to have the port shut and the river
open, than to have the river shut and the port in our possession.

That New Orleans could be taken required no stretch of policy to plan,
nor spirit of enterprize to effect. It was like marching behind a man to
knock him down: and the dastardly slyness of such an attack would have
stained the fame of the United States. Where there is no danger cowards
are bold, and Captain Bobadils are to be found in the Senate as well
as on the stage. Even _Gouverneur_, on such a march, dare have shown a
leg.(1)

1 Gouverneur Morris being now leader of the belligerent
faction in Congress, Paine could not resist the temptation
to allude to a well-known incident (related in his Diary and
Letters, i., p. 14). A mob in Paris having surrounded his
fine carriage, crying "Aristocrat!" Morris showed his
wooden leg, declaring he had lost his leg in the cause of
American liberty. Morris was never in any fight, his leg
being lost by a commonplace accident while driving in
Philadelphia. Although Paine's allusion may appear in bad
taste, even with this reference, it was politeness itself
compared with the brutal abuse which Morris (not content
with imprisoning Paine in Paris) and his adherents were
heaping on the author on his return to America; also on
Monroe, whom Jefferson had returned to France to negotiate
for the purchase of Louisiana.--_Editor._,

The people of the western country to whom the Mississippi serves as
an inland sea to their commerce, must be supposed to understand the
circumstances of that commerce better than a man who is a stranger to
it; and as they have shown no approbation of the war-whoop measures of
the Federal senators, it becomes presumptive evidence they disapprove
them. This is a new mortification for those war-whoop politicians; for
the case is, that finding themselves losing ground and withering away in
the Atlantic States, they laid hold of the affair of New Orleans in the
vain hope of rooting and reinforcing themselves in the western States;
and they did this without perceiving that it was one of those ill judged
hypocritical expedients in politics, that whether it succeeded or failed
the event would be the same. Had their motion [that of Ross and Morris]
succeeded, it would have endangered the commerce of the Atlantic States
and ruined their reputation there; and on the other hand the attempt
to mak