It is indicative of the prevalence of State-sovereignty feeling at the time to note the general alarm caused by this decision. An eleventh amendment to the Constitution, forbidding a State to be sued before the Federal courts by non-residents, immediately passed the Senate by a vote of twenty-three to two and the House by eighty-one to nine. It was ratified by every State except New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. The speed with which this remedy was applied gave confidence in amendments for the future. But the number of amendments must be endless if each aggression of the judiciary was to be met in this manner.

The last toast at the judiciary banquet of 1790 was a wish that the convention of Rhode Island, called for the early spring, would "soon introduce the stray sister to her station in the happy national family of America." Rhode Island represented the extreme of selfishness resulting from State control of commerce. Through her ports passed not only her own imports and products, but those of the adjacent parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts. This geographical situation of the State magnified her commercial interests, and made her unwilling to surrender them to the Union. The country people were equally wedded to paper money, and opposed every suggestion of giving over the right of issuing money exclusively to the Central Government. The State fell into disrepute. "Rhode Island can be relied upon for nothing that is good," said Madison in his despair. "In rebellion against integrity, plundering all the world by her paper money, and notorious for her uniform opposition to every federal duty," was the character given her by Governor Randolph, of Virginia, when by popular vote she refused to come into the Union under the Constitution. Fables were composed which described twelve people desirous of building a new house and hanging a recalcitrant thirteenth man by his garter to a limb near his cabin. A "Southern planter" was reported to have offered the services of his slaves to aid in shovelling Rhode Island into the sea.

North Carolina had also been late in assenting, but simply because her first convention was turned from immediate ratification by the temporary delusion of holding another constitutional convention to incorporate the proposed amendments in the Constitution. The general sentiment of the country had pronounced against running the risk of another convention which was unlikely to produce anything more acceptable. Hence the favourable action of North Carolina was simply a question of time necessary to call another convention. This State was doubly assured to the Federalists after favourable action in Virginia, to which she was closely bound by family ties. The hope was well grounded, for the first act, passed by the second session of the new Congress, in the autumn of 1789, was to extend the impost, tonnage, and other acts of the first session over North Carolina, whose ratification, without amendments, reached New York during the adjournment. Rhode Island was now the only recalcitrant. She still held out for individualism and complete sovereignty. Had Congress a right or the power to coerce her into the Union? Whatever action Congress might take was destined to become important in the later discussions upon the right of a State to withdraw from the partnership now being formed. Fortunately, the opinion of the House upon this point is beyond question. In the middle of the first session a motion made by a member from New York to take up the case of the rebellious Rhode Island had been voted down because it threatened a "delicate situation" for the House and was best left to time and the State itself. Although the recalcitrant sister was a maritime State, "situated in the most convenient manner for the purpose of smuggling and defrauding our revenue," nevertheless, as Madison said, "it would be improper to express a desire on an occasion when a free agency ought to be employed, which would carry with it all the force of a command." One searches equally in vain through the correspondence of the men at the head of government for suggestions of coercion. President Washington, although exasperated to a point where his Virginia temper declared that the majority of the people of Rhode Island had bid adieu to every principle of honour, common-sense, and decency, refused to send any message to the friends of the Constitution in that State other than his hopes that the Legislature would call a convention.

Nevertheless, it was impossible long to continue such an anomalous thing as a foreign State surrounded by the United States. The governor of Rhode Island had become alarmed and early sent to the President and Congress of the "eleven United States of America" assurance of the steadfast adherence of his State to the principles of the Confederation formed in the hour of danger, and begged that they should not be considered altogether as foreigners. Although Rhode Island was speaking a past language in such words, Congress by special enactment relieved her from all duties except on rum, loaf-sugar, and chocolate until January, 1790. When that time arrived, the governor pleaded for a renewal of the privilege, stating that the Legislature had just called a convention to reconsider the Constitution. Waiting several months longer, the Senate passed a bill by a vote of thirteen to eight to treat the goods of Rhode Island as if coming from a foreign country and to demand from her a sum of money to be credited to her account with the Union. In the midst of the consideration of this measure by the House, further action was stopped by the arrival of the official ratification of the Constitution by Rhode Island in a regular convention at Newport by the narrow majority of two votes. "This event," wrote Washington to one of his European correspondents, "will enable us to make a fair experiment of a Constitution which was framed solely with a view to promote the happiness of a people. Its effects have hitherto equalled the expectations of its most sanguine friends." Rhode Island escaped being coerced into the Union by an act of Congress; but she was coerced by the higher law of self-preservation. Surrounded by States in the Union, cut off from the natural channels of trade with them, she must have perished of commercial starvation in the growing trade of the nation, if she had been subjected to the discriminations which Congress placed on the commerce of foreign nations.

