University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VII.

THE QUARREL.

The result of Chase's trial was disastrous to
the influence of Randolph and his whole sect.
It widened the breach between him and the
northern democrats, and deepened his distrust
of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison, who had
taken such good care not to allow their own
credit to be involved with his. The Yazoo
quarrel added intensity to the feeling of bitterness
with which the session closed. When,
after March 4, 1805, he went home to Bizarre,
he was oppressed with feelings of disappointment
and perhaps of rage. There is no proof
that he held the President or Mr. Madison
responsible for the defeat of the impeachment;
certainly he never brought such a charge; but
he thought them to blame for the lax morality
of the Yazoo bill, and he was particularly irritated
with Mr. Madison, whose brother-in-law,
John G. Jackson, a member of Congress from
Virginia, had been a prominent supporter of
that bill, and had sharply criticised Randolph's
course in a speech to the House at a time when

Randolph's authority was trembling on the
verge of overthrow. A few extracts from letters
written during the summer to Joseph
Nicholson will show the two correspondents
and friends in their own fairest light: —

When we reflect that these letters were written
by one angry politician to another, and that
Randolph's relations with Nicholson were absolutely
confidential, it must be agreed that on
the whole they give an agreeable impression of
Randolph. We see him, with Nicholson, Macon,
and a few other very honest men, looking
on with anxiety while Burr and Dayton were
hatching their plot, and working on the "easy
credulity" of Mr. Jefferson's temper. Their
anxiety was not without ample cause, although
Mr. Jefferson did not share it until too late to
prevent the danger. We see them watching
"meddling fools and designing knaves" who
surrounded the administration, and their estimates
of character were not very far from right.
We see, too, the contempt with which Randolph's
group regarded the "whimsicals" of
their party, and "my precious colleague Jackson,"
brother-in-law of the Secretary of State,
and John Smith of Ohio, Burr's friend, who
had voted for Justice Chase's acquittal. There
is no sign of violence or revenge in these letters;
in reading them one is forced to believe

that in this Virginian character there were two
sides, so completely distinct that the one had no
connection with the other. The nobler traits,
shown only to those he loved, were caught
by Gilbert Stuart in a portrait painted in this
year, when Randolph was thirty-three. Open,
candid, sweet in expression, full of warmth,
sympathy, and genius, this portrait expresses all
his higher instincts, and interprets the mystery
of the affection and faith he inspired in his
friends. If there were other expressions in
this mobile face which the painter did not care
to render, he at least succeeded in showing artists
what the world values most, — how to respect
and dignify their subject.

Randolph's letters to Nicholson were not
more temperate or sensible than those he wrote
to Gallatin at the same time, which covertly
suggest without openly expressing two of the
writer's antipathies, the Smiths of Maryland
and Mr. Madison. Robert Smith was Secretary
of the Navy, and Mr. Madison was a rival
with Mr. Monroe for the succession to the
presidency.

The sudden announcement of Mr. Jefferson's
withdrawal now made Madison a candidate for
the presidency in 1808, and, in Randolph's
opinion, Madison was a Yazoo man, a colorless
semi-federalist, an intriguer with northern democrats
and southern speculators, one who never
set his face firmly against an intrigue or a job.
Holding the man at this low estimate, it was
out of the question for Randolph to support him,
and he turned to Monroe, who alone could contest
with Madison the State of Virginia. As

