SERVICE IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE.
Morris was very warmly greeted on his return; and it was evident that
the length of his stay abroad had in nowise made him lose ground with
his friends at home. His natural affiliations were all with the
Federalist party, which he immediately joined.
During the year 1799 he did not take much part in politics, as he was
occupied in getting his business affairs in order and in putting to
rights his estates at Morrisania. The old manor house had become such a
crazy, leaky affair that he tore it down and built a new one; a great,
roomy building, not in the least showy, but solid, comfortable, and in
perfect taste; having, across the tree-clad hills of Westchester, a
superb view of the Sound, with its jagged coast and capes and islands.
Although it was so long since he had practiced law, he was shortly
engaged in a very important case that was argued for eight days before
the Court of Errors in Albany. Few trials in the State of New York have
ever brought together such a number of men of remarkable legal ability;
for among the lawyers engaged on one side or the other were Morris,
Hamilton, Burr, Robert Livingstone, and Troup. There were some sharp
passages of arms: and the trial of wits between Morris and Hamilton in
particular were so keen as to cause a passing coolness.
During the ten years that had gone by since Morris sailed for Europe,
the control of the national government had been in the hands of the
Federalists; when he returned, party bitterness was at the highest
pitch, for the Democrats were preparing to make the final push for power
which should overthrow and ruin their antagonists. Four-fifths of the
talent, ability, and good sense of the country were to be found in the
Federalist ranks; for the Federalists had held their own so far, by
sheer force of courage and intellectual vigor, over foes in reality more
numerous. Their great prop had been Washington. His colossal influence
was to the end decisive in party contests, and he had in fact, although
hardly in name, almost entirely abandoned his early attempts at
non-partisanship, had grown to distrust Madison as he long before had
distrusted Jefferson, and had come into constantly closer relations with
their enemies. His death diminished greatly the chances of Federalist
success; there were two other causes at work that destroyed them
entirely.
One of these was the very presence in the dominant party of so many men
nearly equal in strong will and great intellectual power; their
ambitions and theories clashed; even the loftiness of their aims, and
their disdain of everything small, made them poor politicians, and with
Washington out of the way there was no one commander to overawe the rest
and to keep down the fierce bickerings constantly arising among them;
while in the other party there was a single leader, Jefferson,
absolutely without a rival, but supported by a host of sharp political
workers, most skillful in marshaling that unwieldy and hitherto
disunited host of voters who were inferior in intelligence to their
fellows.
The second cause lay deep in the nature of the Federalist organization:
it was its distrust of the people. This was the fatally weak streak in
Federalism. In a government such as ours it was a foregone conclusion
that a party which did not believe in the people would sooner or later
be thrown from power unless there was an armed break-up of the system.
The distrust was felt, and of course excited corresponding and intense
hostility. Had the Federalists been united, and had they freely trusted
in the people, the latter would have shown that the trust was well
founded; but there was no hope for leaders who suspected each other and
feared their followers.
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 reelected 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 reelection, 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.
During his three years' term in the Senate he was one of the strong
pillars of the Federalist party; but he was both too independent and too
erratic to act always within strict party lines, and while he was an
ultra-Federalist on some points, he openly abandoned his fellows on
others. He despised Jefferson as a tricky and incapable theorist,
skillful in getting votes, but in nothing else; a man who believed "in
the wisdom of mobs, and the moderation of Jacobins," and who found
himself "in the wretched plight of being forced to turn out good
officers to make room for the unworthy."
After the election that turned them out of power, but just before their
opponents took office, the Federalists in the Senate and House passed
the famous judiciary bill, and Adams signed it. It provided for a number
of new federal judges to act throughout the states, while the supreme
court was retained as the ultimate court of decision. It was an
excellent measure, inasmuch as it simplified the work of the judiciary,
saved the highest branch from useless traveling, prevented the calendars
from being choked with work, and supplied an upright federal judiciary
to certain districts where the local judges could not be depended upon
to act honestly. On the other hand, the Federalists employed it as a
means to keep themselves partly in power, after the nation had decided
that they should be turned out. Although the Democrats had bitterly
opposed it, yet if, as was only right, the offices created by it had
been left vacant until Jefferson came in, it would probably have been
allowed to stand. But Adams, most improperly, spent the last hours of
his administration in putting in the new judges.