The adoption of an efficient government and the institution of a central control produced an immediate effect on commerce. Interstate strife ceased. In eighteen months more than twenty million dollars' worth of goods had gone abroad. Great Britain and her dependencies bought almost one-half these American products and produce, with France a second. Then came Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Africa, the East Indies, and Sweden in decreasing order. Even the northwest coast of North America purchased some ten thousand dollars' worth of goods from the new republic. Tobacco, rice, flour, wheat, and corn were the chief articles of export. Manufactured articles were of minor value. The total amount of iron sent out was little over three thousand tons, as against three hundred thousand tons exported in 1900. Furniture to the value of $8351 went abroad, of which $30 worth went to Spain and the remainder to the West Indies.

During this same first fiscal year under the new Government, dutiable goods to the amount of nearly seventy-four million dollars came into the various ports of the United States. Brown sugar from the French West Indies led the list, molasses from the same source ranking second. Tarred cordage from England came next, with coffee from the French West Indies, dried fish from Canada, distilled spirits from the British West Indies, in order. This revival of trade did much to quiet the predictions of those who still imagined the new Government must fail. The second year gave them still less ground to stand on. It showed that the United States custom-houses had collected over three million dollars on imported goods, the largest collections being in the State of Pennsylvania, with New York second, and Massachusetts third. This was a larger sum than had been realised from all taxable sources for the eight years preceding the Constitution government. Nearly $150,000 had been realised from charging tonnage upon vessels entering and leaving American ports. The future of the finances of the National Government was assured. Those who had so long begged that the power of collecting duties might be given to it now felt their judgment vindicated. The obligation incurred to France for loans and supplies amounting to over ten million dollars, a debt of honour especially pressing, was being paid so rapidly that by 1795 the entire balance was advanced and the obligation cancelled.

Prospects brightened for the future. "I sincerely rejoice in the prosperity of your country," wrote Hartley, from London, to Jay, with whom he had negotiated the peace of 1783. "You must not expect to find it otherwise than checkered with good and ill; such is the lot of human life. To be as happy as any people in the world is a lot you must not expect to exceed." In reply Jay said: "Whether the United States will be more or less happy than other nations, God only knows; I am inclined to think they will be, because in my opinion more light and knowledge are diffused through the mass of the people of this country than any other." Brissot de Warville, a French traveller, was impressed by the American vessels venturing to the North-west coast for furs and peltry. Thinking that point not far from the head of the Mississippi, he predicted that Americans would soon find a short intracontinental way to the Pacific. He also predicted that these traders would soon open a new route between the Atlantic and the Pacific by the lake of Nicaragua. "No sea is impenetrable," he said, "to the navigating genius of the Americans. You see their flag everywhere displayed; you see them exploring all islands, studying their wants, and returning to supply them."

External commerce was not allowed to monopolise the attention of the Americans, now at peace with the world and themselves. The Constitution gave to the Central Government the exercise and care of several functions heretofore left to the States. As rapidly as possible, a mint was established to produce gold, silver, and copper coins. Laws punishing the counterfeiting of the coin were passed. The existing military system was recognised and the postal establishment with the routes and offices of the previous year adopted. The pensions paid to invalided veterans of the wars by the States were assumed by the nation. Commissioners were appointed to treat with Indians in the United States territories. Provision for making a count of the people was made. Steps for the adequate protection of the frontier were taken. Commissioners were appointed to lay out the capital city on lands granted by Virginia and Maryland. The provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, modified to meet the new conditions, were re-enacted.

Of less importance than many of these functions bestowed by the Constitution on the Federal Government, but even farther-reaching, was the indefinite power to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" by encouraging authors and inventors. The right of an inventor to a protection on his product had been saved from the monopolies so freely granted to companies in the time of James I. It was one of the birthrights of Englishmen brought to the American colonies. The right of an author to the benefit of his productions was allowed in the common law. Colonial legislatures had been accustomed to encourage both authors and inventors by rewards of money as well as by exclusive rights for a limited term of years. The Legislatures of various States continued the practice after the Revolution, although there was no system of inter-recognition of patents between the States. Fitch, the steam-navigation experimenter, secured exclusive rights on his steamboat from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, and even then was unprotected in the remaining States. This power so evidently belonged to the national instead of State governments, that it was never questioned in the convention, although it had not been included in the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, so essential was the necessity for the development of home resources felt to be that at one time the convention had considered transferring from the States to the Federal Government the general practice of "establishing public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures."

This paternalism was eventually confined in the Constitution to patents and copyrights. Within a fortnight after the beginning of the House sessions, David Ramsey, the South Carolina historian, petitioned Congress for the sole right to sell his books for a limited term of years. He was followed by Hannah Adams, the Massachusetts writer, Jedediah Morse, the geographer, and others. Instead of granting such petitions by individual bills, as the State Legislatures had done, Congress enacted a general copyright law which gave to any applicant exclusive control of his writings for fourteen years.

Simultaneously with the petition from Ramsey, which led to the first copyright law, came one from John Churchman asking for exclusive right to sell spheres, maps, charts, and tables on the principles of magnetism which he had invented after "several years' labour, close application, and great expense." Soon after came requests for such rights from Fitch for a boat propelled by steam, from Rumsey for one propelled by setting poles, and from Stroebel for another to run on wheels without the use of oars. Other inventors asked for patents on a machine for raising water to run a waterwheel, on one for making nails, for producing power by using a weight, for curing the bite of a mad dog, for counting the revolutions of a wheel, for a reaper and thresher, and for a lightning-rod on an umbrella. In the second session Congress passed an act making the members of the Cabinet, except the busy Secretary of the Treasury, a board to hear petitions and to grant sole rights to inventors for fourteen years.

