He actually advocated repudiating our war debt,[3] on the ground that it was void, being founded on a moral wrong; and he wished the Federalists to make public profession of their purpose, so that when they should come back to power, the holders might have no reason to complain that there had been no warning of their intention. To Josiah Quincy, on May 15th, he wrote: "Should it be objected, as it probably will to favor lenders and their associates, that public faith is pledged, it may be replied that a pledge wickedly given is not to be redeemed." He thus advanced the theory that in a government ruled by parties, which come into power alternately, any debt could be repudiated, at any time, if the party in power happened to disapprove of its originally being incurred. No greenback demagogue of the lowest type ever advocated a proposition more dishonest or more contemptible.
[3] As, for instance, in a letter to David R. Ogden, April 5, 1813.
He wrote that he agreed with Pickering that it was impious to raise taxes for so unjust a war. He endeavored, fortunately in vain, to induce Rufus King in the Senate to advocate the refusal of supplies of every sort, whether of men or money, for carrying on the war; but King was far too honorable to turn traitor. Singularly forgetful of his speeches in the Senate ten years before, he declared that he wished that a foreign power might occupy and people the West, so as, by outside pressure, to stifle our feuds. He sneered at the words union and constitution, as being meaningless. He railed bitterly at the honest and loyal majority of his fellow-Federalists in New York, who had professed their devotion to the Union; and in a letter of April 29th, to Harrison Gray Otis,--who was almost as bad as himself,--he strongly advocated secession, writing among other things that he wished the New York Federalists to declare publicly that "the Union, being the means of freedom, should be prized as such, but that the end should not be sacrificed to the means." By comparing this with Calhoun's famous toast at the Jefferson birthday dinner in 1880, "The Union; next to our liberty the most dear; may we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing equally the benefit and the burden of the Union," it can be seen how completely Morris's utterances went on all fours with those of the great nullifier.