luck would have it, Mr. Madison, unknown to
Randolph, was doing much to justify this hostility.
Between him and the President at
Washington, and Mr. Monroe and Mr. Charles
Pinckney at Madrid, the Spanish dispute had
been brought to a pass which only Randolph's
tongue could describe. After claiming West
Florida as a part of the Louisiana purchase,
and allowing Randolph to erect Mobile by law
into a collection district for the United States
customs, they had been compelled to receive a
terrible castigation from the Marquis of Casa
Yrujo at Washington, and to hear his bitter
severities supported at Madrid and indorsed at
Paris. Their own minister at Madrid, Charles
Pinckney, undertaking to bully the Spanish
government into concessions, actually made a
sort of public declaration of war, which Mr.
Madison hastily disavowed by sending Monroe
to Madrid. Monroe suffered ignominious defeat.
The Spanish government, which as must
be owned, was wholly in the right, listened very
civilly to all that Monroe had to say, and after
keeping him five months hanging about Madrid
declined to yield a single point, and left him
to travel back to Paris in high dudgeon. At
Paris, M. Talleyrand coldly announced that an
attack upon Spain was an attack upon France,
and that Spain was right in every particular.
Monroe returned to his legation at London, not
a little bewildered and mortified, just in time
to find that Mr. Pitt, during his absence, had
upset the rules hitherto recognized as regulating
the subject of neutral commerce, and that Sir
William Scott had announced in his Admiralty
Court a new decision, which swept scores of
innocent American ships, without warning, as
good prize into British ports.

Here was a list of misadventures well calculated
to keep Mr. Madison busily at work, with
very little prospect of repairing them. For a
time during the summer of 1805, every one at
Washington, except the Secretary of the Treasury,
fulminated war against Spain. On reflection,
however, the President thought better of
it. This pacific turn took place about October
23, when Randolph was writing so mildly
to Nicholson and Gallatin; and it was caused
ostensibly by the war news in Europe. At a
cabinet meeting on November 12, Mr. Jefferson
accordingly suggested a new overture to
Bonaparte. "I proposed," said he in his manuscript
memoranda, "we should address ourselves
to France, informing her it was a last
effort at amicable settlement with Spain, and
offer to her or through her a sum of money for
the rights of Spain east of Iberville, say the
Floridas." "It was agreed unanimously, and

the sum to be offered fixed not to exceed five
million dollars." Not only was it distinctly
understood and stated in Mr. Jefferson's own
hand at the time that this money "was to be
the exciting motive for France, to whom Spain
is in arrears for subsidies," but in the course of
the next week dispatches arrived from Paris
containing an informal offer from Talleyrand
to effect the object desired on condition of a
payment of seven millions, which were of course
to go to France; and this proposition from Talleyrand
was instantly accepted as the groundwork
of the new offer of five millions.

The President wished to send instructions on
the spot authorizing General Armstrong, our
minister at Paris, to pledge government for the
first instalment of two millions, but was overruled,
and it was decided to wait an appropriation
from Congress. Then the question rose,
How was the subject to be got before Congress?
Secrecy was required, for in this whole transaction
everything was to be secret; but to conceal
measures which must be confided to two
hundred men was not a light task, and Mr. Jefferson,
with his easy temper, forgot that John
Randolph was not so easy-tempered as himself.

At length the President arranged the plan.
He sent to Congress his annual message, containing
a very warlike review of the Spanish

difficulties, and a few days later he followed up
this attack by sending papers showing, among
other things, that trespasses had been committed
in the Mississippi territory by two parties
of Spanish subjects. To these communications
Congress was to respond in a series of belligerent
resolutions, drawn by the President himself.
This done, he was to send a secret message requesting
an appropriation of two millions towards
buying Florida, and this secret message
was to be made the subject of a confidential
report from a special committee, to be followed
by an immediate appropriation.

In due time the matter was arranged. Congress
met on December 2. Macon, after a sharp
contest was reëlected Speaker, the northern
democrats at last working up their courage
so far as fairly to rebel against the tyranny of
the Virginian group. Randolph and Nicholson
were again put at the head of the Ways and
Means Committee. The annual message, sounding
war, was sent in on December 3; the secret
message, inviting Congress to make provision
for a settlement, followed on December 6: both
were referred to committees at the head of
which Randolph and Nicholson were placed,
and the President restlessly waited for the echo
of his words.

