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CHAPTER but a system of coast and harbor defense; fortifications, and a navy adequate to enforce respect and order within 1812. our jurisdiction.

As to the alleged agency of the British in stimulating Indian hostilities-a charge attempted to be sustained by June 13. a recent voluminous report, in which were embodied numerous opinions and assertions to that effect by Indian agents and others that still remained a mere unproved suspicion, which it might have been as well to have tested by first giving some slight attention to the grievances, real or imaginary, so earnestly insisted upon by the Indians. But, suppose it were true, how did a declaration of war against Great Britain tend to the security of the Indian frontiers?

As to the question of blockade, there did not seem to be any real difference. Both parties agreed that, to make a blockade lawful, there must be a force sufficient to maintain it. To the impressment question, and the view taken of it by the Federalists, and set forth in this address, we shall have occasion soon to recur.

"If our ills were of a nature that war could remedy; if war would compensate any of our losses, or remove any of our complaints," such were the concluding portions of this address, "there might be some alleviation of the suffering in the charm of the prospect. But how will war on the land protect commerce on the ocean? How are our mariners to be benefited by a war which exposes those who are free, without promising relief to those who are impressed ?"

"Will Canada compensate the Middle States for New York, or the Western States for New Orleans? Let us not be deceived. A war of invasion may invite a retort of invasion. When we visit the peaceable, and, as to us, innocent colonies of Great Britain with the horrors

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of war, are we assured that our own coast will not be CHAPTER visited with like horrors?"

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"But it is said that war is demanded by honor. Is 1812. national honor a principle that thirsts after vengeance, and only to be appeased by blood? which, untaught by the past, and careless of the future, to gratify a selfish vanity, or to satiate some unhallowed rage, precipitates itself into any folly or madness? If honor demands a war with England, what opiate lulls that honor to sleep over the wrongs done us by France-on land, robberies, seizures, imprisonments; at sea, pillage, sinkings, burnings ?" "With full knowledge of the wrongs inflicted by the French, ought the government of this country to aid the French cause by engaging in war against the enemies of France ?" "It can not be concealed that to engage in the present war against England is to place ourselves on the side of France, and expose us to the vassalage of the states serving under the French emperor."

Here, indeed, the address touched a point upon which that large body of the Federalists, specially known as Essex Junto men, were exceedingly sensitive. That terror of French Jacobinical principles, which, in the time of Adams, had driven a portion of the Federalists from the Washingtonian ground of rigid neutrality, and had made them insist on war with France as the only secu rity against being overwhelmed by French influence and ingulfed by French alliance, was still as strongly felt as ever. Though Bonaparte and the empire stood now in the place of the Directory and the republic, this, in their eyes, was a change merely of persons and names-the principles of violence without restraint, either in law or conscience, of universal conquest and universal empire, being common alike to the Jacobins and to Bonaparte.

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CHAPTER Disgusted at what they considered the evident leaning of their own government, in all the late controversy, to 1812. the French side, they had not hesitated, upon every occasion of collision and controversy, from the affair of the Chesapeake downward, at setting forth the British view of the question, and justifying or palliating the conduct of that government. Hence they had been denounced as a British faction; and certainly their position did resemble, in several respects, that of the French faction, or ultra-Democrats, of the time of Washington and Adams. Yet the most violent among them never went near the lengths of a Monroe, a Barlow, a Skipwith, or a Barney, if, indeed, they at all overstepped that line of constitutional opposition which on that occasion Jefferson and Madison had marked out for their political associates.

To the Federalists of this school a war with England was exceedingly abhorrent; not merely as a throwing away of great commercial opportunities; nor solely nor chiefly by reason of the alarm and the danger to which it would expose the whole maritime section of the country, and the blood and money it would uselessly cost; but on far more fundamental considerations, moral and political. To take sides with France in the pending struggle and to make war on England would be to take sides with France-appeared to them a high crime against the best interests of humanity; the taking sides with a tyrant hostile alike to the rights of nations and the rights of men, whom to help to overthrow England was to help in preparing a terrible yoke for ourselves. Such was the view very generally taken by the New England Congregational clergy, and very freely expressed from the pulpit both before and after the declaration of war. Of the sermons on this subject, of which many were printed, a large part serve, indeed, to show that, however the

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New England clergy of that day might have deviated CHAPTER from the standard of Puritan theological orthodoxy, they had still inherited all the fervid, stubborn, uncompromis- 1812. ing Puritan spirit, and with it the idea of obligations and duties higher than any created by human laws; a spirit not to be rashly encountered even by the strongest governments, and which drew out from the Democratic party bitter complaints against the intermingling of religion and politics.

A notion had indeed prevailed, occasionally thrown out in Congress by Richard M. Johnson and others, that, af ter war had been declared, all opposition to it must stop, or be stopped-intimations which had provoked from Randolph more than one sarcastic allusion to the danger in which he personally stood of being tarred and feathered as a Tory by patriots of two or three years' importation. A few days after the declaration of war, these principles of despotism, avowed and justified by men who professed to hold the old Sedition Law in utter abhorrence, were very signally carried into execution in the city of Baltimore. Though that town owed its rapid rise entirely to the profits of commerce, a majority of its miscellaneous population, including a large proportion of persons foreignborn, were very eager for war, a spirit stimulated to the highest pitch by the Baltimore Whig newspaper. As zeal on one side generally evokes zeal on the other, the principles of Essex Junto Federalism had found an able advocate in the Federal Republican, edited by Alexander Hanson, a young man of twenty-six, son of a chancellor of Maryland, and grandson of a president of the Continental Congress. This paper, in announcing the declaration of war, announced also, in terms moderate but firm, a fixed determination to continue to speak with the same freedom as before. This was on Saturday. The June 20.

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CHAPTER following Monday evening, a mob, headed by a French apothecary, and unopposed by the city magistrates, of 1812. whom several were present, but only two of whom used June 22. a few words of dissuasion, completely demolished the of

fice of that paper, with its types and presses, obliging Hanson's partner, who resided in the city, to fly for his life, the mob insolently searching several dwelling-houses in pursuit of him. Hanson himself might have fared still worse, but he resided in the country. Indeed, his partner thought it wise immediately to close his house and to remove his family.

Encouraged by this success, the mob reassembled the next night, and in pursuit of another obnoxious individual, they assaulted and searched another private dwelling; after which they proceeded to the docks, and dismantled several vessels lawfully bound to sea, acting under the idea that these vessels were about to sail under British licenses or by British connivance. Their patriotic fury next found vent in burning down the house of a free colored man, charged with having spoken in friendly terms of the British nation. They were about setting fire to an African church, when the appearance of a company of horse, called out for that purpose, checked and dispersed them.

The Federal Republican, thus driven from Baltimore, was immediately re-established at Georgetown, in the District of Columbia. This, however, did not satisfy Hanson and his more ardent friends. They were not prepared to submit to an insolent and arbitrary invasion of their rights, perpetrated by their political opponents through the instrumentality of a savage mob. It had become their duty, so they thought, to vindicate the liberty of the press, and for that purpose to insist to insist upon their right of printing and publishing in Baltimore, no matter