Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/274

1801. afterward, expressed his opinion with characteristic frankness:—


 * "You know very well," he said, addressing Speaker Varnum, "that there were many of us, and I was one, who thought that at the commencement of Mr. Jefferson's administration it would be proper for us to pass a sort of declaratory Act on the subject of the Sedition Law; . . . but on this subject, as well as the reduction of the army below its then standard, as on some others, I had the honor, or dishonor as some might esteem it, to be in the minority. I had thought that we ought to have returned the fines of all those who suffered under the law; . . . but you know that it was said that we came in as reformers; that we should not do too much; that we should go on little by little; that we should fire minute-guns, I think was the expression,—which produced no other effect, that I ever found, than the keeping up a spirit of irritation."

Speaker Macon, Joseph Nicholson, and William B. Giles were probably among those who held the same opinion, and were overruled by the Northern democrats. They never quite forgave Madison, to whose semi-Federalist influence they ascribed all Jefferson's sins. Distrust of Madison was natural, for neither Virginian nor New Englander understood how Madison framed the Constitution and wrote the "Federalist" with the same hand which drafted the Virginia Resolutions of 1798; but Jefferson himself would have been last to admit the correctness of such an explanation. He could point to the sentence of his