The necessity for uniform action deprived the States of both copyright and patent control and gave it to the central agency—powers trivial in themselves, but potent in the unforeseen work of transferring the trust and gratitude of men of learning and ability from their several States to the Union. "The encouragement of learning" is sufficiently indefinite to become a giant by interpretation. This was apparent in the very first session of Congress. To his petition concerning his magnetic maps and charts, Churchman had added a prayer for "the patronage of Congress" in undertaking a voyage to Baffin's Bay for studying the cause of the variation of the magnetic needle—a problem handed down from Columbus. The proposition was defeated in the House, although only five to eight hundred dollars was suggested, because of the deranged condition of the national finances. Only one member expressed a doubt as to the constitutional power of Congress to do more than reward inventors by patents. Although the Constitution explicitly confined the encouragement to granting of exclusive rights to the use of the invention, the cause of defeat was not the lack of constitutional power, but the lack of means.

Washington, the friend in Virginia of every movement for the public benefit, showed no fear lest Government assume too much power in this particular. Years before, he had voted in the Legislature of his own State to give exclusive right to a stage-owner to carry passengers over a road because "he had expended a considerable sum of money in the purchase of carriages and horses ... which will be productive of considerable public convenience and utility ... and therefore it is reasonable that he should possess for a reasonable time any emoluments resulting therefrom." Once, in complaining to Jay that the Postmaster-General under the Confederation had delayed the Virginia mails by using horses and showing an antipathy to patronising the stages, Washington had said: "It has often been understood by wise politicians and enlightened patriots that giving a facility to the means of travelling for strangers and of intercourse for citizens was an object of legislative concern and a circumstance highly beneficial to any country." Now, in his message to the second session of the First Congress, he took occasion to suggest to the members "the advancement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures," and "the promotion of science and literature." He advised them to consider whether these desirable objects could be "best promoted by affording aids to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedient." These simple and, at the time, unsuspected phases of paternalism must not be ignored in an examination of the growth of the Union. The most rigid of the strict-construction Presidents became helpless before them, or never foresaw their possibilities. From such small beginnings came the various scientific expeditions, the investigations for the benefit of agriculture, the printing and distribution of books, the distribution of garden seeds, the vast donations of land and money for higher education, and the many other ways in which the Union has expanded under no other warrant than the simple requirement in the Constitution that Congress "promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

In his early messages to Congress, Washington was accustomed to call the attention of members to "facilitating the intercourse between distant parts of our country by a due attention to the post-offices and post roads." This was no new power given to the Central Government as was the right to encourage learning, but it had even more possibilities of extension through interpretation. The monopoly of carrying the mails, now generally claimed by all governments, may be traced to the assumed prerogatives of the Stuarts in England. A few attempts had been made in the dependent days by individual colonies to regulate the carriage of letters, but the provisions of an act of Parliament in Queen Anne's reign for appointing deputy postmasters- general in the colonies placed the posts directly under the care of the royal Government.

The use of the mails without government censorship was essential to the patriots in the American Revolution for carrying out their plans. Nearly a year before independence, the Continental Congress set up a revolutionary postal system to replace the express riders which they had thus far used. Franklin, the colonial deputy for America, who had brought the posts to a high proficiency before he was dismissed for sympathising with his countrymen, was placed in charge. Gradually these "constitutional" post-riders and postmasters supplanted the royal officials, and Congress in time inherited the monopoly. The Articles sanctioned this assumption by giving Congress the sole and exclusive power over the transportation of the mails passing from one State to another, collecting sufficient postage to pay for the same, but tacitly leaving to each State the control of its internal postal system. So little did the postal system develop under this arrangement that, with the exception of an extension fortnightly to Pittsburg and the establishment of a few cross-lines, the main line in 1789, extending from Portland, in Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, had improved but little since Franklin established it years before. There were only seventy-five post-offices in the whole United States in 1789, and they collected less than $40,000 a year.

So essential to the intelligence and happiness of the people did a well-regulated postal system appear, and so properly an interstate agency, that no opposition was heard in the convention to that clause of the Constitution which said: "Congress shall have power to establish post-offices." In the second and in the final draft of the document the words "and post roads" were added, by a vote of six States to five, without debate, according to Madison's notes. In the series of papers now known as the Federalist, Madison, when attempting to quiet the fears of the people upon the possibility of the Central Government securing too much power under the Constitution, said of this provision: "The power of establishing post-roads must, in every view, be a harmless power." Little could he foresee that within ten years he would be called upon by his great chief, Jefferson, to decide whether "to establish" meant to lay out a road, to construct it, or simply to adopt an existing one. "Does the power to establish post roads given you by the Constitution mean that you shall make the roads or only select from those already made, those on which there shall be a post?" wrote Jefferson, taking Madison to task for this fresh assumption of power in the Congress of which the latter was a member. "We have thought hitherto that the roads of a state could not be so well administered even by the state legislature as by the magistracy of the county on the spot. How will it be when a member from New Hampshire is to make out a road for Georgia?" Really, the carrying of the mails was a power not expressed, but deduced, if fine distinctions were to be made.

