p the peace with Great Britain, he
censured the policy as timorous, costly, and ineffectual; but when Mr.
Madison declared war against that power, he deemed the act unnecessary
and rash. His opposition to the war was never carried to the point of
giving aid and comfort to the enemy; it was such an opposition as
patriotic "War Democrats" exhibited during the late Rebellion, who
thought the war might have been avoided, and ought to be conducted
more vigorously, but nevertheless stood by their country without a
shadow of swerving.

He could boast, too, that from his boyhood to the outbreak of the war
he had advocated the building of the very ships which gave the infant
nation its first taste of warlike glory. The Republicans of that time,
forgetful of what Paul Jones and others of Dr. Franklin's captains had
done in the war of the Revolution, supposed that, because England had
a thousand ships in commission, and America only seventeen, therefore
an American ship could not venture out of a harbor without being
taken. We have often laughed at Colonel Benton's ludicrous confession
of his own terrors on this subject.

"Political men," he says,

"believed nothing could be done at sea but to lose the few
vessels which we had; that even cruising was out of the
question. Of our seventeen vessels, the whole were in port
but one; and it was determined to keep them there, and the
one at sea with them, if it had the luck to get in. I am
under no obligation to make the admission, but I am free to
acknowledge that I was one of those who supposed that there
was no salvation for our seventeen men-of-war but to run
them as far up the creek as possible, place them under the
guns of batteries, and collect camps of militia about them
to keep off the British. This was the policy at the day of
the declaration of the war; and I have the less concern to
admit myself to have been participator in the delusion,
because I claim the merit of having profited from
experience,--happy if I could transmit the lesson to
posterity. Two officers came to Washington,--Bainbridge and
Stewart. They spoke with Mr. Madison, and urged the
feasibility of cruising. One half of the whole number of the
British men-of-war were under the class of frigates,
consequently no more than matches for some of our seventeen;
the whole of her merchant marine (many thousands