Morris landed just as the Federalist reaction, brought about by the conduct of France, had spent itself,—thanks partly to some inopportune pieces of insolence from England, in which country, as Morris once wrote to a foreign friend, "on a toujours le bon esprit de vouloir prendre les mouches avec du vinaigre." The famous alien and sedition laws were exciting great disgust, and in Virginia and Kentucky Jefferson was using them as handles wherewith to guide seditious agitation—not that he believed in sedition, but because he considered it good party policy, for the moment, to excite it. The parties hated each other with rancorous virulence; the newspapers teemed with the foulest abuse of public men, accusations of financial dishonesty were rife, Washington himself not being spared, and the most scurrilous personalities were bandied about between the different editors. The Federalists were split into two factions, one following the President, Adams, in his efforts to keep peace with France, if it could be done with honor, while the others, under Hamilton's lead, wished war at once.
Pennsylvanian politics were already very low. The leaders who had taken control were men of mean capacity and small morality, and the State was not only becoming rapidly democratic but was also drifting along in a disorganized, pseudo-jacobinical, half insurrectionary kind of way that would have boded ill for its future had it not been fettered by the presence of healthier communities round about it. New England was the only part of the community, excepting Delaware, where Federalism was on a perfectly sound footing; for in that section there was no caste spirit, the leaders and their followers were thoroughly in touch, and all the citizens, shrewd, thrifty, independent, were used to self-government, and fully awake to the fact that honesty and order are the prerequisites of liberty. Yet even here Democracy had made some inroads.
South of the Potomac the Federalists had lost ground rapidly. Virginia was still a battlefield; as long as Washington lived, his tremendous personal influence acted as a brake on the democratic advance, and the state's greatest orator, Patrick Henry, had halted beside the grave to denounce the seditious schemes of the disunion agitators with the same burning, thrilling eloquence that, thirty years before, had stirred to their depths the hearts of his hearers when he bade defiance to the tyrannous might of the British king. But when these two men were dead, Marshall,—though destined, as chief and controlling influence in the third division of our governmental system, to mould the whole of that system on the lines of Federalist thought, and to prove that a sound judiciary could largely affect an unsound executive and legislature,—even Marshall could not, single-handed, stem the current that had gradually gathered head. Virginia stands easily first among all our commonwealths for the statesmen and warriors she has brought forth; and it is noteworthy that during the long contest between the nationalists and separatists, which forms the central fact in our history for the first three quarters of a century of our national life, she gave leaders to both sides at the two great crises: Washington and Marshall to the one, and Jefferson to the other, when the question was one of opinion as to whether the Union should be built up; and when the appeal to arms was made to tear it down, Farragut and Thomas to the north, Lee and Jackson to the south.
There was one eddy in the tide of democratic success that flowed so strongly to the southward. This was in South Carolina. The fierce little Palmetto state has always been a free lance among her southern sisters; for instance, though usually ultra-democratic, she was hostile to the two great democratic chiefs, Jefferson and Jackson, though both were from the south. At the time that Morris came home, the brilliant little group of Federalist leaders within her bounds, headed by men of national renown like Pinckney and Harper, kept her true to Federalism by downright force of intellect and integrity; for they were among the purest as well as the ablest statesmen of the day.
New York had been going through a series of bitter party contests; any one examining a file of papers of that day will come to the conclusion that party spirit was even more violent and unreasonable then than now. The two great Federalist leaders, Hamilton and Jay, stood head and shoulders above all their democratic competitors, and they were backed by the best men in the state, like Rufus King, Schuyler and others. But, though as orators and statesmen they had no rivals, they were very deficient in the arts of political management. Hamilton's imperious haughtiness had alienated the powerful family of the Livingstones, who had thrown in their lot with the Clintonians; and a still more valuable ally to the latter had arisen in that consummate master of "machine" politics, Aaron Burr. In 1792, Jay, then chief justice of the United States, had run for governor against Clinton, and had received the majority of the votes; but had been counted out by the returning board in spite of the protest of its four Federalist members—Gansevoort, Roosevelt, Jones, and Sands. The indignation was extreme, and only Jay's patriotism and good sense prevented an outbreak. However, the memory of the fraud remained fresh in the minds of the citizens, and at the next election for governor he was chosen by a heavy majority, having then just come back from his mission to England. Soon afterwards his treaty was published, and excited a whirlwind of indignation; it was only ratified in the senate through Washington's great influence, backed by the magnificent oratory of Fisher Ames, whose speech on this occasion, when he was almost literally on his death-bed, ranks among the half dozen greatest of our country. The treaty was very objectionable in certain points, but it was most necessary to our well-being, and Jay was probably the only American who could have negotiated it. As with the Ashburton treaty many years later, extreme sections in England attacked it as fiercely as did the extreme sections here; and Lord Sheffield voiced their feelings when he hailed the war of 1812 as offering a chance to England to get back the advantages out of which "Jay had duped Grenville."