The echo did not come. On the contrary, a

series of lively scenes followed such as no comic
dramatist, neither Sheridan nor Mark Twain
himself, could represent with all the humor of
the reality. Either dramatist or novelist would
be taxed with gross exaggeration who should
describe the events of this winter as grotesquely
as they occurred, or should paint the queer
figure of Randolph, booted, riding-whip in hand,
flying about among the astonished statesmen,
and flinging, one after the other, Mr. Jefferson,
Mr. Madison, and dozens of helpless congressmen
headlong into the mire. The instant Randolph
grasped the situation, he saw that Mr.
Madison had converted the Spanish dispute into
a French job. He put the President's messages
in his pocket. Honestly indignant at what he
considered a mean attempt to bribe one nation
to join in robbing another, he thought the whole
transaction only worthy of Madison's grovelling
character. All his prejudices were strengthened
and his contempt for the Secretary was turned
into a passion. Meanwhile, he had found that
Mr. Madison's partisans were extremely active,
and that his candidacy was to be prevented
only by vigorous resistance. "One of the first
causes of surprise," said he, "which presented
itself to me, on coming to the seat of government,
was that while the people of the United
States thought all eyes were fixed on the shores
of the Atlantic, all eyes were in fact fixed on
the half-way house between this and Georgetown;
that the question was not what we should
do with France or Spain or England, but who
should be the next President." "I came here
disposed to coöperate with the government in
all its measures. I told them so." Mr. Madison's
avowed candidacy and the disclosure of
the two-million job cut all pacific plans short;
he had no choice but to interpose; he felt himself
forced into a dilemma.

For a time he hesitated. Calling his committee
together, he affected to see nothing in
the secret message that could be construed as
a request for money to purchase Florida, and
a majority of the committee joined him in this
view. He went to see Mr. Madison, and, according
to his account, the Secretary told him
that France was the great obstacle to the compromise
of Spanish difficulties; that she would
not permit Spain to settle her disputes with us
because France wanted money, and we must
give her money or have a Spanish and French
war, — all which, whether Mr. Madison said it
or not, was true, but put a terrible weapon into
Randolph's hands. He called on the President,
always affecting total ignorance as to executive
plans, and professing a wish to coöperate
with the government so far as his principles

and judgment would permit; yet when Mr.
Jefferson explained that he wanted two millions
to buy Florida, Randolph replied without
reserve that he would never consent, because
the money had not been asked for in the message,
and he would not take on his own shoulders
or those of the House the proper responsibility
of the Executive; but even if the money
had been expressly asked, he should have been
averse to granting it, because, after the failure
of every attempt at negotiation, such a
step would disgrace us forever; because France
would be encouraged to blackmail us on all occasions,
and England would feel contempt for
our measures and attitude towards herself. He
did not mince his words.

The meeting of the committee and the interviews
with Mr. Madison and the President
seem all to have taken place on December 7 and
8. Randolph now waited a week, and then
on December 14 coolly set out for Baltimore,
where he passed another week, while the administration
was fuming in Washington, unable
to call the committee together. On December
21 he returned, and by this time the excitement
had waxed high, so that even his friend
Nicholson remonstrated. The committee was
instantly called, and Randolph, booted and
spurred, as he had ridden from Baltimore, was

hurrying to the committee-room, when he was
stopped by his friend Gallatin, who put into
his hands a paper headed "Provision for the
purchase of Florida." Randolph broke out
upon him with a strong expression of disgust.
He declared that he would not vote a shilling;
that the whole proceeding was highly disingenuous;
that the President said one thing in public,
another in private, took all the honor to
himself, and threw all the odium on Congress;
and that true wisdom and cunning were utterly
incompatible in the management of great affairs.
Then, striding off to his committee, he
put his opinions into something more than
words. Except for Mr. Bidwell of Massachusetts,
the committee was wholly under his control,
and, instead of reporting the two-million
appropriation proposed by Mr. Bidwell, the majority
directed Randolph to ask the Secretary
of War what force was needed to protect the
southwest frontier. When the Secretary's answer
was received, the committee met again,
and a second time Mr. Bidwell moved the resolution
to appropriate the two millions. Randolph
induced the committee to reject the
motion, and then himself drafted a warlike report,
which closed with a resolution to raise
troops for the defence of the southwest frontiers
"from Spanish inroad and insult."