Still another power was expressly given to the Union which had not existed under the Confederation and had never been exercised—the right to create new States from original soil; to speak into existence rivals of the agencies through which the Union itself had been created. When the States gave this right to the Central Government, they furnished a weapon most deadly to their continued supremacy. "No state shall be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States," declared the Articles. It was to guard against this danger that the States in ceding their western land, and the Central Government in accepting it, had mutually agreed to convert it into States of a limited size as rapidly as population would warrant. As has been shown, unsuccessful steps had been taken under the Confederation to carry out this agreement, "without the least colour of constitutional authority," as Hamilton said in the Federalist.

The law of balance, if not of retribution, finds an illustration in the manner in which the fear of the States lest they give the Union too much power over the lands led eventually to a greater loss of power. Their jealousy of each other prevented the land being held by any one of them. They could not hold it severally, neither could they so dispose of it. When they thought of converting it in time into new States, no workable plan could be devised for such a disposition unless they acted jointly. The control had to be given to the Union. For these reasons, the Union became the parent of all the States except the original thirteen and Texas. It was inevitable that the sympathy of the people during the preliminary condition of a Territory should be weaned away from the original States and their allegiance gradually transferred to their benefactor, the Union. Unfortunately for State supremacy, the process did not end, as then seemed probable, with the Mississippi, but was prolonged for a century by new accessions of territory.

The new Congress had not long to wait for an opportunity of fulfilling the promise made almost ten years before. In his second message, the President sent to Congress a petition for statehood from an authorised convention of the people inhabiting the district of Kentucky, together with a permission to that end from the parent State, Virginia. Both papers had been inherited from the old Congress. As the President said, they contained "sentiments of warm attachment to the Union and its present government." Such a happy termination of the sixteen years' contest between the trans-Alleghenians and their parent State, as well as such a final contradiction to the repeated rumours of the secession of Kentucky, caused the speedy enactment of a law "that upon the aforesaid first day of June, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two, the said new state by the name and style of the state of Kentucky shall be received and admitted into this Union as a new and entire member of the United States of America." A few days later it was decreed in another simple law that Vermont should be admitted on March 4, 1791. New York, the parent State, had agreed to release her on payment of thirty thousand dollars. Vermont secured the prior admission because her application named no day, as that of Kentucky did. In the creation of these two States, the nascent Union was not only adding to its strength, but was removing for ever two of the most alarming cases of possible secession which had thus far menaced it.



CHAPTER X

FIRST LESSONS IN NATIONAL OBEDIENCE



Although the first years under an efficient form of national control were remarkably successful, inspiring what was really the first confidence in the free government of America, it was not to be expected that all difficulties were to be avoided, especially if the new form assumed a vigorous and capable management. Heretofore domestic violence had threatened local government only, because the national administration was too inefficient to come in contact with disorder. If the National Government should now attempt to enforce its laws, the very action must sooner or later bring it into conflict with recalcitrants in some section, as well as with the naturally lawless. Even the understanding that local policing was to be left to local government would not restrain an efficient national administration from meeting such a crisis vigorously. Indeed, the action of the nation in such an emergency would determine whether it was at the mercy of State aid and protection or whether it could care for itself.

If one were attempting to predict at what point of national administration rebellion would arise, he would no doubt choose taxation. The hostility of the people toward taxation, possibly engendered in the Revolutionary days, and exaggerated by human nature, has been described in previous pages. One of the objections to the Constitution had been that the people could now be taxed by two agencies, State and nation, thereby involving double taxes. The resistance to the excise tax, which began to be manifest in a small way soon after its institution in 1791, bore a striking resemblance to the rebellion against the stamp-tax levied by Britain upon the colonists a generation before. A tax levied on imported goods, collected at the ports, quietly added to the original cost, and, therefore, a kind of external tax, is never so objectionable as one paid directly out of hand, and hence an internal tax. So little in evidence is an external tax that the people are sometimes beguiled into questioning whether the producer or the consumer pays the tax. An internal tax, levied on distilled liquors, whiskey, rum, brandy, and gin, was no more a novelty in the early days of the Constitution than was a stamp-tax in 1765. Being accustomed to having it levied by the local government in each instance, it became objectionable when laid by the superior power. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania had used an excise as a means of raising revenue. The people in the western part of the latter State had several times resisted its imposition by the State Legislature, but the penalties imposed upon their lawlessness had generally been remitted by the governor, and the law had been finally repealed. "The Legislature has been obliged to wink at the violation of her excise laws in the western parts of the state ever since the Revolution," confessed a United States Senator from that State.

