In regard to any party, probably, at one of the leading epochs in the history of parties, enough may be found to make out another equally inflamed exhibition as that with which the honorable member has edified us. For myself, sir, I shall not rake among the rubbish of by-gone times to see what I can find or whether I cannot find something by which I can fix a blot on the escutcheon of any state, any party, or any part of the country. General Washington’s administration was steadily and zealously maintained, as we all know, by New England. It was violently opposed elsewhere. We know in what quarter he had the most earnest, constant and persevering support, in all his great and leading measures. We know where his private and personal character was held in the highest degree of attachment and veneration; and we know, too, where his measures were opposed, his services slighted, and his character vilified.
We know, or we might know, if we turn to the journals, who expressed respect, gratitude, and regret, when he retired from the chief magistracy; and who refused to express either respect, gratitude or regret. I shall not open those journals. Publications more abusive or scurrilous never saw the light than were sent forth against Washington, and all his leading measures, from presses south of New England; but I shall not look them up. I employ no scavengers—no one is in attendance on me, tendering such means of retaliation; and if there were, with an ass’s load of them, with a bulk as huge as that which the gentleman himself has produced, I would not touch one of them. I see enough of the violence of our own times to be no way anxious to rescue from forgetfulness the extravagances of times past. Besides, what is all this to the present purpose? It has nothing to do with the public lands, in regard to which the attack was begun; and it has nothing to do with those sentiments and opinions, which I have thought tend to disunion, and all of which the honorable member seems to have adopted himself, and undertaken to defend. New England has, at times—so argues the gentleman,—held opinions as dangerous as those which he now holds. Be it so. But why, therefore, does he abuse New England? If he finds himself countenanced by acts of hers, how is it that, while he relies on these acts, he covers, or seeks to cover, their authors with reproach?
But, sir, if, in the course of forty years, there have been undue effervescences of party in New England, has the same thing happened no where else? Party animosity and party outrage, not in New England, but elsewhere, denounced President Washington, not only as a federalist, but as a tory, a British agent, a man who, in his high office, sanctioned corruption. But does the honorable member suppose that, if I had a tender here, who should put such an effusion of wickedness and folly in my hand, that I would stand up and read it against the south? Parties ran into great heats, again, in 1799. What was said, sir, or rather what was not said, in those years, against John Adams, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and its admitted ablest defender on the floor of Congress? If the gentleman wants to increase his stores of party abuse and frothy violence, if he has a determined proclivity to such pursuits, there are treasures of that sort south of the Potomac, much to his taste, yet untouched. I shall not touch them.
The parties which divided the country, at the commencement of the late war, were violent. But, then, there was violence on both sides, and violence in every state. Minorities and majorities were equally violent. There was no more violence against the war in New England than in other states; nor any more appearance of violence, except that, owing to a dense population, greater facility for assembling, and more presses, there may have been more, in quantity, spoken and printed there than in some other places. In the article of sermons, too, New England is somewhat more abundant than South Carolina: and for that reason, the chance of finding here and there an exceptionable one may be greater. I hope, too, there are more good ones. Opposition may have been more formidable in New England, as it embraced a larger portion of the whole population: but it was no more unrestrained in its principle, or violent in manner. The minorities dealt quite as harshly with their own state governments as the majorities dealt with the administration here. There were presses on both sides, popular meetings on both sides, ay, and pulpits on both sides, also. The gentleman’s purveyors have only catered for him among the productions of one side. I certainly shall not supply the deficiency by furnishing samples of the other. I leave to him, and to them, the whole concern.
It is enough for me to say, that if, in any part of this, their grateful occupation—if in all their researches—they find anything in the history of Massachusetts, or New England, or in the proceedings of any legislative or other public body, disloyal to the Union, speaking slightly of its value, proposing to break it up, or recommending non-intercourse with neighboring states, on account of difference of political opinion, then, sir, I give them all up to the honorable gentleman’s unrestrained rebuke; expecting, however, that he will extend his buffetings, in like manner, to all similar proceedings, wherever else found.
The gentleman, sir, has spoken at large of former parties, now no longer in being, by their received appellations, and has undertaken to instruct us, not only in the knowledge of their principles, but of their respective pedigrees also. He has ascended to their origin and run out their genealogies. With most exemplary modesty, he speaks of the party to which he professes to have belonged himself, as the true, pure, the only honest, patriotic party, derived by regular descent, from father to son, from the time of the virtuous Romans! Spreading before us the family tree of political parties, he takes especial care to show himself snugly perched on a popular bough! He is wakeful to the expediency of adopting such rules of descent, for political parties, as shall bring him in, in exclusion of others, as an heir to the inheritance of all public virtue, and all true political principles. His doxy is always orthodoxy. Heterodoxy is confined to his opponents. He spoke, sir, of the federalists, and I thought I saw some eyes begin to open and stare a little, when he ventured on that ground. I expected he would draw his sketches rather lightly, when he looked on the circle round him, and especially if he should cast his thoughts to the high places out of the Senate. Nevertheless, he went back to Rome, ad annum urbs condita, and found the fathers of the federalists in the primeval aristocrats of that renowned empire! He traced the flow of federal blood down through successive ages and centuries, till he got into the veins of the American tories, (of whom, by the way, there were twenty in the Carolinas for one in Massachusetts.) From the tories, he followed it to the federalists; and as the federal party was broken up, and there was no possibility of transmitting it farther on this side of the Atlantic, he seems to have discovered that it has gone off, collaterally, though against all the canons of descent, into the ultras of France, and finally became extinguished, like exploded gas, among the adherents of Don Miguel.
