was called to the bar; a little longer, and his name
began to be an oft-spoken one in his native county, and not unknown
throughout Virginia.

CHAPTER III

FONTENOY

In the springtime of the year 1804 the spectacle of human conduct ranged
from grave to gay, from gay to grave again much as it had done in any
other springtime of any other year. In France the consular chrysalis was
about to develop imperial wings. The British Lion and the Russian Bear
were cheek by jowl, and every Englishman turned his spyglass toward
Boulogne, where was gathered Buonaparte's army of invasion. In the New
World Spanish troops were reluctantly withdrawing from the vast
territory sold by a Corsican to a Virginian, while to the eastward of
that movement seventeen of the United States of America pursued the
uneven tenor of their way. Washington had been dead five years.
Alexander Hamilton was yet the leading spirit of the Federalist party,
while Thomas Jefferson was the idol of the Democrat-Republicans.

In the sovereign State of Virginia politics was the staple of
conversation as tobacco was the staple of trade. Party feeling ran high.
The President of the Union was a Virginian and a Republican; the Chief
Justice was a Virginian and a Federalist. Old friends looked askance, or
crossed the road to avoid a meeting, and hot bloods went a-duelling. The
note of the time was Ambition; the noun most in use the name of Napoleon
Buonaparte. It seemed written across the firmament; to some in letters
of light and to others in hell fire. With that sign in the skies, men
might shudder and turn to a private hearth, or they might give loosest
rein to desire for Fame. In the columns of the newspapers, above the
name of every Roman patriot, each party found voice. From a lurid
background of Moreau's conspiracy and d'Enghien's death, of a moribund
English King and Premier, of Hayti aflame, and Tripoli insolent, they
thundered, like Cassandra, of home woes. To the Federalist, reverencing
the dead Washington, still looking for leadership to Hamilton, now so
near that fatal Field of Honour, unconsciously nourishing love for that
mother country from which he had righteously torn himself, the name of
Democrat-Republican and all that it implied was a stench in the
nostrils. On the other hand, the lover of Jefferson, the believer in the
French Revolution and that rider of the whirlwind whom it had bred, the
far-sighted iconoclast, and the poor bawler for s