the honor of their
country--Washington in setting on foot and in ratifying, and Jay in
having negotiated, the treaty--coming as it did from the mouth of one
whose evident youth and foreign accent might alone serve to betray him
as an adventurer, whose arrival in the country could hardly have been
long anterior to the termination of the Revolutionary struggle, was
somewhat too much for human nature to bear. There was also something a
little provoking in the denunciation of the merchants as having
conspired to terrify the house, coming from a man who had first obtained
general notoriety, it was now hardly four years since, by the
publication of his name at the bottom of a series of resolutions, of
which the avowed object was to frighten public officers from the
discharge of their duty by threats of a social interdict and
non-intercourse--a method of proceeding which had ended in violent
resistance to the laws and armed insurrection. Nor is it very
surprising, all things considered, that many of the federalists were
inclined to look on Gallatin as a foreign emissary, a tool of France,
and employed and paid to make mischief."[95]

Tracy, of Connecticut, replied to the most prominent points of
Gallatin's speech. He denied that Vattel gave any such opinion as to
slaves, as set forth by Gallatin; and called attention to the fact that
the British did not refuse to restore them as booty, but because they
were men set free by having joined the British standard, that freedom
being the chief inducement held out to them. Other points he commented
upon with equal force. He warmed with his theme, and at length became
severely personal. The opposition, he said, ask, with an air of
triumphant complacency, How is there to be war, if we are not disposed
to fight, and Great Britain has no motive for hostilities? "But look at
the probable state of things," he continued: "Great Britain is to
retain the western posts, and with them, the confidence of the Indians;
she makes no compensation for the millions spoliated from our commerce,
but adds new millions to our already heavy losses. Would Americans
quietly see their government strut, look big, call hard names, repudiate
treaties, and then tamely put up with new and aggravated injuries?
Whatever might be the case in other parts of the Union, his constituents
were not of a temper to dance round a whiskey-pole one day, cursing the
government, and to sneak, the next day, into a swamp, on hearing