for generations to come, and for this he can never be forgiven.  How vain and impotent is party rage, directed against such a man.  He is not more elevated by his lofty residence, upon the summit of his own favorite mountain, than he is lifted, by the serenity of his mind, and the consciousness of a well-spent life, above the malignant passions and bitter feelings of the day.  No! his own beloved Monticello is not less moved by the storms that beat against its sides than is this illustrious man by the howlings of the whole British pack, set loose from the Essex kennel.  When the gentleman to whom I have been compelled to allude shall have mingled his dust with that of his abused ancestors, when he shall have been consigned to oblivion, or, if he lives at all, shall live only in the treasonable annals of a certain junto, the name of Jefferson will be hailed with gratitude, his memory honored and cherished as the second founder of the liberties of the people, and the period of his administration will be looked back to as one of the happiest and brightest epochs of American history; an oasis in the midst of a sandy desert.  But I beg the gentleman’s pardon; he has already secured to himself a more imperishable fame than I had supposed; I think it was about four years that he submitted to the House of Representatives an initiative proposition for the impeachment of Mr. Jefferson.  The house condescended to consider it.  The gentleman debated it with his usual temper, moderation, and urbanity.  The house decided upon it in the most solemn manner, and, although the gentleman had somehow obtained a second, the final vote stood one for, and one hundred and seventeen against, the proposition. * * *

But sir, I must speak of another subject, which I never think of but with feelings of the deepest awe.  The gentleman from Massachusetts, in imitation of some of his predecessors of 1799, has entertained us with a picture of cabinet plots, presidential plots, and all sorts of plots, which have been engendered by the diseased state of the gentleman’s imagination.  I wish, sir, that another plot, of a much more serious and alarming character—­a plot that aims at the dismemberment of our Union—­had only the same imaginary existence.  But no man, who has paid any attention to the tone of certain prints and to transactions in a particular quarter of the Union, for several years past, can doubt the existence of such a plot.  It was far, very far from my intention to charge the opposition with such a design.  No, I believe them generally incapable of it.  But I cannot say as much for some who have been unworthily associated with them in the quarter of the Union to which I have referred.  The gentleman cannot have forgotten his own sentiment, uttered even on the floor of this house, “peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must,” nearly at the very time Henry’s mission was undertaken.  The flagitiousness of that embassy had been attempted to be concealed by directing the public attention to the price which, the gentleman says, was given for the disclosure.  As if any price could change the atrociousness of the attempt on the part of Great Britain, or could extenuate, in the slightest degree, the offence of those citizens, who entertained and deliberated on a proposition so infamous and unnatural * * * But, sir, I will quit this unpleasant subject. * * *