E-text prepared by G. Edward Johnson, Stacy Brown,
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From the original portrait by Stuart, at Bowdoin College.

UNION AND DEMOCRACY

BY

ALLEN JOHNSON

PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY
YALE UNIVERSITY

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY ALLEN JOHNSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.

PREFACE

The title of this volume must be regarded as suggestive rather than as strictly accurate, for the beginnings of union are to be found farther back than 1783, and democracy in its largest sense has even yet been only imperfectly realized. At the close of the Revolution, union was but a name. What Metternich said of the Italy of his day might have been said of the United States in 1783: it was only a geographical expression. The formation of the new federal union under the Constitution is properly the main, though not the sole, theme of this volume. Behind the thirteen Atlantic communities lay a vast region which almost at once invited the colonizing activities of the people. The rise of this western world is a movement of immense significance. Out of the bosom of the West emerged the new democracy which transformed the face of society in the old States. Whether viewed economically or politically, this forms the second theme in any history of the times. Around these two movements, therefore, I have endeavored to group the events of forty-five years.

Within the last few years special studies have added much to the common stock of historical information, and in many ways effected changes in the historian's point of view. The time seemed proper to restate the salient factors in the history of this formative period. I have frankly appropriated the labors of others. Had the plan of the series permitted the use of footnotes, I would gladly have made particular acknowledgment of my indebtedness. At the same time I have not hesitated to present the results of my own studies where they have led away from the conventional view of men and events.

In preparation of the maps showing the popular vote in the elections of 1800 and 1824, I have drawn largely upon the data which Dr. Charles O. Paullin, of the Carnegie Institution, has generously put at my disposal. In States where the presidential electors were not chosen directly by the voters, other votes, such as those for governor, have been made the basis for determining the popular choice among party candidates for the presidency. Two of my graduate students, Miss Isabel S. Mitchell and Mr. Joseph E. Howe, have given me valuable assistance in the execution of the maps. I am under particular obligation to my colleague, Professor Stewart L. Mims, for reading critically both manuscript and proof.

Allen Johnson.

CONTENTS

MAPS AND CHARTS

UNION AND DEMOCRACY

UNION AND DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER I

THE ORDEAL OF THE CONFEDERATION

It was characteristic of the people of the United States that once assured of their political independence they should face their economic future with buoyant expectations. As colonizers of a new world they were confident in their own strength. When once the shackles of the British mercantile system were shaken off, they did not doubt their ability to compete for the markets of the world. Even Washington, who had fewer illusions than most of his contemporaries, told his fellow citizens of America that they were "placed in the most enviable condition, as sole lords and proprietors of a vast tract of continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the world, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life." Independence was the magic word which the common man believed would open wide the gates of prosperity. Yet within a year after the ratification of the Peace of Paris, American society was in the throes of a severe industrial depression.

Contrary to the accepted view, the latter years of the war were not years of penury and want among the people. Outside of those regions of Virginia and the Carolinas, which were devastated by the marching and countermarching of the combatants, the people were living in comparative comfort. North of the Potomac, indeed, there was even a tendency to speculation in business and extravagance in living. Throughout the war farmers had found a ready market for their produce within the lines of the British and French armies. The temporary suspension of commerce had encouraged many forms of productive industry. As the war continued, venturesome skippers eluded British men-of-war and found their way to European or Dutch West India ports, bringing home rich cargoes in exchange for tobacco, flour, and rice. The prizes brought in by privateers added largely to the stock of desirable and attractive merchandise in the shops of Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. If such prosperity could follow in the wake of war, what commercial gains might not be expected in the piping times of peace? In anticipation of immediate returns, merchants drew heavily upon their foreign creditors and stocked their shops with imported commodities. Southern planters indulged similar expectations and bought land and slaves on credit, regardless of the price. "A rage for running in debt became epidemical," wrote a contemporary observer. "Individuals were for getting rich by a coup de main; a good bargain—a happy speculation—was almost every man's object and pursuit."

During the hard times of 1785-86 these golden dreams vanished. Instead of sharing as the people of an independent nation in the trade and commerce of the world, American shippers found themselves no better off than they were as dependents of Great Britain. Orders in council at once closed the ports of the British West Indies to all staple products which were not carried in British bottoms. Certain commodities,—fish, pork, and beef,—which might compete with the products of British dependencies, were excluded altogether. The policy of France and Spain was scarcely less illiberal. The effect was immediate. Cut off from their natural markets, American shipowners were forced either to leave their vessels to rot at their wharves or to seek new markets. For months there seemed to be no other alternative. At the same time the new industries which had sprung up during the war had to meet the shock of foreign competition, as the British manufacturer dumped on American wharves the accumulated stock of his warehouses. The plight of the small farmer and of the large planter was much the same; for both had incurred debts in expectation of continued prosperity.

Everywhere people complained of hard times. Discouragement and ill-humor displaced the buoyant optimism with which peace had been heralded. "What is independence?" asked a writer in A Shorter Catechism. "Dependence upon nothing" was the cynical answer. In many States the popular discontent found vent in a vindictive crusade against the Tories. Even sober-minded citizens shared the general detestation of these unfortunate people. In the heat of war Washington had declared them to be "abominable pests of society" who ought to be hanged as traitors. The States had quite generally confiscated their property and in some cases had passed acts of attainder against them. In communities like New York, which had long remained in the hands of the British, the popular animosity was exceedingly bitter. To aid those citizens who had been dispossessed of their estates, the legislature passed the Trespass Act, which permitted suits for the recovery of property that had passed into the hands of the enemy upon the flight of the owners. The terms of the act were in flat contradiction to the treaty of peace. Further to aid claimants, it was provided that no military order could be pleaded in court in justification of the seizure of property.

In a famous case brought before the Mayor's Court of New York by the widow Rutgers to recover her property from Joshua Waddington, a wealthy Tory, Alexander Hamilton appeared as counsel for the defendant. It was a daring act which brought down upon him the unmitigated wrath of the radical elements. Nevertheless, in an opinion which has considerable interest for students of constitutional law, the court ruled that the Trespass Act, "by a reasonable interpretation," must be construed in harmony with the treaty of peace, which was obligatory upon every State. It was not to be presumed that the legislature would intentionally violate the law of nations. The judgment of the court therefore, was in favor of the defendant. With chagrin and resentment the popular party declared that the court had set aside a law of the State and had presumed to set itself above the legislature. Wherever the radicals got the upper hand, confiscation was the order of the day; and even where the conservatives succeeded in restraining their radical brethren from legislative reprisals, no Tory was safe from the assaults of irresponsible mobs. Thousands took refuge in flight, to the infinite delight of the wits in the coffee-houses who jested of the "Independence Fever" which was carrying off so many worthy people.

Financially the Confederation was hopelessly embarrassed. Having sowed the wind by its issues of bills of credit, it was now reaping the whirlwind. By the end of the war this paper money had so far depreciated that it ceased to pass as currency. "Not worth a continental" has passed into our native idiom. Without power to levy taxes, Congress could only make requisitions upon the States. The returns were pitifully inadequate to the needs of government. All told, less than a million and a half of dollars came into the treasury between 1781 and 1784, although Morris, as Superintendent of Finance, had earnestly besought the governors of the States for two millions for the year 1783 alone, in order to meet outstanding obligations and current expenses. Without foreign and domestic loans the war could never have been carried to a successful conclusion; but in 1783 even that source was drained. In sheer desperation Congress authorized the Superintendent of Finance to draw bills of exchange, at his discretion, upon the credit of loans which were to be procured in Europe. In vain Morris warned Congress that no more loans could be secured. "Our public credit is gone," he declared.

The obvious remedy for the financial ills of the Confederation was to give Congress the power to levy taxes. Early in 1781, indeed, before the Articles of Confederation had been ratified by Maryland, the proposal had been made that Congress should be vested with power to levy a five per cent duty on imports; but the obstinate opposition of Rhode Island effectually blocked the amendment. "She considered it the most precious jewel of sovereignty that no State be called upon to open its purse but by the authority of the State and by her own officers." Again, in 1783, Congress submitted to the States an amendment which would confer upon it the power to place specific duties for a term of twenty-five years upon certain classes of imported commodities. The tardy response of the States to this proposal left little hope that it would be adopted.

In fact, the Confederation and its woes hardly occupied the thoughts of the people at all, except as a subject for jest and ridicule. The newspapers made merry over the peregrinations of Congress. Frightened away from Philadelphia by the riotous conduct of some troops of the Pennsylvania line, who had imbibed too freely, the delegates had withdrawn first to Princeton and then to Annapolis. Thither Washington repaired to resign his commission; but even so notable an occasion as this brought together delegates from only seven of the States. The best talent in America was drafted into the service of the several States. Men had ceased to think continentally. "A selfish habitude of thinking and reasoning," wrote one who styled himself Yorick, in the New York Packet, "leads us into a fatal error the moment we begin to talk of the interests of America. The fact is, by the interests of America we mean only the interests of that State to which property or accident has attached us." "Of the affairs of Georgia," Madison confessed in 1786, "I know as little as those of Kamskatska."

On all sides intelligent men agreed that the return of prosperity depended upon the opening-up of foreign trade. Their immediate concern was the recovery of old markets. When John Adams went to London in 1785 as the first representative of the United States, he bent all his energies to the task of securing a commercial treaty which would provide for unrestricted intercourse between the countries. It was an impossible task. At every turn he encountered the hostility of the mercantile classes, of whom Lord Sheffield was the most conspicuous representative. "What have you to give us in exchange for this and that?" "What have you to give us as reciprocity for the benefit of going to our islands?" "What assurance can you give that the States will agree to a treaty?" These were the embarrassing questions which Adams had to encounter. Baffled by the cool indifference of the English Ministry, Adams wrote home in despair that there was not the slightest prospect of relief for American commerce unless the States would confer the power of passing navigation laws upon Congress or themselves pass retaliatory acts against Great Britain.

Congress had, indeed, already urged upon the States the necessity of yielding the power to enact navigation laws; but they had replied with such deliberation and with so many conditions that Congress was as powerless as ever. Meantime, each State struck blindly at the common enemy with little or no regard for its neighbors. "The States are every day giving proofs," wrote Madison, "that separate regulations are more likely to set them by the ears than to attain the common object." When the other New England States closed their ports to British shipping, Connecticut hastened to profit at their expense by throwing her ports wide open. New Jersey, with New York on one side and Pennsylvania on the other, was likened to a cask tapped at both ends. To find a historical parallel to the annals of this period, one must go back to the bickerings and jealousies of the states of ancient Greece.

In this dark picture, however, there are cheering rays of light. One by one the States were redeeming their promises and ceding their western lands. It seemed as though the Confederation, hitherto a disembodied spirit, was about to tenant a body. By the year 1786 the United States were in joint possession of the greater part of the vast region between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes—a domain of imperial dimensions. In anticipation of these cessions, Congress took under consideration an ordinance reported by a committee of which Thomas Jefferson was chairman. This ordinance contemplated the division of the land north of the thirty-first parallel into fourteen or sixteen States. The settlers in these rectangular areas were not to form state governments at once, but for their temporary government were to borrow such constitutions as they thought best from the older States. When a State had twenty thousand inhabitants, it might frame a permanent constitution and send a delegate to Congress. Admission to the Union was to be granted only when a State had as many free inhabitants as "the least numerous of the thirteen original States." Two features of Jefferson's report do not appear in the Ordinance of 1784; the fantastic names which Jefferson had selected and the fifth of the fundamental conditions which were to be a charter of compact between the old States and the new. It is perhaps no misfortune that the names Assenisipia, Polypotamia, Pelisipia, do not appear on the map; the article prohibiting slavery after the year 1800 might well have been retained.

More important than the Ordinance of 1784, which indeed is interesting chiefly because it was the forerunner of the final ordinance for the Northwest Territory, is that adopted by Congress in the following year. The so-called Land Ordinance of 1785 provided in general for the survey of a series of townships six miles square in the region immediately west of Pennsylvania, and for the further division of each township into thirty-six lots, or, as they were later styled, "sections," one mile square. After satisfying the claims of the soldiers of the Continental Army, Congress proposed to distribute these lands among the States, to be sold at auction for a minimum price of one dollar an acre, reserving certain sections in each township and one third of the mineral ore which might be found. The sixteenth section in each township was to be set aside for the support of education. Each purchaser was to receive with his deed a definite description of his holding. Subsequent amendments to the Land Ordinance made the terms of purchase somewhat easier. Instead of making an out-and-out purchase, prospective settlers might pay one third in cash and receive a credit of three months for the balance of the purchase price. Yet even with these inducements only seventy-three thousand acres had been sold to individuals down to 1788. The hazards of western settlement were still too great.

Disappointed in the sales under the Land Ordinance, Congress was persuaded to consider the alternative course of selling large tracts to companies. The collapse of national credit left the public domain almost the only available source of revenue. Early in 1787 the Ohio Company offered to purchase a tract of land between the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. The promoters of this company had been interested in an earlier project of army officers for the founding of a military colony beyond the Ohio. Organized at Boston in March, 1786, with a nominal capital of one million dollars, it had within a year raised one fourth of that amount and sent first General Samuel Parsons and then the Reverend Manasseh Cutler to secure the desired grant from Congress. The labors of this astute divine at the seat of government form an interesting chapter in the evolution of American legislative methods. By devices well known to the modern lobbyist he not only secured the grant of land, but also took a hand in the shaping of a new ordinance for the Northwest Territory. In order to secure the grant to his associates, he had to resort to log-rolling and agree to procure for a group of land speculators an option to lands on the Scioto River. The grant to the Ohio Company contained a million and a half acres; that to the Scioto Company, five million acres. But while the one paid down half a million dollars, the other made no payment, expecting to dispose of their "rights" before the first payment was due. In the following year a third grant of a million acres on the Great and Little Miami Rivers in Ohio was made to John Cleve Symmes.

From these sales Congress expected to realize over three and a half million dollars in public securities and at the same time to satisfy military bounty warrants amounting to about eight hundred thousand acres. The actual amount realized was less than six hundred thousand dollars. The Scioto Company succeeded in disposing of rights to about three million acres to a company organized in France, which in turn sold them to unsuspecting royalist emigrants. Neither company ever secured a clear title to these lands, and Congress had eventually to come to the relief of the unhappy French settlers with a donation of twenty-four thousand acres. Unforeseen circumstances prevented either the Ohio Company or Symmes from complying with the conditions of sale; and in both cases Congress consented to alter the terms of contract.

On July 13, 1787, Congress adopted the ordinance which it had long had under consideration. The authorship of this "charter of the west," after long controversy, is still in dispute. Like all legislative measures it bears the mark of many hands. Certain features of Jefferson's ordinance reappear: the provision for temporary government and eventual statehood, and the fundamental articles of compact. Other provisions are stated in a detailed fashion and suggest the probability that Congress had definite conditions to meet. The ordinance took final form while the Reverend Manasseh Cutler was representing the Ohio Company in New York. Perhaps the most striking departure from the Ordinance of 1784 is the provision for not less than three nor more than five States north of the Ohio, where Jefferson planned for ten. Admission to the Union was to be gained only after the population had reached sixty thousand. Temporary government was to consist of a governor, a secretary, and three judges appointed by Congress, who were to adopt such laws from other States as they believed suited to local conditions. In each and every case Congress reserved the right to disallow these laws. Whenever a territory attained a population of five thousand, it was to pass to the second grade of government, with a representative assembly, an appointive council, and a delegate in Congress.

Six articles of compact were also written into the ordinance, which were to remain forever unalterable except by the common consent of the parties thereto—"the original States and the people and States in the said territory." Freedom of worship, the usual rights of person and property, and the obligation of private contracts were guaranteed. Religion, morality, and education were to be forever encouraged. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude was to be permitted. In imposing these conditions Congress undoubtedly exceeded its powers under the Articles of Confederation, for that document nowhere confers upon Congress the power to make binding contracts, nor for that matter to legislate in any wise for the government of the common domain.

The Ohio Company hastened to colonize its broad acres on the Muskingum. Before the end of the year 1787, the vanguard of the first colony was on the march through Pennsylvania to the upper waters of the Ohio. There they spent the winter constructing the craft which was to carry them to their destination. As soon as the ice broke up in the spring, they embarked on the Mayflower,—for so they had christened the craft,—and within five days set foot on the soil of Ohio. Other bands joined them, and by midsummer their rude huts and a blockhouse marked the site of what was to be the town of Marietta, the first New England settlement in the West. Across the Muskingum, at Fort Harmar, the new governor, General St. Clair, had already taken up his official residence. Farther down the river, Symmes planted a colony from New Jersey on the tract which he had purchased; and within the next few years settlements were made in the adjoining district, which Virginia had reserved as bounty land for her soldiers. The vision of virgin lands in the Ohio country was beginning to dawn upon the small farmer of the East. Emigration grew apace. Between February and June, 1788, an observer noted not less than forty-five hundred settlers drifting past Fort Harmar in their flatboats, in search of new homes in the wilderness.

While the colonization of the Northwest was going on under the eye of Governor St. Clair, hardy pioneers were laying the foundations of a new society in the Southwest, without the protecting arm of the Government. Before the war Daniel Boone had made his famous trace to "the country of Kentucke" through the Cumberland Gap; and Robertson had led his colony from North Carolina to the upper waters of the Tennessee. Settlers had followed the long-rangers; and numerous communities sprang up by salt lick and water course. In all these settlements there was much local independence. For a time the people on the Watauga had established a government of their own. Upon the cession by North Carolina of her western lands, the settlers of eastern Tennessee took matters into their own hands and prepared to organize as a State. Congress had just adopted the Ordinance of 1784, and one of Jefferson's prospective States included most of the land already appropriated by these pioneers. They nourished, too, long-standing grievances. They were taxed for the support of a government which treated them with contumely and ignored their administrative needs. The movement toward independence acquired such headway that not even the repeal of the act of cession by North Carolina could stay its course. With a confidence born of frontier conditions these "modern Franks, the hardy mountain men," as a contemporary called them, drafted a constitution, organized a government, and appealed to Congress for recognition as a State of the Confederation. For three years the State of Franklin, as it was officially christened, under the able leadership of Governor John Sovier, refused to recognize the authority of North Carolina, even to the point of resisting the militia by arms. But Congress turned a deaf ear to the petitions of the insurgents; and in the year 1788, diplomacy succeeding where coercion had failed, the people of Franklin returned to their first allegiance.

Much the same centrifugal forces were at work in northwestern Virginia and western Pennsylvania, a region which felt its isolation keenly. "Separated by a vast, extensive and almost impassible Tract of Mountains, by Nature itself formed and pointed out as a Boundary between this Country and those below it," the settlers of this trans-Alleghany region besought Congress to recognize them as a "sister colony and fourteenth province of the American Confederacy."

More menacing to the integrity of Virginia was a movement for independent statehood among the people of Kentucky. Rivers were the highways of their commerce and the current of all bore their flatboats away from the parent State. New Orleans was their inevitable entrepôt. The forces of nature seemed to conspire to throw these western settlements into the hands of Spain. Washington was deeply impressed by the necessity of connecting the headwaters of the James and the Potomac with the tributaries of the Ohio, if the trade and allegiance of the people of Kentucky were to be secured to Virginia and to the Union. "The western States," he wrote to Governor Harrison of Virginia, "stand as it were upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way." The situation in Kentucky became more acute as intimations reached the people that John Jay was proposing to renounce the free navigation of the Mississippi.

