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Updated: August 21, 2024
It offered another opportunity to the National Government to assert its authority, but rendered President Adams still more unpopular, and increased public hostility toward the Federalists. Although Adams pardoned the leader, John Fries, he did not appease the Republicans, and he angered the Hamiltonians, who would show no clemency toward the opponents of law and order.
Suppose the power to make a treaty or to raise an army had been omitted from the Constitution, asked the Hamiltonians, could the National Government in an emergency assume such rights from the preamble and the powers expressed? Must it hesitate and temporise while the blood of its citizens was being shed?
The theorists, too, must make their sacrifices; the believers in centralization, the believers in diffusion of power; Madisonians, Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians all must concede something, or there could be no nation. And between principles of moral right and wrong, here, too, can there be compromise?
The three men who wrote and harangued and intrigued against Hamilton for years, were to govern as had they been the humblest of Hamiltonians.
After a desperate struggle in the State Legislature the Hamiltonians succeeded in passing resolutions ordering a State Convention to be elected for the purpose of considering the Constitution; but the result in April proved the unabated power and industry of Clinton, the first, and not the meanest of New York's political "bosses," for two-thirds of the men selected were his followers.
These were the HAMILTONIANS or ENGAGERS. Not the less in Parliament itself was there a strong opposition party, headed by Argyle, Eglinton, Lothian, Cassilis, and some half-dozen other nobles, aided by Johnstone of Warriston; and, as this party rested on the nearly unanimous support of the Scottish clergy, it had a powerful organ of expression, apart from Parliament, in the Commission of the Kirk.
The creek is here broad and sandy: the timber is small and stunted. Towards evening the two Hamiltonians put on airs of great impudence, and became very objectionable; two or three times I had to resist their encroachments into the camp, and at last they greatly annoyed me.
Necessity was here the moving principle and it scattered to the winds party objection to using the implied powers, and forced the friends of government to take refuge in the preamble to the Constitution and in "all laws which are just and necessary," a position from which they had tried in vain to drive the Hamiltonians a few years before.
England and France were now arrayed against each other, and Americans, though their Government remained neutral, arrayed themselves openly as partisans of either combatant. The division followed almost exactly the lines of the earlier quarrel which had begun to appear as the true meaning of Hamilton's policy discovered itself. The Hamiltonians were for England. The Jeffersonians were for France.
The younger Republicans were disposed to a liberal, if not to a latitudinarian construction of the Constitution. In short, they were Federalists and Hamiltonians, bank men, tariff men, internal-improvement men. Then was afforded to the country the curious spectacle of Federalists opposing the measures which had been among the rallying-cries of their party for twenty years.
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