The Secretary of State required nothing less than the retirement of the two of his colleagues in the Cabinet, and of the general in chief command of the army. The Secretary of the Treasury, though less censorious than Clay, Crawford, or Monroe, shared their opinions. He spoke of Eustis’s incompetence as a matter universally admitted, and wrote to Jefferson that though the three disasters of Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smyth could not with justice be ascribed to the Secretary of War, “yet his incapacity and the total want of confidence in him were felt through every ramification of the public service.”[347] Jefferson abstained from criticising the chief incompetents, but set no bounds to his vindictiveness against the unfortunate generals. “Hull will of course be shot for cowardice and treachery,” he wrote to Madison;[348] “and will not Van Rensselaer be broke for incapacity?” The incapacity of Eustis, Hamilton, Dearborn, Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smyth pointed directly to the responsible source of appointment,--the President himself; but in face of a general election Republicans could not afford to criticise their President, and only in private could they assail his Cabinet. The Federalists, factious, weak, and unpopular as they were, expressed the secret opinion of the whole country, and could be answered by no facts or arguments except military success, which Madison was admittedly incompetent to win; but perhaps the failure of his Cabinet, of his generals, and of his troops gave the Federalists less advantage than they drew from the failures of diplomacy in which his genius lay. With reasons such as few nations ever waited to collect for an appeal to arms, Madison had been so unfortunate in making the issue that on his own showing no sufficient cause of war seemed to exist. His management was so extraordinary that at the moment when Hull surrendered Detroit, Great Britain was able to pose before the world in the attitude of victim to a conspiracy between Napoleon and the United States to destroy the liberties of Europe. Such inversion of the truth passed ordinary bounds, and so real was Madison’s diplomatic mismanagement that it paralyzed one half the energies of the American people. Largely if not chiefly owing to these mistakes, the New England Federalists were able to convince themselves that Jefferson and Madison were sold to France. From the moment war was declared, the charge became a source of serious danger. Only one more step was needed to throw the clerical party of New England into open revolution. If the majority meant to close their long career by a catastrophe which should leave the Union a wreck, they had but to try the effects of coercion.