In the summer of 1785, Don Diego de Gardoqui, the first accredited Minister from Spain, arrived in the United States to settle all outstanding differences between the two countries. Congress appointed John Jay as its diplomatic agent and instructed him to hold insistently to the thirty-first parallel as the southern boundary of the States and to the free navigation of the Mississippi. The prospect of agreement was very slight. The American claims were based solely on the Treaty of 1783 which the King of Spain was determined not to recognize. Negotiations dragged on for months. Reporting to Congress in August, 1786, Jay advised the abandonment of the claim of free navigation of the Mississippi for the sake of securing an advantageous commercial treaty with Spain. The delegates from Northern States were ready to barter away the Southwest; but the Southern delegates succeeded in postponing action until the impotent Confederation gave way to a more perfect union.

At the Court of St. James, John Adams was having no better luck in pressing the rights of the moribund Confederation. Notwithstanding the explicit terms of the Treaty of 1783, British garrisons still held strategic posts along the Great Lakes, exercising a strong influence upon the Indians and guarding the interests of British fur traders. Such a situation would have been intolerable to a self-respecting nation. Smothering his pride, Adams mustered all the diplomacy which his nature permitted and sought an explanation of this extraordinary conduct from the ministers. He was finally told that he need not expect Great Britain to relinquish the Western posts so long as the States continued to put obstacles in the way of the collection of British debts.

A general reluctance to meet financial obligations was a deplorable aspect of the depression to which American society had succumbed. In all the States there was a more or less numerous class of debtors who were convinced that the Government could help them out of all their distresses. As the cause of all their woes was the scarcity of money, why, let the Government manufacture money and so put an end to the stringency. What Madison called "the general rage for paper money" seized upon Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Coupled with paper-money acts were others designed to alleviate the distress of the unfortunate. Stay laws of one sort or another were devised to keep the wolf, in the guise of the sheriff, from the door. Legal-tender acts made cattle and produce equivalent to money when offered in payment of debts. Nor was this legislation inspired altogether by dishonest intent. Many believed with Luther Martin, of Maryland, that there were times of great public distress and extreme scarcity of specie when it was the duty of the Government to pass stay laws and legal-tender acts, "to prevent the wealthy creditor and the moneyed man from totally destroying the poor, though even industrious, debtor."

No State suffered more from the paper-money aberration than Rhode Island. Under pressure from the radical elements the legislature passed an act for the emission of bills of credit which were to be issued to any freeholder who would offer as security real estate of any sort to double the amount of the loan. "Many from all parts of the State made haste to avail themselves of their good fortune, and mortgaged fields strewn thick with stones and covered with cedars and stunted pines for sums such as could not have been obtained for the richest pastures." But when they sought their creditors, not a merchant nor a shop-keeper could be found. Nobody fished to have a just debt discharged in such currency. Not to be thwarted in their purpose, the radicals then enacted a law which threatened with a summary trial and a heavy fine any one who refused to accept paper money in payment of debt.

Under this Force Act, one John Weeden, a butcher, was brought to trial for refusing to receive the paper offered by a customer in payment for meat. To the discomfiture of the legislature the court refused to enforce the law in this instance, on the ground that the statute was contrary to the constitution of Rhode Island; and when summoned before the legislature to answer for their defiance, the judges boldly stood their ground. The case of Trevett v. Weeden was not without its lesson to those who were casting about for ways and means to defend property from the assaults of popular majorities. In Virginia, too, the highest state court, in the case of Commonwealth v. Caton, boldly asserted the right of the judiciary to declare void such acts of the legislature as were repugnant to the constitution.

Meantime the debtor and creditor classes in Massachusetts were locked in a struggle which menaced the peace of the country. Here as elsewhere hard times had forced the small farmers of the interior counties to the wall. No doubt their difficulties were caused in part by their own improvidence, but they were increased by the prevailing scarcity of money. So dire was the want of a medium of exchange that many communities resorted to barter. The editor of a Worcester paper advertised that he would accept Indian corn, rye, wheat, wood, or flaxseed, in payment of debts owed to him, up to the amount of twenty shillings. It seemed to the ignorant farmer that his creditors were taking an unfair advantage of circumstances in demanding currency to settle debts which had been contracted when money was abundant. The law, however, favored the creditor. The jails were filled to overflowing with men imprisoned for debt; the courts were overwhelmed with actions. In Worcester County, with a population of less than fifty thousand people, there were in 1784 two thousand cases on the docket of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas. In this age of litigation only one class appeared to thrive—the lawyers. The anger of the poor debtors, inflamed by attachments and foreclosures, vented itself upon the ostensible cause of their misfortunes. The excessive costs of courts and the immoderate fees of lawyers are grievances which bulk large in every indictment drawn by town meeting or county convention. Young John Quincy Adams, then a senior in Harvard College, was so affected by the odium which had fallen upon the practice of law that he was almost ready to abandon the career which he had chosen.

The adjournment of the General Court in July, 1786, without authorizing an issue of paper money or passing a legal-tender act or fixing the fees of lawyers and the costs of courts, contributed to the unrest which was now assuming a threatening aspect. During August and September riotous mobs prevented the courts from sitting at Northampton, Worcester, Great Barrington, and Concord. Alarmed by these disorders Governor Bowdoin convened the legislature in special session and summoned the militia to the protection of the capital. While the legislature was devising ways and means of allaying the public excitement, another demonstration occurred at Worcester which resulted in the dispersion of the Court of General Sessions by a force of armed men. From Worcester the disorders spread into adjoining counties; and something like a concerted movement upon Boston and Cambridge seemed to be preparing. The prompt action of the state authorities however, balked the plans of the insurgents. The main body of insurgents under Shays scattered; but a month later they rallied around Springfield to prevent the holding of court. Governor Bowdoin then dispatched troops, four thousand strong, under the command of General Lincoln, to the assistance and protection of the civil authorities. A civil war seemed imminent. Shays had planned an attack upon the national arsenal at Springfield, but he could not bring his rustics to act together. Before the determined resistance of the local militia his undisciplined troops broke and fled. The arrival of the state militia under Lincoln completed the demoralization of Shays' army. Retreating through the hilly country of Hampshire, they wore finally overtaken and routed at Petersham. Some of the insurgents went to their homes, completely humbled and subdued; others fled across the border to await better times; and still others, unrepentant and unsubdued, continued to harass the countryside. It was not until the following September that Governor Bowdoin ventured to disband the militia.

To these disturbances in Massachusetts, Congress had not remained indifferent. Aside from the direct interest that all members were bound to take in a rebellion which seemed to threaten the very foundations of a sister State and which might easily recur in their own, Congress was concerned for the fate of the national arsenal at Springfield. But no forces were available for the protection of the property of the Confederation. The few hundred men who comprised the army were scattered in garrisons along the western frontier. Acting as intermediary between Congress and Governor Bowdoin, General Knox as Secretary of War made what provision he could for the defense of the arsenal by local militia; but these measures were confessedly inadequate. Upon his report Congress was finally moved to increase the army, ostensibly for the protection of the frontier, where in truth Indian hostilities required the presence of additional troops. As these forces would be raised chiefly in New England, they could be employed first to protect Springfield. Any open avowal of this plan was avoided, however, lest the insurgents should take alarm and immediately attack the arsenal. But these plans were wrecked on the reef of financial bankruptcy. Congress could only supplicate the States for money and borrow what it might on its expectations. Recruiting went on so slowly that the rebellion was practically over when two companies of artillery, numbering seventy-three men each, which had been raised in Massachusetts, were finally marched to Springfield. All the other recruits were dismissed. The inefficiency of Congress and its want of moral influence were self-confessed.

In his famous circular letter of 1783, Washington had spoken of the times as a period of "political probation." The moment had come for the United States to determine, said he, "whether they will be respectable and prosperous, or contemptible and miserable, as a nation." Three years had now passed and the period of probation seemed to have ended in the ruin of national hopes. The events of the years 1786 made a profound impression upon the minds of all responsible and conservative men. In undisguised alarm, Washington wrote: "There are combustibles in every State which a spark might set fire to.... I feel ... infinitely more than I can express to you, for the disorders which have arisen in these States. Good God! Who, besides a Tory, could have foreseen, or a Briton, predicted them?" Rightly or wrongly, men of the upper classes believed that the foundations of society were threatened and that the State Governments would fall a prey to the radical and unpropertied elements, unless a stronger Federal Government were created. "With this idea, they are thinking, very seriously," wrote an interested observer at the seat of Federal Government in New York, "in what manner to effect the most easy and natural change of the present form of the Federal Government to one more energetic, that will, at the same time, create respect, and secure properly life, liberty, and property. It is, therefore, not uncommon to hear the principles of government stated in common conversation. Emperors, kings, stadtholders, governors-general, with a senate or house of lords, and house of commons, are frequently the topics of conversation." There were those who frankly advocated a monarchical government as the only way of escape from the ills under which American society was laboring. There is reason to believe that a project was on foot to invite Prince Henry of Prussia to become the head of a new consolidated government. The influence of the Order of the Cincinnati was much feared by friends of republican institutions. Individually members of the order did not hesitate to express their impatience with popular government. What was to come out of this political chaos, no man could tell.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The two most extensive histories dealing with the period of the Confederation are George Bancroft's History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America (2 vols., 1882) and G. T. Curtis's History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States (2 vols., 1854). In the fourth volume of Hildreth's History of the United States (6 vols., 1849-52), a concise but rather dry account of the Confederation may be found. More entertaining is John Fiske's The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789 (1888). Valuable information bearing on the social as well as the political history of the times is contained in the first volume of J. B. McMaster's History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (7 vols., 1883-1913). More recent histories of the period are A. C. McLaughlin's The Confederation and the Constitution, 1783-1789 (in The American Nation, vol. 10, 1905), and Edward Channing's History of the United States, vol. III (3 vols., 1905- ). A vigorous narrative of the exploits of the pioneers beyond the Alleghanies has been written by Theodore Roosevelt, Winning of the West (4 vols., 1889-96). A more restrained account of the beginnings of Western settlement is B. A. Hinsdale's The Old Northwest, the Beginnings of our Colonial System (1899).

CHAPTER II

THE MAKING OF THE CONSTITUTION

Notwithstanding the manifold differences between State and State in the Confederation, there were everywhere groups of men who confronted much the same economic conditions. Between the farmer who tilled his sterile hillside acres in the interior of New England and the cultivator of the richer soil of the Piedmont in Virginia and the Carolinas, a greater identity of economic interests existed than the casual observer would have suspected. The feeling of hostility which circumstances bred in the followers of Daniel Shays toward the merchants of Boston was akin to that which the farmers of middle and western Pennsylvania harbored toward the aristocratic and wealthy classes of Philadelphia and the eastern counties. A similar antagonism appears between the yeomen of the uplands and the planters of the tidewater farther to the south, accentuated, no doubt, by religious and racial differences. The Scotch-Irish or German dissenter, who was treated with contempt as a foreigner and forced to support a church established by a State Government which discriminated against numbers and in favor of property, was not likely to feel kindly toward the tidewater aristocracy. Bad crops spelled disaster for these farmers, for they had incurred debt to purchase their lands and had borrowed capital to work them. In hard times they were the first to suffer, for whether money was scarce or plentiful, the tax-collector and the money-lender knocked inexorably at their doors. Bad roads kept them isolated and want of intercourse bred much ignorance and prejudice in even honest men. Were the recorded grievances of these inland groups brought together, they would show a surprising agreement.

Set over against this interior population with predominant agrarian interests were those classes, urban for the most part, whose income was derived from personal rather than real property. Even at this time a capitalist class of no mean proportions existed. No inconsiderable part of this personalty was invested in shipping and manufacturing. A part, not easily determined, was tied up in Western lands, which appealed strongly to the speculative instincts of the American. The amount of money at interest was also considerable in States like Massachusetts. As creditors of the debt-burdened farmers these classes were everywhere on the defensive. To this group should be added the holders of public securities, both state and continental, who could not have remained uninterested witnesses of the demise of the Confederation.

The logic of events was drawing these holders of personal property together. Capitalists with idle money found the avenues to profitable investment closed by the inability of Congress to offer protection to either manufacturing or shipping; creditors with money at interest witnessed with alarm the inability or unwillingness of state legislatures to resist attacks upon private contracts and public credit; holders of public securities shared the general contempt for a Government, which, so far from providing for the ultimate redemption of its obligations, could not even pay interest on its debts; speculators in lands despaired of a rise in values so long as the Government could not defend its borders and protect its frontier population. The desire of all these classes, from Boston to Charleston, was for a Government which would govern.

Under these circumstances the idea of a special convention to revise the Articles of Confederation grew in favor. Some of the States, notably Delaware, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, had employed constituent conventions to draft new frames of government. The legislature of New York had in 1782 proposed a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. At the suggestion of Governor Bowdoin, the General Court of Massachusetts had resolved in 1785 in favor of such a convention; but the delegates in Congress, for reasons best known to themselves, had refused to present the resolution. In any case Congress could hardly be expected to take the initiative.

For many years Virginia and Maryland had been at loggerheads over the navigation of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. In 1784 commissioners from both States met at Alexandria, and subsequently at Washington's country-seat, at Mount Vernon, to make a last effort to adjudicate their differences. It speedily appeared that the question of commercial regulations was one that concerned also their neighbors to the north. Maryland proposed that Pennsylvania and Delaware should be invited to a further conference. The assembly of Virginia went still further and appointed delegates to meet with delegates from other States "to take into consideration the trade of the United States" and "to consider how far a uniform system in their commercial regulations may be necessary to their common interest and their permanent harmony." Annapolis was selected as the place of meeting.

The response of the States to this call was disappointing. Only five States sent delegates. Positive action on trade relations was, of course, out of the question. But Alexander Hamilton, who attended as a delegate from New York, drafted a report which went far to redeem the situation. Addressed to the legislatures of the States represented at Annapolis, it called attention to the critical state of the Union and the need of a convention of delegates with wider powers from all the States; and in conclusion, it named Philadelphia and the second Monday in May, 1787, as a suitable place and time for such a convention. "From motives of respect" a copy of this report was sent to Congress.

With its wonted indecision, Congress dallied with this bold proposal until late in the following February. Meantime, Virginia and other States appointed delegates to the convention which Congress had not yet sanctioned. When Congress finally issued the summons, it made no reference to the Annapolis Convention, though it took over bodily the recommendations of that body. The sole and express purpose of the convention was declared to be the revision of the Articles of Confederation.

The delegates to the Philadelphia Convention were to be "appointed by the States." As a matter of course, the choice devolved upon the legislature in every instance. To what extent the active economic interests directed and controlled the selection is a mere matter of speculation. Certain it is that the members of the convention belonged to the governing class in their respective communities. Almost to a man they had held important public positions. To a surprising extent they came from the commercial sections of their States. "Not one member represented in his immediate personal economic interests the small farming or mechanic classes." A large majority were "directly and personally interested in the outcome of their labors through their ownership of property, real or personal." Many were holders of public securities and profited by the later funding operations of the new Government; some had invested in Western lands; others had capital invested in manufacturing, shipping, and slaves. Thus circumstanced, they had no mind to try doubtful experiments in government.

Among the first of the delegates to reach Philadelphia was James Madison. Other members of the Virginia delegation soon joined him, and on the 13th of May, Washington made what was really a triumphant entry into the city. When the 14th dawned only a few delegates had arrived. Inclement weather and bad roads detained many, no doubt; but a general dilatoriness in heeding the summons was accountable for the tardiness of others. Until a majority of States were represented, the delegates could only adjourn from day to day. That the gentlemen from Virginia put this time to good use appears from the plan which they drew up as a tentative program and which Randolph presented to the convention. Indeed, there is little doubt that much unrecorded progress was made throughout the convention by informal conferences among the leaders.

It was not until Friday, May 25, that seven States were represented and a preliminary organization could be effected. Washington was the unanimous choice for president, though tradition has it that Franklin was the first choice of many delegates. Altogether, though not at any one time, there were fifty-five delegates in attendance from twelve States. Rhode Island was never represented. The average attendance was hardly more than thirty. It was possible, therefore, to adopt simple rules of procedure and to permit full discussion. The credentials of the delegates gave them, with a single exception, free hand in revising the Articles of Confederation. Delaware alone forbade its representatives to make any alterations which should deprive the State of its equal vote in Congress.

As the doors closed on this notable body in the chamber over Independence Hall in the State House, profound secrecy enveloped its proceedings. Not until the publication of the journal by act of Congress in 1819 were the actual proceedings of the convention divulged; and many more years passed before Madison's notes on the debates were given to the curious public. The earth scattered on the pavement to silence the rattling of wheels and the sentries stationed at the doors to warn intruders gave added emphasis to the importance of this gathering.

The task before the convention was one of immense difficulty. The most general criticism of the Confederation was that expressed in the vague phrase, "lack of power"; but the defect could not be overcome merely by giving new powers to Congress. Any such increase of authority involved a delicate readjustment of the relations of the States to each other and to the central Government. Before the convention had been in session a fortnight, a line of cleavage among the delegates appeared. To the most obtuse mind the resolutions presented as the Virginia plan seemed to reach far beyond any mere revision of the Articles of Confederation. Randolph frankly admitted the scope of his resolutions by urging that a union of the States merely federal would not suffice. The convention so far yielded to the general drift as to adopt, in committee of the whole, the resolution "that a national government ought to be established consisting of a supreme Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary."

As the group of nationally minded delegates, led by Madison and Wilson, of Pennsylvania, seized this initial advantage and secured the acceptance, step by step, of the main features of a national government, the delegates from the smaller States drew together in alarmed opposition. It was in their behalf that Paterson, of New Jersey, presented his resolutions. In contrast to the Virginia plan, this held out only the prospect of an improved Confederation. Additional powers were to be given to Congress and there was to be an executive and a supreme judiciary; but the basal principle of the Confederation—the equality of the States—was left untouched. Given the alternative between the New Jersey plan and the Virginia plan as amended, seven States voted for the latter. Only New York, New Jersey, and Delaware preferred the former. The vote of Maryland was divided. The convention then returned to the detailed consideration of the amended Virginia plan. The large-State men were now disposed to make some concessions. The word "national" was dropped from all the resolutions; and minor changes were made in the interest of harmony. But on the fundamental question of what was termed "proportional representation,"—that is, representation of the States in proportion to numbers in the national legislature,—no agreement seemed possible. More than once the convention was on the point of adjourning sine die. Even the usually placid Franklin suggested that "prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven ... be held in this Assembly every morning."

In spite of the opposition of the smaller States, the convention finally voted that the rule of suffrage in the first branch of the legislature ought not to be according to that established by the Articles of Confederation. Debate then turned on the manner of constituting the upper chamber. On July 2, a vote was taken on the proposal of the Connecticut delegation that each State should have an equal vote in the upper house. The result was a tie, five States against five, with the vote of one State divided. The deadlock seemed complete.

