THE President’s Annual Message, read November 29 before Congress,
threw no light on the situation. If Madison’s fame as a statesman
rested on what he wrote as President, he would be thought not only
among the weakest of Executives, but also among the dullest of men,
whose liveliest sally of feeling exhausted itself in an epithet, and
whose keenest sympathy centred in the tobacco crop; but no statesman
suffered more than Madison from the constraints of official dress.
The Message of 1809 hinted that England had no right to disavow her
minister’s engagement, and that Jackson’s instructions as well as his
conduct betrayed a settled intent to prevent an understanding; but
these complaints led to no corrective measures. The President professed
himself still willing to listen with ready attention to communications
from the British government through any new channel, and he seemed to
fall back on Jefferson’s “painful alternatives” of the year before,
rather than on any settled plan of his own:--
“In the state which has been presented of our affairs with the
parties to a disastrous and protracted war, carried on in a
mode equally injurious and unjust to the United States as a
neutral nation, the wisdom of the national Legislature will be
again summoned to the important decision on the alternatives
before them. That these will be met in a spirit worthy of the
councils of a nation conscious both of its rectitude and of its
rights, and careful as well of its honor as of its peace, I
have an entire confidence. And that the result will be stamped
by a unanimity becoming the occasion, and be supported by every
portion of our citizens with a patriotism enlightened and
invigorated by experience, ought as little to be doubted.”
Such political formulas, conventional as a Chinese compliment, probably
had value, since they were current in every government known to man;
but that President Madison felt entire confidence in the spirit of the
Eleventh Congress could not be wholly believed. John Randolph best
described Madison’s paper in a letter to Judge Nicholson, a few days
afterward:[139]
“I have glanced over the President’s Message, and to say the
truth it is more to my taste than Jefferson’s productions on the
same occasions. There is some cant to be sure; but politicians,
priests, and even judges, saving your honor’s presence, must
cant, ‘more or less.’”
Probably the colorless character of the Message was intended to disarm
criticism, and to prevent Randolph and the Federalists from rousing
again the passions of 1808; but sooner or later some policy must be
adopted, and although the Message suggested no opinion as to the
proper course, it warned Congress that the crisis was at hand: “The
insecurity of our commerce and the consequent diminution of the public
revenue will probably produce a deficiency in the receipts of the
ensuing year.” The moment when a Republican administration should begin
to borrow money for ordinary expenses in time of peace would mark a
revolution in the public mind.
Upon Gallatin, as usual, the brunt of unpopular responsibility fell.
His annual Report, sent to the House December 8, announced that a loan,
probably of four million dollars, would be required for the service
of 1810; that the Non-intercourse Law, as it stood, was “inefficient
and altogether inapplicable to existing circumstances;” and finally
that “either the system of restriction, partially abandoned, must be
reinstated in all its parts, and with all the provisions necessary for
its strict and complete execution, or all the restrictions, so far
at least as they affect the commerce and navigation of citizens of
the United States, ought to be removed.” This subject, said Gallatin,
required immediate attention; but in regard to the wider question of
war or peace he contented himself with a reference to his two preceding
reports.
Congress showed more than usual unwillingness to face its difficulties.
The episodes of Erskine and Jackson supplied excuse for long and
purposeless debates. In the Senate, December 5, Giles reported from
a special committee the draft of a Resolution denouncing Jackson’s
conduct as indecorous, insolent, affronting, insidious, false,
outrageous, and premeditated,--epithets which seemed to make
superfluous the approval of Madison’s course or the pledge of support
with which the Resolution ended. Giles reviewed the conduct of Jackson
and Canning, entreating the Senate to banish irritation and to restore
harmony and mutual good-will, “the most fervent prayer of one who in
the present delicate, interesting crisis of the nation feels a devotion
for his country beyond everything else on this side of heaven.”[140]
The experience of many years warranted Giles’s hearers in suspecting
that when he professed a wish for harmony, the hope of harmony must
be desperate, for his genius lay in quite another direction; and when
he laid aside partisanship, his party had reason to look for some
motive still narrower. His course quickly proved the sense in which he
understood these phrases.
January 3, 1810, the President recommended by message the enlistment
for a short period of a volunteer force of twenty thousand men, and a
reorganization of the militia; adding that it would rest with Congress
also “to determine how far further provision may be expedient for
putting into actual service, if necessary, any part of the naval
armament not now employed.” No one knew what this language meant.
