“Before you quitted this place you knew that causes of dissension subsisted in the Executive departments. So ominous an event has not failed to be an object of my continued and anxious attention, and I am now fully persuaded that these unfriendly feelings are fast approaching to a degree of animosity that must end in open rupture, with its very injurious consequences to the Republican cause.... This break of harmony in the Executive departments, added to the extreme points of difference in opinion among the majority in Congress in relation to the great questions of peace and war, renders the apathy and inaction of the Republicans here extremely mortifying. I never knew them more disconnected in sentiment and system, as probably may have been made manifest to you by the desultory and inconclusive work of nearly three months.... You will recollect that at the close of the last Congress the appearance of umbrage was confined to Mr. Gallatin and Mr. R. Smith; indeed, excepting themselves there were no other secretaries effectively in office. It is now supposed, and I believe with truth, that the former stands alone against the more or less unfriendly dispositions of all the rest. Their _main abettors_ of last spring have abated nothing of their strong and indecent zeal.” Upon feelings so irritable and at a moment when schism was imminent, as Walter Jones described, the action of Samuel Smith and Michael Leib with six or eight more Republican senators, in emasculating Macon’s bill, left small chance of reconciliation. Giles, having declared himself in favor of energy, did not vote at all. The debate being for the most part not reported, the arguments of the dissenting senators have been lost. One speaker alone broke the monotony of the discussion by an address that marked the beginning of an epoch. Henry Clay had been barely two weeks a senator, when, February 22, he rose to move that the bill as amended by Samuel Smith be recommitted; and this motion he supported by a war speech of no great length, but full of Western patriotism.