Hoping that a compromise might even yet be effected, General Pinckney proposed a committee of one from each State to consider the whole matter. Opposition was made, but the convention indorsed the proposal and chose the members of the committee by ballot. The selection was obviously favorable to the small-State party, for the committee abandoned the idea of proportional representation in the second chamber. On July 5, it recommended that in the first branch of the legislature there should be one representative for every forty thousand inhabitants in each State, counting three fifths of the slaves, and that in the second chamber the States should have an equal vote. The first proposition underwent further changes at the hands of a special committee, but the principle of representation was accepted. On July 16, the first proposition as amended and the second proposition without change were adopted by a vote of five States to four, with the vote of one State divided. Very properly historians have termed this the great compromise of the Constitution, for without it the further work of the convention would have been impossible. In agreeing that three fifths of the slaves should be counted in apportioning representation, the convention made no innovation, but simply took over the federal ratio which Congress had recommended in 1783 as the basis for future apportionment of requisitions among the States. On this point there was no great difference of opinion in the convention.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that with this obstacle to union removed, the Constitution speedily took form. On the contrary, every proposal bristled with controversial points. The Northern commercial States demanded insistently that Congress should be given power to regulate commerce. It was, indeed, the desire of the commercial classes in all the States that Congress should be given power to pass retaliatory acts against Great Britain, but the planters of the Carolinas and Georgia feared—not without reason—that the power to regulate commerce might be used to interfere with the importation of slaves. Here, too, the spirit of compromise prevailed. The power was granted, but the importation of such persons as the States thought proper to admit was not to be prohibited before the year 1808.

From first to last, divergent views were held as to the constitution of the chief executive office. After the initial question, whether the office should be single or plural, was decided, the manner of election remained to be considered. The early proposal to make the President elective by the national legislature was dropped as the office assumed greater importance in the general scheme. If the independence of the legislature was to be maintained, some form of indirect popular choice was favored. But if the people were to elect, the larger States would have a decided advantage. Here was the old question in another form. The electoral scheme finally adopted was essentially a compromise. In most instances—Mason, of Virginia, said nineteen out of twenty times—it was believed that the electors would so scatter their votes that no candidate would have a majority; consequently the Senate would make a choice from among the five candidates having the highest votes. By this arrangement the large States would in effect nominate and the small States elect the President. But because the Senate had already been given extensive powers, the convention transferred the final election to the House, with the provision that the vote there should be by States. The eventual election of a Vice-President was left to the Senate, whenever the electoral college failed to make a choice.

From time to time the convention resorted to committees to facilitate its work. Most important services were rendered by the committee of detail, which early in August put into orderly and connected form the conclusions which the convention had reached. It was the committee on unfinished business which suggested the method finally adopted of electing the President. In its final form and phrasing the Constitution is the work of Gouverneur Morris, who prepared the report of the committee of style.

Citizens of Philadelphia who took up their copies of the Pennsylvania Advertiser on Tuesday, September 17, found to their surprise that the columns were completely filled with the new Constitution. This was their first intimation of what the convention had really done. Rumor had stalked abroad that the convention was rent by dissensions; but the envious reader saw at the end of his paper the words, "Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the States ... in witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names." Done by unanimous consent of the delegates the Constitution was not, for not all the delegates who were present on the last day would affix their signatures. It was Gouverneur Morris who suggested the phrase which gave a specious unanimity to the work of the convention.

The thoughtful reader of the Constitution must have been impressed by the new features which caught his eye. In place of the old inefficient and powerless Congress, he observed a well-organized national legislature, an independent executive, and a federal judiciary of ample jurisdiction. Further scrutiny must have apprised him that the new Government would operate directly upon individuals, thus remedying a vital defect in the Confederation. The powers given to Congress may well have set at rest the minds of anxious public creditors. With the power to lay and collect taxes, to raise and support a military and naval establishment, and to regulate commerce, Congress had ample means to pay the public debt, to enforce its claims, and to offer protection to trade and industry. Not less significant to property-owners were the brief clauses in the new Constitution which sharply forbade States to emit bills of credit, to make anything but gold and silver legal tender in payment of debts, and to make laws impairing the obligation of contracts.

But what guaranty was there that States would observe these prohibitions? The power to coerce a State was nowhere conferred. The militia, to be sure, could be called out to execute the laws; and the United States guaranteed to every State a republican form of government and promised protection against domestic violence. Congress could deal surely and effectively with any future Shays if it were invited to do so. But what if a State passed a law violating the obligation of contracts? The answer is contained in the clause which reads: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." This and the correlative clause which extended the judicial power to all cases arising under the Constitution, the laws and the treaties of the United States, may be called the keystone of the whole constitutional structure. "For the first time in history, courts are called upon by the simple processes of administering justice, in cases where private right or personal injury is involved, to uphold the structure of the body politic." And there were those in the convention who believed that the principle of judicial control included the power of passing upon the constitutionality of laws enacted by Congress.

It was still within the power of the old Congress to expedite or block the ratification of the new Constitution. The document which the Philadelphia Convention presented was technically only a revision of the Articles of Confederation, which might be altered only with the consent of the legislatures of all thirteen States; but the last article of this new instrument provided that when ratified by conventions (not legislatures) in nine States, it should go into effect among the States so acting. In effect, Congress was asked to sanction a secession of nine States from the old Union which had been declared perpetual. Making a virtue of necessity, Congress finally yielded and passed the Constitution on to the States.

Since the party struggles of Whigs and Tories no campaign of continental proportions had ever been seen like that which ensued between the friends and foes of the new Constitution. By their forehandedness and their clear perception of what they must do, the Federalists, as the proponents of better government styled themselves, had a slight tactical advantage. The Anti-Federalists resented the assumption of the name by their opponents. They were the true friends of federal government, while the friends of the new Constitution aimed to set up a consolidated government. The press teemed with letters and essays, allegories and satires, squibs and pasquinades, expostulating, warning, ridiculing. The public was invited to heed the admonitions of Cato, Cassius, and many another worthy Roman.

Although much the same arguments, sober or satirical, were used everywhere, the campaign had to be fought out in the several States, each with its own peculiar social, economic, and political conditions. In Massachusetts the eastern counties, with their dominant commercial and mercantile interests, favored the Constitution, while the interior agricultural section, which had fought the battles of the Revolution and recruited the ranks of Shays' army, opposed it. The interior counties of New York containing the farming population were Anti-Federal, while the city and county of New York with its environs—the commercial section—were Federalist. In Pennsylvania, those who had opposed the domination of the Scotch-Irish and German radicals in the State Government now united in advocacy of the new Constitution. Here as elsewhere the Federal area corresponded closely to the counties where commercial and mercantile interests were most in evidence. In Virginia, the old-time social and economic antagonism between east and west, between the planters and merchants of the tidewater and the small farmers of the interior, reappeared. Much the same alignment is found in the Carolinas. Beyond the Alleghanies, the people were a unit in opposing the Constitution.

Detailed studies of the geographical distribution of votes in the state conventions, and recent investigations in the archives of the Treasury Department, sustain the conclusion to which the historian is driven by the testimony of contemporaries, that the fundamental opposition between the advocates and opponents of the Constitution was based on distinctions of wealth. On his first view of the Constitution young John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: "It is calculated to increase the influence, and power, and wealth of those who have any already." A writer in the Boston Gazette declared that the supporters of the Constitution consisted generally of the noble Order of Cincinnatus, holders of public securities, bankers, and lawyers: "these with their train of dependents form the Aristocratick combination." Over against this should be put the remark of Alexander Hamilton: that the new Constitution encountered the "opposition of all men much in debt, who will not wish to see a government established, one object of which is to restrain the means of cheating creditors." According to John Adams, the Constitution was "the work of the commercial people in the seaport towns, of the planters of the slaveholding states, of the officers of the Revolutionary army, and the property-holders everywhere."

From November to the following July the campaign continued. Delaware, New Jersey, and Georgia ratified the Constitution unanimously; Connecticut by a majority of three to one; and Pennsylvania, by a majority of two to one. But there is reason to believe that these majorities in the ratifying conventions did not reflect public opinion accurately. Massachusetts, Maryland, and South Carolina followed hesitatingly, each proposing amendments to the Constitution. Toward the end of June the ninth State, New Hampshire, threw in her lot with the majority; and on the heels of this news came the intelligence that the Old Dominion had also ratified. The Constitution was now the law of the land. In the stanch Federal city of Philadelphia, the Fourth of July was celebrated with great rejoicing, for in the parlance of the time the sloop Anarchy was ashore on Union Rock, the old scow Confederation had put to sea, and the good ship Federal Constitution had come into port bringing a cargo of Public Credit and Prosperity.

But until New York ratified the Constitution this rejoicing was premature. Geographically New York was a pivotal State. A union without this member was not worthy of the name. The task of the Federalists was here most difficult. Fully two thirds of the convention were at first opposed to the Constitution. The leadership of the Federalists fell to Hamilton. Together with James Madison and John Jay, he contributed to the newspapers a series of essays in advocacy of the Constitution, which, under the title The Federalist, have become a classic in our political literature. Just how the Federalists succeeded in overcoming a hostile majority and in securing a ratification of the Constitution by a vote of thirty to twenty-seven, remains a mystery to this day.

Half a century later it became the habit of statesmen of the nationalist school to speak of the Constitution as the work of the people of the United States. John Marshall declared the Constitution to be "an expression of the clear and deliberate will of the whole people." As a matter of fact, no direct popular vote was taken at any stage in its evolution. The delegates to the Philadelphia Convention were chosen by the state legislatures; their work was ratified by conventions of delegates in the several States; and these delegates were chosen in every State but one on a carefully limited suffrage. New York alone provided that delegates to the convention should be elected on the basis of manhood suffrage. Elsewhere property qualifications were imposed which disfranchised probably about one third of the adult male population. In all the States a considerable proportion of the voters abstained from voting. In Boston, where twenty-seven hundred were qualified to vote, only seven hundred and sixty took the trouble to vote for delegates to the state convention. A recent writer hazards the guess that "not more than one fourth or one fifth of the adult white males took part in the election of delegates to the state conventions." If this be true, the Constitution expressed something less than the will of the whole people and perhaps not even of a majority. The making of the Constitution was clearly the work of a party rather than of the whole people. In the ranks of the Federalist party were the wealth and intelligence which made possible concerted and rapid action. The leadership fell naturally to those who had been accustomed to public life. From this point of view, the adoption of the Constitution was the triumph of a "natural aristocracy."

Meantime, Congress nearing its end made testamentary provision for its heir. After much wrangling and vacillation, it fixed upon New York as the seat of the new Government and summoned the States to choose presidential electors, Senators, and Representatives. The new national legislature was to assemble on the first Wednesday in March, which fell upon the 4th. To this summons, two States turned a deaf ear. Not having ratified the new Constitution, North Carolina and Rhode Island were strangely circumstanced. Of all the States which had entered into the "firm league of friendship," they alone remained loyal—loyal, but discredited.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Full accounts of the work of the Federal Convention may be found in the histories of Bancroft and Curtis; briefer accounts, in the volumes already cited, by McMaster, Fiske, McLaughlin, and Channing. A succinct narrative is given by Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution (1913). A suggestive volume, treating of the Constitution as the resultant of conflicting economic interests, is C. A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). Among the special studies of the ratification of the Constitution may be mentioned, O. G. Libby, The Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788 (1888); McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788 (1888); S. B. Harding, The Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in the State of Massachusetts (1896); and F. G. Bates, Rhode Island and the Formation of the Union (1898). The most illuminating notes of the debates in the Convention were those taken by James Madison, which are printed in the Records of the Federal Convention (3 vols., edited by Farrand, 1911). The most valuable commentary on the Constitution is still The Federalist, written by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay.

CHAPTER III

THE RESTORATION OF PUBLIC CREDIT

"The people have been ripened by misfortune for the reception of a good government," Washington wrote to Jefferson, in the midsummer of 1788. "They are emerging from the gulf of dissipation and debt into which they had precipitated themselves at the close of the war. Economy and industry are evidently gaining ground." There is, indeed, abundant evidence that thrift and enterprise were steadily banishing hard times. The task of establishing the new government was made incomparably easier by the confidence inspired by returning prosperity.

Already West India commerce had resumed very nearly its old volume. Both France and Spain had made concessions to vessels which came to the island ports laden with American produce. The Dutch and the Danish islands had always been kept open to American trade; and evidence is not wanting that the needs of British West India planters were stronger than their respect for orders in council. At all events, by hook or crook, American farm products and lumber found their way to British planters as well as to their French competitors. But something more than the resumption of the West India traffic was needed to restore prosperity. Necessity drove American sea captains to longer voyages and larger ventures. American vessels found their way in increasing numbers through the Baltic to Russia, and around Cape Horn to the Pacific ports, to China, and to the East Indies. One of the pioneers of this traffic to the Far East was Captain Robert Gray, of Boston, who, in his ship, the Columbia, doubled the Cape of Good Hope and completed the first American voyage around the world.

While hardy seamen were seeking new markets, American ingenuity was trying to reproduce the machinery which was coming into use in England for the manufacture of textiles. In the year 1789, Pennsylvania was manufacturing cotton cloths, hats, and "all articles in leather," while Massachusetts was making cordage, duck, and glass. "The number of shoes made in one town, and nails in another, is incredible," wrote Washington. When Hamilton made his famous report on manufactures two years later, he described some seventeen industries which had already attained considerable proficiency, though nearly all of these were carried on in the household.

The dawn of the 4th of March was saluted by the guns at the Battery in New York and by the ringing of church bells. This day was to witness the inauguration of the new Government. Delusive expectation! The dilatory habits of a decade were not so readily unlearned. To the amusement of ill-wishers, barely a score of Congressmen appeared in the city; and the carpenters were still at work remodeling the old City Hall into a fitting habitation for the new Federal Congress. It was not until the 30th that enough Representatives were in attendance to make up a quorum and to permit the House to organize. Another week passed before the Senate could organize.

On the 6th of April, the Senate summoned the House to attend the counting of the electoral votes. It then appeared that George Washington had received the highest number (69) and John Adams the next highest (34). This happy result had not been achieved without some concerted action among the Federalist leaders. The great personal influence of Washington was needed, indeed, to give dignity to the new office. While messengers were hastening to inform Washington and Adams of their election, the members of Congress had ample opportunities to look each other over. If they were not well known to each other, they were at least conspicuous in their respective communities. Nearly every man had held public office under his State Government and a large proportion had sat in the state conventions which had ratified the Constitution. Over two thirds of the Representatives counted themselves Federalist, or at least friends of the new Constitution.

On the 30th of April, the Senate and House in joint session received the President-elect. With simple ceremonies as befitted the occasion, the inauguration of our first President was consummated. Stepping from the Senate chamber upon the balcony, Washington looked out upon the crowds which thronged Wall Street. The Chancellor of New York administered the oath, the populace shouted, "Long live George Washington, President of the United States!" and then the President withdrew to deliver his inaugural address.

When the minutes of the Senate were read next day an incident occurred, which, trivial as it seems, was indicative of a spirit that may be truly characterized as American. The President's address was referred to as "His most gracious Speech." In a moment the doughty Maclay, of Pennsylvania, sprang to his feet with a vigorous protest. These were words which savored of kingly authority and which were odious to the people. He moved that they be struck out. Vice-President John Adams remonstrated mildly; he saw no objection to borrowing the practices of a government under which we had lived so long and happily. Senator Maclay was on his feet at once with the declaration that the sentiments of the people had undergone a change adverse to royal government. Such a phrase on the minutes of the Senate would immediately be represented as "the first rung of the ladder in the ascent to royalty." Maclay had his way and the offensive phrase was erased. Much the same republican spirit appeared in the debate on titles. The Senate would have preferred to address the President as "His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties"; but the House insisted on having the plain title, "President of the United States."

Even before the inauguration, the House of Representatives had entered upon its first tariff debate, for an immediate revenue was needed if the wheels of government were to move. Madison was ready with a scheme of customs duties patterned very largely after the ill-fated project of 1783. On all sides it was agreed that taxes should be external rather than internal, upon foreign rather than domestic commerce. Madison advocated duties upon "articles of requisition likely to occasion the least difficulty," such as spirituous liquors, molasses, wines, tea, coffee, cocoa, pepper, and sugar. But almost at once the idea was broached that indirect aid should be given to certain industries. The clash of opposing sectional interests appears even in this first debate. In the end Madison's simple revenue measure was set aside. Specific duties were levied on more than thirty articles, and ad valorem duties ranging from five to fifteen per cent on all others. Revenue was still the main object, but protective duties were deliberately grafted upon the bill. Tonnage dues were fixed in a separate act, while still another act laid the foundations of our national fiscal administration. In every State, side by side with local officials, yet independent of state control, there were to be collectors, surveyors of ports, inspectors, weighers, gaugers, measurers,—in short, so many living witnesses to the existence of a self-sufficient central government.

When Congress addressed itself to the work of establishing the executive departments, questions of constitutional interpretation thrust themselves into the foreground. Experience under the Confederation proved the need of at least the three departments of foreign affairs, war, and treasury. Bills to establish these departments were at once framed and favorably considered, but exception was taken to the provisions making the heads of these departments, who were appointed by the President and Senate, removable by the President alone. It was finally agreed to assume that the President had the power to remove from office. The act was therefore made to read, "Whenever said principal officer shall be removed by the President." In this wise, by legislative construction, the Constitution was expanded at many points in the early years of the new Government.

The bill to establish the Treasury Department was drawn in accordance with the ideas of Hamilton, for it was expected that he would be the first incumbent of the office. It may have been his well-known partiality for British institutions that caused the House to mistrust the phrase which made it the duty of the Secretary "to digest and report plans for the improvement and management of the revenue, and the support of the public credit." "If we authorize him to prepare and report plans," argued Tucker, of Virginia, voicing that fear of executive authority which was then instinctive, "it will create an interference of the executive with the legislative powers; it will abridge the particular privilege of this House.... How can business originate in this House, if we have it reported to us by the Minister of Finance?" The House was not minded to make Alexander Hamilton a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The bill was amended to read, "digest and prepare." Subsequently the House showed unmistakably its determination to assume direction of the national revenues and expenditures.

One of the first concerns of Congress was to give substance to the colorless statement of the Constitution that there should be one supreme court and such inferior courts as Congress should ordain and establish. On the day following its organization, while the House was grappling with the question of revenue, the Senate appointed a committee to bring in a bill to establish the federal courts. The chairman of this committee was Oliver Ellsworth, of Connecticut, who had sat on the bench of the Court of Appeals under the Confederation and who had been an influential member of the Federal Convention. The bill reported by the committee was substantially his work. It provided for a supreme court bench of six judges—a chief justice and five associates; for thirteen district courts, each with a single judge; and for three circuit courts, each of which was to consist of two justices of the Supreme Court and a district judge. Lengthy provisions in the act carefully delimited the jurisdiction of these courts, and laid down the modes of procedure and practice in them. Of great importance was the twenty-fifth section, which provided for taking cases on appeal to the Supreme Court from the lower federal and state courts. The words of the act, by a fair implication, would seem to confer upon the Supreme Court the power to review the decision of a state court holding an act of the United States unconstitutional. It would seem to follow logically that the Supreme Court might do also directly what it might do indirectly—declare an act of Congress void by reason of its repugnance to the Constitution. Ellsworth, at least, held that in the discharge of their ordinary duties, the judges of the federal courts would have the right to pronounce acts of Congress void when they stood in conflict with the Constitution. Attempts were made, in the course of the debate on the Judiciary Act, to strip the federal courts of all jurisdiction except in admiralty and maritime cases. Many members of Congress agreed with Maclay in thinking that the Judiciary Act was calculated to draw all law business into the federal courts. "The Constitution is meant to swallow all the state constitutions, by degrees," averred the worthy Senator from Pennsylvania; "and this [bill] to swallow, by degrees, all the state judiciaries."

