Gouverneur Morris

by Theodore Roosevelt

The war was distinctly worth fighting, and resulted in good to the country. The blame that attaches to Madison and the elder democratic-republican leaders, as well as to their younger associates, Clay, Calhoun, and the rest, who fairly flogged them into action, relates to their utter failure to make any preparations for the contest, to their helpless inability to carry it on, and to the extraordinary weakness and indecision of their policy throughout; and on all these points it is hardly possible to visit them with too unsparing censure.

Yet, grave though these faults were, they were mild compared to those committed by Morris and the other ultra-Federalists of New York and New England. Morris's opposition to the war led him to the most extravagant lengths. In his hatred of the opposite party he lost all loyalty to the nation. He championed the British view of their right to impress seamen from our ships; he approved of peace on the terms they offered, which included a curtailment of our western frontier, and the erection along it of independent Indian sovereignties under British protection. He found space in his letters to exult over the defeats of Bonaparte, but could spare no word of praise for our own victories.

He actually advocated repudiating our war debt,[3] on the ground that it was void, being founded on a moral wrong; and he wished the Federalists to make public profession of their purpose, so that when they should come back to power, the holders might have no reason to complain that there had been no warning of their intention. To Josiah Quincy, on May 15th, he wrote: "Should it be objected, as it probably will to favor lenders and their associates, that public faith is pledged, it may be replied that a pledge wickedly given is not to be redeemed." He thus advanced the theory that in a government ruled by parties, which come into power alternately, any debt could be repudiated, at any time, if the party in power happened to disapprove of its originally being incurred. No greenback demagogue of the lowest type ever advocated a proposition more dishonest or more contemptible.

He wrote that he agreed with Pickering that it was impious to raise taxes for so unjust a war. He endeavored, fortunately in vain, to induce Rufus King in the Senate to advocate the refusal of supplies of every sort, whether of men or money, for carrying on the war; but King was far too honorable to turn traitor. Singularly forgetful of his speeches in the Senate ten years before, he declared that he wished that a foreign power might occupy and people the West, so as, by outside pressure, to stifle our feuds. He sneered at the words union and constitution, as being meaningless. He railed bitterly at the honest and loyal majority of his fellow-Federalists in New York, who had professed their devotion to the Union; and in a letter of April 29th, to Harrison Gray Otis,—who was almost as bad as himself,—he strongly advocated secession, writing among other things that he wished the New York Federalists to declare publicly that "the Union, being the means of freedom, should be prized as such, but that the end should not be sacrificed to the means." By comparing this with Calhoun's famous toast at the Jefferson birthday dinner in 1880, "The Union; next to our liberty the most dear; may we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing equally the benefit and the burden of the Union," it can be seen how completely Morris's utterances went on all fours with those of the great nullifier.

To Pickering he wrote, on October 17th, 1814: "I hear every day professions of attachment to the Union, and declarations as to its importance. I should be glad to meet with some one who could tell me what has become of the Union, in what it consists, and to what useful purpose it endures." He regarded the dissolution of the Union to be so nearly an accomplished fact that the only question was whether the boundary should be "the Delaware, the Susquehanna, or the Potomac"; for he thought that New York would have to go with New England. He nourished great hopes of the Hartford convention, which he expected would formally come out for secession; he wrote Otis that the convention should declare that the Union was already broken, and that all that remained to do was to take action for the preservation of the interests of the Northeast. He was much chagrined when the convention fell under the control of Cabot and the moderates. As late as January 10, 1815, he wrote that the only proceeding from which the people of his section would gain practical benefit would be a "severance of the Union."

In fact, throughout the war of 1812 he appeared as the open champion of treason to the nation, of dishonesty to the nation's creditors, and of cringing subserviency to a foreign power. It is as impossible to reconcile his course with his previous career and teachings as it is to try to make it square with the rules of statesmanship and morality. His own conduct affords a conclusive condemnation of his theories as to the great inferiority of a government conducted by the multitude, to a government conducted by the few who should have riches and education. Undoubtedly he was one of these few; he was an exceptionally able man, and a wealthy one; but he went farther wrong at this period than the majority of our people—the "mob" as he would have contemptuously called them—have ever gone at any time; for though every state in turn, and almost every statesman, has been wrong upon some issue or another, yet in the long run the bulk of the people have always hitherto shown themselves true to the cause of right. Morris strenuously insisted upon the need of property being defended from the masses; yet he advocated repudiation of the national debt, which he should have known to be quite as dishonest as the repudiation of his individual liabilities, and he was certainly aware that the step is a short one between refusing to pay a man what ought to be his and taking away from him what actually is his.

