XV. served toward the president great courtesy of manner; CHAPTER he was an excellent Secretary of the Treasury, whose place it might not be so easy to fill; and perhaps the 1800. president considered it politic to allow to the ultra section of the Federal party a representation, though not a majority in the cabinet. The places of the dismissed. secretaries were very ably filled by Marshall as Secretary of State, and Dexter as Secretary of War. In desiring to make their position in the cabinet a vantage-ground from which to carry on an intrigue to defeat the president's re-election, and in considering themselves as suffering a political martyrdom in being removed, M'Henry and Pickering by no means correctly appre ciated the true and proper relation in which a cabinet officer ought to stand. The president, being solely responsible for the executive administration, has an unquestionable right to the unshackled selection of his political advisers and executive assistants; and after so well expounding the matter, as he formerly had done to Monroe, Pickering ought never to have put the president to the necessity of dismissing him. These dismissals increased the anxiety of the ultra Federalists to substitute Pinckney as president in the place of Adams. But this was a matter in which they could not move without the greatest risk of burying themselves as well as Adams in one common ruin. Should they openly attempt to deprive him of any Federal votes in order to give the majority to Pinckney, it could not be doubted that the same policy would be retorted upon Pinckney, so that the result might be to place them both behind the two opposition candidates. The mass of the Federalists remained ignorant of the bitter feud which had sprung up among the leaders. That feud was still a political secret into which few were in XV. CHAPTER itiated, and but very slightly alluded to in the public prints. The feeling against Adams was confined, in a 1800. great measure, to a few active politicians. The attempt to diffuse their feeling among the mass could only give rise to dissensions in a party whose united force was hardly able to withstand the external pressure against it. Yet there were some so embittered against Adams as to be ready to operate for his defeat, even' at the risk of bringing in Jefferson. Such was the feeling of Wolcott, who seems to have been chief engineer for the dissatisfied. Other cooler heads perceived that by no means whatever could the Federal leaders opposed to Adams more effectually destroy themselves in the public estimation than by following out a plan of impotent resentment, and thus bringing about the election of a man whom they had so long combined to hold up as devoid of every good principle, religious or political. In what a ridiculous position would they place themselves, after lauding Adams for four years as the wisest and firmest of men, to turn about and denounce him as one whose weakness, caprices, selfishness, and vanity made him unfit to be the head of a party or a nation! The painful and almost helpless position of these inJuly 22. triguers is graphically portrayed in a letter from M'Henry to Wolcott. "Have our party shown that they possess the necessary skill and courage to deserve to be continued to govern? What have they done? They did not (with a few exceptions), knowing the disease, the man, and his nature, meet it, when it first appeared, like wise and resolute politicians; they tampered with it, and thought of palliations down to the last day of the late session of Congress. Nay, their conduct even now, notwithstanding the consequences full in view, should the present chief be re-elected, in most, if not in all of the XV. states, is tremulous, timid, feeble, deceptive, and coward- CHAPTER ly. They write private letters. To whom? To each other. But they do nothing to give a proper direction to 1800. the public mind. They observe, even in their conversation, a discreet circumspection, ill calculated to diffuse information, or to prepare the mass of the people for the result. They meditate in private. Can good come out of such a system? If the party recover its pristine energy and splendor, shall I ascribe it to such cunning, paltry, indecisive, back-door conduct?" The Federal leaders in New England, dreading the weight of Adams's name and influence, desired that the first open demonstration against him, if any was to be made, as to which they very much doubted, should come from Maryland or New Jersey. But the Federalists of these two states, accustomed to look to New England for leadership, did not think it at all expedient to place themselves at the head of so serious a movement. Fully aware of the intrigues going on against him, Adams was not the man to remain quietly on the defensive. He freely denounced his Federal opponents under the appellation of the " Essex Junto"-several of their chief leaders in Massachusetts being residents in or connected with that maritime county-as a faction devoted to England, whose real ground of complaint against him was that he had refused to involve the nation in an unnecessary war with France. Thus, both personally and through his partisans, he appealed to that spirit of animosity against England, deeply rooted in his own breast, and still operating with great force on the popular mind. The men thus struck at thought it hard indeed that this imputation of subserviency to Englanda long-standing accusation of the opposition as against the whole Federal party, and of which Adams himself had XV. Aug. 3. titude. CHAPTER been a special mark-should now be caught up by him and pointed exclusively against them; nor could they 1800. see any thing in it but a mere electioneering trick, a dishonest appeal to the passions and prejudices of the mul"You will at length," so Ames wrote to Wolcott, clearly discern in the gazettes the whole plan of a certain great man. It is by prating about impartiality, Americanism, liberty and equality, to gull the weak among the Feds. Half the wealthy can be made to repine that talents without wealth take the right hand of them. Purse-pride works in Boston. They are vexed that an Essex Junto should be more regarded than the men whose credit in money matters so far outweighs them. The Federalists hardly deserve the name of a party. Their association is a loose one, formed by accident, and shaken by every prospect of labor or hazard." Yet this charge of devotion to England, though somewhat exaggerated, was not by any means without foundation. Though, when first brought forward against the whole Federal party, it had been a mere chimera, the offspring of that unsatiated hatred which saw in any thing approaching to moderation and candor symptoms of a culpable attachment, it had come now in the course of events to describe something that actually existed-a counterpart, though comparatively a very modest one, to that French faction which had exercised so powerful an influence upon the national politics. Sympathy for revolutionary France, regarded as the champion of political and social reforms as against the ancient despotisms of Europe, had created a faction in the United States, the object of which seemed to be to throw America headlong into the arms of France-an object supported and encouraged, to a very considerable extent, by the general opposition of which this faction formed a part. At first XV. these enthusiasts had found their principal opposition in CHAPTER the firmness of Washington, the sagacity of Hamilton, and especially from that inertia which always opposes it- 1800. self to any great and sudden movement. But those excesses of the French Revolution which, at the moment of their happening, had seemed to strike the public attention as little more than a horrible dream, had begun, in the minds of a large portion of the community, to as, sume the character of terrible realities, and to be brooded over, without any very nice analysis of their real causes, as the necessary consequences of the practical application of those principles which the leaders of the French Revolution had proclaimed-principles held up to execration under what had now become the odious name of Jaco. binism. As developed in practice, whatever it might be in theory, the system of Jacobinism had turned out to be nothing more than the violent seizure of power by successive factions of audacious, enthusiastic, and turbulent men, impatient of all control and greedy of authority, who, as the pretended agents of the people, and in the name of the rights of man, had successively exercised a horrible despotism, not to be paralleled except by the worst passages in the history of the worst times. A natural reaction against the admirers and would-be imitators of such a system and such men, joined to the late outrageous conduct of France, and to the fact that England seemed to be the only power capable of offering to her any effectual resistance, had in many bosoms extinguished the Revolutionary antipathy to Great Britain, and had gradually brought her to be regarded as the great champion of law, order, religion, and property, against what seemed the demoniac fury of the French Revolutionists. Of those entertaining these feelings there were many ready and anxious to join England in the war |