The sentiment was patriotic; but as though expressly to prove how little it could be trusted, Barent Gardenier rose to say, in emphatic and unqualified terms, that England was wholly in the right, and that from the first the American government had aimed at provoking war.[323] Gardenier’s views were those of a majority of Federalists, and in the end were adopted by the party. Quincy’s blindness to the serious danger of war cost him the confidence of more cautious conservatives. On the opposite side, the Republicans seemed for the most part fairly cowed by the vigor with which the Federalists defied the embargo and war at once. Nothing in American history offered a more interesting illustration of the first stage of the national character than the open avowals by Congress in 1808 of motives closely akin to fear. America as a nation could run no serious military peril, even though she declared war on England and France at once. The worst military disaster that could happen would be a bombardment or temporary occupation of some seaboard city; the most terrible punishment within the range of possibility was the burning of a few small wooden towns which could be rebuilt in three months, and whose destruction implied no necessary loss of life. Neither England nor France had armies to spare for permanent conquest in America; but so thoroughly had the theory of peaceable coercion taken possession of the national character that men of courage appealed to motives such as in a private dispute they would have thought degrading. “The gentleman talked of resistance, and resistance on sea,” said Willis Alston of North Carolina, in reply to Quincy.[324] “Did any one believe that he seriously meant meeting the powerful navy of Great Britain on the sea,--of that Britain who had been emphatically styled ‘the mistress of the ocean,’ and who was ‘fighting for the liberties of the world and of mankind’? No, sir; nothing of the kind is meant. Submission to her orders would be the inevitable consequence of the gentleman’s resistance, and finally a loss of everything dear to the American character,--a loss of our liberty and independence as a free people.” As though one such admission were not enough, Alston obstinately recurred to it. “An idea of that sort of resistance is too idle to merit serious consideration.” That Willis Alston was a man of no great distinction might be true; but such expressions were not confined to him. Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, as brave a man as lived, could not face the idea of war:-- “At the most alarming crisis that ever convulsed the political world, when empires and kingdoms have changed with the season, and America, buffeted on every side, has maintained the ground of perfect neutrality, this nation should make a pause on this high eminence before they plunge into the dread conflict.”