[43] See vol. I, chaps. VI and VII, of this work.
[44] Marshall to Pinckney, March 4, 1801, MS. furnished by Dr. W. S. Thayer of Baltimore.
[45] Cabot to Wolcott, Aug. 3, 1801, Lodge: _Life and Letters of George Cabot_, 322.
George Cabot was the ablest, most moderate and far-seeing of the New England Federalists. He feared and detested what he called "excessive democracy" as much as did Ames, or Pickering, or Dwight, but, unlike his brother partisans, did not run to the opposite extreme himself and never failed to assert the indispensability of the democratic element in government. Cabot was utterly without personal ambition and was very indolent; otherwise he surely would have occupied a place in history equal to that of men like Madison, Gallatin, Hamilton, and Marshall.
[46] Hale to King, Dec. 19, 1801, King, IV, 39.
[47] Sedgwick to King, Dec. 14, 1801, _ib._ 34-35.
[48] Dwight's oration as quoted in Adams: U.S. I, 225.
[49] J. Q. Adams to King, Oct. 8,1802, _Writings of John Quincy Adams_: Ford, III, 8-9. Within six years Adams abandoned a party which offered such feeble hope to aspiring ambition. (See _infra_, chap, IX.)
[50] J. Russell's _Gazette-Commercial and Political_, January 28, 1799.
[51] _History of the Last Session of Congress Which Commenced 7th Dec. 1801_ (taken from the _National Intelligencer_). Yet at that time in America manhood suffrage did not exist excepting in three States, a large part of the people could not read or write, imprisonment for debt was universal, convicted persons were sentenced to be whipped in public and subjected to other cruel and disgraceful punishments. Hardly a protest against slavery was made, and human rights as we now know them were in embryo, so far as the practice of them was concerned.
[52] Wirt: _Letters of the British Spy_, 10-11.
These brilliant articles, written by Wirt when he was about thirty years old, were published in the Richmond _Argus_ during 1803. So well did they deceive the people that many in Gloucester and Norfolk declared that they had seen the British Spy. (Kennedy: _Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt_, I, 111, 113.)
[53] Ames to Pickering, Feb. 4, 1807, Pickering MSS. Mass. Hist. Soc.
[54] Jefferson to Rush, Oct. 4, 1803, _Works_: Ford, X, 32.