The wisdom of the new President appeared in his appointments to office. Concerned solely with the fate of the federal experiment, he sought consistently the support of those who would add weight to the new Government, and who were Federalists in politics. Not only personal fitness but sectional interests had to be taken into consideration. Washington was solicitous to draw "the first characters of the union" into the judiciary, particularly those who had served in the state courts and commanded public confidence. His choice for Chief Justice fell upon John Jay. Rutledge, of South Carolina, Wilson, of Pennsylvania, Cushing, of Massachusetts, Harrison, of Maryland, and Blair, of Virginia, were first named as Associate Justices. Washington chose his chief advisers also from different sections. Thomas Jefferson was invited to become Secretary of State—a post which he accepted somewhat reluctantly. Hamilton did not have to be urged to take the headship of the Treasury. Knox was given the superintendence of a military establishment which then numbered only a few hundred men. Edmund Randolph was appointed Attorney-General.

Before Congress adjourned in the fall, it adopted and sent to the States for ratification twelve amendments to the new Constitution. There were those who thought this action precipitate. Why tinker with a constitution which had hardly been tried? To all such Madison replied cogently that the amendments which his committee reported did not alter the framework of the instrument, but added only certain safeguards to individual rights. The lack of a declaration of rights had been deplored in every convention and had cost the support of many respectable people. Moreover, two communities had not yet "thrown themselves into the bosom of the Confederacy." The wisdom of this course was attested by the prompt ratification of ten of the twelve proposed amendments.

On November 21, 1789, North Carolina ratified the Constitution, leaving Rhode Island to a position of hazardous isolation. Congress was considering a bill to cut off the commercial privileges of the State, by putting her on the footing of a foreign nation, when news came that a convention at Newport had ratified the Constitution by the narrow margin of two votes. In the following year the number of States was increased by the admission of Vermont. The admission of Kentucky followed in 1792; and Congress paved the way for the entrance of other States into the Union by organizing the Southwest Territory out of Western lands ceded by the three southernmost States. The expansion of the United States had begun, bringing with it unforeseen problems.

The severest labors of Congress began in the second session, when the new Secretary of the Treasury presented his first report on public credit. Shortly after the Convention of 1787, Hamilton had expressed his belief that one of the great dangers which threatened American society was "the depredations which the democratic spirit is apt to make on property." Distrusting the political capacity of the people, whom in private he called "a great beast," he believed that the new Government would succeed or fail in just the proportion that it enlisted the support of the influential and wealthy classes. He set himself deliberately to the task of identifying the interests of the propertied classes with those of the Government.

It was a sorry state in which Hamilton found the national finances. The foreign debt, including principal and arrears of interest, amounted to $11,710,000. The domestic debt, much more difficult to determine, was not less than $42,414,000, about one third of which was made up of arrears of interest. The debts of the individual States, principal and interest, were estimated at about $25,000,000. These were heavy burdens for the shoulders of a young Government whose fiscal powers were as yet untested. But the shoulders had to be fitted to the burden, if public credit was to be restored.

In this first report on public credit, January 9, 1790, Hamilton analyzed the financial situation with masterly clearness and set forth his plans for the adjustment of the national debt. The determination of Congress to make adequate provision for the support of the public credit was justified in his mind by every consideration. A country like the United States, possessed of little active wealth, must borrow in emergencies; to borrow on good terms, it must establish its credit; and to maintain its credit, it must faithfully observe its contracts. But over and above these considerations, dictated by expediency, were "immutable principles of moral obligation." Moreover, the national debt was no ordinary obligation: it was "the price of liberty." On all sides, it was agreed that the debt contracted abroad should be provided for in the precise terms of the contracts.

It was only in regard to the domestic debt that differences of opinion were likely to arise. The notes representing this debt were of all sorts and kinds. Much of it had changed hands and all of it had depreciated in value. Some of it still circulated as a monetary medium. The vital question was: how were the present holders to be paid? At the face value of the paper, or at the price for which it had been purchased? Hamilton argued firmly against any discrimination, both because it was a breach of contract and because it was a violation of the rights of a fair buyer.

When this part of Hamilton's plan came before Congress in concrete form, it gave rise to the bitterest debate which had been heard. That it would give opportunity for immoderate speculation was plain enough; yet every alternative which aimed to do justice by both the original and the present holder was confessedly inadequate, when a certificate of indebtedness, for example, had passed through several hands without record.

No sooner was Hamilton's proposal made than a wild scramble began for the possession of the hitherto worthless government paper. "Couriers and relay horses by land, and swift sailing pilot boats by sea, were flying in all directions," wrote Jefferson. "Active partners and agents were associated and employed in every state, town, and country neighborhood, and this paper was bought up at 5/ and even as low as 2/ in the pound, before the holder knew Congress had already provided for its redemption at par. Immense fortunes were thus filched from the poor and ignorant, and fortunes accumulated by those who had themselves been poor enough before."

The second part of the scheme outlined in Hamilton's first report aroused even more bitter opposition. With a fine audacity he proposed the assumption of state debts. It is difficult to believe that Hamilton was perfectly ingenuous in stating his reasons for this move. He apprehended, he said, that the States would be hampered in satisfying their creditors because they had surrendered one important source of revenue to the central Government, duties on imports. In resorting to other means, the States might pass conflicting measures which would oppose industry. Besides, the debts had been incurred in the cause of Union and should be borne by all. But deeper than these reasons was probably a political motive. Hamilton had no local attachments. A thoroughgoing nationalist, he saw in the claims of the States to autonomy only so many obstacles in the path of national unity. "To cement more closely the Union of States" by creating a solidarity of financial interests, was, indeed, the basal principle of his fiscal plans.

The wrath of Congressmen from States like Virginia, which had already discharged most of their debts, knew no bounds. After they had practiced thrift and met their obligations, should they, forsooth, now aid their less provident sisters? The chief opponents of assumption came from the South, and the chief advocates from the North. South Carolina and New Hampshire parted company with their neighbors, the one because it had a large debt and the other because it had not. Pennsylvania was divided on this question. For a time the opposition was too strong to be overcome. On May 25, 1790, an adverse vote seemed to seal the fate of "Miss Assumption," as the wits of the day called this measure. Just at this juncture the question of the location of the future capital, which had been debated inconclusively during the first session, was revived. Here again the North was arrayed against the South. Should the capital be located on the Potomac, as Maryland and the Southern States wished, or somewhere in Pennsylvania? New York was now out of the question, and since Pennsylvania would not support assumption, the New England States rather spitefully opposed the claims of Philadelphia.

Here was a situation which called for the finesse of the politician. Might not votes for one project be traded for the other? Would the Virginia representatives abandon their opposition to assumption for the sake of locating the capital on the banks of the Potomac? It was at this juncture that Hamilton sought out Jefferson, whose influence over the Congressmen from Virginia was very considerable, and laid the project before him. With a readiness which he afterward regretted, Jefferson fell in with the scheme, and invited Hamilton and certain Virginia Representatives to dine at his table. In this comfortable fashion, over their wine, these gentlemen reached an amicable agreement. Such is Jefferson's account, but the matter could not have been quite so simple, for other Representatives than those from Virginia changed their votes and so contributed to the final settlement of the controversy. Nor is Jefferson quite ingenuous when he afterward described himself as duped by Hamilton, for he had not shown himself averse to assumption at any time. Be this as it may, Congress voted to assume the debts of the States, and to remove the seat of government from Philadelphia after ten years to a district ten miles square on the Potomac, which Washington was to select.

The need of further revenue was now imperative. As Hamilton said in his second report on the public credit, the duties on imported articles had reached a point which might not be exceeded "without contravening the sense of the body of the merchants." When Congress met for its third session in December, 1790, Hamilton boldly urged what was perhaps as unpopular a tax as he could have proposed—a duty on distilled spirits. To most Americans an excise was not only an internal tax, but as Jefferson said, "an infernal one." It was bound to fall with heavy weight upon the people of the interior who turned much of their corn and rye into whiskey, for more convenient transportation over the mountains to Eastern markets. But despite strenuous opposition the excise was voted. It was, as a member of Congress expressed it, like "drinking down the national debt."

In this same report of December 13, 1790, Hamilton advocated the establishment of a national bank. Such an institution, he believed, would increase the amount of active capital in the country and at the same time serve the Government as a fiscal agent in obtaining loans and in collecting taxes. Opposition to this project gathered rapidly and was encouraged by the Secretary of State. The debates in Congress touched upon the monopolistic tendency of such a banking institution and its constitutionality, rather than upon its intrinsic merits and demerits. The bill was carried by substantial majorities in February, 1791, and sent to the President for his approval.

Washington was so beset with doubts as to the constitutionality of the bank bill that he asked his secretaries and the Attorney-General to express their opinions. Jefferson argued that the power to incorporate a bank was not given by the Constitution to Congress, for it was not among the enumerated powers and it was not a power which belonged to any of the enumerated powers as indispensably necessary to their exercise. Hamilton deprecated this attempt to confine the general Government either to powers expressly granted or to powers absolutely necessary to carry out the enumerated powers. There was another class, he contended, which might be termed "resulting" powers. If the end to be gained by a measure was comprehended within the specified powers, and the measure was obviously a means to that end and not forbidden by the Constitution, then it was clearly within the compass of the national authority. Washington finally yielded to Hamilton's persuasions, and signed the bill.

The charter of the bank fixed the capital stock at ten million dollars, of which the Government was to subscribe one fifth; the rest was open to public subscription. Three fourths of the public subscriptions might be paid in bonds of the Government. The notes issued by the bank were made receivable for all payments to the United States. The bank was to be the repository of the government funds. Its management was committed to a board of twenty-five directors chosen annually, who could establish branch banks as they deemed advisable. The charter was to run for twenty years.

The stock of the bank was not only subscribed at once, but soon sold at a premium which invited the wildest sort of speculation in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Stock-jobbing became a mania. "The coffee house is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers," Madison wrote from the seat of government. Sinister aspects of this speculative craze soon began to appear. "Of all the shameful circumstances of this business," said Madison, "it is among the greatest to see the members of the Legislature who were most active in pushing this job openly grasping its emoluments." It was reported that Schuyler, Hamilton's father-in-law, was to head the board of directors.

As the wide reach of Hamilton's financial policy became clear, men like Madison, whose sympathies had hitherto been enlisted on the side of more efficient government, had grave misgivings. When the Secretary of the Treasury intimated in his report on manufactures that Congress might promote the general welfare by appropriating money in any way it chose, Madison definitely parted company with his former collaborator, holding that by such an interpretation of the Constitution "the Government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular restrictions." Jefferson had already expressed himself in a similar way apropos of the bank bill. The suspicions which the Secretary of State entertained of his brilliant colleague were deep-seated. Hamilton's well-known preference for the British Constitution and his disposition to convert his secretaryship into a sort of chief ministerial office confirmed Jefferson's distrust. Had he and Madison been alone in their suspicions, their misgivings would not be worth recording; but they voiced the sentiments of an increasing number of men who disliked the consolidating tendencies of the new Government.

Moreover, the aristocratic tone of Washington and his entourage gave deep offense. Both by disposition and by calculation the President cultivated a certain official etiquette. His receptions were formal to the point of frigidity. He received his visitors "with a dignified bow, while his hands were so disposed as to indicate that the salutation was not to be accompanied with shaking hands." His figure clad in black velvet was most impressive. His hair was powdered and gathered in a large silk bag. His hands were dressed in yellow gloves, and he carried a cocked hat adorned with a black feather, while at his side hung a sword in a scabbard of white polished leather. To ardent republicans these trappings were so many manifestations of monarchical leanings. Hamilton's suggestion that coins should bear the head of the President under whom they were minted, was additional evidence to suspicious minds that the group of men who had the President's ear were monarchists at heart.

Before the First Congress adjourned, the nucleus of a new party was at hand and its fundamental tenet roughly foreshadowed: namely, opposition to the increase of the powers of the Federal Government through the use of implied powers and at the expense of the State Governments. The appearance of the first number of the National Gazette under the editorship of Philip Freneau was a sign that the further conduct of the Administration would be subjected to searching criticism. Freneau succeeded admirably in voicing the opinions of the nascent party. The columns of the National Gazette had much to say about "aristocratic juntos," "ministerial systems," and "the control of the government by a wealthy body of capitalists and public creditors," whose interests were in opposition to those of the people. When Hamilton's paper, the United States Gazette, attempted to stigmatize the opposition as essentially Anti-Federalist, Freneau replied that only those men were true friends of the Union who adhered to a limited and republican form of government and who were ready to resist the efforts which had been made "to substitute, in the room of our equal republic, a baneful monarchy." By posing as the only stanch supporters of republicanism, the opposition secured a great tactical advantage. To call one's self emphatically a Republican was to cast aspersions upon the republicanism of one's opponents.

As yet, however, there existed only tendencies toward parties and not clearly defined political groups. The voting in the early sessions of Congress was far from consistent. The members gave little indication that they regarded themselves as adherents of parties whose fortunes depended on preserving an unbroken alignment for or against the Government. How little coherence the opposition possessed was apparent when Giles, of Virginia, presented a resolution censuring Hamilton for his management of the Treasury. Despite the unpopularity of Hamilton and the general distrust of his policy in Republican circles, the opposition could muster only seven votes in favor of the resolution, in the closing hours of the Second Congress.

The presidential election of 1792, therefore, was not properly a contest between parties. When Washington consented reluctantly to serve a second term, his unopposed reëlection was assured. The Republicans expressed their opposition only by supporting for Vice-President, George Clinton, of New York, whose Anti-Federalism was well known, instead of John Adams, of Massachusetts. The congressional elections of this year resulted in the choice of men whose leanings were rather Republican than Federalist.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Besides the works of Hildreth and of McMaster, there are several compendious histories which treat of the beginnings of the new government. Among these are James Schouler, History of the United States under the Constitution (7 vols., 1880-1913), and E. M. Avery, History of the United States and its People from their Earliest Records to the Present Time (7 vols., 1904- ). The events of the Administrations of Washington and Adams are narrated by J. S. Bassett, The Federalist System (in The American Nation, vol. 11, 1906). Among the special studies of importance are D. R. Dewey, Financial History of the United States (1903); C. R. Fish, The Civil Service and the Patronage (1905); H. B. Learned, The President's Cabinet (1912); and W. W. Willoughby, The Supreme Court of the United States (1890). There are many biographies of the Federalist leaders. Among the best are W. C. Ford, George Washington (2 vols., 1900); W. G. Sumner, Alexander Hamilton (1890); F. S. Oliver, Alexander Hamilton; an Essay on American Union (1907); J. T. Morse, John Adams (1885); W. G. Brown, Life of Oliver Ellsworth (1905). Of contemporary writings none will give a more intimate view of politics than Senator William Maclay's Journal (1890). William Sullivan, Familiar Letters on Public Characters (1834), gives some lively sketches of notable figures, but he writes with a strong Federalist bias.

CHAPTER IV

THE TESTING OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT

The new Government fell heir to all the unsettled diplomatic problems of the Confederation. The political destiny of the thirteen States seemed fixed when they ratified the Constitution; the fate of the Western communities beyond the Alleghanies still hung in the balance. In Kentucky, General Wilkinson still intrigued in behalf of Spain. Sevier and Robertson, in Tennessee, were not averse to separation from the Eastern States nor to a Spanish protectorate. From New Orleans, Mobile, St. Marks, and Pensacola, the Spanish authorities supplied the Indians of the Southwest with arms and ammunition, counting on these uncertain allies to maintain their long frontier, for Spain still claimed Florida with its most northern boundary and refused to accept the validity of the British cession of 1783. More than this: Spain was disposed to claim both sides of the Mississippi, at least as far north as the Ohio.

In the Northwest, British garrisons still held Michilimackinac, Detroit, Niagara, Oswego, and other posts. The policy of Great Britain was dictated by much the same considerations as was that of Spain. Lord Dorchester, Governor of Canada, assured the home Government that "the flimsy texture of republican government" could not long hold the Western settlements in the Union. In 1789, the Lords of Trade reported that it was a matter of interest for Great Britain "to prevent Vermont and Kentucke, and all other settlements now forming in the Interior parts of the great Continent of North America, from becoming dependent upon the Government of the United States, or of any other Foreign Country, and to preserve them on the contrary in a State of Independence and to induce them to form Treaties of Commerce and Friendship with Great Britain."

President Washington had hardly taken the oath of office when a war cloud appeared on the western horizon. Certain British vessels, bound for Nootka Sound to establish a trading-post, were seized by Spanish authorities in a way which provoked bitter resentment. In the early months of 1790, war seemed imminent. The situation was full of peril for the United States, for war would inevitably bring about military operations directed against Florida and Louisiana, and neither party was likely to respect the neutrality of the United States. The prospect of a conquest of the Spanish colonies by Great Britain alarmed the Administration. "Embraced from the St. Croix to the St. Mary's on the one side by their possessions, on the other side by their fleet," wrote Jefferson, "we need not hesitate to say that they would soon find means to unite to them all the territory covered by the ramifications of the Mississippi." Representations were therefore made to the British Government that "a due balance on our borders is not less desirable to us than a balance of power in Europe has always appeared to them."

Fortunately the war cloud vanished as rapidly as it had formed. In the fall of 1790, Spain and England entered into a convention which averted hostilities. Yet the situation on both flanks of our long frontier was full of peril. Spain intrigued with the Creeks of the Southwest, while the British authorities in Canada encouraged the Indians north of the Ohio in their hostility to the white settlers. The attitude of the Indians along the Maumee and Wabash Rivers was so menacing that Governor St. Clair sent a punitive expedition against them; but the effect upon the Indians was so slight that a second expedition was set on foot in the following year. With a force of fourteen hundred raw recruits, unused to Indian warfare, St. Clair marched into the heart of the Indian country and suffered an inglorious defeat, on November 4, 1791. More than half of his command were killed, and scarcely a man escaped unscathed. It was a most humiliating reverse for the new Government, occurring almost under the eyes of British garrisons, and just as opposition was coming to a head in Congress.

While two European powers were thus poised like vultures awaiting the demise of the new republic, a third darkened the sky. France deemed the moment auspicious for an attack upon the colonial possessions of her late ally, the King of Spain. The South American revolutionist, Miranda, had persuaded the French Ministry, as he had before persuaded Pitt, that the Spanish colonial empire was tottering and would readily fall with its rich spoil at the first resolute attack. The French Ministers were dazzled by the prospect of reviving a colonial empire in the new world. It seemed well within the range of possibilities to reduce Louisiana, and from the mouth of the Mississippi to begin the conquest of Spanish Central and Southern America. With this purpose in view, the Government sent as Minister to the United States, Citizen Genet, an ardent apostle of the Revolution. He was instructed to secure a treaty with the United States—"a true family compact"—which "would conduce rapidly to freeing Spanish America, to opening the navigation of the Mississippi to the inhabitants of Kentucky, to delivering our ancient brothers of Louisiana from the tyrannical yoke of Spain, and perhaps to uniting the fair star of Canada to the American constellation." But without waiting for the coöperation of the United States, Genet was to arouse the people of Kentucky and Louisiana by sending among them agents who should light the fires of revolution.

The first news of the revolution in France had kindled the warmest sympathy in the United States. Emotional individuals thought they saw the events of our own revolution mirrored in the stirring drama in France. The spectacle of the new republic confronting the allied monarchs of Europe thrilled those who had battled with the hirelings of George the Third. Civic feasts became the fashion; liberty caps and French cockades were donned; "the social and soul-warming term Citizen" was adopted by the more demonstrative. But there were those who did not sing "Ça Ira" and who foresaw the peril of a general European war.

