ntinued, {208} whenever they had a
chance, to seize and burn American vessels bound for England, and his
port authorities to sequester vessels arriving from England. The decrees
were not in fact repealed.

Madison had committed himself, however, to upholding the honour of
Napoleon--a task from which any other man would have recoiled--and the
United States continued to insist on a fiction. Madison's conduct in
this affair was that of a shrewd lawyer-like man who tried to carry on
diplomacy between two nations fighting to the death as though it were a
matter of contracts, words and phrases of legal meaning. To Napoleon,
legality was an incomprehensible idea. To the Tory ministries,
struggling to maintain their country against severe economic pressure,
facts, not words, counted, and facts based on naval force. Upon the
Jeffersonian and Madisonian attempts at peaceful coercion they looked
with mingled annoyance and contempt, believing, as they did, that the
whole American policy was that of a weak and cowardly nation trying by
pettifogging means to secure favourable trade conditions. The situation
had reached a point where the United States had nothing to hope from
either contestant, by continuing this policy.

At this juncture a new political force {209} appeared. By 1811 the
old-time Republican leaders, trained in the school of Jeffersonian
ideals, were practically bankrupt. Faction paralyzed government, and
Congress seemed, by its timid attitude, to justify the taunt of Quincy of
Massachusetts that the Republican party could not be kicked into a war.
But there appeared on the stage a new sort of Republican. In the western
counties of the older States and in the new territories beyond the
mountains, the frontier element, once of small account in the country and
wholly disregarded under the Federalists, was multiplying, forming
communities and governments, where the pioneer habits had created a
democracy that was distinctly pugnacious. Years of danger from Indians,
of rivalry with white neighbours over land titles, of struggle with the
wilderness, had produced a half-lawless and wholly self-assertive type of
man, as democratic as Jefferson himself, but with a perfect willingness
to fight and with a great respect for fighters. To these men, the
tameness with which the United States had submitted to insults and
plundering was growing to be unendurable. Plain masculine anger began to
obscure other considerations.