Crawford of Georgia, with his usual bluntness, said:[141] “This
Message, in point of obscurity, comes nearer my ideas of a Delphic
oracle than any state paper which has come under my inspection. It
is so cautiously expressed that every man puts what construction on
it he pleases.” Giles pleased to put upon it a warlike construction.
January 10 he reported a bill for fitting out the frigates; January
13 he supported this bill in a speech which surprised Federalists and
Republicans alike, if they could be still surprised at the varieties of
Giles’s political philosophy.
“The visionary theory of energy,” said he, “was the fatal error
of the Federal party, and that error deprived it of the power
of the nation. The government being thus placed in the hands
of the Republicans, while heated by the zeal of opposition to
the Federal doctrines and flushed with their recent triumph, it
was natural for them, with the best intentions, to run into the
opposite extreme; to go too far in the relaxations of the powers
of the government, and to indulge themselves in the delightful
visions of extending the range of individual liberty.... It
was natural that in the vibration of the political pendulum,
it should go from one extreme to another; and that this has
been too much the case with the Republican administration, he
regretted to say, he feared would be demonstrated by a very
superficial review of the events of the last two or three years.”
Energy was a fatal mistake in the Federalists; relaxation was an
equally fatal mistake in the Republicans,--and the remedy was a show
of energy where energy did not exist. Giles won no confidence by thus
trimming between party principles; but when Samuel Smith argued for
Giles’s bill on grounds of economy, friends of the Administration
felt little doubt of the motives that guided both senators. Had
they declared for war, or for peace; had they proposed to build
more frigates or ships-of-the-line, or to lay up those in active
service,--had they committed themselves to a decided policy of any
kind, their motives would have offered some explanation consistent with
a public interest; but they proposed merely to fit out the frigates
while giving them nothing to do, and the Republican party, as a whole,
drew the inference that they wished to waste the public money, either
for the personal motive of driving Madison and Gallatin from office,
or for the public advantage of aiding the Federalists to weaken the
Treasury and paralyze the nation.
Crawford replied to Giles with some asperity; but although Crawford was
known to represent the Treasury, so completely had the Senate fallen
under the control of the various cabals represented by Vice-President
Clinton, Giles, Smith, and Michael Leib of Pennsylvania, with their
Federalist associates, that Crawford found himself almost alone.
Twenty-five senators supported the bill; only six voted against it.
Giles impressed the least agreeable qualities of his peculiar character
on this Senate,--a body of men easily impressed by such traits. By
a vote of twenty-four to four, they passed the Resolution in which
Giles showed energy in throwing epithets at the British government,
as they passed the bill for employing frigates to pretend energy that
was not in their intentions. No episode in the national history was
less encouraging than the conduct of Congress in regard to Giles’s
Resolution. From December 18 to January 4, the House wasted its time
and strength in proving the helplessness of Executive, Congress,
parties, and people in the grasp of Europe. With painful iteration
every Republican proved that the nation had been insulted by the
British minister; while every Federalist protested his inability to
discern the insult, and his conviction that no insult was intended.
Except as preliminary to measures of force, Giles’s Resolution showed
neither dignity nor object; yet the Republicans embarrassed themselves
with denials of the Federalist charge that such language toward a
foreign government must have a warlike motive, while the Federalists
insisted that their interests required peace.
If the Resolution[142] was correct in affirming as it did that the
United States had suffered “outrageous and premeditated insults” from
Jackson, Congress could not improve the situation by affirming the
insult without showing even the wish to resent it by means that would
prevent its repetition; but the majority saw the matter in another
light, and when the Federalists resorted to technical delays, the
Republicans after a session of nineteen hours passed the Resolution
by a vote of seventy-two to forty-one. Macon, Stanford, and the old
Republicans voted with the Federalists in the minority, while Randolph
was ill and absent throughout the debate.
The Resolution marked the highest energy reached by the Eleventh
Congress. Giles’s bill for fitting out the frigates was allowed to
slumber in committee; and a bill for taking forty thousand volunteers
for one year into government service never came to a vote in the
Senate. Congress was influenced by news from England to lay aside
measures mischievous except as a prelude to hostilities. The change of
Administration in London opened the way to new negotiations, and every
fresh negotiation consumed a fresh year.
