our most gainful commerce, to inflict upon our own people all the
injuries which war would produce without any of the advantages that
might accrue from a successful prosecution of hostilities; that the
commercial regulations of England and France, though bearing
disastrously on us, were chiefly designed to injure each other during
actual war; and that, being war measures, they would determine on a
restoration of peace, when we could obtain from the respective powers
full redress for all our grievances.

He accordingly opposed the election of Mr. Madison to the presidency,
whom he regarded as the impersonation of the restrictive policy which he
had defended in his diplomatic writings, and from the press; and which
was deemed the pledge of its continuance; and, in the spring of 1809,
voted for the federal candidate for Congress, in opposition to Newton,
who, though coming from a sea-port, had gallantly upheld the commercial
policy of Jefferson, and who was returned by a decisive majority.

That epoch was the most mortifying in the annals of our country; and
posterity must decide whether any action of ours could have averted the
difficulty, and on whose shoulders the responsibility shall rest. When I
reflect upon the incidents of that day; when I recount the millions of
American capital sacrificed by the remorseless rapacity of England and
France; when I call up from their graves the hundreds and thousands of
American sailors, the sons of the men who had fought at Bunker Hill, who
had led the forlorn hope at Stony Point, who had bled on the sweltering
field of Eutaw, and who had stormed the outworks at York; when I reflect
that such men were forcibly taken from their ships, and were compelled
to fight the battles of England, to be doomed to the prison-ship, or to
be scourged by the lash, and that not one dollar of those pilfered
millions has yet been paid by one of the belligerents; and that all