ee to draft
resolutions, which were only a little less strong than those of the
earlier assemblage. But though many of the Federalists thus tardily
and reluctantly fell in with the popular sentiment, they were for the
most part heartily incensed against Mr. Adams. They threatened him
that he should "have his head taken off for apostasy," and gave him to
understand that he "should no longer be considered as having any
communion with the party." If he had not already quite left them, they
now turned him out from their community. But such abusive treatment
was ill adapted to influence a man of his temper. Martyrdom, which in
time he came to relish, had not now any terrors for him; and he would
have lost as many heads as ever grew on Hydra, ere he would have
yielded on a point of principle.

[Footnote 1: Mr. John Lowell.]

His spirit was soon to be demonstrated. Congress was convened in extra
session on October 26, 1807. The administration brought forward the
bill establishing an embargo. The measure may now be pronounced a
blunder, and its proposal created a howl of rage and anguish from the
commercial states, who saw in it only their utter ruin. Already a
strong sectional feeling had been developed between the planters (p. 053)
of the South and the merchants of the North and East, and the latter
now united in the cry that their quarter was to be ruined by the
ignorant policy of this Virginian President. Terrible then was their
wrath, when they actually saw a Massachusetts Senator boldly give his
vote for what they deemed the most odious and wicked bill which had
ever been presented in the halls of Congress. Nay, more, they learned
with horror that Mr. Adams had even been a member of the committee
which reported the bill, and that he had joined in the report.
Henceforth the Federal party was to be like a hive of enraged hornets
about the devoted renegade. No abuse which they could heap upon him
seemed nearly adequate to the occasion. They despised him; they
loathed him; they said and believed that he was false, selfish,
designing, a traitor, an apostate, that he had run away from a failing
cause, that he had sold himself. The language of contumely was
exhausted in vain efforts to describe his baseness. Not even yet has
the echo of the hard names which he was called quite died away in the
land; and there are still families in New England with whom his
dishonest tergiversation remains a traditional bel