He seems to have dragged Nicholson with
him by main force, for among Judge Nicholson's
papers is a slip of Randolph's handwriting,
carefully preserved and indorsed in the
Judge's hand: "John Randolph's note relative
to the vote of two millions for the Floridas.
Last of December, 1805, or first of January,
1806, just before the report was made."

Nicholson did not persist, and accordingly
the report as Randolph drafted it was adopted
by the aid of federalist votes in committee, and
was presented to the House on January 3,
1806. This serio-comic drama had now consumed
a month, during which time Randolph
was gravely undertaking to govern the country

in spite of itself, and, by tactics of delay, resistance,
and dictation, to defeat the will of the
President and the party. He had succeeded in
checking the Yazoo compromise by like tactics,
and he did not altogether fail in this new
struggle, although no sooner had the House recovered
possession of the subject than it went
into secret session, flung Randolph's report
aside, and took up in its place the President's
two-million appropriation. Randolph, whose
temper never allowed him to play a losing
game with coolness or skill, threw himself with
a sort of fury into the struggle over his report,
and day after day for a week occupied the floor
in committee of the whole House. Beaten in
committee, and forced to see the appropriation
reported, he kept up his opposition at every
stage in its passage, while the federalists smiled
approval, and the northern democrats sulkily
voted as they were bidden. On January 11
Randolph's warlike report was rejected by a
vote of 72 to 58, and on the 14th the House
adopted Bidwell's resolution by a vote of 77
to 54, the federalists and twenty-seven republicans
voting with Randolph against the administration.

At length the House reopened its doors, and
the world asked curiously what had happened
in the long conclave. Randolph was not the

man to let himself be overridden in secret.
His method of attack was always the same: to
spring suddenly, violently, straight at the face
of his opponent was his invariable rule; and
in this sort of rough-and-tumble he had no
equal. In the white heat of passionate rhetoric
he could gouge and kick, bite off an ear
or a nose, or hit below the waist; and he did
it with astonishing quickness and persistence.
No public man in America ever rivaled him in
these respects; it was his unapproached talent.
With a frail figure, wretched health, and despondent
temperament, he could stand on the
floor of the House two or three hours at a time,
day after day, and with violent gesticulation and
piercing voice pour out a continuous stream of
vituperation in well-chosen language and with
sparkling illustration. In the spring of 1806
he was new in the rôle, and still wore some
of the shreds and patches of official dignity.
The world was scandalized or amused, according
to its politics, at seeing the President's
cousin and friend, Virginian of Virginians,
spoiled child of his party and recognized
mouthpiece of the administration, a partisan
railer against federalism, whose bitter tongue
had for years spit defiance upon everything
smacking of federal principles, now suddenly
turn about and rail at Mr. Jefferson and Mr.
Madison, as he had railed at Washington and
John Adams, while he voted steadily with federalists
and exercised diabolical ingenuity to
thwart and defeat the measures of his friends.
His melodramatic success was largely one of
scandal, but there was in it also an element of
respectability. To defy power requires courage,
and although Randolph's audacity too
closely resembled mere bad temper, yet it was
rare, and to the uncritical public admirable.
Moreover, there could be no doubt of the infernal
ability with which he caught and tortured
his victims; and finally, although the
question of fact was unfortunately little to the
purpose even then, and now only interests
mere fumblers of historical detail, it is quite
certain that in his assertions he was essentially
correct, and that the sting of his criticisms lay
in their truth.

