s mission contrived between Henry and
Craig,--yet Mr. Madison pronounced the letters to be the "formal proof
of the cooperation between the Eastern Junto and the British cabinet."
The charge was monstrous, for this pretended proof had no existence. If
the President, however, could persuade himself that the story was true,
it would help him to justify himself to himself for a change of policy,
the result of which would be the coveted renomination for the
presidency.

Not that there had never been talk of disunion in New England. There had
been in years past, as there was to be in years to come. But talk of
that kind did not belong exclusively to that particular period, nor was
it confined to that particular region of country. Ever since the
adoption of the Constitution the one thing that orators, North and
South, inside the halls of Congress and outside them, were agreed upon
was, that in all debate there was one argument, equally good on both
sides, to which there could be no reply; that in all legislation there
was one possible supreme move that would bring all the wheels of
government to a dead stop. The solemn warning or the angry threat was
always in readiness for instant use, that the bonds of the Union, in one
or another contingency, were to be rent asunder. But so frequent had
been these warning cries of the coming wolf that they were listened to
with indifference, except when some positive act indicated real danger,
as in the Jefferson-Madison "resolutions of '98." It was easy,
therefore, to alarm the public with confessions of a secret emissary, as
he pretended, who had turned traitor to the government which had
employed him and to the conspirators to whom he had been sent; and the
more reprehensible was it, therefore, in a President of the United
States, to make the use that was made of this story, which an impartial
examination would have shown was essentially absurd and infamously
false. Mr. Madison's intelligence is not to be impugned. He was too
sagacious, as well as too unimpassioned a man, to be taken in by the
ingenious tale of such an adventurer as Henry. In a letter to Colonel
David Humphreys, written the next spring, in defense of the policy of
commercial restrictions, he says: "I have never allowed myself to
believe that the Union was in danger, or that a dissolution of it could
be desired, unless by a few individuals, if such there be, in desperate
situations or of unbridled passions." New England,