The Constitution clearly stated the power of Congress to lay and collect both imposts and excises. From the beginning of his reports upon available sources of revenue, Hamilton had suggested a special impost upon imported liquors and an excise upon those manufactured in the United States. He fully realised that the word "excise" was obnoxious to citizens who had migrated from Scotland and Ireland, where the tax was imposed by a superior force, and in England as well, where it had been known since Cromwell's day. To these people it meant not only a tax on liquors, but on candles, salt, vinegar, and other forms of domestic manufacture. It meant a license to own a gun, and to peddle small wares. Not many years had passed since Samuel Johnson in his dictionary had defined it as "a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom it is paid." Added to these inherited prejudices of the Irish and Scotch-Irish settlers in western Pennsylvania against the excise was a local complaint that they lacked roads for transporting their grain across the mountains to market and were prohibited from floating it down to New Orleans both by the distance and by the hostility of the Spanish. Their surplus produce must rot unless it could be manufactured into spirits which could be consumed at home or carried to a market. A horse, it was said, could carry only four bushels of grain across the mountains; but he could take twenty-four bushels when converted into liquor. In that day, before the later temperance movements had created a different sentiment, whiskey was regarded as a necessary article of food as much as beef or bread. The amount of strong liquor used in the United States was estimated at two and one-half gallons per year for every man, woman, and child.

Although the consumption of liquor in the uplands of North Carolina was almost equal to that in western Pennsylvania, there were no such geographical causes for resistance to the General Government's excise. It was seen by the Administration that opposition would be most likely in the four western counties of Pennsylvania. That State had the most diverse elements of population. Its colonial history had been marked by racial and factional contests. It was now to have the unfortunate distinction of producing the first open resistance to the Federal Union. The disorder at first took the form of mobbing and intimidating collectors, destroying the property of distillers who complied with the law, and holding public meetings at which resolutions denouncing the laws of the Government were passed. During the two and a half years that the insurrectionary spirit increased, Congress twice modified the excise law in a vain attempt to conciliate its Pennsylvania opponents, who demanded a total repeal of the tax. To check the General Government the leaders of the insurrection threatened to secede, thus setting an early pattern for this form of intimidation.

"I am induced to believe," wrote one of them, "the three Virginia counties this side the mountain will fall in. The first measure then will be the reorganization of a new government, comprehending the three Virginia counties and those of Pennsylvania to the westward, to what extent I know not... Being then on an equal footing with other parts of the Union, if they submit to the law, this country might also submit."

With such a spirit of combination against the Federal Government as these words indicated, the supporters of the national power cast about to find what provisions had been made for enforcing the national laws. The Constitution gave the command of the army and navy to the President; but the peace establishment, on which the army had been put at the close of the war, placed at his service an inadequate force. The necessity for economising, as well as the fear of a standing army, had kept the army down to five regiments of infantry and one battalion of cavalry. This force was required constantly on the frontier and could not be spared to suppress domestic insurrection. In such a defenceless condition, the Union must turn to the militia of the various States.

The Constitution had provided for such an emergency in a general way by making the President the head "of the militia of the several states when called into the actual service of the United States." Here was opportunity in working out the details for the individualists to protect themselves against the unjust use of the militia by restricting the circumstances under which it could be called into the actual service of the Federal Government. Unfortunately for them, measures for the proper defence of the frontier were necessary from the beginning of the new Government. Since the frontier lay so largely in the United States territories, its defence belonged to that authority and not to any State. Under certain limits of time and distance, the President had been authorised in various laws to employ State militia on the frontier. The Secretary of War eventually drew up a plan for organising uniformly the militia of the States into a national defence, believing, as he said, that "an energetic militia is to be regarded as the capital security of a free republic, and not a standing army, forming a distinct class in the community."

In drafting the militia law of 1792, in accord with the recommendations of Knox, the President was authorised to call out the militia of any State "whenever the laws of the United States should be opposed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." This efficient clause was productive of a prolonged debate in each branch and a conference between the two. Its opponents made various efforts to substitute the Legislature of a State as the agency for calling out the militia, to require a previous notice to the President from a justice that the laws could not be enforced, and to have a session of Congress intervene before the President could march the militia of one State into another. The fear of giving the central power an excuse for maintaining a standing army had led the framers of the Constitution to incorporate a clause placing the militia at national service only for the purpose of executing its laws, suppressing insurrection, and repelling invasion. Of these emergencies, Congress was to be the judge. Should the dangerous authority now be given over to the Executive? The long intermissions between sessions of Congress made such delegating imperative. The Shays rebellion had left its lesson. Yet, according to one speaker, the measure seemed to suppose that only the General Government possessed the power to suppress insurrections, whereas the States individually certainly possessed this power and would execute it. Another thought it an insult to the majesty of the people to hold out the idea that it may be necessary to execute the laws at the point of the bayonet. "If an old woman," cried a disgusted member of the minority, "was to strike an excise officer with a broomstick, forsooth the military is to be called out to suppress an insurrection."

