Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/425

1809. forces and all our militia placed under the control of this same foreigner, whom we cannot but think a satellite of Bonaparte. . . . In our opinion the national Cabinet has given to this country and the world the most indubitable evidence of their insincerity; that their great study has been to involve this country in a war with Great Britain, and of course to form a coalition with France, regardless of consequences. Their pledges to France of their willingness to submit to the wishes or mandates of the Corsican have been satisfactory. . . . We should deprecate a separation of the States, and would resort to every honorable means of redress before we would seek relief in a dissolution of the Union. . . . Our Administration can dissemble their real motives no longer; our dreadful forebodings prove realities; the expected blow has reached us, and by it has fled our liberty."

In quaint and pathetic phrases, the little town of Alfred, in Maine, sent to the general court a petition which charged the national government with endeavoring "to provoke a ruinous and destructive war with England, to gratify the ambition and caprice, and augment the power, of the tyrant of France."


 * "We are the poor inhabitants of a small town," continued the Alfred petition, "rendered poorer by the wayward, inconsistent policy of the general government; but life and liberty are as dear to us as to our opulent brethren of the South, and we flatter ourselves that we have as much love of liberty and abhorrence of slavery as those who oppress us in the name of Republicanism.