Early in April, 1793, a British packet brought the news to New York that Louis XVI had been guillotined and that France was at war with England and Spain. The ominous tidings brought President Washington post-haste from Mount Vernon to Philadelphia. Summoning his advisers, he put before them the perplexing questions which had arisen in his mind. Neutrality was obviously the policy which national self-interest dictated; but neutrality seemed hardly compatible with our treaty obligations to France. In the treaties of 1778, the United States had expressly guaranteed French possessions in America and had opened its ports to French privateers and their prizes, denying the privilege to her enemies. Hamilton argued rather fallaciously that these treaties were made by the King of France and were binding upon his successors alone; they were not in force after the Revolutionary Government had destroyed the monarchy. Furthermore, the guaranty did not apply to an offensive war such as that which France was now waging. Jefferson and Randolph took issue with Hamilton on these points; but all agreed that neutrality must be preserved. On April 22, the President issued a proclamation, which, avoiding the word "neutrality," declared that the United States was at peace with both France and Great Britain, and warned all citizens to avoid all acts of hostility.

The proclamation was well-timed, for Genet had already landed at Charleston and had begun his extraordinary career as revolutionary agent of the Gironde. He found the ground well watered for the seeds of revolution. In Georgia and South Carolina, the frontiersmen were smarting under the repeated depredations of the Cherokees and Creeks and eager to put an end to Spanish ascendancy in that quarter. Under these circumstances it was no difficult matter to arrange for expeditions against St. Augustine from the Georgia frontier, and against New Orleans from South Carolina by way of the Tennessee River and the Mississippi. Assuming that the United States was already enlisted in the cause by the treaties of 1778, Genet sent out orders to French consuls, bidding them set up courts of admiralty for the trial of prize cases, and even dispatched privateers from the port of Charleston to prey upon British vessels. Before Genet could reach Philadelphia, the French frigate L'Ambuscade had captured the Little Sarah in lower Delaware Bay, and had anchored with her prize in the river opposite the city.

From Charleston, Genet made a triumphal progress to Philadelphia, receiving on all sides demonstrations which convinced him that the heart of the nation beat in unison with that of France. He was therefore much disconcerted and angered by the studied reserve of the President, to whom he presented his credentials in Philadelphia. What a contrast between the liberty-loving populace and this haughty aristocrat who kept medallions of Capet and his family upon his parlor walls! At a banquet in Oeller's Tavern, however, Genet received the sort of demonstrations which his French heart craved. There, amid poetic declamations and many libations to the Goddess of Liberty, he and his hosts donned the crimson cap of liberty and sang with infinite zest the new "Marseillaise." Even a well-balanced mind might have become convinced that the Administration and the people were out of accord.

On the threshold of his career at Philadelphia, Genet demanded an advance payment on the debt which the United States owed to France. The refusal of the Administration to supply him with funds embittered him still further. He now took up with vigor his revolutionary projects in the West. The proposal of George Rogers Clark to raise a force and take all Louisiana for France reached him at this time and fitted in well with his general mission. Clark was given a commission as "Major General of the Independent and Revolutionary Legion of the Mississippi," and was promised the coöperation of frigates in his attack upon New Orleans. For this purpose Genet made haste to transform the Little Sarah into a privateer, under the very eyes of the Government. He was warned that he must not allow La Petite Democrate, as the vessel was rechristened, to put to sea. Nevertheless, in defiance of the state and federal authorities, the ship dropped down the bay and eventually put out to sea.

Up to this moment Genet's popularity was immense. Very probably this popular devotion to the cause of France was inspired in part by the factious opposition which was irritating the Administration on purely domestic issues. Nevertheless, Liberty, Equality, and the Rights of Man were phrases which appealed cogently to the democratic masses in the States. In imitation of the Jacobin Club, Democratic societies sprang up in all the considerable centers of population from Boston to Charleston. In these organizations the voice of the disfranchised classes was articulate for the first time. With unprecedented virulence these Democrats attacked not only policies but personalities. Washington was libeled in such scurrilous fashion that even his composure broke down on one occasion, so Jefferson records; and he declared in a passion that by God! he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation.

After the Little Democrat episode, however, popular sentiment began to grow cold toward Genet. His plans failed to carry; and he was reported to have exclaimed in a moment of irritation that he would appeal from the President to the people. This was the last straw. All but his most radical followers deserted him. The Administration now determined to demand his recall. But events in France had already terminated Genet's career. The Girondist party had fallen and the triumphant Jacobins had no use for an agent who had served the discredited faction. In February, 1794, Genet was replaced by Fauchet and his revolutionary mission ended with his official duties.

From the moment when France declared war upon Great Britain to the exile of Napoleon two decades later, the United States as a neutral nation was incessantly menaced by the aggressions of one or the other of the belligerents. A faithful picture of American politics must set the stirring events of this epoch against the forbidding background of European intrigue and war. In this struggle the supremacy of the seas fell to Great Britain. However victorious on European battlefields, French armies were powerless to defend the colonial possessions in the West Indies. Cut off from France the colonies could only maintain themselves by direct trade with neutrals like the United States. But by the so-called rule of 1756, neutral commerce was forbidden under these conditions. Ports closed to neutral commerce in time of peace might not be thrown open in time of war. Flinging consistency to the winds, the French Convention decreed in February, 1793, that neutral states might trade with her colonies on the same terms as French vessels. That Great Britain would refuse to sanction this trade was fully expected. It was inevitable that Great Britain would treat neutrals who accepted the French invitation as having forfeited their neutrality.

With little or no thought of probable consequences, fleets of merchantmen set sail from Boston, Philadelphia, and other ports in the spring of the year, with cargoes of fish and grain to barter for sugar, coffee, and rum at Martinique, Antigua, and St. Kitts. The traffic promised to be most lucrative. But disaster overtook many a gallant vessel before she could reach her destination. In June, British orders in council instructed English cruisers to detain all vessels bound for a French port with corn, flour, and meal, and to purchase such supplies as were needed. Such vessels were then to be allowed to proceed to any port of a state with which His Majesty was living in amity. The skipper who had anything worth taking to a foreign port after an experience of this sort was lucky indeed. In November orders were issued for the seizure of all vessels laden with French colonial products or carrying provisions to any French colony.

Tales of outrages perpetrated under the British orders in council soon began to reach the home ports of the West India merchantmen. Doubtless these tales lost nothing in the telling, but the unimpeachable fact remains that scores of American ships were seized and libeled in admiralty courts set up in the British West Indies. Nor did the British naval officers hesitate to impress seamen who were suspected of being British subjects. Republican opponents of the Administration, who had felt the proclamation of neutrality as a rebuff to our old ally, France, were now confirmed in their hostility to Great Britain. To their minds ample cause for war existed.

The policy which Jefferson and Madison would have forced upon the Administration was one of retaliation. In a report to Congress Jefferson proposed that whenever our commerce was laid under restrictions by a foreign nation, similar restrictions should be put upon the trade of the offending state. By pacific coercion, the United States would oblige foreign states to make favorable commercial treaties. Madison urged this policy upon Congress in a series of resolutions; but the supporters of the Administration pointed out that retaliatory measures would sacrifice the trade with Great Britain, which furnished seven eighths of the total imports into the country. It was plain that the mercantile classes which upheld the Administration did not desire either war or retaliatory legislation, however much they might be suffering from British depredations. The resources of diplomacy were not yet exhausted. Might not a treaty be secured which would open up the British West India trade?

Upon the news of the offensive orders in council of November, which reached Philadelphia in the following March, public feeling veered strongly toward war. At the same time with tales of new outrages at sea came a not very well authenticated but commonly accepted report of Lord Dorchester's speech to the Indians of the Northwest, in which he assured his dusky hearers that war was imminent between his country and the United States. Congress now began to prepare for the inevitable. Appropriations were made for the fortification of harbors and the collection of military stores. The depredations of the Algerine pirates in the Mediterranean gave excuse for the building of six frigates. An embargo was laid upon commerce for thirty days and then extended over another thirty days. Dayton, of New Jersey, alarmed the administration party by proposing the sequestration of all British debts as an indemnity for the vessels which had been seized by British cruisers.

A rift now appeared in the war cloud. Early in April, Washington received intelligence of a new order in council dated January 8, 1794, which only forbade trade between the French colonies and Europe, leaving American vessels to trade freely with the French West Indies. Washington seized the opportune moment to test the resources of diplomacy. On April 16, he sent to the Senate the nomination of Chief Justice John Jay as Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of St. James. Three days later the nomination was confirmed, and by the middle of May, Jay was on his way to England upon the most difficult mission of his diplomatic career.

While Jay was pressing American grievances upon Lord Grenville, not the least of which was the retention of the Western posts by British garrisons, events occurred near one of the unsurrendered posts which might easily have brought on war. The humiliating defeat of St. Clair in 1791 had left the settlers beyond the Ohio at the mercy of the Indians. British authorities in Canada encouraged the Indians to believe that by combination they could check the advance of the whites. An Indian territory under British protection would have served the purposes of Great Britain admirably. To forestall these designs President Washington appointed to command in the Northwest Anthony Wayne—"Mad Anthony" of Revolutionary days. With a caution and thoroughness which belied his reputation, Wayne spent nearly two years in recruiting and drilling an army. Every effort in the mean time to conciliate the Indians was made futile by the machinations of their British advisers. By the spring of 1794, Wayne had an army sufficiently trustworthy to undertake a forward movement. His route lay down the Maumee River, at the rapids of which Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe had built a fort and stationed a small garrison, in anticipation of an American attack upon Detroit, which was supposed to be Wayne's objective. At a place known as Fallen Timber, a few miles south of the rapids, on August 18, Wayne found the Indians ready to offer battle. They had chosen their ground with considerable skill, but Wayne employed his cavalry and infantry so effectively that he drove the redskins from cover and pursued them with great slaughter almost to the walls of the British fort. The British commander demanded an explanation. Wayne replied with a taunt which amounted to a challenge and which was probably intended to be such; but the British refused to be drawn into hostilities. Had Wayne attacked and dispersed the British garrison, he would hardly stand condemned at the bar of history, for by the Treaty of Paris not he, but the British commander, was the intruder on foreign soil. Nevertheless, war at this time would have made Jay's mission futile and might have sacrificed the whole Mississippi Valley.

The Administration had hardly time to applaud Wayne's victory when it was greatly perturbed by an insurrectionary movement in western Pennsylvania. The sturdy Scotch-Irish people of the southwestern counties beyond the mountains had always felt their aloofness from the eastern counties. They were now still further disaffected because of the federal tax on spirituous liquors. They shared the feeling of the Continental Congress, which in 1774 had declared an excise "the horror of all free states." Even before the incidence of the tax was fully felt, protests were drafted at mass-meetings and federal collectors were roughly treated. The tax fell with heavy weight upon the small farmer. Whiskey was not merely his chief marketable commodity: it was also his medium of exchange when money was scarce. A tax on his still seemed to be an unfair discrimination. Such was the pitch of public feeling in the year 1793 that farmers who complied with the law had their stills wrecked by masked men, popularly known as "Whiskey Boys."

Early in July, 1794, the marshal of the district court of Philadelphia attempted to serve writs against distillers in the western counties who were charged with breaking the law. He chose his time unwisely, for the farmers were in the midst of harvesting, and liquor was circulating freely among the laborers. In serving his last writ, he was threatened by a number of reapers. This was the spark needed to start a conflagration. On the next morning the house of a revenue inspector, Neville, was attacked and blood was shed. A small detachment of soldiers from Fort Pitt was stationed at the house; but on the following day they were fired upon and forced to surrender, and the house of the inspector was burned. The marshal and the inspector fled the country. Matters went from bad to worse. The mail was robbed; the militia was summoned to meet at Braddock's Field for the avowed purpose of attacking the garrison at Fort Pitt; but there the courage of the leaders evaporated. The attack upon the garrison was commuted into a boisterous march through the streets of Pittsburg, whose citizens purchased immunity by liberal donations of whiskey to the thirsty rioters.

On August 7, 1794, the President issued a proclamation commanding the insurgents to disperse, and summoned twelve thousand militia from the adjoining States to hold themselves in readiness for active service on the 1st of September. Meanwhile, earnestly desiring to avoid the use of force, Washington sent three commissioners to the scene of the riots in the hope of appealing to the sober sense of the people. They held protracted negotiations with representatives of the people in the disaffected district, but were unable to persuade them to deliver up the ringleaders of the revolt. On September 24, the President issued a second proclamation and set the troops in motion. Under the command of "Light Horse Harry" Lee, now Governor of Virginia, the army marched west in two divisions, but encountered no resistance. Many arrests were made and eighteen alleged leaders of the insurrection were sent to Philadelphia for trial. Only two of these, however, were convicted of treasonable conduct, and they were pardoned by the President. Some twenty-five hundred troops were quartered near Pittsburg for the winter; but rebellion did not again lift its head.

The utter collapse of the Whiskey Rebellion made the whole affair seem ridiculous to those who gathered in the coffee-houses to hear the tales of the militiamen but the importance of the episode was not slight. Hamilton is said to have remarked on one occasion that a government can never be said to be established "until some signal display of force has manifested its power of military coercion." The Federal Government had now demonstrated that it was equal to the emergency whenever the laws were opposed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by law. The days of Shays' Rebellion had gone, never to return.

There was an aspect of the insurrection which Washington did not fail to note in his annual address to Congress in November, 1794. The Democratic clubs had been unsparing in their condemnation of the excise law, and their resolutions had more than once a treasonable sound. Washington did not hesitate to deprecate the untoward influence of these "self-created societies" and to condemn those "combinations of men, who, careless of consequences, and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse cannot always appease a civil convulsion, have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole Government." The Democratic societies now fell into disrepute and did not long survive their great prototype, the Jacobin Club of Paris.

Although Jay had presented his credentials in June, 1794, it was the 19th of November before a treaty was signed; and it was not until the 8th of June, 1795, that Washington could send an authentic copy to the Senate. The most dispassionate member of that body must have confessed privately to a sense of disappointment as he heard the terms for the first time. Listening intently for the redress of grievances, he seemed to hear only concessions. The United States was to assume the debts still unpaid to British merchants since the peace, so far as "lawful impediments" had been put in the way of their collection; to open all ports to British ships on the footing of the most favored nation; and to make restitution for losses and damages to the property of British subjects occasioned by French privateers in American waters, whenever compensation could not be obtained in the ordinary course of justice. And for all these concessions what had been gained? The promise to evacuate the Western posts? That was but a tardy redemption of an old promise. No mention was made of the negroes carried away by British armies during the war. Nothing was said about the impressment of American seamen. To be sure, the ports of the East Indies were to be opened to direct commerce with the United States; but no American vessel might engage in the coasting trade of these East India dependencies. As for the West India trade, only vessels of seventy tons burden might participate, and even that concession was yielded on the express understanding that molasses, sugar, coffee, cocoa, and cotton should not be exported from the United States to any part of the world. After hearing this obnoxious twelfth article, few Senators could preserve a fair mind on the remaining provisions of the treaty.

The historian is in a better position to evaluate the treaty. To the cause of international arbitration, Jay and Grenville made a distinct contribution. They provided for three commissions which were to settle the uncertain boundaries of the United States on the northeast and northwest; to adjudicate the claims of British creditors; and to adjust the claims of those citizens of the United States whose ships and cargoes had been seized in the West India trade, and on the other hand, the claims of those British subjects who had suffered losses through French privateers in American waters. Moreover, an agreement was reached on what should in future be regarded as contraband, and on the treatment of vessels which should be captured on suspicion of carrying enemies' property or contraband.

There were two cogent reasons for ratifying the treaty despite its defects: it provided for indemnity in respect to recent seizures on the high seas; and it averted war. But no arguments could justify the surrender of American trade in the West Indies, to the minds of either the New England shipper or the Southern planter, for while the latter might be indifferent to other considerations, he would not willingly part with his right to ship his cotton crop, now becoming every year more valuable. The requisite two-thirds vote of the Senate was secured only by dropping out altogether the objectionable twelfth article.

The publication of the treaty was followed by an outburst of popular indignation which made even the President wince. Remonstrances and protests poured in upon him from every part of the Union. The sailors and shipowners of Portsmouth burned Jay and Grenville in effigy, together with a miniature ship of seventy tons. In Charleston, the flags were put at half-mast and the public hangman burned copies of the treaty in the open street. While remonstrating with a disorderly crowd in Wall Street which was vilifying Jay, Hamilton was stoned and forced to give way with the blood streaming down his face. Personal abuse of the coarsest kind was heaped upon Washington by the opposition press, while a host of pamphleteers assailed him under cover of anonymity. Congress expressed its hostility toward the President by omitting to congratulate him on his birthday.

In the face of this denunciation, Washington might well have hesitated to press the ratification of the amended treaty upon Great Britain. His perplexities were further increased by the tidings that the Ministry had renewed the earlier orders for the seizure of provisions on neutral vessels bound for French ports. Hamilton was of the opinion that the President should insist upon the withdrawal of this order in council and upon the acceptance of the Senate amendment before he ratified the treaty. The delicate task of securing the consent of Great Britain to these conditions was entrusted to John Quincy Adams, then Minister at The Hague.

Meanwhile the skies cleared in the Northwest. Wayne's punitive expedition had done its work. With their towns destroyed and their crops ruined, the Indians had passed a terrible winter. By the following summer they were ready to sue for peace. In a great council at Greenville, on August 4, 1795, they agreed to a treaty which ceded to the United States all the region south and east of a line running from the intersection of the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers to Lake Erie. Only one thing was needed to secure the Northwest and that was the evacuation of the British posts.

During this same summer, Thomas Pinckney, at the Court of Madrid, was trying to secure the liberation of the Southwest from the control of Spain. On October 27, 1795, the treaty of San Lorenzo was signed, which conceded the thirty-first parallel as the northern boundary of West Florida from the Mississippi to the Apalachicola. This was in itself a notable achievement; but even more important to the people of the Western world was the declaration that the Mississippi River should be open to their commerce with the right of deposit at New Orleans.

The mission of Adams at the Court of St. James was not less successful. The Ministry agreed to modify the objectionable order in council and to accept the treaty without the twelfth article. With a deep sense of relief Washington promulgated the treaty as the law of the land on February 27, 1795. With these three treaties of 1795, not only was war averted, but our slender hold upon the vast tract between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi immeasurably strengthened, if not secured for all time.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The attitude of historical writers toward the events recorded in this chapter has been considerably altered since the publication of a series of articles by F. J. Turner. The more important of these contributions are: "The Origin of Genet's Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas" (American Historical Review, III); "The Policy of France toward the Mississippi Valley" (Ibid., X); and "The Diplomatic Contest for the Mississippi Valley" (Atlantic Monthly, XCIII). Nearly all the authorities cited in the foregoing chapter deal in greater or less detail with the diplomatic events of Washington's Administrations. The following may be added to the list: Trescott, Diplomatic History of the Administrations of Washington and Adams (1857); F. A. Ogg, The Opening of the Mississippi (1904); C. D. Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (1897). The story of the expeditions against the Indians of the Northwest is told by Roosevelt, Winning of the West (vol. IV). A reliable account of the Whiskey Insurrection is given in Brackenridge, History of the Western Insurrection (1859).

