Christian justice and fair dealing into legislative enactment was the more startling to entrenched "special privilege" because with all his democratic convictions he rode a pusillanimous Congress with an iron bit and cruel spurs.
In foreign affairs he believed with the pacifists that armies and navies were useless. He also held the opinion, derived from his dislike of their manners, that the English were a people to be rude to. Otherwise his idea of diplomacy consisted of sympathy for the French Revolution and an uneasy conscience with regard to his impossible Spanish-American neighbours.
He was unable to reconcile their haughty unreasonableness, his constituent's warlike intentions, and his own earnest desires for the "rule of reason."
When he received the intelligence from Livingston that Napoleon had secretly purchased the Middle West and the mouth of the Mississippi he turned a political and philosophical somersault. Those who supposed, because