This, sir, is an abstract of the gentleman’s history of federalism. I am not about to controvert it. It is not, at present, worth the pains of refutation, because, sir, if at this day one feels the sin of federalism lying heavily on his conscience, he can easily obtain remission. He may even have an indulgence, if he is desirous of repeating the transgression. It is an affair of no difficulty to get into this same right line of patriotic descent. A man, nowadays, is at liberty to choose his political parentage. He may elect his own father. Federalist or not, he may, if he choose, claim to belong to the favored stock, and his claim will be allowed. He may carry back his pretensions just as far as the honorable gentleman himself; nay, he may make himself out the honorable gentleman’s cousin, and prove satisfactorily that he is descended from the same political great-grandfather. All this is allowable. We all know a process, sir, by which the whole Essex Junto could, in one hour be all washed white from their ancient federalism, and come out every one of them, an original democrat, dyed in the wool! Some of them have actually undergone the operation, and they say it is quite easy. The only inconvenience it occasions, as they tell us, is a slight tendency of the blood to the face, a soft suffusion, which, however, is very transient, since nothing is said calculated to deepen the red on the cheek, but a prudent silence observed in regard to all the past. Indeed, sir, some smiles of approbation have been bestowed, and some crumbs of comfort have fallen, not a thousand miles from the door of the Hartford Convention itself. And if the author of the ordinance of 1787 possessed the other requisite qualifications, there is no knowing, notwithstanding his federalism, to what heights of favor he might not yet attain.
Mr. President, in carrying his warfare, such as it was, into New England, the honorable gentleman all along professes to be acting on the defensive. He desires to consider me as having assailed South Carolina and insists that he comes forth only as her champion, and in her defence. Sir, I do not admit that I made any attack whatever on South Carolina. Nothing like it. The honorable member, in his first speech, expressed opinions, in regard to revenue, and some other topics, which I heard both with pain and surprise. I told the gentleman that I was aware that such sentiments were entertained OUT of the government, but had not expected to find them advanced in it; that I knew there were persons in the south who speak of our Union with indifference, or doubt, taking pains to magnify its evils, and to say nothing of its benefits; that the honorable member himself, I was sure, could never be one of these; and I regretted the expression of such opinions as he had avowed, because I thought their obvious tendency was to encourage feelings of disrespect to the Union, and to weaken its connection. This, sir, is the sum and substance of all I said on the subject. And this constitutes the attack which called on the chivalry of the gentleman, in his opinion, to harry us with such a forage among the party pamphlets and party proceedings of Massachusetts. If he means that I spoke with dissatisfaction or disrespect of the ebullitions of individuals in South Carolina, it is true. But, if he means that I had assailed the character of the state, her honor, or patriotism, that I had reflected on her history or her conduct, he had not the slightest ground for any such assumption. I did not even refer, I think, in my observations, to any collection of individuals. I said nothing of the recent conventions. I spoke in the most guarded and careful manner, and only expressed my regret for the publication of opinions which I presumed the honorable member disapproved as much as myself. In this, it seems, I was mistaken.
I do not remember that the gentleman has disclaimed any sentiment, or any opinion, of a supposed anti-Union tendency, which on all or any of the recent occasions has been expressed. The whole drift of his speech has been rather to prove, that, in divers times and manners, sentiments equally liable to objection have been promulgated in New England. And one would suppose that his object, in this reference to Massachusetts, was to find a precedent to justify proceedings in the south, were it not for the reproach and contumely with which he labors, all along, to load his precedents.
By way of defending South Carolina from what he chooses to think an attack on her, he first quotes the example of Massachusetts, and then denounces that example, in good set terms. This twofold purpose, not very consistent with itself, one would think, was exhibited more than once in the course of his speech. He referred, for instance, to the Hartford Convention. Did he do this for authority, or for a topic of reproach? Apparently for both; for he told us that he should find no fault with the mere fact of holding such a convention, and considering and discussing such questions as he supposes were then and there discussed; but what rendered it obnoxious was the time it was holden, and the circumstances of the country then existing. We were in a war, he said, and the country needed all our aid; the hand of government required to be strengthened, not weakened; and patriotism should have postponed such proceedings to another day. The thing itself, then, is a precedent; the time and manner of it, only, subject of censure.