But the clash with France shortly afterwards swept away the recollection of the treaty, and Jay was reëlected in 1798. One of the arguments, by the way, which was used against him in the canvass was that he was an abolitionist. But, in spite of his reëlection, the New York Democrats were steadily gaining ground.
Such was the situation when Morris returned. He at once took high rank among the Federalists, and in April, 1800, just before the final wreck of their party, was chosen by them to fill an unexpired term of three years in the United States Senate. Before this he had made it evident that his sympathies lay with Hamilton and those who did not think highly of Adams. He did not deem it wise to renominate the latter for the Presidency. He had even written to Washington, earnestly beseeching him to accept the nomination; but Washington died a day or two after the letter was sent. In spite of the jarring between the leaders, the Federalists nominated Adams and Pinckney. In the ensuing Presidential election many of the party chiefs, notably Marshall of Virginia, already a strong Adams man, faithfully stood by the ticket in its entirety; but Hamilton, Morris, and many others at the North probably hoped in their hearts that, by the aid of the curious electoral system which then existed, some chance would put the great Carolinian in the first place and make him President. Indeed, there is little question that this might have been done, had not Pinckney, one of the most high-minded and disinterested statesmen we have ever had, emphatically declined to profit in any way by the hurting of the grim old Puritan.
The house thus divided against itself naturally fell, and Jefferson was chosen President. It was in New York that the decisive struggle took place, for that was the pivotal state; and there the Democrats, under the lead of the Livingstones and Clintons, but above all by the masterly political manoeuvres of Aaron Burr, gained a crushing victory. Hamilton, stung to madness by the defeat, and sincerely believing that the success of his opponents would be fatal to the republic,—for the two parties hated each other with a blind fury unknown to the organizations of the present day,—actually proposed to Jay, the governor, to nullify the action of the people by the aid of the old legislature, a Federalist body, which was still holding over, although the members of its successor had been chosen. Jay, as pure as he was brave, refused to sanction any such scheme of unworthy partisanship. It is worth noting that the victors in this election introduced for the first time the "spoils system," in all its rigor, into our state affairs; imitating the bad example of Pennsylvania a year or two previously.
When the Federalists in Congress, into which body the choice for President had been thrown, took up Burr, as a less objectionable alternative than Jefferson, Morris, much to his credit, openly and heartily disapproved of the movement, and was sincerely glad that it failed. For he thought Burr far the more dangerous man of the two, and, moreover, did not believe that the evident intention of the people should be thwarted. Both he and Hamilton, on this occasion, acted more wisely and more honestly than did most of their heated fellow-partisans. Writing to the latter, the former remarked: "It is dangerous to be impartial in politics; you, who are temperate in drinking, have never perhaps noticed the awkward situation of a man who continues sober after the company are drunk."
Morris joined the Senate at Philadelphia in May, 1800, but it almost immediately adjourned, to meet at Washington in November, when he was again present. Washington, as it then was, was a place whose straggling squalor has often been described. Morris wrote to the Princess de la Tour et Taxis, that it needed nothing "but houses, cellars, kitchens, well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of the kind to make the city perfect;" that it was "the very best city in the world for a future residence," but that as he was "not one of those good people whom we call posterity," he would meanwhile like to live somewhere else.