it cannot be so much an object to him, since the salary is very little compared with the profits to be made by the Treasury.” Then comes the inevitable “extract of a letter from a gentleman of high standing” in New York to Dr. Leib: “The events at Washington have not at all surprised me; nay, they were such as I had been looking for for some time, knowing the ascendency which Gallatin had acquired over the mind of Mr. Madison, and knowing too the secret and invisible agency which was operating to produce it and to keep this crafty Genevan in place.” Under the form of an allegory the same idea is intensified:[107] “He was a man of singular sagacity and penetration; he could read the very thoughts of men in their faces and develop their designs; a man of few words; made no promises but to real favorites that would help him out at a dead lift, and ever sought to enhance his own interest, power, and aggrandizement by the most insatiate avarice on the very vitals of the unsuspecting nation.”

The charges of embezzlement and wholesale speculation in public lands, of immense wealth and limitless corruption, were probably harmless; they affected only the groundlings; but the insidious elevation of Mr. Gallatin, the displaying him as an irresistible magician whose touch was superhuman; the ascribing to him every power and every act that emanated from government, and the concentration upon him of the whole blaze of attack, destroyed his usefulness by indirection. No man can afford to stand in this attitude; it creates jealousies, estranges precisely the men of force and character who value their own independence, exposes to the attacks and obstructions of those who wish to be known by the greatness of their enmities, and in a manner stifles direct and warm co-operation. In such cases every newspaper, every Congressman, and every small politician thinks it necessary to protest that he is not under the alleged influence; that he is not afraid to oppose it; and that he holds a position of judicial neutrality. The Virginians thought it a matter of regret that Mr. Gallatin had not retired with Mr. Smith. Gallatin was fortunate if the men who disavowed him in public did not offer him an additional insult by assuring him in secret of their friendship.

“These repeated attacks are enough to beat down even you,” wrote Judge Nicholson. And Mr. Dallas, in a letter dated 21st April, 1811, added: “If Mr. Jefferson and his powerful friends at Washington, in the year 1805, had not given their countenance to the proscriptions of the Aurora, the evils of the present time would not have happened. I do not say this by way of reproach, but to point out the true cause why no man of real character and capacity in the Republican party of Pennsylvania has the power to render any political service to the Administration. It rests with Duane and Binns to knock down and set up whom they delight to destroy or to honor. In the present conflict, so far as you are personally concerned, I see with pride and pleasure that the influence of Duane is at an end.”

Even Mr. Jefferson was now obliged to choose sides. It is, perhaps, useless to expect that a public or private man will deal harshly with followers and flatterers; Duane had served Jefferson well, and Jefferson clung to him as to a wayward child; but now that Mr. Gallatin had at last forced the issue, Mr. Jefferson came to the President’s support, and, stimulated by the blunt response of Wirt and the Richmond Republicans that Duane might go to the Smiths for money but would not get it from them, he wrote Duane a letter to say, with a degree of tenderness that seems to the cold critic not a little amusing, that the Aurora had gone too far and was to be read out of the party. This was well enough; but the curb, as Mr. Dallas very properly said, should have been applied five years before; the harm was done, and it made very little difference whether the Aurora were in opposition or not; perhaps, indeed, it was already more dangerous in friendship than in enmity.

Mr. Gallatin himself was far from exulting over the fall of Robert Smith. There was something humiliating in the mere thought that he should have been pitted against so unsubstantial an opponent: there was a loss of power, an exhaustion of reserved force in the very effort he had been obliged to make. His success, if it were success, deprived him of freedom of action, tied him beyond redemption to the chariot of government, and took away his last means of escape from the humiliations his enemies might inflict. As he wrote to Judge Nicholson on the 30th May, a few weeks after the Cabinet crisis: “Notwithstanding the change, I feel no satisfaction in my present situation, and the less so because that circumstance has made me a slave. Perhaps for that reason I feel an ineffable thirst for retirement and obscurity.” Further Cabinet changes were imminent. Dr. Eustis, who had succeeded General Dearborn as Secretary of War, was unequal to the growing responsibilities of the office. Among prominent Republicans the only conspicuous candidate for the place was General Armstrong, just returned from France, one of the Clinton family, whom Mr. Gallatin always disliked, and who cordially returned the sentiment. There could be no real harmony between Mr. Gallatin and General Armstrong. Meanwhile, Justice Chase of the Supreme Court was dead, and the Attorney-General, Rodney, wished to be appointed to the bench. Mr. Madison passed him over to appoint Gabriel Duval, of Maryland; he resigned, and William Pinkney, recently minister to England, took the post of Attorney-General. The following letters of Mr. Dallas show the discontent aroused by these changes:

A. J. DALLAS TO GALLATIN.

24th June, 1811.

Dear Sir,—I do not know the arrangements to fill the vacancy occasioned by the death of Judge Chase. I do not wish to suggest any name from personal feelings. But perhaps it may be useful that you should know that Mr. Ingersoll would accept the appointment, as far as I can infer from his conversations during the vacancy occasioned by Judge Cushing’s death.