Morris, who heartily championed the measure, wrote his reasons for so
doing to Livingstone; giving, with his usual frankness, those that were
political and improper, as well as those based on some public policy,
but apparently not appreciating the gravity of the charges he so lightly
admitted. He said: "The new judiciary bill may have, and doubtless has,
many little faults, but it answers the double purpose of bringing
justice near to men's doors, and of giving additional fibre to the root
of government. You must not, my friend, judge of other states by your
own. Depend on it, that in some parts of this Union, justice cannot be
readily obtained in the state courts." So far, he was all right, and the
truth of his statements, and the soundness of his reasons, could not be
challenged as to the propriety of the law itself; but he was much less
happy in giving his views of the way in which it would be carried out:
"That the leaders of the federal party may use this opportunity to
provide for friends and adherents is, I think, probable; and if they
were my enemies, I should blame them for it. Whether I should do the
same thing myself is another question.... They are about to experience a
heavy gale of adverse wind; can they be blamed for casting many anchors
to hold their ship through the storm?" Most certainly they should be
blamed for casting this particular kind of anchor; it was a very gross
outrage for them to "provide for friends and adherents" in such a
manner.
The folly of their action was seen at once; for they had so maddened the
Democrats that the latter repealed the act as soon as they came into
power. This also was of course all wrong, and was a simple sacrifice of
a measure of good government to partisan rage. Morris led the fight
against it, deeming the repeal not only in the highest degree unwise
but also unconstitutional. After the repeal was accomplished, the
knowledge that their greed to grasp office under the act was probably
the cause of the loss of an excellent law, must have been rather a
bitter cud for the Federalists to chew. Morris always took an
exaggerated view of the repeal, regarding it as a death-blow to the
constitution. It was certainly a most unfortunate affair throughout; and
much of the blame attaches to the Federalists, although still more to
their antagonists.
The absolute terror with which even moderate Federalists had viewed the
victory of the Democrats was in a certain sense justifiable; for the
leaders who led the Democrats to triumph were the very men who had
fought tooth and nail against every measure necessary to make us a free,
orderly, and powerful nation. But the safety of the nation really lay in
the very fact that the policy hitherto advocated by the now victorious
party had embodied principles so wholly absurd in practice that it was
out of the question to apply them at all to the actual running of the
government. Jefferson could write or speak--and could feel too--the most
high-sounding sentiments; but once it came to actions he was absolutely
at sea, and on almost every matter--especially where he did well--he had
to fall back on the Federalist theories. Almost the only important
point on which he allowed himself free scope was that of the national
defenses; and here, particularly as regards the navy, he worked very
serious harm to the country. Otherwise he generally adopted and acted on
the views of his predecessors; as Morris said, the Democrats "did more
to strengthen the executive than Federalists dared think of, even in
Washington's day." As a consequence, though the nation would certainly
have been better off if men like Adams or Pinckney had been retained at
the head of affairs, yet the change resulted in far less harm than it
bade fair to.
On the other hand the Federalists cut a very sorry figure in opposition.
We have never had another party so little able to stand adversity. They
lost their temper first and they lost their principles next, and
actually began to take up the heresies discarded by their adversaries.
Morris himself, untrue to all his previous record, advanced various
states-rights doctrines; and the Federalists, the men who had created
the Union, ended their days under the grave suspicion of having desired
to break it up. Morris even opposed, and on a close vote temporarily
defeated, the perfectly unobjectionable proposition to change the
electoral system by designating the candidates for President and
Vice-President; the reason he gave was that he believed parties should
be forced to nominate both of their best men, and that he regarded the
Jefferson-Burr tie as a beautiful object-lesson for teaching this point!
On one most important question, however, he cut loose from his party,
who were entirely in the wrong, and acted with the administration, who
were behaving in strict accordance with Federalist precepts. This was in
reference to the treaty by which we acquired Louisiana.
While in opposition, one of the most discreditable features of the
Republican-Democratic party had been its servile truckling to France,
which at times drove it into open disloyalty to America. Indeed this
subservience to foreigners was a feature of our early party history; and
the most confirmed pessimist must admit that, as regards patriotism and
indignant intolerance of foreign control, the party organizations of
to-day are immeasurably superior to those of eighty or ninety years
back. But it was only while in opposition that either party was ready to
throw itself into the arms of outsiders. Once the Democrats took the
reins they immediately changed their attitude. The West demanded New
Orleans and the valley of the Mississippi; and what it demanded it was
determined to get. When we only had the decaying weakness of Spain to
deal with, there was no cause for hurry; but when Louisiana was ceded to
France, at the time when the empire of Napoleon was a match for all the
rest of the world put together, the country was up in arms at once.
