ely with the President and Senate, and the House do
not claim an agency in making them, or ratifying them when made; 2d,
that when made a treaty must depend for the execution of its
stipulations on a law or laws to be passed by Congress; and the House
have a right to deliberate and determine the expediency or inexpediency
of carrying treaties into effect. These resolutions were carried by a
vote of 63 to 27.

There was now a truce of a few days. In the meanwhile the country was
agitated to an extent which, if words mean anything, really threatened
an attempt at dissolution of the Union, if not civil war itself. The
objections on the part of the Republicans were to the treaty as a whole.
Their sympathies were with France in her struggle for liberty and
democratic institutions and against England, and their real and proper
ground of antipathy to the instrument lay in its concession of the right
of capture of French property in American vessels, whilst the treaty
with France forbade her to seize British property in American vessels.
The objections in detail had been formulated at the Boston public
meeting the year before. The commercial cities were disturbed by the
interference with the carrying trade; the entire coast, by the search of
vessels and the impressment of seamen; the agricultural regions, by the
closing of the outlet for their surplus product; the upland districts,
by the stoppage of the export of timber. But the country was without a
navy, was ill prepared for war, and the security of the frontier was
involved in the restoration of the posts still held by the British.

The political situation was uncertain if not absolutely menacing. The
threats of disunion were by no means vague. The Pendleton Society in
Virginia had passed secession resolutions, and a similar disposition
appeared in other States. While the treaty was condemned in the United
States, British statesmen were not of one opinion as to the advantages
they had gained by Grenville's diplomacy. Jay's desire, expressed to
Randolph, "to manage so that in case of wars our people should be united
and those of England divided," was not wholly disappointed. And there is
on record the expression of Lord Sheffield, when he heard of the rupture
in 1812, "We have now a complete opportunity of getting rid of that most
impolitic treaty of 1794, when Lord Grenville was so perfectly duped by
Jay."[4] Washington's ratification of the treaty went far to correct the