On March 5, 1806, he began his long public
career of opposition. Mr. Gregg of Pennsylvania
had offered a resolution for prohibiting
the importation of British goods, in retaliation
for Mr. Pitt's attack on our carrying trade.
Mr. Crowninshield of Salem supported the
measure in a speech strongly warlike in tone,
which certainly promised more than was afterwards
achieved as a result of our future conquests,
besides suggesting confiscation of British

debts to the amount of forty million dollars.
Mr. Crowninshield was a New England democrat,
a thorough supporter of Mr. Jefferson, a
"Yazoo man," who had lately allowed himself
to be made Secretary of the Navy and declined
to serve. On all these accounts he was an object
of hatred to Randolph, who rose when he
sat down.

First he gave Mr. Crowninshield a stinging
blow in the face: "I am not surprised to hear
men advocate these wild opinions, to see them,
goaded on by a spirit of mercantile avarice,
straining their feeble strength to excite the
nation to war, when they have reached this
stage of infatuation that we are an overmatch
for Great Britain on the ocean. It is mere
waste of time to reason with such persons.
They do not deserve anything like serious
refutation. The proper arguments for such
statesmen are a strait-waistcoat, a dark room,
water gruel, and depletion." Then, after a
few words on the dispute with England, adopting
the extreme ground that the carrying trade
was a mushroom, a fungus, not worth a contest,
an unfair trade, to protect which we were to be
plunged into war by the spirit of avaricious
traffic, he hit one of his striking illustrations:
"What! shall this great mammoth of the American
forest leave his native element, and plunge

into the water in a mad contest with the shark!
Let him beware that his proboscis is not bitten
off in the engagement. Let him stay on shore,
and not be excited by the mussels and periwinkles
on the strand." Then he touched on the
policy of throwing weight into the scale of
France against England, and on the effects of
foreign war in subverting the Constitution, gradually
coming round to the proposed confiscation
of British debts in order to strike another ugly
blow at Mr. Crowninshield's face: "God help
you, if these are your ways and means for carrying
on war; if your finances are in the hands
of such a chancellor of the exchequer! Because
a man can take an observation and keep
a log-book and a reckoning, can navigate a cockboat
to the West Indies or the East, shall he
aspire to navigate the great vessel of state, —
to stand at the helm of public councils? Ne
sutor ultra crepidam!"

This, however, was mere by-play; it was not
Crowninshield at whom his harangue was aimed,
but far more important game, and his audience
could see him approach nearer and nearer his
real victim, as though he were himself drawn on
against his own judgment by the fascination of
hatred.

This attempt to drag Mr. Gallatin into the
business of discrediting the President and Secretary
of State was a serious if not a fatal
mistake; but Randolph was already out of his
head. After alienating Gallatin, he insulted
the whole House, exasperating poor Sloan of
New Jersey as he had already embittered
Crowninshield: "Like true political quacks,
you deal only in hand-bills and nostrums. Sir,
I blush to see the record of our proceedings,

they resemble nothing but the advertisements
of patent medicines. Here you have `the worm-destroying
lozenges;' there `Church's coughdrops;'
and, to crown the whole, `Sloan's vegetable
specific,' an infallible remedy for all
nervous disorders and vertigos of brain-sick politicians,
— each man earnestly adjuring you to
give his medicine only a fair trial." This done,
he suddenly shot another arrow within the sacred
circle of the administration into the secret and
mysterious Spanish embroglio: "And where
are you going to send your political panacea,
resolutions and hand-bills excepted, your sole
arcanum of government, your king cure-all?
To Madrid? No! You are not such quacks
as not to know where the shoe pinches. To
Paris!" "After shrinking from the Spanish
jackal, do you presume to bully the British
lion?" Another foul blow, for his lips were
sealed on what had been done in secret session;
but it brought him at last to his end. "Unde
derivatur? Whence comes it," this non-importation
bantling? "Some time ago, a book
was laid on our tables, which, like some other
bantlings, did not bear the name of its father."
This was Mr. Madison's well-known examination
into the British doctrine of neutral trade.
"If, sir, I were the foe, as I trust I am the
friend, of this nation, I would exclaim, `Oh
that mine enemy would write a book!' At the
very outset, in the very first page, I believe,
there is a complete abandonment of the principle
in dispute. Has any gentleman got the
work?" Then he read a few lines from the
book, and flung it aside. Again sweeping away
over a long, discursive path of unconnected discussion
about Spain, France and England, New
Orleans, Holland, and a variety of lesser topics,
including remarks made by "the greatest man
whom I ever knew, the immortal author of
the letters of Curtius," he closed by another
challenge to the administration: —

