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Madison opposed the execution of the treaty, but the principal speech was made by Giles, whose argument covers twenty-eight columns in the Annals. As the struggle proceeded, the Jeffersonians lost ground. It became evident that weighty elements of public opinion were veering around to the support of the treaty as the best arrangement attainable in the circumstances.
But the Jeffersonians were separatists and State's-rights men. They believed in a government so weak as to be ineffective, and showed a folly literally astounding in their unwillingness to provide for the wars which they were ready to provoke. They resolutely refused to provide an army or a navy, or to give the Central Government the power necessary for waging war.
Clair was mobbed in Chillicothe, the then capital of Ohio, with no other effect than to procure a change of capital to Cincinnati. Finally both Sargent and St. Clair were removed by Jefferson, early in his administration. The Jeffersonians the Champions of the West.
There have been but two Chief Justices of the United States for wellnigh sixty-four years, though it is well known that Chief-Justice Marshall was as odious to the Jeffersonians of the early part of the century as Chief-Justice Taney is to the ascendent party of the last four years.
In the midst of the warlike preparations, when the two republics seemed determined to test the patience of each other; when the Jeffersonians were bound hand and foot by the war craze; when Hamilton awaited the word which would at last league his country with England against French fanaticism and would also bring a realisation of his dream of a military command in the midst of all this, President Adams, in February, suddenly sent to the Senate the nomination of the American Minister at The Hague to be an envoy to France!
So regardful of the rights of the individual had the Jeffersonians been in the early days that many had hesitated about creating Territories in the western vacant lands, lest the people migrating to them should not enjoy equal rights with their fellows in the States.
In American histories written since the Civil War he is not only acclaimed as a great statesman, but his overthrow at the hands of the Jeffersonians is generally pointed at as a typical example of the folly and ingratitude of the mob. This version is at least as unjust to the American people as the depreciation of the Democrats was to him. The fact is that Hamilton's work had a double aspect.
They were quite right in their feeling of hostility to England, and one of the fundamental and fatal weaknesses of the Federalists was the Federalist willingness to submit to England's aggressions without retaliation; but the Jeffersonians had no gift for government, and were singularly deficient in masterful statesmen of the kind imperatively needed by any nation which wishes to hold an honorable place among other nations.
The Jeffersonians had been excusing the defeat they had received in attacking Hamilton in the previous Congress on the ground that the House had acted without allowing sufficient time for due examination of the evidence. This plea supplied to Hamilton an occasion for prompt action.
All this was less indefensible under the judicial practice of a century ago than it would be now, and there were not enough votes of Guilty on the article of impeachment founded upon it to secure a conviction. In the same year, Judge Alexander Addison of the Circuit Court of Pennsylvania was charging a Pennsylvania grand jury that the Jeffersonians had assumed a name that did not belong to them.
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