Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/282

1801. neglected. The Federalists even in their reduced condition, numbering barely one third of the House, still overmatched the majority in debate. Randolph, Nicholson, Samuel Smith, and Giles were hardly equal to Bayard, Griswold, Dana, John Cotton Smith, and John Rutledge.

No member of the House wielded serious influence over the President, or represented with authority the intentions of the party; and although in the Senate the Republicans were stronger in ability, they were weaker in numbers, and therefore more inclined to timidity. The ablest of the Republican senators was a new man, John Breckinridge of Kentucky, another Virginia aristocrat, chiefly known as the putative father of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Breckinridge was bold enough to support any policy that the Administration would consent to impose; but he was new to the Senate, and, like Randolph, had yet to win the authority of a leader against a strong Federalist opposition.

The business of the first session of the Seventh Congress quickly took shape in two party struggles on the lines marked out by the Message; and the same caution which made the Message disappointing as a declaration of principles, affected the debates and laws. Although the Federalists offered challenge after challenge, charging the majority with revolutionary schemes which no honest democrat needed to deny, the Republicans, abiding carefully for the most part within the defences selected by the President,