The Administration promptly began to negotiate for the purchase of
Louisiana. Morris backed them up heartily, thus splitting off from the
bulk of the Federalists, and earnestly advocated far stronger measures
than had been taken. He believed that so soon as the French should
establish themselves in New Orleans, we should have a war with them; he
knew it would be impossible for the haughty chiefs of a military
despotism long to avoid collisions with the reckless and warlike
backwoodsmen of the border. Nor would he have been sorry had such a war
taken place. He said that it was a necessity to us, for we were
dwindling into a race of mere speculators and driveling philosophers,
whereas ten years of warfare would bring forth a crop of heroes and
statesmen, fit timber out of which to hew an empire.
Almost his last act in the United States Senate was to make a most
powerful and telling speech in favor of at once occupying the territory
in dispute, and bidding defiance to Napoleon. He showed that we could
not submit to having so dangerous a neighbor as France, an ambitious and
conquering nation, at whose head was the greatest warrior of the age.
With ringing emphasis he claimed the western regions as peculiarly our
heritage, as the property of the fathers of America which they held in
trust for their children. It was true that France was then enjoying the
peace which she had wrung from the gathered armies of all Europe; yet he
advised us to fling down the gauntlet fearlessly, not hampering
ourselves by an attempt at alliance with Great Britain or any other
power, but resting confident that, if America was heartily in earnest,
she would be able to hold her own in any struggle. The cost of the
conquest he brushed contemptuously aside; he considered "that
counting-house policy, which sees nothing but money, a poor,
short-sighted, half-witted, mean, and miserable thing, as far removed
from wisdom as is a monkey from a man." He wished for peace; but he did
not believe the Emperor would yield us the territory, and he knew that
his fellow-representatives, and practically all the American people,
were determined to fight for it if they could get it in no other way;
therefore he advised them to begin at once, and gain forthwith what they
wanted, and perhaps their example would inspirit Europe to rise against
the tyrant.
It was bold advice, and if need had arisen it would have been followed;
for we were bound to have Louisiana, if not by bargain and sale then by
fair shock of arms. But Napoleon yielded, and gave us the land for
fifteen millions, of which, said Morris, "I am content to pay my share
to deprive foreigners of all pretext for entering our interior country;
if nothing else were gained by the treaty, that alone would satisfy me."
Morris's term as senator expired on March 4th, 1803, and he was not
reelected; for New York State had passed into the hands of the
Democrats. But he still continued to play a prominent part in public
affairs, for he was the leader in starting the project of the Erie
canal. It was to him that we owe the original idea of this great
water-way, for he thought of it and planned it out long before any one
else. He had publicly proposed it during the revolutionary period; in
1803 he began the agitation in its favor that culminated in its
realization, and he was chairman of the Canal Commissioners from the
time of their appointment, in 1810, until within a few months of his
death. The three first reports of the Commission were all from his pen.
As Stephen Van Rensselaer, himself one of the commissioners from the
beginning, said, "Gouverneur Morris was the father of our great canal."
He hoped ultimately to make it a ship canal. While a member of the
commission, he not only discharged his duties as such with
characteristic energy and painstaking, but he also did most effective
outside work in advancing the enterprise, while he mastered the subject
more thoroughly in all its details than did any other man.
He spent most of his time at Morrisania, but traveled for two or three
months every summer, sometimes going out to the then "far West," along
the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and once descending the St.
Lawrence. At home he spent his time tilling his farm, reading, receiving
visits from his friends, and carrying on a wide correspondence on
business and politics. Jay's home was within driving distance, and the
two fine old fellows saw much of each other. On the 25th of December,
1809, Morris, then fifty-six years old, married Miss Anne Cary Randolph,
a member of the famous Virginia family; he was very happy with her, and
by her he had one son. Three weeks after the marriage he wrote Jay a
pressing request to visit him: "I pray you will, with your daughters,
embark immediately in your sleigh, after a very early breakfast, and
push on so as to reach this house in the evening. My wife sends her
love, and says she longs to receive her husband's friend; that his
sickness must be no excuse, for she will nurse him. Come, then, and see
your old friend perform his part in an old-fashioned scene of domestic
enjoyment." Jay was very simple in his way of living; but Morris was
rather formal. When he visited his friend he always came with his valet,
was shown straight to his room without seeing any one, dressed himself
with scrupulous nicety,--being very particular about his powdered
hair,--and then came down to see his host.
Although his letters generally dealt with public matters, he sometimes
went into home details. He thus wrote an amusing letter to a good friend
of his, a lady, who was desirous, following the custom of the day, to
send her boy to what was called a "college" at an absurdly early age; he
closed by warning her that "these children of eleven, after a four
years' course, in which they may learn to smatter a little of
everything, become bachelors of arts before they know how to button
their clothes, and are the most troublesome and useless, sometimes the
most pernicious, little animals that ever infested a commonwealth."
