“We’ll see about that!”

Terrence was determined on making the journey, and he set out next day by the mail coach for Washington City.  Public houses in Washington were not numerous then, yet there were a few good hotels, and he put up at the old Continental House.  Terrence, with all his reckless impetuosity, proceeded carefully to his point.  Where boldness won success, he was bold; where caution and prudence were essential to win, he was cautious and prudent.

He noticed a door opening into a room from the main corridor, over which was tacked a strip of white canvas bearing in large black letters the words: 

“HEADQUARTERS OF THE PEACE PARTY.”

Men were coming and going from this apartment with grave and serious faces and corrugated brows, as if they had the weight of all the world on their shoulders.  Terrence watched the comers and goers awhile and then halted a colored chambermaid, and, in an awe-inspiring whisper, asked who was sick in the room “ferninst.”  He was told no one.  He thought some one must be dangerously ill, people went in and out so softly and talked in such low tones; but she assured him it was the room where the “peace party” met to discuss means to prevent President Madison and congress from declaring or prosecuting war against Great Britain.  That those men were congressmen or merchants from Boston and other New England towns, who opposed war.

Terrence was opposed to peace, and he knew no better way to declare war than to begin it on the peace party.  A bull was never made more furious at sight of a red flag, than Terrence Malone at the streamer of the peace party.  One who knows what Terrence had suffered cannot blame him.  At the very outset of the war, the government encountered open and secret, manly and cowardly opposition.  The Federalists in congress, who had opposed the war scheme of the administration from the beginning, published an address to their constituents in which they set forth the state of the country at that time, the course of the administration, and its supporters in congress, and the minority opinion for opposing the war.  This was fair and, if they acted on their convictions and not from political prejudices, was honorable; but outside and inside of congress there was a party of politicians composed of Federalists and disaffected Democrats, organized under the name of the Peace Party, whose object was to cast obstructions in the way of the prosecution of war, and to compel the government, by weakening its resources and embarrassing the operations, to make peace.  They tried to derange the public finances, discredit the faith of the government, prevent enlistment, and in every way to cripple the administration and bring it into discredit with the people.  It was an unpatriotic and mischievous faction, and the great leaders of the Federalists, like Mr. Quincy and Mr. Emot, who, when the war began, lent their aid to the government in its extremity, frowned upon these real enemies of their country; but the machinations of the Peace Party continued until the close of the war, and did infinite mischief unmixed with any good. [Footnote:  Lossing’s “Our Country,” Vol.  V., Page 1203.]