In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain against the French Republic and its successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian Democracy with France.  The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping abstractions of the French Revolution and clung to the conservative notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings.  On their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism.  By a singular reversal of the natural order of things, the strength of the Federalist party was in New England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure—­owing to the system of slavery—­was intensely aristocratic.  The War of 1812 with England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the secession of New England from the Union.  A good deal of oratory was called out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the downfall of that party and the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800.  The best of the Federalist orators during those years was Fisher Ames, of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech on the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 18, 1796.  The speech was, in great measure, a protest against American chauvinism and the violation of international obligations.  “It has been said the world ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea; if where there are now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no more than a sand-bank for sea-monsters to fatten on; space for the storms of the ocean to mingle in conflict. . . .  What is patriotism?  Is it a narrow affection for the spot where a man was born?  Are the very clods where we tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are greener? . . .  I see no exception to the respect that is paid among nations to the law of good faith. . . .  It is observed by barbarians—­a whiff of tobacco-smoke or a string of beads gives not merely binding force but sanctity to treaties.  Even in Algiers a truce may be bought for money, but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise or too just to disown and annul its obligation.”  Ames was a scholar, and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful, more literary, in a way, than those of his contemporaries.  His eulogiums on Washington and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather excessive, perhaps, in laudation and in classical allusions.  In all the oratory of the Revolutionary period there is nothing equal in deep and condensed energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”