At one time he received as his guest Moreau, the exiled French general,
then seeking service in the United States. Writing in his diary an
account of the visit, he says: "In the course of our conversation,
touching very gently the idea of his serving (in case of necessity)
against France, he declares frankly that, when the occasion arrives, he
shall feel no reluctance; that France having cast him out, he is a
citizen of the country where he lives, and has the same right to follow
his trade here as any other man."
He took the keenest pleasure in his life, and always insisted that
America was the pleasantest of all places in which to live. Writing to a
friend abroad, and mentioning that he respected the people of Britain,
but did not find them congenial, he added: "But were the manners of
those countries as pleasant as the people are respectable, I should
never be reconciled to their summers. Compare the uninterrupted warmth
and splendor of America, from the first of May to the last of September,
and her autumn, truly celestial, with your shivering June, your July and
August sometimes warm but often wet, your uncertain September, your
gloomy October, and your dismal November. Compare these things, and then
say how a man who prizes the charm of Nature can think of making the
exchange. If you were to pass one autumn with us, you would not give it
for the best six months to be found in any other country.... There is a
brilliance in our atmosphere of which you can have no idea."
He thoroughly appreciated the marvelous future that lay before the race
on this continent. Writing in 1801, he says: "As yet we only crawl along
the outer shell of our country. The interior excels the part we inhabit
in soil, in climate, in everything. The proudest empire in Europe is but
a bauble compared to what America _will_ be, _must_ be, in the course of
two centuries, perhaps of one!" And again, "With respect to this
country, calculation outruns fancy, and fact outruns calculation."
Until his hasty, impulsive temper became so soured by partisanship as to
warp his judgment, Morris remained as well satisfied with the people and
the system of government as with the land itself. In one of his first
letters after his return to America he wrote: "There is a fund of good
sense and calmness of character here, which will, I think, avoid all
dangerous excesses. We are free: we know it: and we know how to continue
free." On another occasion, about the same time, he said: "_Nil
desperandum de republica_ is a sound principle." Again, in the middle of
Jefferson's first term: "We have indeed a set of madmen in the
administration, and they will do many foolish things; but there is a
vigorous vegetative principle at the root which will make our tree
flourish, let the winds blow as they may."
He at first took an equally just view of our political system, saying
that in adopting a republican form of government he "not only took it,
as a man does his wife, for better or worse, but, what few men do with
their wives, knowing all its bad qualities." He observed that there was
always a counter current in human affairs, which opposed alike good and
evil. "Thus the good we hope is seldom attained, and the evil we fear is
rarely realized. The leaders of faction must for their own sakes avoid
errors of enormous magnitude; so that, while the republican form lasts,
we shall be fairly well governed." He thought this form the one best
suited for us, and remarked that "every kind of government was liable to
evil; that the best was that which had fewest faults; that the
excellence even of that best depended more on its fitness for the nation
where it was established than on intrinsic perfection." He denounced,
with a fierce scorn that they richly merit, the despicable demagogues
and witless fools who teach that in all cases the voice of the majority
must be implicitly obeyed, and that public men have only to carry out
its will, and thus "acknowledge themselves the willing instruments of
folly and vice. They declare that in order to please the people they
will, regardless alike of what conscience may dictate or reason approve,
make the profligate sacrifice of public right on the altar of private
interest. What more can be asked by the sternest tyrant of the most
despicable slave? Creatures of this sort are the tools which usurpers
employ in building despotism."
Sounder and truer maxims never were uttered; but unfortunately the
indignation naturally excited by the utter weakness and folly of
Jefferson's second term, and the pitiable incompetence shown both by
him, by his successor, and by their party associates in dealing with
affairs, so inflamed and exasperated Morris as to make him completely
lose his head, and hurried him into an opposition so violent that his
follies surpassed the worst of the follies he condemned. He gradually
lost faith in our republican system, and in the Union itself. His old
jealousy of the West revived more strongly than ever; he actually
proposed that our enormous masses of new territory, destined one day to
hold the bulk of our population, "should be governed as provinces, and
allowed no voice in our councils." So hopelessly futile a scheme is
beneath comment; and it cannot possibly be reconciled with his previous
utterances when he descanted on our future greatness as a people, and
claimed the West as the heritage of our children. His conduct can only
be unqualifiedly condemned; and he has but the poor palliation that, in
our early history, many of the leading men in New York, and an even
larger proportion in New England, felt the same narrow, illiberal
jealousy of the West which had formerly been felt by the English
statesmen for America as a whole.
It is well indeed for our land that we of this generation have at last
learned to think nationally, and, no matter in what state we live, to
view our whole country with the pride of personal possession.