Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/385

1808. Gardenier rose to say, in emphatic and unqualified terms, that England was wholly in the right, and that from the first the American government had aimed at provoking war. Gardenier's views were those of a majority of Federalists, and in the end were adopted by the party. Quincy's blindness to the serious danger of war cost him the confidence of more cautious conservatives.

On the opposite side, the Republicans seemed for the most part fairly cowed by the vigor with which the Federalists defied the embargo and war at once. Nothing in American history offered a more interesting illustration of the first stage of the national character than the open avowals by Congress in 1808 of motives closely akin to fear. America as a nation could run no serious military peril, even though she declared war on England and France at once. The worst military disaster that could happen would be a bombardment or temporary occupation of some seaboard city; the most terrible punishment within the range of possibility was the burning of a few small wooden towns which could be rebuilt in three months, and whose destruction implied no necessary loss of life. Neither England nor France had armies to spare for permanent conquest in America; but so thoroughly had the theory of peaceable coercion taken possession of the national character that men of courage appealed to motives such as in a private dispute they would have thought degrading.