Note 185 — Chapter XLIX

The distinguished Joseph Quincy, of Boston, leader of the Federalist party, said, in his place in Congress, "I have evidence satisfactory in my own mind, that the Secretary of War has made it a principle not to appoint any man to a command in that army who is not an open partizan of the existing Administration. If it be denied, appoint a Committee of Inquiry. If the intention had been to unite the nation as one man against a foreign enemy, is not this the last policy that any Administration ought ever to have adopted? Is not a partizan army the most dreadful and detestable of all engines, and most likely to awaken suspicions and to inspire discontent?" (Hildreth, Second Series, Vol. III., Chap. xxi., p. 123.)

"The place of the first major-general, with the command of the Northern Department, had been given to the petted favourite, Henry Dearborn, late Secretary of War, and, since Madison's accession, collector of the port of Boston—a lucrative post, kept in his family by his son's appointment to it."—"Wilkinson, the senior brigadier, just acquitted by court-martial of long-pending charges against him, had been sent to New Orleans [afterwards to Canada] to relieve Hampton [who was afterwards sent to Canada], whose command there had been a constant scene of collision and turmoil with his officers. Commissions as brigadiers, under the late Acts, had been given to Bloomfield, Governor of New Jersey; to James Winchester, of Tennessee; and to Hull, Governor of Michigan Territory. * * Hampton and Smythe had been civilians for more than thirty years, and were indebted for their present appointments rather to political than to military considerations. Of the inferiors of the old army, presently distinguished, Alexander MacNab, of the Engineers, was now a colonel, and Winfield Scott and Edmund Gaines lieutenant-colonels. A lieutenant-colonelcy in one of the new regiments had been given to Eleazar W. Ripley, a young Democrat from Maine, who had succeeded Storey, of the late Democratic Massachusetts House of Representatives. Ripley's subsequent conduct justified his appointment; but the colonel of that same regiment was afterwards cashiered for peculation; and as few of the new regimental officers had any military knowledge, so numbers of them were quite destitute of those qualities without which even that knowledge would have been of little avail." (Hildreth's History of the United States, Second Series, Vol. III., Chap, xxiv., pp. 308-310.)