When the Senate, February 20, divided on the motion to strike out the enacting clause, seventeen senators voted for the Bank and seventeen voted against it. Nine Northern senators voted in its favor, including seven of the ten from New England, and nine on the opposite side. Eight Southern senators voted one way, and eight the other. Of the twenty-seven Republican senators, seventeen voted against the Bank, and ten in its favor; while the three senators who were supposed to be in personal opposition to the President--Giles, Samuel Smith, and Michael Leib--all voted in opposition. The force of personal feeling was credited with still another vote; for when the result was announced, the Vice-President, George Clinton, whose attitude was notorious, made a short address to the effect that “the power to create corporations is not expressly granted; it is a high attribute of sovereignty, and in its nature not accessorial or derivative by implication, but primary and independent.” On this ground he threw his casting vote against the bill. So perished the first Bank of the United States; and with its destruction the Federalist crisis, so long threatened, began at last to throw its shadow over the government. CHAPTER XVI. WHILE Congress recoiled from the problem of West Florida, and by a single voice decreed that the United States Bank should cease to exist, nothing had yet been decided in regard to England and France. This delay was not due to negligence. From the first day of the session anxiety had been great; but decision, which even in indifferent matters was difficult for the Eleventh Congress, became impossible in so complicated a subject as that of foreign relations. The President’s proclamation named Feb. 2, 1811, as the day when intercourse with England was to cease. Congress had been six weeks in session, and had barely a fortnight to spare, when at last the subject was brought before the House, January 15, by John W. Eppes of Virginia, chairman of the committees of Ways and Means and Foreign Relations, who reported a bill for regulating commercial intercourse with Great Britain. As a third or fourth commercial experiment,--a companion to the partial Non-intercourse Act of April, 1806; the embargo of December, 1807; and the total Non-intercourse Act of March, 1809,--the new bill promised more discontent in America than it was ever likely to create in England. The measure was not a non-intercourse, but a non-importation, severe and searching, in some ways almost as violent as the embargo; and was to be passed by a Congress elected expressly for the purpose of repealing the embargo.