The next day he returned to the attack, and
assailed Mr. Madison's pamphlet with a sort of
fury. "No, sir; whatever others may think, I
have no ambition to have written such a book as
this. I abjure the very idea." He called it "a
miserable card-house of an argument, which the
first puff of wind must demolish." "Sir, I have
tried, but I could not get through this work. I
found it so wiredrawn, the thread so fine, that
I could neither see nor feel it; such a tangled
cobweb of contradictions that I was obliged to
give it up." Flinging it violently upon the
floor, as though it were only fit to be trampled
on, he maintained that England was justifiable
in all her measures, even in impressing our seamen;
impressment was a necessity of war. He
attacked the navy department for waste. He
affirmed that Great Britain was the sole bulwark
of the human race.

This was the man who, barely a year before,
had been crying out that the navy should be
employed to blow the British frigates out of

water, and who wished to see our officers and
seamen lying yard-arm and yard-arm in the
attack. "Though we lost all, we should not
lose our national honor." Within the year
Great Britain had made more than one additional
onslaught upon our national honor, but
Randolph would now listen to no thought of
war, and derided the use of our navy. After
all, there was much to be said on this side of
the question, and, as events proved, had Mr.
Jefferson followed his first impulse in the summer
of 1805, and seized the moment for going
to war with Spain and France, he might perhaps
have checkmated the aggressive tories in
England, prevented the war of 1812, and probably
saved himself, his successor, and his party
from being driven into a false position in regard
to the liberties of Europe and the states' rights
of America. Randolph, however, did not advocate
this policy now, when he might have done
so with effect. Repeatedly and emphatically
he declared himself opposed to war with Spain
or France or any other nation. "There was
no party of men in this House or elsewhere in
favor of war." "We were not for war; we
were for peace." His only recommendation,
repeated over and over again, was one of the
most extraordinary, as coming from his mouth,
that human wit could have imagined: —

With what interest and amusement, with
what fury and unconcealed mortification, such
speeches were listened to by the House may be
easily conceived. That they were desultory,
and skipped from subject to subject with little
apparent connection, was an additional charm.
No one could tell where or when his sudden
blows were to fall. He dwelt on nothing long
enough to be tedious. He passed hither and
thither, uttering sense and nonsense, but always
straining every nerve to throw contempt on
Mr. Madison and his supporters. In his next
speech he avowed himself to be no longer a
republican; he belonged to the third party, the