CHAPTER V

ANGLOMEN AND JACOBINS

In January, 1795, Hamilton retired from the Treasury Department. The moment was well chosen, for his great creative work was done and signs were not wanting that the initiative in finance was about to pass to the House of Representatives. As he passed out of office, a young Representative from Pennsylvania made his appearance in Congress who was scarcely his inferior in quick grasp of the intricacies of public finance. Almost the first efforts of Albert Gallatin were directed to the improvement of the methods of congressional finance. It was at his suggestion that the first standing Committee of Ways and Means in the House was appointed, in the expectation that it would assume a general superintendence of finance. Believing that the Executive could be held in check only by systematic, specific appropriations, Gallatin became an insistent advocate of the rule, and in consequence a thorn in the flesh of the departments. "The management of the Treasury," complained Wolcott to Hamilton, "becomes more and more difficult. The legislature will not pass laws in gross. Their appropriations are minute; Gallatin, to whom they yield, is evidently intending to break down this department, by charging it with an impracticable detail." "The heads of departments," Fisher Ames wrote despondently, two years after Hamilton left office, "are chief clerks. Instead of being the ministry, the organs of the executive power, and imparting a kind of momentum to the operation of the laws, they are precluded even from communicating with the House by reports." There was no room for a British ministry in the Republican scheme of politics.

Meantime, Washington's foreign policy had widened the breach between the political factions and had forced him into a partisan position. From the Republican point of view, Jay's treaty threw the United States into the arms of England and gave just cause of offense to France. Knowing the popular temper, which was undoubtedly hostile to the treaty, the Republican leaders endeavored to defeat the purposes of the Administration by refusing to vote the necessary appropriations. Their first demand was for the papers relating to the treaty, on the ground that in matters upon which the action of the House was needed, that body might properly call for information to guide its deliberations. The President refused this demand, both because he deemed it imprudent to make the papers public, and because he denied the right of the House to participate in the treaty-making power.

The debate which followed is one of the most illuminating in the early history of Congress. The trend of argument may be suggested by two remarks of opposing partisans. Said Griswold for the Federalists, "The House of Representatives have nothing to do with the treaty but provide for its execution." Disclaiming that the House was bent upon impairing the constitutional right of the President and Senate to make treaties, Gallatin contended that the power claimed by the House was "only a negative, a restraining power on those subjects over which Congress has the right to legislate." In vigorous resolutions the House sustained Gallatin's position; and the appropriation for the treaty was carried only by the casting vote of the Speaker, on April 29, two months after Washington by proclamation had declared the treaty to be the law of the land.

The consequences of the rapprochement between the United States and Great Britain were far-reaching. The French Minister, Fauchet, urged his Government to take immediate steps to acquire a continental colony which would not only serve France and her West India colonies as a granary and as a market for their exports, but which would also bring pressure to bear upon the disaffected border communities of the United States. Such a colony was Louisiana. With this province in her possession, a power like France would speedily control the Mississippi and the Western people who used that highway for their commerce. Throughout the year 1795, the French Government sought by persuasion and threats to secure Louisiana from Spain as the price of an alliance.

How far the Administration was apprised of these designs is not clear; but against the background of French intrigue certain passages of Washington's Farewell Address take on a new significance. The West was warned that it could control "the indispensable outlets for its own productions" only by attaching itself firmly to "the Atlantic side of the Union." "Any other tenure ... whether derived from its own separate strength, or from an apostate and unnatural connection with any foreign power, must be intrinsically precarious." And the admission of Tennessee as a State in the year 1796 may have been hastened by an ill-defined fear that the people of the West might not be proof against French machinations.

The purpose of Washington not to accept a re-election was known to his intimates early in the spring of 1796. Upon whom would his mantle fall? There was much searching of hearts among Federalist leaders, but by the end of the summer it was well understood that Federalist electors would support John Adams and Thomas Pinckney for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency. The most talented man in the party was unquestionably Alexander Hamilton; but Hamilton had made too many enemies to be a popular candidate. By common consent, Thomas Jefferson became the candidate of the Republicans for President; with him was associated Aaron Burr, of New York.

The most remarkable aspect of the campaign of 1796 was the undisguised attempt of Adet, who had succeeded Fauchet, to turn the election in Jefferson's favor. The treaty with England could not be undone; but France had much to hope from a Republican administration. In a series of letters directed to the Secretary of State, but printed in the Philadelphia Aurora, Adet announced that the Directory regarded the treaty of commerce concluded with Great Britain as "a violation of the treaty made with France in 1778, and equivalent to a treaty of alliance with Great Britain." "Justly offended," the Directory had ordered him to "suspend his ministerial functions with the Federal Government." This action, however, was not to be regarded as a rupture between the two peoples, but only "as a mark of just discontent, which is to last until the Government of the United States returns to sentiments and to measures, more conformable to the interests of the alliance, and the sworn friendship between the two nations."

Adet would have had the people believe that the alternatives were Jefferson or war; and the threat of war, so it was said, was enough to drive the peace-loving Quakers of Pennsylvania into the Republican ranks. In more northerly States Adet's manifesto probably had the opposite effect. "There is not one elector east of the Delaware River," declared the Connecticut Courant, "who would not sooner be shot than vote for Thomas Jefferson." Not a Republican elector was chosen in the States to the north and east of Pennsylvania. On the other hand, Adams received only two electoral votes south of the Potomac. South Carolina divided its vote between Jefferson and Pinckney. Only unexpected votes in Virginia and North Carolina gave Adams the election, for Pennsylvania was carried by the Republicans. Pinckney lost the Vice-Presidency through the defection of Federalists in New England.

An incident of the election in Pennsylvania revealed the change already wrought by parties in the Constitution. The framers of the Constitution expected that a small number of persons selected by their fellow citizens from the general mass would deliberately weigh "all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice," and in their mature wisdom choose the individual who met the requirements of the office. It fell out otherwise. In Pennsylvania, one of the six States to choose electors by popular vote, each party had put forward a ticket with fifteen names. Thirteen of the fifteen Republican electors were chosen. Of the two Federalist electors who were chosen, one broke faith with his party and cast his vote for Jefferson and Pinckney. The Federalists were exasperated by this treachery. "What!" expostulated a writer in the United States Gazette: "Do I chuse Samuel Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be President? No! I chuse him to act, not to think."

While Adet was endeavoring to bring what the Federalists called the French party into power, the Administration was urging the reluctant Monroe at Paris to make the Jay Treaty as palatable as possible to the French Government. This was an irksome task for that ardent Republican. From the outset of his mission he found it difficult to sustain that detachment from French politics which his position demanded. Moreover, after having assured the French Government that Jay was negotiating at London only for the redress of grievances and not for a commercial treaty, Monroe found it peculiarly humiliating to be obliged to confess that he had been kept in ignorance of the real trend of negotiations. Under these circumstances, he temporized and gave only half-hearted attention to the task of placating the Directory. Hamilton now advised his recall; and Washington, who had on two occasions expressed his displeasure with Monroe's conduct, determined to send Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in his stead.

Trivial as this incident seems, it was not without its effect upon the course of diplomacy abroad and of politics at home. When Monroe endeavored to put his successor into touch with the French Foreign Office, he was told that the Directory was not prepared to receive another American representative until their grievances had been redressed. This affront left Pinckney in an embarrassing position, for until his credentials were accepted, he was liable, like all foreigners at that time, to arrest as a spy. It was not until February, after many months of waiting, that he was given his passport. He at once crossed the border and took up his residence at Amsterdam.

Meantime, Monroe had taken his departure with the warmest expressions of regard on the part of the French Government. He was assured that his worth and his efforts in behalf of his country's interests were understood and appreciated. He returned to the United States with the firm conviction, which his Republican friends shared, that he had been made the victim of Federalist chicanery. In the following year he published an elaborate defense which served admirably as a popular campaign document in the next presidential elections.

It fell to John Adams on the very threshold of his administration to deal with what he euphemistically called the misunderstanding with France. His inaugural address announced unmistakably his intention to preserve neutrality between the belligerents of Europe, and to treat France with impartiality but with a sincere desire for her friendship. Between the lines may be read also an equally sincere desire to placate the opposition and to free himself from all imputation of a bias toward Great Britain and a monarchical system. From the first news of Pinckney's dismissal, President Adams was disposed "to institute a fresh attempt at negotiation": he even approached Jefferson to see if he would not persuade Madison to serve on a special commission, believing that Madison's well-known Gallic sympathies would commend him to the French nation. At the same time he declared stoutly in a message to Congress, in special session on May 15, that France had treated the United States "neither as allies nor as friends nor as a sovereign state." Attempts which had been made to create a rupture between the people of the United States and their Government "ought to be repelled with a decision which shall convince France and the world that we are not a degraded people humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority." While he therefore recommended measures of defense, he asked the Senate to confirm the appointment of three commissioners whom he proposed to send to France. Two of these, Pinckney and John Marshall, were Federalists, but the third was Elbridge Gerry, a Massachusetts Republican, who was the second choice of the President, Dana having declined to serve.

While Congress was acting upon the President's recommendations and voting appropriations for fortifications and for the completion of the three frigates which were then on the stocks, disquieting disclosures came from the West. Spain having declared war upon England in the previous fall, British emissaries, it was rumored, were concerting plans for the conquest of New Orleans and West Florida. While expeditions made up of Western frontiersmen and Indians descended upon the Spanish strongholds in the Southwest, a British fleet was to blockade the mouth of the Mississippi. The evidence which President Adams laid before Congress in July implicated Senator Blount, of Tennessee. In common with other land speculators, he had become alarmed at the rumor that France was about to acquire Louisiana, and had agreed to use his influence among the whites and Indians of the Southwest, where he had formerly been governor, to assist the designs of Great Britain. He was expelled from the Senate and impeached. Before his trial could take place, he was elected a member of the legislature of Tennessee, and from that point of vantage he successfully defied the federal authorities.

The episode had unfortunate consequences: it aroused the distrust of the Spanish Government and delayed the surrender of Natchez and other posts which Spain had agreed to cede in the Treaty of 1795; and it furnished Talleyrand, who had become Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Directory, with an additional argument for the cession of Louisiana to France. France in control of Louisiana and Florida would be "a wall of brass forever impenetrable to the combined efforts of England and America."

Early in March, 1797, dispatches arrived from the envoys which were full of sinister disclosures. On the 19th, President Adams announced gloomily that he perceived "no ground of expectation" that the objects of the mission could be accomplished "on terms compatible with the safety, honor, or the essential interests of the nation." He renewed his recommendations of measures of defense "proportioned to the danger." The average Republican regarded this message as tantamount to a declaration of war. Jefferson spoke of it as "an insane message." The partisan press held it to be further proof of British bias in John Adams, the old aristocrat! But when the President sent to Congress the deciphered dispatches, and the newspapers had printed extracts from them, a wave of indignation swept over the country. For the moment the wildest partisan of France was silenced.

The envoys told a sordid tale of French intrigue and greed. It appeared that they had never been received officially when they made known their presence on French soil, but had been approached by agents of Talleyrand, whom they referred to in the dispatches as Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z. They were much mystified by the language used by these gentlemen, until the evening of October 18, when Mr. X called on General Pinckney and whispered that he had a message from Talleyrand. "General Pinckney said he should be glad to hear it. Mr. X replied that the Directory, and particularly two of the members of it, were exceedingly irritated at some passages of the President's speech, and desired that they should be softened; and that this step would be necessary previous to our reception. That, besides this, a sum of money was required for the pocket of the Directory and Ministers, which would be at the disposal of M. Talleyrand; and that a loan would also be insisted on. Mr. X said if we acceded to these measures, M. Talleyrand had no doubt that all our differences with France might be accommodated. On inquiry, Mr. X could not point out the particular passages of the speech that had given offense, nor the quantum of the loan, but mentioned that the douceur for the pocket was twelve hundred thousand livres, about fifty thousand pounds sterling."

Unwilling to believe their ears, the astonished envoys asked to have these proposals put in writing. Mr. X not only complied with this request, but brought with him Mr. Y, a confidential friend of Talleyrand, who repeated the terms upon which the envoys would be received, and pointed out convenient means by which the money could be secretly transferred.

The American commissioners responded that while they had ample powers to make a treaty, they had none to make a loan. They offered, however, to send one of their number to America for further instructions, provided that the Directory would check the further capture of American vessels. Nevertheless, the efforts of X and Y to secure the douceur were not relaxed. Finally, finding the envoys either obstinate or obtuse, Mr. X exclaimed, "Gentlemen, you do not speak to the point. It is money; it is expected that you will offer money." The Americans were inexorable. "What is your answer?" asked X impatiently. "It is," said the envoys, "no, no; not a sixpence."

On November 1, the commissioners agreed to hold no more indirect intercourse with the Government, but to prepare a statement of the American grievances against France and to send it to Talleyrand. Two weary months passed before they received his answer. Couched in language which was both contemptuous and insulting, this reply of Talleyrand terminated the mission. The Directory intimated that in future they would treat only with Gerry as "the more impartial" member of the commission. Pinckney and Marshall remonstrated against this discrimination, but Gerry unwisely consented to deal with Talleyrand alone. Marshall secured a passport with some difficulty and departed for home. Pinckney with more difficulty secured permission to retire to southern France with his invalid daughter.

The war spirit now ran high. President Adams declared that he would never send another minister to France without assurances that he would be "received, respected, and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation," and the people supported this declaration with surprising unanimity. Demonstrations occurred in all the playhouses of Philadelphia and New York; young men formed associations and donned the black cockade as an emblem of patriotic devotion; even in the quiet towns of New England, women met to drink tea and to sing the new song "Adams and Liberty." Cities along the coast vied with one another in their eagerness to build warships. The patriotic fervor found expression in original song and verse. "Hail Columbia" was the happy inspiration of young Joseph Hopkinson, of Philadelphia. For once in his life President John Adams found himself a popular hero riding on the crest of public applause.

To the intense disgust of Jefferson, even Republicans caught the war fever, and joined with the Federalists in putting the country on a war footing. Among the earliest measures of Congress was an act providing for the establishment of a Navy Department. In rapid succession followed acts authorizing the President to permit merchantmen to arm in their own defense and our warships to seize French vessels which preyed upon our commerce. On July 7, the existing treaties with France were repealed. In short, without a formal declaration, the United States was virtually at war with France. The new navy soon put to sea and gratified national pride by several gallant victories, the most notable being the capture of the frigate L'Insurgente by the newly commissioned Constellation, on February 9, 1799. When peace was restored in 1800, the navy had a record of eighty-four prizes, most of which were French privateers.

The organization of the provisional army did not move so rapidly, partly because of the incompetence of the Secretary of War, and partly because of an unseemly wrangle for precedence among the three major-generals whom Adams had named. Conscious of his own inexperience in military affairs, President Adams had persuaded Washington to take chief command of the army with the distinct understanding that he would not be called into active service unless an emergency arose. Washington named Hamilton, C. C. Pinckney, and Knox as major-generals, and the President sent the nominations to the Senate in this order. Misunderstandings arose at once as to the relative rank of these three major-generals. Hamilton and his intimates in the circle of the President's advisers urged that as his name was first on the list he was the ranking officer. At this Knox took umbrage, for he had outranked Hamilton in the old army; and so, too, had Pinckney. Knowing the intrigue in Hamilton's behalf and not a little alarmed at the prospect of having the direction of the war pass into the hands of a man whom he regarded as a rival, Adams determined to sign the commissions in the reverse order, thus giving Knox precedence. The friends of Hamilton were enraged at this turn of affairs and prevailed upon Washington to write a letter of protest to the President. Adams was finally persuaded to date all three commissions alike and to leave the designation of rank to the commander-in-chief. Washington promptly named Hamilton as inspector-general with precedence over Pinckney and Knox; whereupon Knox refused to serve.

The immediate outcome of this controversy was to widen the rift which was already separating the President from the faction led by Hamilton. Adams had taken office in the belief that Washington's cabinet advisers were loyal to him. "Pickering and all his colleagues are as much attached to me as I desire," he had written just before his inauguration. But he speedily found that all were accustomed to look to Hamilton as the virtual leader of the Federalist party. Moreover, he found himself thrust into the background in the matter of military appointments, as soon as Hamilton took over the actual work of organizing the army. The Constitution made him commander-in-chief; circumstances seemed to conspire, he complained bitterly, "to annihilate the essential powers given to the President." He had, too, all the natural aversion of a civilian for military affairs. "Regiments are costly articles everywhere," he told McHenry testily, "and more so in this country than in any other under the sun. And if this country sees a great army to maintain, without an enemy to fight, there may arise an enthusiasm that seems to be little foreseen."

It would have been strange, indeed, if under these circumstances the President had not scanned the horizon anxiously for the faintest intimations of peace. In October, 1798, definite assurances were given by Talleyrand, through our Minister at The Hague, that France would receive a new minister from the United States. On February 18, 1799, the President confounded both friends and foes by sending to the Senate the nomination of Vans Murray to be Minister to France. The emotions of the militant Federalists were too various to admit of description. It would have been madness, however, not to accept the proffered olive branch. Swallowing their wrath, they agreed to the mission, but substituted a commission of three for a single minister.

From Napoleon, the new master of France, the commissioners secured a convention which not only restored peace, but safeguarded the rights of neutrals, by restraining the right of search and conceding the principle that free ships make free goods. Napoleon consented also to the abrogation of the treaties of 1778, but only upon condition that the new treaty should contain no provision for the settlement of claims for indemnity. John Adams was not far from the truth when he accounted this peace one of the most meritorious actions of his life. "I desire no other inscription over my gravestone," he wrote fifteen years later, "than: 'Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.'"

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

On the origin and growth of political parties in the United States, the following books are suggestive and informing: H. J. Ford, The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898); C. E. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (1910); J. P. Gordy, Political History of the United States (2 vols., 1900-03); A. E. Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800 (1909); J. D. Hammond, History of the Political Parties in the State of New York, 1789-1840 (2 vols., 1850). To those histories already mentioned which describe the quarrel with France may be added G. W. Allen, Our Naval War with France (1909), and A. T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power on the French Revolution and Empire (2 vols., 1898). A most readable account of manners and customs in America is given by La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels through the United States, 1795-1797 (2 vols., 1799). Social life in New York and Philadelphia is described by R. W. Griswold, The Republican Court (1864).

CHAPTER VI

THE REVOLUTION OF 1800

The greatest obstacle in the path of the people of the United States in their struggle toward national life was the vastness of the territory which they occupied. Even the region between the Alleghanies and the sea was as yet imperfectly subdued. Great tracts of wilderness separated communities beyond the fall-line of the rivers. Intercourse was incredibly difficult even between the commercial ports of New England and the Middle States. Stage-coaches plied between Boston and New York, to be sure, and between New York and Philadelphia. By stage, too, a traveler could reach Baltimore and Washington in the course of time. But beyond the Potomac public conveyances were few and uncertain in their routes. The only public stage in the Carolinas and Georgia plied between Charleston and Savannah. Those whom either public or private business forced to journey from these remote Southern States to Philadelphia took passage in coasting vessels. It is difficult to say which were greater, the perils by land or by sea. Writing from Philadelphia in 1790, William Smith, of South Carolina, described the misfortunes of his fellow Congressmen in trying to reach the seat of government, as follows: "Burke was shipwrecked off the Capes; Jackson and Mathews with great difficulty landed at Cape May and traveled one hundred and sixty miles in a wagon to the city. Burke got here in the same way. Gerry and Partridge were overset in the stage; the first had his head broke and made his entrée with an enormous black patch; the other had his ribs sadly bruised and was unable to stir for some days. Tucker had a dreadful passage of sixteen days with perpetual storms. I wish these little contretemps may not sour their tempers and be inauspicious to our proceedings."

