But these young Republicans marched faster than the rank and file. Not so lightly were Jeffersonian traditions to be thrown aside. The old Republican prejudice against standing armies and seagoing navies still survived. Four weary months of discussion produced only two measures of military importance, one of which provided for the addition to the army of twenty-five thousand men enlisted for five years, and the other for the calling into service of fifty thousand state militia. The proposal of the naval committee to appropriate seven and a half million dollars to build a new navy was voted down; Gallatin's urgent appeal for new taxes fell upon deaf ears; and Congress proposed to meet the new military expenditure by the dubious expedient of a loan of eleven million dollars.
A hesitation which seemed fatal paralyzed all branches of the Federal Government in the spring months. Congress was obviously reluctant to follow the lead of the radicals who clamored for war with Great Britain. The President was unwilling to recommend a declaration of war, though all evidence points to the conclusion that he and his advisers believed war inevitable. The nation was divided in sentiment, the Federalists insisting with some plausibility that France was as great an offender as Great Britain and pointing to the recent captures of American merchantmen by French cruisers as evidence that the decrees had not been repealed. Even the President was impressed by these unfriendly acts and soberly discussed with his mentor at Monticello the possibility of war with both France and England. There was a moment in March, indeed, when he was disposed to listen to moderate Republicans who advised him to send a special mission to England as a last chance.
What were the considerations which fixed the mind of the nation and of Congress upon war with Great Britain? Merely to catalogue the accumulated grievances of a decade does not suffice. Nations do not arrive at decisions by mathematical computation of injuries received, but rather because of a sense of accumulated wrongs which may or may not be measured by losses in life and property. And this sense of wrongs is the more acute in proportion to the racial propinquity of the offender. The most bitter of all feuds are those between peoples of the same blood. It was just because the mother country from which Americans had won their independence was now denying the fruits of that independence that she became the object of attack. In two particulars was Great Britain offending and France not. The racial differences between French and American seamen were too conspicuous to countenance impressment into the navy of Napoleon. No injuries at the hands of France bore any similarity to the Chesapeake outrage. Nor did France menace the frontier and the frontier folk of the United States by collusion with the Indians.