No one understood or represented so well as Macon the instincts and ideas of the Southern people at that time, and he never represented them more truly than in the matter of the embargo. Virginia and the Carolinas were with him at heart. Macon’s hopes for the republic depended on his confidence in the people; and that confidence in its turn depended on his belief that the people were still true to a dogma which the Government had abandoned as impracticable. The belief was well founded, as the course of events proved. The House, April 7, by a vote of one hundred and fifteen to thirty-seven, passed the bill repealing the Embargo and Non-importation Acts; the Senate also passed it, April 12, by a vote of twenty-six to four; the President, April 14, approved it; and from that day the restrictive system, which had been the cardinal point of Jefferson’s and Madison’s statesmanship, seemed to vanish from the public mind and the party politics of the country. Yet so deeply riveted was the idea of its efficacy among the Southern people, that at the next great crisis of their history they staked their lives and fortunes on the same belief of their necessity to Europe which had led them into the experiment of coercing Napoleon and Canning by commercial deprivations; and their second experiment had results still more striking than those which attended their first. The explanation of this curious popular trait certainly lay in the nature of Southern society; but the experience was common to the whole Union. When the restrictive system was abandoned of necessity in April, 1814, it had brought the country to the verge of dissolution. The Government could neither make war nor peace; the public seemed indifferent or hostile; and the same traits which characterized the restrictive system continued to paralyze the efforts of Congress to adopt more energetic methods. “I will yet hope we may have no more war,” wrote Mrs. Madison to Mrs. Gallatin Jan. 7, 1814.[471] “If we do, alas! alas! we are not making ready as we ought to do. Congress trifle away the most precious of their days,--days that ought to be devoted to the defence of their divided country.” Mrs. Madison doubtless echoed the language she heard used at the White House; yet the leaders of Congress were neither triflers nor idlers, and they did all that public opinion permitted. Within a week after Mrs. Madison’s complaint, the military committee of the House reported a bill for encouraging enlistments. Viewed as a means of embodying the whole military strength of the republic to resist the whole military strength of Great Britain, about to be released from service in Europe, Troup’s bill[472] was not an efficient measure; but it terrified Congress.