The contest ended on April 7, with the adoption of two resolutions: 1st, that the power of making treaties is exclusively with the President and Senate, and the House do not claim an agency in making them, or ratifying them when made; 2d, that when made a treaty must depend for the execution of its stipulations on a law or laws to be passed by Congress; and the House have a right to deliberate and determine the expediency or inexpediency of carrying treaties into effect.

These resolutions were carried by a vote of 63 to 27.
There was now a truce of a few days.

In the meanwhile the country was agitated to an extent which, if words mean anything, really threatened an attempt at dissolution of the Union, if not civil war itself.

The objections on the part of the Republicans were to the treaty as a whole.
Their sympathies were with France in her struggle for liberty and democratic institutions and against England, and their real and proper ground of antipathy to the instrument lay in its concession of the right of capture of French property in American vessels, whilst the treaty with France forbade her to seize British property in American vessels.
The objections in detail had been formulated at the Boston public meeting the year before.

The commercial cities were disturbed by the interference with the carrying trade; the entire coast, by the search of vessels and the impressment of seamen; the agricultural regions, by the closing of the outlet for their surplus product; the upland districts, by the stoppage of the export of timber.