No course would have pleased Congress so much as to do nothing at
all; but this wish could not be fully gratified. The Non-intercourse
Act of March 1, 1809, was to expire by limitation with the actual
session. As early as December 1 the House referred the matter to a
committee with Macon for its head. Macon probably went to the Treasury
for instructions. A plan drawn by Gallatin, and accepted without
opposition by the Cabinet, was reported December 19 to the House in
the form of a bill which had less the character of a Non-intercourse
than of a Navigation Act; for while it closed American ports to every
British or French vessel public and private, it admitted British and
French merchandise when imported directly from their place of origin
in vessels wholly American. The measure was as mild a protest as human
skill could devise if compared with the outrages it retaliated, but
it had the merit of striking at the British shipping interest which
was chiefly to blame for the conduct of the British government. Under
the provisions of the bill, American shipping would gain a monopoly
of American trade. Not a British vessel of any kind could enter an
American port.
Macon’s bill came before the House Jan. 8, 1810, for discussion, which
lasted three weeks. The opposition objected to the new policy for the
double reason that it was too strong and too weak. St. Loe Livermore, a
Massachusetts Federalist, began by treating the measure as so extreme
that England and France would resent it by shutting their ports to
all American ships; while Sawyer of North Carolina denounced it as
evaporating the national spirit in mere commercial regulations, when
no measure short of war would meet the evil. According as commerce
or passion weighed with the reasoners, the bill was too violent or
disgracefully feeble. Throughout the winter, these contradictory
arguments were pressed in alternation by speaker after speaker. Macon
reflected only the views of Madison and Gallatin when he replied that
if England and France should retaliate by excluding American shipping
from their ports, they would do what America wanted; for they must
then enforce the non-intercourse which the United States had found
impossible to enforce without their aid. He agreed with the war-members
that the bill showed none too much energy, but he argued that the
nation was less prepared for war than in 1808 and 1809; while as for
Jackson’s quarrels, he declined to admit that they changed the affair
one iota.
Although the two extremes still stood so far apart that their arguments
bore no relation to each other, the violence of temper which marked the
embargo dispute, and which was to mark any step toward actual measures
of force, did not appear at this session. Indeed, the Federalists
themselves were not unanimous; some of the most extreme, like Barent
Gardenier and Philip Barton Key, supported Macon’s plan, while some of
the extremists on the other side, like Troup of Georgia, voted against
it. January 29, by a vote of seventy-three to fifty-two, the House
passed the bill. The Senate soon afterward took it up; and then, as was
to be expected, the factions broke loose. February 21, at the motion of
Senator Samuel Smith, by a vote of sixteen to eleven the Senate struck
everything from the bill except the enacting clause and the exclusion
of belligerent war-vessels from United States’ harbors.
An Administration measure could not without rousing angry feelings be
so abruptly mutilated by a knot of Administration senators. Samuel
Smith’s motives, given in his own words, were entitled to proper
attention; but President Madison’s opinion on the subject, whether
correct or mistaken, had even more effect on what was to follow.
Madison believed that the rejection of the bill was an intrigue of the
Smiths for selfish or personal objects. He recorded the language which
he felt himself obliged to use on the subject, twelve months afterward,
to Robert Smith’s face:[143]--
“For examples in which he had counteracted what he had not
himself disapproved in the Cabinet, I referred to the bills
called Macon’s bills, and the Non-intercourse Bill, on the
consultation on which he appeared to concur in their expediency;
that he well knew the former, in its outline at least, had
originated in the difficulty of finding measures that would
prevent what Congress had solemnly protested against,--to wit,
a complete submission to the belligerent edicts; that the
measure was considered as better than nothing, which seemed to
be the alternative, and as part only of whatever else might in
the progress of the business be found attainable; and that he
neither objected to what was done in the Cabinet (the time and
place for the purpose), nor offered anything in the place of it,
yet it was well understood that his conversations and conduct
out of doors had been entirely of a counteracting nature;
that it was generally believed that he was in an unfriendly
disposition personally and officially; and that although in
conversations with different individuals he might not hold the
same unfavorable language, yet with those of a certain temper it
was no secret that he was very free in the use of it, and had
gone so far as to avow a disapprobation of the whole policy of
commercial restrictions from the embargo throughout.”
Robert Smith, doubtless believing that all his actions had been above
question or reproach, protested warmly against these charges of
unfriendliness and intrigue; but Madison, with a feminine faculty for
pressing a sensitive point, insinuated that in his opinion both the
Smiths were little better than they should be. “With respect to his
motives for dissatisfaction I acknowledged that I had been, for the
reasons given by him, much puzzled to divine any natural ones without
looking deeper into human nature than I was willing to do.” The meaning
of the innuendo was explained by Joel Barlow the following year in
the “National Intelligencer,” where he acted as Madison’s mouthpiece
in defending the Administration from Robert Smith’s attacks. One of
Smith’s complaints rested upon Macon’s bill. Barlow asked, “What gives
Mr. Smith a right at this day to proclaim himself in opposition to that
bill? Was it ever laid before the Cabinet and opinions taken? Did he
there oppose it? Did he not rather approve it, and give his vote for
every article? Did he ever utter a syllable against it till his more
acute brother discovered the commercial bearing that it would have upon
the house [of Smith and Buchanan], and concluded that their interest
required its rejection?”