Even in the North, where distances were not so great and where great arms of the ocean did not penetrate so far inland, as in North Carolina, for example, interposing so many barriers to communication, travel was painfully slow and hazardous. Travelers who made the journey from Boston to New York by stage-coach accounted themselves lucky if they reached their destination in six days, for no bridges spanned any of the great waterways and the crossing by ferryboats was uncertain and often dangerous. Many travelers preferred to journey by water from port to port, but coasting vessels, contending with the winds and the tides, were often nine or ten days in sailing from Boston to New York.

The post traveled with somewhat greater speed; yet a letter sent from Portland, Maine, could not be delivered in Savannah, Georgia, in less than twenty days. From Philadelphia a post went to Lexington, Kentucky, in sixteen days, and to Nashville, Tennessee, in twenty-two days. The cost of these posts, like the cost of traveling, was in many cases prohibitive. The rate for a letter of a single sheet was twenty-five cents. News traveled slowly from State to State. The best news sheets in New York printed intelligence from Virginia which was almost as belated as that which the packets brought from Europe.

With such barriers in the way of intercourse, the masses, so far indeed as they possessed the suffrage at all, were not politically self-assertive. Devoted primarily to the pursuit of agriculture and commerce, essentially rural in their distribution, the people had neither the desire nor the means, nor yet the leisure, to engage in active politics. Politics was the occupation of those who commanded leisure and some accumulated wealth. The voters of the several States touched each other only through their leaders. In these early years national parties were hardly more than divisions of a governing class. Party organization was visible only in its most rudimentary form—a leader and a personal following. The machinery of a modern party organization did not come into existence until the railroad and the steamboat tightened the bonds of intercourse between State and State, and between community and community.

In another respect political parties of the Federalist period differed from later political organizations. Under stress of foreign complications, Federalists and Republicans were forced into an irreconcilable antagonism. The one group was thought to be British in its sympathies, the other Gallic. In the eyes of his opponents, the Republican was no better than a democrat, a Jacobin, a revolutionary incendiary; and the Federalist no better than a monocrat and a Tory. The effect was denationalizing. Each lost confidence in the other's Americanism.

The Federalists, in control of the Executive,—and thus, in the common phrase, "in power,"—were disposed to view the opposition as factious, if not treasonable. Washington deprecated the spirit of party and thought it ought not to be tolerated in a popular government. Fisher Ames expressed a common Federalist conviction when he wrote in 1796: "It is a childish comfort that many enjoy, who say the minority aim at place only, not at the overthrow of government. They aim at setting mobs above law, not at the filling places which have known legal responsibility. The struggle against them is therefore pro aris et focis; it is for our rights and liberties." Such a state of mind can be understood only by a diligent reading of the newspapers and political tracts of the time. Republican journalists, many of whom were of alien origin, still gloried in the ideals and achievements of the French Revolution. But liberty and democracy, as preached by a Tom Paine and glorified by a Callender and exemplified by the Reign of Terror in France, had caused an ominous reaction in the minds of upholders of the established order in the United States.

Under these circumstances, when, in the minds of those in authority, party was identified with faction, and faction was held to be synonymous with treason, the position of the Republicans was precarious. War with France they bitterly opposed, but were powerless to prevent. The path of opposition was made all the more difficult by the well-known attitude of conspicuous Federalist leaders who favored war as an opportunity for discrediting their political opponents, or, as Higginson expressed it, for closing the "avenues of French poison and intrigue."

Laboring under the conviction that they had to deal not only with an enemy without but with an insidious foe within, the Federalists carried through Congress in June and July, 1798, a series of measures which are usually cited as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The first in the series was the Naturalization Act, which lengthened the period of residence required of aliens who desired citizenship, from five to fourteen years. The Alien Act authorized the President, for a period of two years, to order out of the country all such aliens as he deemed dangerous to public safety or guilty of treasonable designs against the Government. Failure to leave the country after due warning was made punishable by imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years and by exclusion from citizenship for all time. A third act conferred upon the President the further discretionary power to remove alien enemies in time of war or of threatened war. Finally, the Sedition Act added to the crimes punishable by the federal courts unlawful conspiracy and the publication of "any false, scandalous, and malicious writings" against the Government, President, or Congress, with the intent to defame them or to bring them into contempt or disrepute. For conspiracy the penalty was a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars and imprisonment not exceeding five years; for seditious libel, a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars and imprisonment not exceeding two years.

The debates in Congress left little doubt that the Sedition Act was a weapon forged for partisan purposes. The Federalists were convinced that France maintained a party in America which by means of corrupt hirelings and subsidized presses was paralyzing the efforts of the Administration to defend national rights. That there was great provocation for the act cannot be denied. The tone of the press generally was low; but between the scurrilous assaults of Cobbett in Porcupine's Gazette upon Republican leaders, and the atrocious libels of Bache upon President Washington, there is not much to choose.

What the opposition had to fear from the Sedition Act, appeared with startling suddenness in October, 1798, when Representative Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, an eccentric character who had become the butt of all Federalists, was indicted for publishing a letter in which he maintained that under President Adams "every consideration of the public welfare was swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice." The unlucky Lyon was found guilty, sentenced to imprisonment for four months, and fined one thousand dollars.

Alarmed by this attack on what he termed the freedom of speech and of the press, Jefferson cast about for some effective form of protest. Collaborating with John Breckenridge, a member of the Kentucky Legislature, he prepared a series of resolutions which were adopted by that body, while Madison, then a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, secured the adoption of a set of resolutions of similar purport which he had drafted. Both sets of resolutions condemned the Alien and Sedition Acts as unwarranted by the letter of the Constitution and opposed to its spirit. Both reiterated the current theory of the Union as a compact to which the States were parties; and both intimated that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party had an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode of redress.

The real purport of these Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions has been much misunderstood. The emphasis should fall not upon the compact theory, for that was commonly accepted at this time; nor yet upon the vague remedies suggested by the phrases "nullification" and "interposition." With these remedies Jefferson and Madison were not greatly concerned. Protest rather than action was uppermost in their minds. As Jefferson said to Madison, they proposed to "leave the matter in such a train as that we may not be committed absolutely to extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as events will render prudent." What they desired was such an affirmation of principles as should rally their followers and arrest the usurpation of power by their opponents. The fundamental position assumed is that the Federal Government is one of limited powers and that citizens must look to their State Governments as bulwarks of their civil liberties, whenever the express terms of the federal compact are violated. The Federal Government was not to be allowed to become the judge of its own powers. By recalling the party to its original position of opposition to the consolidating tendencies of the Federalists, the resolutions of 1798 served much the same purpose as a modern party platform. In this light, their ambiguities are not greater nor their political theories more vague than those of later platforms.

In the early months of 1799, petitions for the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts began to pour in upon Congress from the Middle States; but the Federalists felt secure enough in popular favor to ignore these protests. With a keener ear for the voice of the people, Jefferson summoned his Republican friends to seize the moment to effect an entire "revolution of the public mind to its republican soundness." "This summer is the season for systematic energies and sacrifices," he wrote to Madison. "The engine is the press. Every man must lay his purse and pen under contribution." The response was immediate and hearty. Not only were political pamphlets printed and distributed from Cape Cod to the Blue Ridge, but an astonishing number of newspapers were founded to disseminate Republican doctrine. The three or four years before the presidential election of 1800 are marked by an unprecedented journalistic revival. Instead of being mere purveyors of facts, these newspapers became, as a contemporary observes, "Vehicles of discussion, in which the principles of government, the interests of nations, the spirit and tendency of public measures, and the public and private characters of individuals, are all arraigned, tried, and decided." Such a systematic attempt to direct public opinion had not been made since the early days of the Revolution.

The Federalists watched this Republican revival with grave misgivings. What Jefferson called "the awakening of the spirit of 1776" was to Fisher Ames an ominous sign of impending "revolutionary Robespierrism." Federalists of the Hamiltonian brand unhesitatingly held the Republicans responsible for the Fries Rebellion, which occurred in Pennsylvania. The immediate occasion for these disturbances, to be sure, was the federal house tax, but the rioting occurred in those eastern counties which were ardently Republican; hence the outbreak could be denounced plausibly enough as the result of Jacobin teachings. In some alarm the Administration dispatched troops to quell the riots, and prosecuted the leaders with relentless vigor. Fries was condemned to death, and the President's advisers would have carried out the decree of the court, "to inspire the malevolent and factious with terror"; but President Adams persisted in pardoning Fries, holding wisely that there was grave danger in so construing treason as to apply it to "every sudden, ignorant, inconsiderable heat, among a part of the people, wrought up by political disputes, and personal and party animosities." Such motives were not appreciated by the circle of Hamilton's admirers. Why were the renegade aliens who were running the incendiary presses not sent out of the country, Hamilton asked Pickering. "Are laws of this kind passed merely to excite odium and remain a dead letter?"

If the Administration made only a half-hearted effort to arrest and deport aliens, it could at least not be accused of letting the Sedition Act remain a dead letter. Some unnecessary and thoroughly unwise prosecutions in the year 1799 were followed by a series of trials for seditious libel in the spring term of the federal courts. All the individuals indicted were either editors or printers of Republican newspapers. The impression created by these prosecutions was, therefore, that the Administration had determined to crush the opposition. What deepened this impression was the obvious bias of the federal judges and the partisanship of the juries, which it was alleged were packed by the prosecution.

With one accord Republican editors lifted up their voices in defense of freedom of speech, never losing from view, however, the political possibilities of the situation. The more prosecutions the better, wrote one editor significantly to a fellow victim: "You know the old ecclesiastical observation that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church." From the Federalist point of view these editors were "lying Jacobins," incendiaries, anarchists. "Should Jacobinism gain the ascendency," an orator at Deerfield, Massachusetts, warned his auditors, in the midst of the elections of 1800, "let every man arm himself, not only to defend his property, his wife, and children, but to secure his life from the dagger of his Jacobin neighbor." In vain Republicans protested that they had a right to form a party to oppose measures which they deemed destructive to public liberty. They were not opposing the Constitution but the Administration; not government in general, but the existing Government, of men who were employing despotic methods.

In the presidential election of 1800 only four of the sixteen States provided for a choice of the electors directly by the people. The outcome depended upon the action of the legislatures in a comparatively few States. New England was so steadfast in the Federalist faith that the Republicans gave up all hope of contesting the control of the legislatures. After an electioneering tour through Connecticut, Aaron Burr is said to have remarked that they might as well attempt to revolutionize the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, Jeffersonian Republicanism was deeply rooted in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. The contestable area lay in the Middle States and in the Carolinas.

In the early spring, both parties began to burnish their armor for the first encounter in New York. It was generally believed that the May elections to the Assembly would determine the vote of the presidential electors, and that the vote of the city of New York would settle the control of the Assembly. The task of carrying the legislative districts of the city for the Republicans fell to Aaron Burr, past-master of the art of political management and first of the long line of political bosses of the great metropolis. How he concentrated the party vote upon a ticket which bore such names as those of George Clinton, Horatio Gates, and Henry Rutgers; how he wooed and won voters in the doubtful seventh ward among the laboring classes,—these are matters which elude the most painstaking researches of the historian. The outcome was a Republican Assembly which beyond a peradventure would give the electoral vote of the State to the Republican candidates.

In another respect Burr's victory in New York was important. It made him the logical and most available candidate for the vice-presidential nomination. By general consent Jefferson became for the second time the candidate of his party for the Presidency. On May 11, the Republican members of Congress met in caucus and unanimously agreed to support Burr for the Vice-Presidency. Already wiseacres were figuring out the probabilities of a Republican victory.

It was a chastened group of Federalist Congressmen who met in caucus on May 3, after the disheartening tidings from New York. Though their hearts misgave them, they still supported John Adams. To carry South Carolina, they agreed to support Charles C. Pinckney for the Vice-Presidency; but rumor had it that many Federalists would be glad to see Pinckney outstrip Adams,—a hope which in the course of the summer was frankly avowed by Hamilton. In a letter which he had privately printed for circulation among the Federalists, Hamilton declared without disguise his hostility to Adams. The imprudence of this act was apparent when Burr seized upon a copy of the letter and scattered reprints far and wide as good campaign material.

The effect of Hamilton's indiscretion was probably slight. Adams carried all the electoral votes in the New England States, leading Pinckney by a single vote. The Federalists were completely successful also in New Jersey and Delaware. Through the tactics of thirteen Federalists in the Senate of Pennsylvania, they won seven of the fifteen electoral votes of that State. In Maryland they divided the electoral vote evenly with their opponents. In North Carolina, they secured four of the twelve votes; but in South Carolina they were completely discomfited. Instead of carrying his own State for the ticket, Pinckney was outgeneraled by the strategy of his cousin Charles Pinckney, who effected an irresistible combination of the Piedmont farmers and the artisans of Charleston. The loss of South Carolina was irretrievable and decisive. The Federalists had to concede the defeat of their ticket.

The exultation of the Republicans was at first unbounded. "The election of a Republican President," wrote the editor of the Schenectady Cabinet triumphantly, "is a new Declaration of Independence, as important in its consequences as that of '76, and of much more difficult achievement." But the elation of the Jeffersonians was somewhat tempered by the information that Jefferson and Burr had an equal number of votes in the electoral college. Adams was defeated, to be sure, but was Thomas Jefferson elected? Neither Jefferson nor Burr had "the highest number of votes" which the Constitution required for an election. The House of Representatives, therefore, must choose between them. But the House was Federalist! Coincidently with these tidings came rumors that the Federalists would prevent an election by the House until the 4th of March passed, when the Presidency and Vice-Presidency would fall vacant, necessitating a new election. Scarcely less ominous was the report that the Federalists would endeavor to seat Burr in the presidential chair.

When balloting began in the House on February 11, 1801, enough Federalists had been involved in an intrigue to defeat Jefferson to give the vote of six States to Burr. Jefferson received the vote of eight States, but not the majority which was needed to elect, inasmuch as the delegations of two States were evenly divided. The result was the same on thirty-five successive ballots. On the thirty-sixth, February 17, Jefferson received the votes of ten States and Burr of four. The votes of Delaware and South Carolina were blank, the Federalists having agreed to produce a tie by not voting. A similar abstention from voting on the part of Federalists from Vermont and Maryland gave the votes of those States to Jefferson.

More than any other man, Bayard, of Delaware, was responsible for the election of Jefferson. Finding that Burr would not "commit himself," Bayard announced that he would cast the single vote of his State for Jefferson. "You cannot well imagine the clamor and vehement invective to which I was subjected for some days," he wrote to Hamilton. "We had several caucuses. All acknowledged that nothing but desperate measures remained, which several were disposed to adopt, and but few were willing openly to disapprove. We broke up each time in confusion and discord, and the manner of the last ballot was arranged but a few minutes before the ballot was taken." How narrowly the Federalists escaped the folly of electing Burr may be inferred from the further statement of Bayard, that "the means existed of electing Burr, but this required his coöperation. By deceiving one man (a great blockhead), and tempting two (not incorruptible), he might have secured a majority of the States."

In after years Jefferson was wont to speak of his election as "the Revolution of 1800." To his mind, it was "as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected, indeed, by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people." In one sense, at least, Jefferson was right. Taken collectively, the events of 1800 do constitute a revolution—the first party revolution in American history. For a season it seemed as though the Republican party was to be denied the right to exist as a legal opposition, entitled to attain power by persuasion. At the risk of incurring the suspicion of disloyalty, if not of treason, the Republicans clung tenaciously to their rights as a minority. By persistent use of the press, by unremitting personal efforts, and by adroit electioneering, the leaders succeeded in arousing the apathetic masses and converted their minority into an actual majority. They won, therefore, for all time that recognition of the right of legal opposition which is the primary condition of successful popular government.

The change in political weather was foreshadowed during the summer of 1800 by the removal of the seat of government to the banks of the Potomac. For ten years Philadelphia had been the center of the political and the social worlds, which for the only time in American history were then identical. Even those who knew the court life of Europe marveled at the display of wealth and fashion at this republican court. Of this social world, the "President and his Lady" were not merely the titular and official leaders, but the real leaders. Between the Virginia aristocracy and the wealthy families of Philadelphia there were natural affinities. And if the second Federalist President and his consort did not become leaders in quite the same sense, it was because John and Abigail Adams belonged temperamentally to a more restrained society.

Those who had enjoyed the hospitalities of the Morrises, the Binghams, and the Willings, and the bodily comforts of Philadelphia hotels and inns, were not likely to find any compensations in the unkempt, straggling village which the Government and private speculators were trying to convert into a fitting abode for the National Government. There were few comfortable private dwellings. Most of the houses were mere huts occupied by laborers. Great tracts were left unfenced and uncultivated, in the firm expectation that an extraordinary rise in land value was about to take place. That craze for speculation in land which had possessed those with any idle capital afflicted every landowner in or near the new city.

When Mrs. Adams finally reached the city, after a difficult journey through the forest between Baltimore and Washington, she met with anything but a cheering welcome. The President's house was not yet finished: the plaster was not even dry on the walls. It was built on a grand and superb scale, but the thrifty New England spirit of the President's wife was appalled at the prospect of having to employ thirty servants to keep the apartments in order and to tend the fires which had everywhere to be kept up to drive away the ague. The ordinary conveniences were wanting. For lack of a yard, Mrs. Adams made a drying-room out of the great unfinished audience room. And the only society which she might enjoy was in Georgetown, two miles away. "We have, indeed," she wrote, "come into a new country." But with true pioneer spirit, she added, "It is a beautiful spot, capable of every improvement, and, the more I view it, the more I am delighted with it."

The gloom which enveloped the Federalists after the elections of the year deepened as they straggled into the new capital in November. They approached their labors as men who would save what they could of a falling world. For some time there had been an urgent demand for the reorganization of the federal judiciary. The justices of the Supreme Court objected to circuit duty and urged the erection of a circuit court with a permanent bench of judges. Such a reform was inevitable, it was said; therefore let the Federalists find what consolation they might from the possession of these new judgeships. Patriotism, too, suggested the wisdom of filling the judiciary with men who would uphold the established order. "In the future administration of our country," President Adams wrote to Jay, "the firmest security we can have against the effects of visionary schemes or fluctuating theories will be in a solid judiciary."

The Judiciary Act of February 13, 1801, which embodied these aims, added five new districts to those which had been established in 1789, and grouped the twenty-two districts into six circuits. The amount of patronage which thus fell into the President's hands was very considerable, though it was grossly exaggerated by Republicans. The partisan press pictured President John Adams signing the commissions of these new judgeships to the very stroke of twelve on the night of March 3, and then entering his coach and driving in haste from the city.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

On the organization of parties at the close of the century there are two works of importance: G. D. Luetscher, Early Political Machinery in the United States (1903), and M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (2 vols., 1902. Vol. II deals with parties in the United States). Prosecutions under the Sedition Act are reported in F. Wharton, State Trials of the United States during the Administrations of Washington and Adams (2 vols., 1846). F. T. Hill, Decisive Battles of the Law (1907), gives an interesting account of the trial of Callender. Two special studies should be mentioned: E. D. Warfield, The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (1887), and F. M. Anderson, "Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions," in the American Historical Review, vol. v. The spirit of American politics at this time can be best appreciated by perusing Porcupine's Works, the writings of Callender and Tom Paine, and the letters of Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Timothy Pickering.

