“I would prefer a war with England to the humiliation which
we have tamely submitted to; and I venture the assertion
that such a war would have called into the field five
hundred thousand men who are not now there, and never will
be without it, and have developed an energy and power in
the United States which no country has exhibited in modern
times, except France, in her great struggle in 1793.”[30]
In equal opposition to the British demand, Mr. B. F. Thomas, of
Massachusetts, an able lawyer, said:--
“The surrender is made, the thing done. In the presence
of great duties we have no time for the luxury of grief.
Complaint of the Government would be useless, if not
groundless. It was too much to ask of it to take another
war on its hands.… But we are not called upon, Mr.
Speaker, to say that the demand was manly or just. It was
unmanly and unjust. It was a demand which, in view of her
history, of the rights she had always claimed and used as a
belligerent power, of the principles which her greatest of
jurists, Lord Stowell, had imbedded in the Law of Nations,
England was fairly estopped to make.… When the matter is
more carefully weighed, it will be seen and felt that no
wrong was done to England,--that there was no wrong in the
forbearance to exercise an extreme right,--no insult, for
none was intended,--that our feeling, if any, leaned to
virtue’s side, was a relaxation of the iron rigor of law
from motives of humanity and Christian courtesy,--that,
on the other hand, England has done to us a great wrong,
in availing herself of our moment of weakness to make a
demand, which, accompanied as it was by the ‘pomp and
circumstance of war,’ was insolent in spirit and thoroughly
unjust.… But the loss will ultimately be hers. She is
treasuring up to herself wrath against the day of wrath.
She has excited in the hearts of this people a deep and
bitter sense of wrong, of injury inflicted at a moment
when we could not respond. It is night with us now; but
through the watches of the night, even, we shall be girding
ourselves to strike the blow of righteous retribution.”[31]