Finally, by a close vote in each House, the United States was given power through its Chief Executive to call forth the militia of the several States. The action made a connecting ligament between the national body politic and the arm of a widespread and always prepared force. The militia proved most effective in preserving the sovereignty of the National Government in domestic affairs until the regular troops were relieved from the duty of guarding the frontier. Unquestionably, the measures pending at the same time for the protection of the frontier and the inquiry into the defeat of General St. Clair in the North-Western Territory did much to hasten the passage of the militia bill.

Being thus fortified against domestic insurrection and resistance to its laws, the decision whether the new Government would be more successful in these particulars than its predecessor depended entirely upon the attitude of its administrators. It was fortunate for the people of the United States and the growth of the Union that Hamilton was at the head of the department in which the first resistance to the laws occurred. A secretary less devoted to the aggrandisement of the central authority, more careful of the reserved rights of the individual, or more temporising by nature, might have attempted to check the well-known predilection of his chief for vigorous enforcement of the laws instead of constantly urging him thereto. If Hamilton and Jefferson had exchanged secretaryships, the story of the United States would have been vastly different. Hamilton had time to time notified the President that his departmental collectors were interfered with in the execution of their duties in the districts of western Pennsylvania. He wanted to use the full force of the Government against offenders. "Moderation enough has been shown," said he. "It is time to assume a different tone." The spirit was spreading to other parts. The Federal officials of both North and South Carolina warned him that the disaffection was extending to those States.

From the standpoint of the Union it was also fortunate that a military man was President. Those who criticised the choice for the Presidency of a man with military experience but no civic training, and those who deplore a custom so frequently repeated since, may find here some benefits arising from having a man with such an education. "I have no hesitation in declaring," replied Washington to Secretary Hamilton, when notified of the resistance manifested in western Pennsylvania to the revenue officers, "that I shall, however reluctantly exercising them, exert all the legal powers with which the executive is invested to check so daring and unwarrantable a spirit. It is my duty to see the laws executed." Very carefully the soldier-President felt his way through his civic powers of coercion before using his military authority in this first of several cases of preserving the Union against insurrection. There was absolutely no precedent for the coercion of citizens by the National Government. The Federal courts had not yet come into conflict with any considerable number of citizens of a State. But they extended as a judicial network over the whole national domain. They covered every inhabitant. To them Washington turned first. Although Attorney-General Knox decided that the insurgent meetings were not illegal, several rioters were fined by the United States Circuit Court, special sessions of which were held in Pennsylvania.

The President showed his appreciation of the delicate adjustment between State and national authority by consulting the Governor of Pennsylvania at every step. If the State at this formative hour had possessed an executive confident in himself and in his ability to suppress the disorder, he might have done a lasting service to the preservation of the supremacy of the States and forestalled the prestige which the Central Government was bound to obtain from its leadership in this crisis. But Governor Mifflin was content to support the national authority, claiming that the militia of his State was inadequate to the emergency.

In the summer of 1794, the disorder broke out afresh, extending to the spoliation of the United States mail. The National Government dared hesitate no longer. Hamilton, by private letters and public reports, urged the President incessantly to action. His unusual foresight saw the opportunity for strengthening the nation. Weakness in the written Constitution might here be remedied by the precedent of strong action under it. At last a Federal judge of Pennsylvania notified the President that the laws could no longer be enforced in his district. Washington immediately issued the required proclamation of warning, which had been penned by Hamilton. Five weeks later, the Chief Executive called upon the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia for militia and issued a second proclamation commanding peace. He based this action on the constitutional provision requiring the Executive to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

The seat of the National Government being at Philadelphia, near the rendezvous of the militia, enabled the President to place himself at the head of the militia. No later President has interpreted so literally his office as commander-in-chief of the army. As he reached Bedford, Fort Cumberland, and other scenes of his campaigns against the French a half-century before, he must have compared that errand with his present one. Then he was saving helpless colonists from a foreign foe; now he was preserving a government from its own constituents.

"No citizens of the United States," he wrote to Governor Lee, of Virginia, when leaving him at the head of the militia in order to return to Philadelphia for the opening of Congress, "can ever be engaged in a service more important to their country. It is nothing less than to consolidate and to preserve the blessings of that revolution, which, at much expense of blood and treasure, constituted us a free and independent nation."

It was also fortunate that Washington had passed through some instructive experience in Revolutionary days on the disadvantages of an insufficient military force. To put down the small body of insurgents in the western borders of Pennsylvania he called for almost thirteen thousand militiamen. To a delegation of the insurgents who met him on the way to complain of such an armed force coming to conquer them, Washington replied that although we had made a republican form of government and enacted laws under it, yet we had given no testimony to the world of being able or willing to support our Government; that, this being the first instance of the kind since the commencement of the Government, he thought it his duty to bring out such a force as would not only be sufficient to subdue the insurgents if they made resistance, but to crush to atoms all opposition that might arise in any quarter.