CHAPTER VII

JEFFERSONIAN REFORMS

The society over whose political destiny Thomas Jefferson was to preside for eight years was for the most part still rural and primitive. Evidences of a higher culture were wanting outside of communities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston. Even in Philadelphia, the literary as well as the social and political capital, the poet Moore could find only a sacred few whom "'twas bliss to live with, and 'twas pain to leave." American life had not yet created an atmosphere in which poetry, or even science, could thrive. The scientific curiosity of the younger generation does not seem to have been whetted in the least by the startling experiments of Franklin; and the figure of Philip Freneau stands almost alone, though Connecticut, to be sure, boasted of her Dwight, her Trumbull, and her Barlow. The "Connecticut wits" are interesting personalities; but the society which could read, with anything akin to pleasure, Dwight's Conquest of Canaan—an epic in eleven books with nearly ten thousand lines—was more admirable for its physical endurance than for its poetical intuitions. Latrobe was quite right when he wrote that in America the labor of the hand took precedence over that of the mind.

The American people were still engaged almost exclusively in agriculture and commerce. Manufacturing was in its infancy. In his report on manufactures in 1791, Hamilton had named seventeen industries which had made notable progress, but most of these were household crafts. In 1790, Samuel Slater had duplicated the inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright, and had, with Moses Brown, of Rhode Island, set up a successful cotton mill at Pawtucket; but ten years later only four factories were in operation in the whole country.

The wars in Europe had created an unprecedented and ever-increasing demand for American agricultural products. The price of foodstuffs like flour and meal reached a point which made possible enormous profits. Shipping became, therefore, the indispensable handmaid of agriculture, as Jefferson observed. The volume of trade expanded at an astonishing rate. The total value of exports mounted from $20,000,000 in 1790 to $94,000,000 in the year of Jefferson's inauguration. One half of this amount, however, represented the value of commodities like sugar, coffee, and cocoa, which had been brought into the country for exportation. The easy and almost certain profits of this trade attracted capital which might otherwise have gone into manufacturing.

Shipping was stimulated also by the Navigation Act of 1789, which imposed lower tonnage duties in American ports on vessels built or owned by American citizens, and by the Tariff Act of the same year, which allowed a ten per cent deduction from the customs duties levied on goods imported in American vessels. These discriminating duties, together with the law of 1792, which excluded foreign-built ships from American registry, would have aided materially in the building of an American marine, even in less prosperous times. The registered tonnage engaged in foreign trade increased from 346,254 in 1790 to 718,549 in 1801; and in coast trade, from 103,775 to 246,255. Yet there was an artificial quality in this prosperity. "Temporary benefits were mistaken for permanent advantages," writes a contemporary; "so certain were the profits on the foreign voyages, that commerce was only pursued as an art; ... the philosophy of commerce, if I am allowed the expression, was totally neglected ... they [merchants] did not contemplate a period of general peace, when each nation will carry its own productions, when discriminations will be made in favour of domestic tonnage, when foreign commerce will be limited to enumerated articles, and when much circumspection will be necessary in all our commercial transactions."

It cannot be said, either, that the American farmer studied the philosophy of agriculture. He owed his crops less to intelligent cultivation of the soil than to provident Nature in a new and untilled country. Both his methods and his implements were bad, and resulted in that land spoliation which has been the bane of American industry. "Agriculture in the South," said John Taylor, of Caroline, "does not consist so much in cultivating land as in killing it"; and the statement was scarcely less true when applied to the Northern farmer. The soil was rapidly exhausted by planting the same crop year after year, for it was easier to take up fresh land than to restore productivity to the old. Indeed, the comments of foreign travelers at the close of the century suggest doubts as to whether the American farmer understood the importance of rotating his crops and of fertilizing his fields. The farming implements in use showed little of that mechanical ingenuity which is now characteristic of the American people. The plough was still a clumsy affair with heavy beam and handles, and wooden mould-board. The scythe, the sickle, and the flail were the same as their forbears had used for centuries.

The demand of Europe for the food products of the Northern and Middle States obscured for a time the importance of cotton as an article of export. In 1790, South Carolina and Georgia, then the only cotton-growing States, produced less than two million pounds of inferior quality, none of which was exported. A decade later thirty-five million pounds were raised, one half of which was exported; and Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee had begun the cultivation. This sudden development was due to the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, in 1793. This machine facilitated the separation of the seed from the fiber of the short-staple variety of cotton, which alone could be profitably cultivated in the uplands, and thus made possible a vast extension of the area of cotton culture.

The cotton gin came at an opportune moment for the Southern planters, since rice and indigo were declining in importance as exports, and their gangs of African slaves were likely to become a burden. They could now cultivate cotton under an extensive system of agriculture with large immediate profits. Experience proved, however, that the system was extraordinarily wasteful, leading to a rapid exhaustion of the soil. This ever-recurring exhaustion of the soil and demand for new land was a potent cause of the incessant pressure of population into the virgin lands of the Southwest, in succeeding decades.

The new President was the embodiment of the national life. Although he was tall of stature, he was not outwardly an impressive figure. His red, freckled face wore a frank, good-natured expression, but he lacked dignity and poise. "His whole figure has a loose, shackling air," wrote a contemporary. "A laxity of manner seemed shed about him ... even his discourse partook of his personal demeanor. It was loose and rambling." With his blue coat and red waistcoat, his green velveteen breeches, yarn stockings, and slippers down at the heels, he seemed to an English visitor, who saw him in 1804, "very much like a tall, large-boned farmer." Jefferson would have been the last to resent this epithet. No man had a more profound respect for tillers of the soil. Years before he had written: "Generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen is the proportion of its sound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption." He rejoiced in the agricultural possibilities of America. Could he have had his way, he would have made the republic, in the apt phrase of Mr. Henry Adams, "an enlarged Virginia—a society to be kept pure and free by the absence of complicated interests, by the encouragement of agriculture and of commerce as its handmaid." He abhorred cities and factories, and dreaded the growth of a manufacturing and capitalist class.

An agricultural society bent upon justice, Jefferson believed, could always protect itself against the aggressions of foreign nations. "Our commerce," he wrote soon after his inauguration, "is so valuable to them, that they will be glad to purchase it, when the only price we ask is to do us justice. I believe we have in our own hands the means of peaceable coercion." In this wise the United States would set an example to the world of a society democratically organized and capable of unlimited moral and physical progress.

As the head of a party which had effected a revolution in government, Jefferson's first care was to reconcile his opponents to Republican rule. The inaugural address emphasized the principles upon which all republican governments must be based. It is often said that these principles might have been uttered by Washington with equal propriety—as good Federalist doctrine. This is to mistake the significance of the revolution which had occurred. A party had triumphed which Federalists firmly believed inimical to all government. The announcement that the fundamental principles to which all Americans were attached would guide the new Administration had a meaning which it would not have had if uttered by a Federalist President. So far did Jefferson lean in holding out the olive branch that he ran the risk of minimizing the revolution of 1800. To say that "every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," was to contradict his often expressed conviction that his party had saved the country from monarchy.

Aside from such generalities as that wise government consists in restraining men from injuring one another and leaving them free to regulate their own pursuits, the inaugural address contains no declaration of purpose or policies. No such reticence marks Jefferson's private letters, which are, indeed, the best expression of his political philosophy. Nowhere is the governing purpose of his Administration stated more clearly than in a letter written just before his inauguration. "Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very unexpensive one,—a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants."

The first and most troublesome task of the Administration was to select these few servants. Even in naming the heads of departments, the President experienced some embarrassment, for, while Madison accepted readily the Secretaryship of State and Albert Gallatin that of the Treasury, the naval portfolio went begging. Robert Smith, of Maryland, was finally persuaded to accept the post. Two New Englanders, Henry Dearborn and Levi Lincoln, became Secretary of War and Attorney-General respectively. Far more difficult was the distribution of the lesser federal offices. Had Jefferson been free to follow his own inclination, he would probably have made few removals, even though such a course would have seemed somewhat inconsistent with his belief that Federalists were monarchists at heart. He yielded slowly and reluctantly to the demands of his partisans for their share of the offices; but he professed to look forward with joy to that state of things when the only questions concerning a candidate shall be, Is he honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?

The embarrassment of the President was all the greater because removals from office were likely to defeat his policy of conciliating the Federalists; and because the bestowal of offices was likely to alienate some local faction, as in New York, where the Clintons and the Livingstons were fighting the faction led by Burr. Once started on the policy of removal, the descent was easy. The point of equilibrium between the parties was soon passed. By the end of Jefferson's second term of office, the civil service was as preponderatingly Republican as it had been Federalist in 1800. It cannot be denied that Jefferson opened the door to the spoils system; but it should be stated also that he endeavored to make fitness a qualification for office. The charge that offices were given indiscriminately to "wild Irishmen" and French refugees, is not sustained by the facts. On the whole Jefferson's appointments were not inferior in character to those of his predecessors. The vicious aspects of the spoils system did not appear for a generation.

As an opposition party the Republicans had always declaimed vociferously against the powers wielded by the President. Jefferson sincerely wished to avoid what he termed the monarchical tendencies of his predecessors; and as an earnest of his intentions he abandoned not only levees but also the practice of addressing Congress in a speech, since Republicans held this custom a reprehensible imitation of the British speech from the throne. Yet with characteristic indirection, Jefferson assigned other reasons for substituting a written message for the usual personal address. "I have had principal regard," said he, "to the convenience of the Legislature, to the economy of their time, to their relief from the embarrassment of immediate answers, on subjects not yet fully before them, and to the benefits thence resulting to public affairs." It is highly probable that Jefferson had his own convenience also in mind, for he was not a ready nor an impressive speaker.

The keynote of the reforms which the President suggested tactfully to Congress was economy. It was to effect a reduction of the debt, indeed, that Jefferson had called Gallatin to the head of the Treasury. Eight years later he wrote: "The discharge of the debt is vital to the destinies of our government; we shall never see another President and Secretary of the Treasury making all other objects subordinate to this." By laborious calculation Gallatin reached the conclusion that if $7,300,000 were set aside each year, the debt, principal and interest, could be discharged within sixteen years. But the party was clamoring for the reduction of taxes. The problem before the Secretary of the Treasury was how to accomplish these antithetical purposes. The most unpopular tax was unquestionably the excise. If this were cut out and the estimated appropriation for the reduction of the debt were made, the Government would be unable to live within its income. The only alternative was to reduce expenditures. It was at this point that Jefferson's "chaste reformation" of the government was to begin. Under the Federalist régime, in anticipation of war with France, the expenditures for the army and navy had mounted to six millions of dollars, nearly double the normal expenditure of those departments. All good Republicans would welcome a proposal to reverse the militant policy of the Federalists, which, indeed, the return of peace seemed to make unnecessary. It was agreed that the expenditures for the army and navy should be kept below two million dollars.

Notwithstanding Jefferson's wish to avoid everything savoring of executive dictation, he could not abdicate his position as leader of his party. Throughout his first term, at least, he was the master mind directing the policies of the party, in ways which were not less effective because they were personal and indirect. The leadership in the House of Representatives, which then overshadowed the Senate, fell to Southern rather than to Northern Republicans. In close touch with the Speaker, Nathaniel Macon, of North Carolina, and with the chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, the eccentric John Randolph, of Roanoke, the Administration scored comparatively easy victories over the Federalists on matters of financial policy.

The repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 was the second task which the President laid upon the shoulders of Congress. No act of the outgoing Administration had given greater offense. Jefferson expressed a general impression when he declared that the Federalists, driven from the legislative and executive branches of the Government, had retreated into the judiciary as their stronghold. "There the remains of federalism are to be preserved and fed from the Treasury; and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and destroyed." But no suggestion of this animus toward the Federalist judges appeared in the studied moderation of the President's message. The President contented himself with presenting a record of the causes decided by the courts, in order that Congress might "judge of the proportion which the institution bears to the business it has to perform."

Taking their cue from the President, the Republican leaders in Congress urged the repeal of the Judiciary Act on the ground that the new courts had not justified their existence. Republican economy required that unnecessary, and therefore improper, institutions should be abolished. Certain bolder spirits like William Giles, of Virginia, however, frankly admitted a fear of the "ultimate censorial and controlling power" of the courts over all the departments of the Government—a control "over legislation, execution, and decision, and irresponsible to the people." In the background of the active mind of this Virginian was hostility to the new courts "because of their tendency to produce a gradual demolition of State Courts." If this last were the real reason for the repeal of the act, consistency should have led the Republicans to revise the whole judiciary system from the Supreme Court down. But for such radical action few, if any, were prepared. The repealing act passed the House by a party vote of fifty-nine to thirty-two, and was signed by the President on March 8, 1802.

In the course of the acrimonious debate over the judiciary, Federalists had challenged the constitutional right and power of Congress to vacate the judgeships, asserting that the plain intent of the Constitution is to place the judges beyond the power of Congress by prescribing a tenure of office during good behavior. The challenge was disquieting, for with John Marshall on the bench of the Supreme Court, the Republican reformation of the courts might be brought to naught by an adverse decision. A supplementary act was therefore passed which prevented the Supreme Court from holding its usual session. It was hoped that when the court met in the following year, Federalist partisanship would have lost its violence.

Two obnoxious acts of the late Administration—the Alien and the Sedition Acts—had expired by limitation. Congress suffered the Alien Enemies Act to remain upon the statute book, but insisted upon the repeal of the Naturalization Act of the year 1798. The time of residence required of aliens before they could acquire citizenship was again fixed at five years. With these rather meager performances, the reforms of the Republicans came to an end.

Perhaps none of the last appointments of John Adams had so exasperated his successor as that of John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Jefferson had an invincible repugnance for Marshall; and the feeling was cordially reciprocated. Between these men there were temperamental differences as wide as the ocean. Moreover, Jefferson entertained the belief that all appointments made by Adams after the results of the election were known were nullities, on the theory that a retiring President might not bind his successor. Two years later, in 1803, in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court, speaking through the Chief Justice, took sharp issue with the President. William Marbury had applied to the court for a mandamus to compel Madison, Secretary of State, to deliver his commission as justice of the peace, which, it was alleged, had been duly signed and sealed, but never delivered. The Supreme Court held that Marbury was entitled to his commission. "To withhold his commission, therefore," said Marshall, "is an act deemed by the Court not warranted by law, but violative of a legal vested right." Let President Thomas Jefferson take notice of his constitutional obligations.

The case of Marbury v. Madison, however, has a much deeper significance for constitutional history. Having asserted the right of Marbury to his commission, the court disappointed expectations by refusing to issue the writ of mandamus, on the ground that the power to issue such writs was not conferred by the Constitution upon the Supreme Court as part of its original jurisdiction. And as the Judiciary Act of 1789 had conferred this authority, the court was impelled to declare this provision of the act unwarranted by the Constitution and therefore void. For the first time the Supreme Court asserted its power to pronounce an act of Congress repugnant to the Constitution not to be law, but void and of no effect. In substantiating its position, the court did not inquire into the difficult question whether the framers of the Constitution intended or expected the national judiciary to exercise this authority. It was enough for the purposes of the court that the Constitution was the supreme and paramount law of the land, established by the people of the United States. The Constitution defines and limits the powers of government it must then control any legislative act repugnant to it. "Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and, consequently, the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void."

With equal certitude the court declared that it was the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is. "Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each." So if a law stood in opposition to the Constitution, the court must decide which of these conflicting rules governs the case. "This is of the very essence of judicial duty." Moreover, the judges may not shut their eyes to the Constitution and see only the law, for they are bound by oath to administer justice not according to the laws alone, but "agreeably to the Constitution and the laws of the United States." "Thus, the particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument."

On two other occasions the hostility of the Republican Administration provoked a trial of strength with the Federalist judiciary. The impeachment in 1804 of John Pickering, District Judge in New Hampshire, on charges of intoxication and habits unfitting him for his duties, amounted to little short of a tragedy. When the trial opened, Judge Pickering did not appear, but representations made by his son showed beyond a doubt that he was and had been for two years of unsound mind. To convict a man of misdemeanors for which he was not morally responsible seemed a travesty on justice. Yet there was no other constitutional device for removing him. Though Pickering never appeared in person, the managers for the House pressed the prosecution; and rather than leave the administration of justice to a demented judge, the Senate pronounced the unhappy man "guilty as charged," and resolved that he should be removed from office.

On the same day that the Senate reached this monstrous decision, March 12, 1804, the House voted to impeach Justice Samuel Chase, of the Supreme Court. While the defiant words of Chief Justice Marshall in the Marbury case were still rankling in Jefferson's bosom, Justice Chase had gone out of his way to attack the Administration, in addressing a grand jury at Baltimore. The repeal of the Judiciary Act, he had declared, had shaken the independence of the national judiciary to its foundations. "Our republican Constitution," said he, "will sink into a mobocracy—the worst of all possible governments." To appreciate the effect of this partisan outburst upon the President, one must recall that Chase was the judge who had presided at the trials of Fries and of Callender, and who had left the bench to electioneer for John Adams in the campaign of 1800. Jefferson immediately wrote to Nicholson, who was managing Pickering's impeachment, raising the question whether "this seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution" ought to go unpunished.

Such was Jefferson's way of initiating the measures of the Administration. His supporters in the House were not over-eager to take up the gauntlet, but as usual the wishes of the President prevailed. The management of the impeachment of Chase fell to John Randolph, who was as ill-fitted by temperament for the difficult task as a man could be. Instead of impeaching Chase for his indiscretion at Baltimore, Randolph dragged into the indictment his conduct on the bench during the trials of Fries and of Callender, and certain errors in law which he was alleged to have committed. The effect of these latter items was to range all the bench on the side of Chase, for if a mere mistake in judgment was a proper ground of impeachment, no judge was safe in his tenure. Justice Chase secured some of the best legal talent in the country to conduct his defense; and the trial assumed from the outset a spectacular character from the personalities involved.

The managers of the impeachment were far from consistent in their conception of the nature of impeachable offenses. Randolph, Campbell, and Giles held that an impeachment was "a kind of inquest into the conduct of an officer merely as it regards his office," rather than a criminal prosecution. A judge, in short, might be removed for a mistake in the administration of the law. Nicholson rejected this theory, contending that impeachment was essentially a criminal prosecution which aimed at not only the removal but also the punishment of the offender. Yet the managers had not specified any offense which could be called a "high crime" or "misdemeanor" within the meaning of the Constitution. The counsel for Justice Chase, on the other hand, held consistently to the position that a judge might not be impeached or removed from office for anything short of an indictable offense, an offense indictable under the known law of the land.

From the first, the legal counsel for the accused were more than a match for the managers. Randolph's erratic course culminated in an impassioned but incoherent speech which closed the argument for the prosecution and left the outcome hardly in doubt. Not one of the articles of impeachment received the two-thirds majority which was necessary to convict. The eighth article, which touched upon the real provocation for the trial,—the harangue at Baltimore,—received the highest vote; but nearly one fourth of the Republican Senators refused to sustain the managers. The acquittal of Chase was, therefore, a judgment against Randolph. He never recovered his lost prestige as the leader of his party in the House. Jefferson could accept Randolph's downfall with equanimity, but not the failure of the impeachment. Years afterward he wrote, bitterly that impeachment was "an impracticable thing, a mere scarecrow." From this time on, said he, the judges held office without any sense of responsibility, led "by a crafty chief-judge who sophisticates the law to his mind by the turn of his own reasoning."