Perhaps this explanation, however offensive to the Smiths, injured
them less than the other suspicion which had as much vogue as the
first,--that their conduct toward Macon’s bill was a part of their feud
against Gallatin, and proved their determination to oppose everything
he suggested. At the moment when Samuel Smith revolted against Macon’s
measure, Washington was filled with tales of quarrels in the Cabinet.
In truth, these reports were greatly exaggerated. Robert Smith had
not the capacity to develop or to pursue a difficult line of argument
even without opposition. Against Gallatin he could not, and as Madison
testified did not, open his mouth, nor did Gallatin or Madison ever
complain except of Smith’s silence in the Cabinet; but he talked freely
in society, and every one heard of battles supposed to be raging.
Walter Jones, one of the most respectable Virginia members, wrote to
Jefferson, February 19, imploring him to intervene:[144]--
“Before you quitted this place you knew that causes of
dissension subsisted in the Executive departments. So ominous an
event has not failed to be an object of my continued and anxious
attention, and I am now fully persuaded that these unfriendly
feelings are fast approaching to a degree of animosity that must
end in open rupture, with its very injurious consequences to
the Republican cause.... This break of harmony in the Executive
departments, added to the extreme points of difference in
opinion among the majority in Congress in relation to the great
questions of peace and war, renders the apathy and inaction of
the Republicans here extremely mortifying. I never knew them
more disconnected in sentiment and system, as probably may have
been made manifest to you by the desultory and inconclusive work
of nearly three months.... You will recollect that at the close
of the last Congress the appearance of umbrage was confined
to Mr. Gallatin and Mr. R. Smith; indeed, excepting themselves
there were no other secretaries effectively in office. It is
now supposed, and I believe with truth, that the former stands
alone against the more or less unfriendly dispositions of all
the rest. Their _main abettors_ of last spring have abated
nothing of their strong and indecent zeal.”
Upon feelings so irritable and at a moment when schism was imminent,
as Walter Jones described, the action of Samuel Smith and Michael Leib
with six or eight more Republican senators, in emasculating Macon’s
bill, left small chance of reconciliation. Giles, having declared
himself in favor of energy, did not vote at all. The debate being for
the most part not reported, the arguments of the dissenting senators
have been lost. One speaker alone broke the monotony of the discussion
by an address that marked the beginning of an epoch.
Henry Clay had been barely two weeks a senator, when, February 22, he
rose to move that the bill as amended by Samuel Smith be recommitted;
and this motion he supported by a war speech of no great length, but
full of Western patriotism.
“The conquest of Canada is in your power,” he said. “I trust
I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state that I verily
believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to
place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.... The withered
arm and wrinkled brow of the illustrious founders of our freedom
are melancholy indications that they will shortly be removed
from us. Their deeds of glory and renown will then be felt only
through the cold medium of the historic page; we shall want the
presence and living example of a new race of heroes to supply
their places, and to animate us to preserve inviolate what they
achieved.... I call upon the members of this House to maintain
its character for vigor. I beseech them not to forfeit the
esteem of the country. Will you set the base example to the
other House of an ignominious surrender of our rights after they
have been reproached for imbecility and you extolled for your
energy! But, sir, if we could be so forgetful of ourselves, I
trust we shall spare you [Vice-President George Clinton] the
disgrace of signing, with those hands so instrumental in the
Revolution, a bill abandoning some of the most precious rights
which it then secured.”
Other members both of the House and of the Senate had made war
speeches, and in Clay’s harangue no idea could be called original;
yet apart from the energy and courage which showed a new and needed
habit of command, these sentences of Clay’s maiden speech marked
the appearance of a school which was for fifty years to express the
national ideals of statesmanship, drawing elevation of character
from confidence in itself, and from devotion to ideas of nationality
and union, which redeemed every mistake committed in their names.