There were many other Federalist leaders in the same position as himself, especially in the three southern New England states, where the whole Federalist party laid itself open to the gravest charges of disloyalty. Morris was not alone in his creed at this time. On the contrary, his position is interesting because it is typical of that assumed by a large section of his party throughout the Northeast. In fact, the Federalists in this portion of the Union had split in three, although the lines of cleavage were not always well marked. Many of them remained heartily loyal to the national idea; the bulk hesitated as to whether they should go all lengths or not; while a large and influential minority, headed by Morris, Pickering, Quincy, Lowell and others, were avowed disunionists. Had peace not come when it did, it is probable that the moderates would finally have fallen under the control of these ultras. The party developed an element of bitter unreason in defeat; it was a really sad sight to see a body of able, educated men, interested and skilled in the conduct of public affairs, all going angrily and stupidly wrong on the one question that was of vital concern to the nation.

It is idle to try to justify the proceedings of the Hartford convention, or of the Massachusetts and Connecticut legislatures. The decision to keep the New England troops as an independent command was of itself sufficient ground for condemnation; moreover, it was not warranted by any show of superior prowess on the part of the New Englanders, for a portion of Maine continued in possession of the British till the close of the war. The Hartford resolutions were so framed as to justify seceding or not seceding as events turned out; a man like Morris could extract comfort from them, while it was hoped they would not frighten those who were more loyal. The majority of the people in New England were beyond question loyal, exactly as in 1860 a majority of Southerners were opposed to secession; but the disloyal element was active and resolute, and hoped to force the remainder into its own way of thinking. It failed signally, and was buried beneath a load of disgrace; and New England was taught thus early and by heart the lesson that wrongs must be righted within, and not without the Union. It would have been well for her sister section of the South, so loyal in 1815, if forty-five years afterwards she had spared herself the necessity of learning the same lesson at an infinitely greater cost.

The truth is that it is nonsense to reproach any one section with being especially disloyal to the Union. At one time or another almost every state has shown strong particularistic leanings; Connecticut and Pennsylvania, for example, quite as much as Virginia or Kentucky. Fortunately the outbursts were never simultaneous in a majority. It is as impossible to question the fact that at one period or another of the past, many of the states in each section have been very shaky in their allegiance as it is to doubt that they are now all heartily loyal. The secession movement of 1860 was pushed to extremities, instead of being merely planned and threatened, and the revolt was peculiarly abhorrent, because of the intention to make slavery the "corner-stone" of the new nation, and to reintroduce the slave-trade, to the certain ultimate ruin of the Southern whites; but at least it was entirely free from the meanness of being made in the midst of a doubtful struggle with a foreign foe. Indeed, in this respect the ultra-Federalists of New York and New England in 1814 should be compared with the infamous Northern copperheads of the Vallandigham stripe rather than with the gallant confederates who risked and lost all in fighting for the cause of their choice. Half a century before the "stars and bars" waved over Lee's last intrenchments, perfervid New England patriots were fond of flaunting "the flag with five stripes," and drinking to the health of the—fortunately stillborn—new nation. Later on, the disunion movement among the Northern abolitionists, headed by Garrison, was perhaps the most absolutely senseless of all, for its success meant the immediate abandonment of every hope of abolition.

In each one of these movements men of the highest character and capacity took part. Morris had by previous services rendered the whole nation his debtor; Garrison was one of the little band who, in the midst of general apathy, selfishness, and cowardice, dared to demand the cutting out of the hideous plague spot of our civilization; while Lee and Jackson were as remarkable for stainless purity and high-mindedness as they were for their consummate military skill. But the disunion movements in which they severally took part were wholly wrong. An Englishman of to-day may be equally proud of the valor of Cavalier and Roundhead; but, if competent to judge, he must admit that the Roundhead was right. So it is with us. The man who fought for secession warred for a cause as evil and as capable of working lasting harm as the doctrine of the divine right of kings itself. But we may feel an intense pride in his gallantry; and we may believe in his honesty as heartily as we believe in that of the only less foolish being who wishes to see our government strongly centralized, heedless of the self-evident fact that over such a vast land as ours the nation can exist only as a Federal Union; and that, exactly as the liberty of the individual and the rights of the states can only be preserved by upholding the strength of the nation, so this same localizing of power in all matters not essentially national is vital to the wellbeing and durability of the government.