quiddists or quids, being that tertium quid, that
"third something," which had no name, but was
really an anti-Madison movement, an "anti-Yazoo"
combination. When at last, on April
5, 1806, he dragged the Spanish embroglio before
the open House under pretext of correcting
the secret journal, the personal bias of his opposition
became still more strongly marked. He
told how Mr. Madison had said to him that
France wanted money, and we must give her
money. "I considered it a base prostration of
the national character to excite one nation by
money to bully another nation out of its property,
and from that moment and to the last
moment of my life my confidence in the principles
of the man entertaining those sentiments
died, never to live again." No answer to this
charge was ever made; no satisfactory answer
was possible. Mr. Madison's counter-statement,
which may be seen in the third volume of his
printed correspondence (p. 104), is equivocal
and disingenuous. The "two million" transaction
was one of the least defensible acts of
Mr. Jefferson's administration; but this does
not affect the fact that Randolph was merely
using it and the private knowledge which Mr.
Madison's confidence had given him, in order to
carry out an attempt at political assassination.
His deepest passions were not roused by the
"two million job," but by Madison's overpowering
influence. From the first this domination
had galled him: in the Yazoo contest it strove
to defeat him on his own ground; it crowed
over him on his own dung-hill; and he had
fought and beaten it with the desperate courage
of his Virginian game-cocks. Even at this
moment he was proclaiming the fact in his
speeches. "The whole executive government
has had a bias to the Yazoo interest ever since
I had a seat here. This is the original sin
which has created all the mischiefs which gentlemen
pretend to throw on the impressment of
our seamen and God knows what! This is the
cause of those mischiefs which existed years
ago." "The Yazoo business is the beginning
and the end, the Alpha and Omega of our alphabet."
Mr. Madison's influence had been
brought into the House and pitted against his
own; he was now retaliating by an attack on
Mr. Madison before the country. A rumor ran
through Washington that he meant to impeach
Madison for attempting to get the two millions
to Europe before receiving authority
from Congress, and he did in fact make a desperate
attempt to drag Gallatin into support
of this charge.

Unluckily for Randolph, it was not directly
Mr. Madison, but the President, who had invented

and carried out the whole "two-million"
scheme down to its smallest detail. All
the Cabinet knew this fact, and the President's
conscience was of course active in stimulating
him to protect his Secretary. The party
could not let Mr. Madison perish as a martyr
before the altar of Jeffersonian popularity. To
sustain him was no matter of choice, but a
necessity. The northern democrats never faltered
in their discipline, and the southern republicans
were slowly whipped back to their
ranks. Randolph's wild speeches between
March 5 and April 21, 1806, were fatal only
to himself. In his struggle against the administration
on the two-million policy, early in
January, he carried with him some twenty-seven
republicans, including a majority of the
Virginia delegation; but his withdrawal from
the party in April, and his unexpected devotion
to England, left these followers in an awkward
place, where little could be done by resisting
Madison within the party, and still less by following
Randolph into opposition. One by one
they fell away from their eccentric and extravagant
chief.

Meanwhile, Randolph showed an astonishing
genius for destroying his own influence and
strengthening his opponents. He obstructed
the business of the House, and then sneered

at the majority for the condition their affairs
were in. He brought up the navy appropriations
with a blank for contingent expenses,
and told the House to fill it up as they pleased;
their decision would be no check on the expenditure;
whether they provided the money
or not, the department would spend it. He
kept back the appropriation bills till late in
the session, and then rose to inform the House,
with a contemptuous smile, that All Fools' Day
was at hand, when, if they did not pass the bill
for the support of government, they would look
like fools indeed. He made the most troublesome
attempts to abolish taxes. He had
another bout with the Yazoo men, and managed
to procure the rejection of their bill.
He tore the mask of secrecy from the Spanish
negotiation, and succeeded in defeating all
chance of its success. He even irritated Napoleon
against the government, and helped
to confirm both France and Great Britain in
their meditated aggressions. His vehemence
of manner was equal to the violence of his language
and acts. One of the members, Sloan,
of the "vegetable specific," described him on
the floor of the House inviting the attacks of his
enemies, and representing them as crying out,
"Away with him! Away with him! Clap on
the crown of thorns!" (clapping his hand on
the top of his head). "Crucify him! Crucify
him!" (whirling his arm about). On another
occasion, it seems, he shook his fist at a member,
and not only ordered him to sit down, but
to go down the back-stairs. Finally he charged
Mr. Findley of Pennsylvania, once his "venerable
friend" and "political father," not only
with "mumbling," but with being an old
toothless driveller, in his second dotage.