In Clay’s speech almost for the first time the two rhetorical marks
of his generation made their appearance, and during the next half
century the Union and the Fathers were rarely omitted from any popular
harangue. The ideas became in the end fetiches and phrases; but they
were at least more easily understood than the fetiches and phrases of
Jeffersonian republicanism which preceded them. Federalists used the
name of Washington in the same rhetorical manner, but they used it for
party purposes to rebuke Washington’s successors. The Union and the
Fathers belonged to no party, and might be used with equal advantage
by orators of every section. Clay enjoyed almost alone for years the
advantage of winning popularity by this simple means; but in 1810,
at least along the Atlantic coast, such appeals had little popular
success. Least of all had they weight in the Senate, which listened
unmoved to Clay’s oratory, and replied to it immediately on the same
day by passing the “ignominious surrender” of national rights by a vote
of twenty-six to seven. Giles did not vote. Samuel Smith, Leib, and
even Crawford were in the majority.
Macon’s bill came back to the House as a law for the exclusion of
British and French war-vessels from American harbors. The House
resented the treatment, and after another long debate, March 5, refused
to concur in the Senate’s amendments. By a vote of sixty-seven to
forty-seven the bill was sent back to the Senate in its original form.
A long wrangle ensued; a committee of conference failed to agree, and
March 16 the Senate was obliged to decide whether it would yield to the
House, or allow the bill to fail.
On that question Samuel Smith made a speech,[145] which he afterward
printed, and which demanded attention because it forced President
Madison into a course that exposed him to severe and perhaps deserved
criticism. The Senate was equally balanced. Samuel Smith’s voice
and vote decided the result. His reasons were such as no one could
misunderstand.
“I found in it,” said he, criticising Macon’s bill, “or
believed I did, that which would be ruinous to the commerce
of the United States, and therefore felt myself bound by the
duty I owe to my constituents to remove the veil and leave
the measure open to public view.... Is there no danger, Mr.
President, to be apprehended from the Emperor if the bill
should pass with this provision [that any British or French
ship hereafter arriving in an American harbor should with its
cargo be seized and condemned]? His character for decision is
well known. Might we not fear that he would retort our own
measure upon us by causing all the property of our merchants
now under sequestration (amounting to at least three millions
of dollars) to be condemned?... But what will England do should
this law pass? Will the King and Council retaliate our measure?
I confess, Mr. President, that I think they will.... What will
be the consequence? Ruin to your merchants and destruction to
the party which now governs this country.... But I have been
told that if England should retaliate, her retaliation would
operate as a complete non-intercourse between the two countries,
and in a way that would be effectual; and that as I had always
approved those measures, this view of the subject must meet my
approbation,--that it would precisely create that which I have
said was a powerful measure against Great Britain: to wit, an
embargo. I never will agree, Mr. President, in this side-way to
carry into execution a great national measure.”
The speech excited surprise that Samuel Smith, a man accounted shrewd,
should suppose such arguments to be decent, much less convincing. From
Federalists, who conscientiously wished submission to British policy,
Smith’s reasoning would have seemed natural; but Smith protested
against submission, and favored arming merchant-ships and providing
them with convoy,--a measure useless except to bring on war in a
“side-way.” Congress preferred to choose its own time for fighting, and
declined listening to Smith’s advice, although the Senate sustained him
in rejecting Macon’s bill. On this occasion Giles appeared, and voted
with the Administration; but sixteen senators followed Smith, while
only fifteen could be found to act in concert with the House and the
Executive.
After the Senate had thus put an end to Macon’s bill, the House after
much hesitation, March 31, put an end to Smith’s bill. After five
months of discussion Congress found itself, April 1, where it had been
in the previous November.
Rather than resume friendly relations with both belligerents without
even expressing a wish for the recovery of national self-respect, the
House made one more effort. April 7 Macon reported a new bill, which
was naturally nicknamed Macon’s bill No. 2. This measure also seems to
have had the assent of the Cabinet, but Macon himself neither framed
nor favored it. “I am at a loss to guess what we shall do on the
subject of foreign relations,” he wrote to his friend Judge Nicholson,
three days later.[146] “The bill in the enclosed paper, called Macon’s
No. 2, is not really Macon’s, though he reports it as chairman. It is
in truth Taylor’s. This I only mention to you, because when it comes to
be debated I shall not act the part of a father, but of a step-father.”
The Taylor who took this responsibility was a member from South
Carolina, whose career offered no other great distinction than the
measure which produced a war with England.
