Monroe grasped too much, and the prizes which would have destroyed him slipped through his fingers. The story that he was to be general-in-chief as well as Secretary of War, exaggerated by jealousy, roused a storm of protest. Even the patient Gallatin interposed there, and gave the President to understand that if Monroe were transferred to the army, he should himself claim the vacant Department of State; and Madison admitted the justice of the claim, although the difficulty of filling the Treasury created a new obstacle to the scheme. A greater difficulty arose from sectional jealousies. The loss of New York to the Republican party, due chiefly to dislike of Virginia and to Monroe’s previous promotion, was too recent and serious to allow further experiments. The Republican leaders in New York--Governor Tompkins, Judge Spencer, and their connections--felt their hopes depend on checking the open display of Virginia favoritism. Finally, the Federalists made a scandal of the subject. January 5, Josiah Quincy, in a speech which for literary quality was one of the best ever delivered in the House, after giving a keen if not an exact, account of the “Cabinet, little less than despotic, composed, to all efficient purposes, of two Virginians and a foreigner, which had for twelve years ruled the nation,” rose to a climax by averring that all the new Cabinet projects--the loan of twenty millions, an army of fifty-five thousand regulars, the scheme of mock negotiation--had no other object than to satiate the ambition of a single man:-- “The army for the conquest of Canada will be raised,--to be commanded by whom? This is the critical question. The answer is in every man’s mouth. By a member of the American Cabinet; by one of the three; by one of that trio who at this moment constitute in fact, and who efficiently have always constituted, the whole Cabinet. And the man who is thus intended for the command of the greatest army this New World ever contained,--an army nearly twice as great as was at any time the regular army of our Revolution,--I say the man who is intended for this great trust is the individual who is notoriously the selected candidate for the next Presidency.” In face of these difficulties, Madison could not carry out his scheme. His only object in pushing Monroe forward was to strengthen himself by using what he supposed to be Monroe’s popularity; but from the moment it appeared that Monroe, in the War Department or at the head of the Northern army, would be a source of weakness rather than of strength, Madison had no motive to persist; so that Monroe, failing to take a decided step, suddenly found himself--he hardly knew how--in the awkward attitude of a disappointed Cromwell. His rival first withdrew the War Department from his hands. He described to Jefferson[373] the way in which he lost this vantage ground:--