Washington foresaw the effects of using the military power in behalf of the Union. "The most delicate and momentous duty the chief magistrate of a free people can have to perform," he called it. Early in the excise resistance he had declared that the Government must not use the regular troops if order could possibly be effected without this aid. "Otherwise," said he, "there would be a cry at once, 'The cat is let out; we now see for what purpose an army was raised!'" But individualistic spirits who were alarmed at this new distortion of the Government toward centralisation feared the results of using even the militia. Jefferson, having resigned his secretaryship and seeing the unusually prominent part assumed by Hamilton in the expedition, protested from his retirement at Monticello against such "employment of military force for civil purposes." To his mind the disorder was simply a riot and not an insurrection. "Yet it answered the purpose," said he, "of strengthening the government and increasing public debt and therefore an insurrection was announced." To Madison he declared: "The excise law is an infernal one. The first error was to admit it to the Constitution; the second, to act on that admission; the third and last will be to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union." Madison, who had at first looked upon the suppression of the insurrection as an electioneering scheme, thought it fortunate for the lovers of liberty that the movement was so easily crushed, since otherwise the principle would have been established that a standing army was necessary to enforce the Federal laws. "I am extremely sorry to remark," he wrote to Monroe during the ensuing session of Congress, "a growing apathy to the evil and danger of standing armies." This remark was brought out by the failure of the minority, with which Madison had now fully allied himself, to restrict the use hereafter of any militia to its own State. A "Federal army," the bugaboo of the opposition, had been brought into existence by this unwarranted use of the militia. Seven acts placing the military power of the United States on a permanent basis and giving the Central Government efficient control were passed at this session of 1795, the first fruits of the Western rebellion to be reaped by the Union. Madison accounted for this legislation by the influence of the Chief Executive and the confidence of the people that he would not abuse the power. What later Presidents might do could not be foreseen.

Outside the disaffected districts and with the exception of a few alarmed leaders like Jefferson and Madison, the people undoubtedly sustained Washington in his firm action against rebellion. An ode written for the birthday of the President in 1796 contains an allusion to his influence in suppressing the insurrection:

"When o'er the western mountain's brow, Sedition rear'd her impious head, And Tumult wild his legions led, Serenely great, the Patriot rose.— Yet in his breast conflicting throes Of mercy check'd the impending blows.

"He view'd them with a father's eye, Dimmed by thy tear, Humanity! Reluctant Justice half unsheathed the sword. Scar'd at the awful Sight, Sedition shrunk in realms of night, And Order saw her peaceful reign restored."

Giving the Central Government sufficient military strength was not the only result of the first open attempt to oppose it. Individualism had received a telling blow. The State was no longer inviolate. Objection had been raised in the trivial matter of creating districts for collecting the revenue because they disregarded State boundaries. It was now seen that the National Government could and would march militia directly to a place of resistance regardless of State lines. The people of the States were no longer safe from invasion by the power which they had created. Not only a respect for the United States laws, taxes, courts, and officers was created by the incident, but the fidelity of the militia, residents of different States, to the central authority was assured. Jay was at this time on his celebrated mission to England to prevent war with that nation, if possible. To him Washington sent enthusiastic accounts of the people turning out to show their abhorrence of the insurrection. He said that some of the officers had disregarded rank and that others had gone as privates. He told of numbers of men, possessed of the first fortunes of the country, yet willing to stand in ranks, to carry knapsacks, and sleep on straw in soldiers' tents with a single blanket on frosty nights. Evidently the spirit of Valley Forge had not been lost. Five times the number could have been secured, he said, to preserve the peace of the country. He also hazarded a prediction that the failure of the insurrection would have a deterrent effect on the political clubs, which he blamed almost entirely for the inception of the insurgent spirit.



CHAPTER XI

NATIONAL PARTIES ON FOREIGN ISSUES



The Democratic clubs, which Washington scored so roundly, and so unjustly as Jefferson thought, were simply reflexes of one phase of the French Revolution. They serve to illustrate not only how dependent America was upon Europe for political guidance and how strong was European influence in America, but also that early parties were factions along social lines of cleavage rather than divisions on national policies.

Caste is always a relative thing. The patriots who inaugurated and led to success the American Revolution had been, generally speaking, of an inferior social rank to the Tories. Washington is regarded as a striking exception. Yet his fame rested solely upon his early military record. He was never a part of the gay life at Williamsburg. The royal governor was at the head of the Court and set the social standard. The patriots, being opposed to him, were placed in an inferior social position. But when once the governors had been driven out and the Tories had been subjugated or exiled, the patriots became the ruling or superior class. Immediately a new inferior class arose, hostile to the Administration. Thus it came about that Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jay, the former democrats, were changed into aristocrats in the eyes of Jefferson, Madison, and the present democrats.

The new democrats were in full sympathy with the effort made in France to abolish the nobility, and imitated the Democratic clubs which were established there on the basis of "liberty, equality, and fraternity." Having no nobility to abolish in America, they declared war upon such titles as "His Excellency the President," or "His Honour the Mayor," and even "Reverend" and "Esquire." These they would replace by a uniform "Citizen." Record is to be found of some twenty-four of these local Democratic societies, scattered from Maine to South Carolina and westward to Kentucky. Their object, as set forth by a Vermont society, was "the promotion of real and genuine Republicanism, unsullied and uncontaminated with the smallest spark of monarchical or aristocratic principles." They pledged themselves to the "utmost exertions to support the rational and equal rights of man."