Macon’s bill No. 2 was the last of the annual legislative measures
taken by Congress to counteract by commercial interest the
encroachments of France and Great Britain. The first was the Partial
Non-intercourse Act of April, 1806; the second was the Embargo Act
with its supplements, dating from Dec. 22, 1807; the third was the
Total Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809; and the fourth was Macon’s
bill No. 2. Each year produced a new experiment; but the difference
could be easily remembered, for after the climax of the embargo each
successive annual enactment showed weakening faith in the policy,
until Macon’s bill No. 2 marked the last stage toward the admitted
failure of commercial restrictions as a substitute for war. Abandoning
the pretence of direct resistance to France and England, this measure
repealed the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, leaving commercial
relations with all the world as free as ever before, but authorizing
the President “in case either Great Britain or France shall, before
the 3d day of March next, so revoke or modify her edicts as that they
shall cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States,” to
prohibit intercourse with the nation which had not revoked its edicts.
The objections to the bill were overpowering, for its effect was
equivalent to alliance with England. Had the United States taken
active part in the war against France, they could have done Napoleon
no greater injury than by the passage of this Act, which invited Great
Britain to control American commerce for her military purposes. On the
other hand the bill conferred on the President a discretion dangerous,
unconstitutional, and unnecessary,--a power once before conferred by
the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, and then resulting in the
mistakes of Erskine’s arrangement, which seemed warning enough against
repeating the same risk.
These objections were well understood and forcibly pointed out,
while the arguments in support of the bill were melancholy in their
admissions. The records of Congress could hardly parallel the
disregard of dignity with which Taylor defended his bill in a tone
that could have been endured only by an assembly lost to the habits
of self-respect. His denunciation of war expressed party doctrine,
and he harmed no one by repeating the time-worn moral drawn from
Greece and Rome, the Persian millions, Philip of Macedon, Syracuse
and Carthage,--as though the fate of warlike nations proved that they
should have submitted to foreign outrage, or as though the world could
show either arts or liberty except such as had sprung from the cradle
of war; but feeling perhaps that classical authority proved too little
or too much, he told the House frankly why those members who like
himself opposed war found themselves unable to maintain the pledge of
resistance they had given in imposing the embargo:--
“But concerning the breaking down of the embargo! Let the truth
come out! Neither this plea nor the other miserable one of the
fear of insurrections, and what not, will do.... The embargo
repealed itself. The wants created by it to foreigners, and the
accidental failure of crops in England had reduced the thing
in one article to plain calculation. The vote of this House
to repeal the law gave from four to five dollars rise on each
barrel of flour. This was the weight that pulled us down.”
The admission could not inspire enthusiasm or raise the moral standard
of Congress; but the House accepted it, and amended the bill only by
adding fifty per cent to the existing duties on all products of Great
Britain and France. The amendment was also a business speculation, for
it was intended to protect and encourage American manufactures; but
it did not come directly from the manufacturers. Richard M. Johnson
of Kentucky moved the amendment. “Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
and the New England Republicans,” wrote Macon,[147] “are full of
manufacturing. To these may be added some of the Virginia Republicans.
This plan is said to be a Cabinet project; if so, it satisfies me that
the Cabinet is hard pushed for a plan.”
April 19 the bill passed the House by a vote of sixty-one to forty.
The Senate referred it to a select committee with Samuel Smith at
its head,--a committee made for Smith to control. As before, he
reported the measure with its only effective provision--the additional
duty--struck out, and with the addition of a convoy-clause. The Senate,
by nineteen votes to eight, sustained Smith; nor did one New England
senator, Federalist or Republican, vote for the protection offered
by Kentucky and Virginia. The bill went to a third reading by a vote
of twenty-one to seven, and April 28, having passed the Senate as
Smith reported it without a division, was sent back to the House for
concurrence.
Irritated though the House was by the Senate’s hostility to every
measure which had support from the Treasury or was calculated to give
it support, the members were for the most part anxious only to see
the session ended. No one cared greatly for Macon’s bill No. 2 in any
shape. The House refused to accept the Senate’s amendments, and found
itself May 1 within a few hours of adjournment, and within the same
time of seeing the Non-intercourse Act expire, without having made
provision for the commercial relations that were to follow. Perhaps
Congress might have shown wisdom by doing nothing; but the instinct
to do something was strong, and party feeling mixed with the sense
of responsibility. At five o’clock in the afternoon committees of
conference were appointed, and at the evening session, Samuel Smith
having abandoned his convoy-clause, the House gave up its extra duties
and the bill came to its passage. All the Federalists voted against it
with Macon, Randolph, and Matthew Lyon,--a minority of twenty-seven.
Sixty-four Republicans recorded themselves in its favor, and made the
bill a law.