Yet in his most violent passions he kept his
coolness of head, and knew well how to subordinate
an enmity to an interest. Even while
most bitterly charging Mr. Madison with subservience
to France, and proving his charge by
betraying private conversations, as no man of
true self-respect could have done, he was himself
helping the Secretary to put the country
on its knees before Napoleon in an attitude
more humiliating than the United States had
ever yet assumed towards a foreign power.
In the session of 1804-5 Congress, out of deference
to France and to the obligations of international
law, passed an act to regulate the
trade with revolted St. Domingo, and to restrain
it within proper and peaceful limits. In
the summer of 1805 Napoleon, still unsatisfied,
issued an order that the United States government
should stop the trade altogether. His
peremptory note on the subject to Talleyrand,

dated August 10, 1805, is curious, not only as
an example of his extraordinary ignorance, but
still more as a specimen of his emphasis. "I
want you to send a note to the American minister
here, . . . and declare to him that it is
time to stop this." M. Talleyrand obeyed. General
Turreau, also, his minister at Washington,
notified Mr. Madison that "this system must
continue no longer (ne pourrait pas durer)."
These letters were called for and printed,
while Congress, in December, 1805, and January,
1806, were considering a bill introduced
by Senator Logan of Pennsylvania to prohibit
the trade in question. That Logan's bill was in
reality a subordinate but essential part of the
two-million scheme, is self-evident; but Randolph,
not Mr. Jefferson or Mr. Madison, is
the subject of this story, and it is interesting
to ask whether Randolph denounced the bill
and exposed the shame to which the administration
was privy.

To prohibit the trade with St. Domingo was
to make the United States government a party
in the attempt to reëstablish French influence
in the American hemisphere; it was to help
Napoleon in his plan of reënslaving the negroes
whom France had declared free; it was to enforce
a French sham blockade by our legislation,
to bolster up a mere pretence of French

occupancy, to throw the whole trade of this
rich market into the hands of England, and to
endanger the life of every American in St. Domingo.
Mr. Madison had resisted the measure
as long as he dared. He now yielded, partly
to the mandate of Napoleon, partly to the
outcry of the southern slave-holders, who were
wild with fear of the revolted Haytian negroes,
and who seized with avidity upon the
bill. They forced it through the House with
unreasoning arrogance, at the time when Randolph,
an ami des noirs, a hater of slavery,
was angriest at the attempt of Mr. Madison to
bribe the French government with five million
dollars. This new proof of the "base prostration
of the national character" inherent in the
Florida negotiation might have been a terrible
weapon in Randolph's hands had he chosen to
use it, but, so far from using it, he imitated
Mr. Madison's own conduct: he did himself
from sight. "I voted in favor of it," said he
in 1817. He was mistaken. He did not vote
at all; he gave the bill his silent support. "I
voted in favor of it because I considered St.
Domingo as an anomaly among the nations of
the earth, and I considered it my duty, . . .
as a representative above all of the southern
portion of the United States, to leave nothing
undone which could possibly give to the white
population in that island an ascendency over
the blacks." For such a purpose he could
consent to use the powers of centralization in
defiance of international law, in contempt of
the rights of northern merchants, and in forgetfulness
of constitutional theories; but if he
held the arbitrary prohibition of trade with
St. Domingo to be constitutional, how was he
afterwards to denounce as unconstitutional either
the embargo, or the non-intercourse, or the
law abolishing the coast-wise slave-trade?

Thus, at length, on April 21, 1806, this
extraordinary session closed, one of the most
remarkable in the history of our government.
Randolph was left a political wreck; the true
Virginian school of politics was forever ruined;
Macon was soon driven from the speakership,
and Nicholson forced on to the bench; Gallatin
was paralyzed; Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison,
and ultimately Mr. Monroe were thrown into
the hands of the northern democrats, whose
loose political morality henceforward found no
check; the spirit of intrigue was stimulated,
and the most honest and earnest convictions of
the republican party were discredited. That
Mr. Jefferson had steadily drifted away from
his original theories was true, and that his
party, like all other parties, was more or less
corrupted by power can hardly be denied; but

Randolph's leadership aggravated these evils,
deprived him and the better southern republicans
of all influence for good, and left corrupt
factions to dispute with each other the possession
of merely selfish power.