enclosing a communication, which he fully endorses, from the editors of the National Intelligencer, not only the ablest journal at the seat of government, but then, as it was understood, the exponent of the views of the Administration, thanking him in strong terms for a political article, which he had furnished, and inviting further contributions.

While yet resident at Providence, he delivered, on the 4th of July, 1810, an oration before his townsmen, in acknowledging the receipt of which Mr. Jefferson says: "he rejoices over every publication wherein such sentiments are expressed. While these prevail all is safe."

In 1811, Mr. Wheaton married his cousin Catharine, the daughter of Dr. Wheaton, to whom he had been attached from an early day, and who, after partaking with him all his vicissitudes of fortune, at home and abroad, still survives her irreparable loss. He appears, at this period, to have sought a wider field than his native place afforded for his talents, and to have intended to exercise his profession in the State of New York. This, however, was prevented by the old system of apprenticeship or clerkship, only fully abrogated by the Constitution of 1846. It, at the time referred to, required a novitiate of at least three years, which, Judge Spencer wrote to his father in law, could not then be dispensed with, even in the case of a practitioner from another State, or in consequence of attainments however extensive.

Towards the close of 1812, and some months after the declaration of the war with England, Mr. Wheaton was induced to take charge of a paper in New York, established under the title of the National Advocate, as the organ of the Republican party, in that city. The editorship of a daily newspaper at that time presented no flattering position. With the exception of the National Intelligencer, and of a few other cases, the newspapers of the United States, forty years ago, instead of being the vehicles of sound political intelligence and the means of diffusing correct information among the people, on the great

topics of public interest, were the mere conduits of personal invective and party acerbity.

The establishment of the National Advocate constitutes a new epoch in the history of the newspaper press of the country. At the conclusion of the first year, the Editor remarks: "Our ideas of the manner in which a free press should be conducted were developed in the Prospectus, and we contracted the obligation that this print should be conducted in conformity to them. We promised that it should never wound the feelings of virtue; never infringe the laws of decorum; and never spare the vices of political turpitude. It is for our readers to determine how far we have performed our engagements."

In the Advocate were discussed, with the pen of a gentleman and scholar, the great questions of violated neutral rights, which had given rise to the belligerent position of the country. The new duties which war had created, on the part of our country, towards other nations, and the rights which it gave us, as well as the obligations of the several State governments to the Federal government, and the paramount allegiance of the citizens of the different States to the United States, were elucidated with the learning of an accomplished publicist.

The period was one well calculated to arouse the patriotism of a republican editor. War had been declared, when there had been a refusal to make an adjustment on the subject of impressment, and after it had been officially announced to the American government, that the obnoxious Orders in Council would not be repealed, without a repeal of internal measures of France, which, not violating any neutral rights, we had no pretence to call on her to abrogate, and with regard to which England, therefore, had no excuse for asking us to interpose, even if one belligerent could make it a ground of offence towards a friendly power, that it had neglected to exact from the other all that

1 National Advocate, December 15, 1813.

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its neutral rights would authorize. Great Britain, after first requiring us to obtain the repeal of the Berlin and Milan decrees to induce an abandonment of the Orders in Council, was not satisfied with their abrogation, as regarded the United States, but demanded that their repeal should be general, and should extend to the removal of the prohibition of English produce and manufactures from the continent of Europe, where they operated as internal and municipal regulations not contravening any rights of neutrality.

The diplomatic papers of the American government, indeed, show that there was ground enough for a resort to extreme measures against both the great European belligerents, especially after the case of The Horizon,1 in 1807. The effect of such an anomalous condition of things would scarcely have changed the actual position of the parties, inasmuch as the navy of Great Britain, by driving from the ocean not only the military, but mercantile, marine of France, had left her unassailable by us, in a maritime war, the only species of hostilities that we could carry on against a strictly European power. Moreover, the avowed withdrawal of her hostile decrees, by France, in 1810, though the indemnity for past spoliations was deferred, had, already, induced a distinction in her favor as to our retaliatory interdicts on commercial intercourse. And the conviction, which circumstances subsequently confirmed, that the savages had been, while peace with the mother country still continued, excited by her provincial authorities, to carry the horrors of barbarous warfare into our frontier settlements, and that a secret agency had been instituted to separate the New England States from the Union, was deemed to justify a difference. of conduct towards the two nations. War was consequently declared, on the 18th of June, 1812, against England alone.

1 American State Papers, vol. vi. p. 463.

2 Ibid. vol. vii. p. 441.

At this day, looking not only to the causes of the war — the utter disregard of our flag in the impressment of our seamen, aggravated, even so early as June, 1807, by the act of a British admiral, scarcely disavowed and most inadequately atoned for, in wresting, after the loss of several lives, four of the crew from a ship of war of the United States,' and the condemnation of our vessels, in pursuance of Orders in Council, which even the British courts of admiralty did not venture to assert were consistent with the law of nations, but to the manner in which it was conducted - subjecting to conflagration edifices consecrated to legislation, setting at naught the ties of a common origin and introducing the tomahawk of the Indian among the weapons of British warfare, it is scarcely possible to believe that those, to whom the Constitution confided the conduct of our foreign affairs, did not receive the unanimous support of the American people and of the State authorities.

Such, however, was not the fact. It is true that some of the most illustrious, in the annals of federalism, merged all party considerations in their patriotic obligations,-that the coadjutor of Jefferson in the declaration of Independence and his great rival, at the origin of the government, the Ex-President Adams, exclaimed, "How it is possible that a rational, social, or moral creature can say that the war is unjust, is to me utterly incomprehensible. I have thought it both just and necessary for five or six years." Such, also, were the often reiterated opinions of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury under the administrations of Washington and Adams. Samuel Dexter, another member of the last cabinet of the federal party, whose political reputation was merged in his forensic fame, and Rufus King, deservedly esteemed one of the most enlightened statesmen among the founders of the government, and who was looked to as the individual, on whom alone President Madison's opponents

1 See case of The Chesapeake. American State Papers, vol. v. p. 480.

could consistently rally for the chief magistracy, though not approving the war in advance, achieved for themselves an eternal claim to the gratitude of their country, by sustaining the administration, when menaced by foreign armies and internal foes.

Not only were the energies of the government shackled by local legislatures denying, in the very midst of hostilities, the sufficiency of the causes of the war, and justifying the acts of Great Britain as being retaliatory of those of France, while even the victories achieved by our own infant navy were availed of to repudiate their glorious exploits, as unbecoming the approbation of a moral and religious people; but the federal authorities were, in 1818, brought into direct collision with those of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Governors of those States assumed the right of determining for themselves the exigencies, which authorized the calling out of the militia, even in time of war, and refused to allow them to be placed in any case under the orders of the officer of the United States, commanding the regular troops within the military department. The unconstitutionality of these pretensions, which it was obvious would have defeated the main object for which the federal government was formed, and which, as pronounced by the Supreme Court of the United States, it was one of his last acts, when connected with that tribunal, to report, was, at the time, ably exposed by Mr. Wheaton in the columns of his journal. It was, also, his duty to point out the highly objectionable nature of the convention of delegates from some of the New England States, held at Hartford, in 1814, for the purpose of considering their sectional interests; but which the news of peace, arriving almost simultaneously with their adjournment, rendered wholly innocuous.

Among the articles of the Advocate, which appropriately

' Wheaton's Reports, vol. xii. p. 29. Martin v. Mott. See also Ibid. vol. v. p. 1. Houston v. Moore. Kent's Com. vol. i. p. 265.