Like all movements depending upon enthusiasm, the Democratic societies went to the bounds of extravagance. Taking offence at a tavern sign in Philadelphia, they were not content until the proprietor had painted a red streak about the neck of Marie Antoinette to denote the work of the guillotine. A waxworks in the same city drew large crowds to witness a representation of the execution of Louis XVI. According to the advertisement, "The knife falls, the head drops, and the lips turn blue. The whole is performed to the life by an invisible machine, without any perceivable assistance." Children were admitted at half price. A bust of George III., which had stood through the intense feeling engendered by the Revolution, was now mutilated. At Democratic banquets, a boar's head, representing the head of Louis XVI., was passed about to be stabbed by the guests.

The resolutions adopted by the local societies frequently concerned local grievances. The Kentucky club protested against the Spanish claim to the exclusive control of the lower Mississippi, and a club in western Pennsylvania paid its respects to the collection of the excise tax. Nevertheless, it should be said that many societies in other States deprecated the resistance to the National Government in that quarter. In view of this fact, Jefferson thought Washington unjust in attributing the insurrection to the encouragement of the clubs.

There was a more practical aim in the associations than the adoption of resolutions. They hoped to unite the local bodies in a national association which should bring the State and eventually the nation into sympathy with France and her struggle for liberty. "France caught the divine fire of liberty from us," said one society. "Shall we now withhold ourselves from her?" The varying responses to this question brought about eventually the rise of political parties in the United States.

Three well-defined periods have marked political parties in the Republic. The first epoch turned, as indicated above, entirely upon the choice of sides in the war between France and England, which followed the proclamation of the French Republic, September 21, 1792. The second period, following the close of the War of 1812, the end of foreign dominance, was produced by differences of opinion upon the constitutional powers of the National Government. It was foreshadowed by several constitutional debates in the first period. The Civil War, by an appeal to the sword, decided the majority of these constitutional doubts in favour of the Union. Since that time, a third phase of party government has been developed, purely on grounds of expediency in domestic and foreign control.

Political parties, therefore, are peculiarly dependent upon public opinion. They are creatures of sentiment. They possess no power save that of persuasion as to the proper lines of conducting the administration. Choosing positions on great questions largely from previous policy, they must appeal to the people for justification and support. They live by opposition. No party can exist alone. In their modern aspect, political parties were unknown in Revolutionary days. Whig and Tory were simply reflections from the parties in England supporting or opposing the Administration. There were divisions among men, largely of a social nature; "court and country" parties, as John Adams called them in reminiscence. The royal governor, surrounded by his place-men and followers, residing in the city and opposed by the rural element, represented the monarch. The opposition became the patriotic party of the Revolution. After a decade, the patriots themselves divided into Federalists and Anti-Federalists upon the advisability of changing from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. These divisions were not political parties in the modern sense. Neither developed any policy of administration or offered any candidate for office at the time.

When the Constitution was finally adopted, the Anti-Federalists ceased their opposition. Since the impetus of adopting the new Government was sufficient to place its supporters in power, its enemies held off and awaited the day of failure when they should have the pleasure of saying, "I told you so." In a few instances they made a demonstration, as when Patrick Henry, according to Madison's belief, had Virginia redistricted in order to keep him out of the Senate. After the new venture had passed beyond the experimental stage under the Federalist party, the name "Anti-Federalist" gradually passed from use. As policies of administration were developed, an opposition was bound to be formed, and thus modern political parties were born. A preliminary line-up was caused by Hamilton's measure for a government bank; but the real cleavage was produced by opposing opinions concerning the side which the United States should take in the war between France and England.

If Great Britain, toward whom the animosity of the recent war was still strong, had not been a monarchy, or if the revolution which changed our Revolutionary benefactress, France, into a republic, had happened in England, or if the French Revolution had not so closely followed in form the change in the United States from monarchy to republicanism, party animosity in America would have been checked instead of advanced by the Old World contest. The same end might have been reached if John Adams had been sent as Minister to France and Thomas Jefferson to England. But Britain being the token of centralisation, the general tendency of the United States toward unionism seemed to Jefferson to be the certain road to monarchism. This he conceived to be the ultimate aim of Hamilton, born in the British West Indies, and Adams, who had returned from Britain with his obnoxious theory that the "well-born" ought to rule the remainder of the people.

The attempt of France, on the contrary, to secure the rights of man, with which Jefferson had grown familiar during his residence in that country, appealed to him both from a national and a personal standpoint. "I still hope," he said in one of those periods of French excess which bade fair to ruin the whole, "that the French Revolution will issue happily. I feel that the permanence of our own leans in some degree on that, and that a failure there would be a powerful argument to prove that there must be a failure here." "A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious," said Hamilton, in giving a Cabinet opinion that the treaty made with France in 1778 had been annulled by the abrogation of the monarchy and the execution of Louis XVI. "But if sullied by crimes and extravagance it loses respectability. It appears, thus far, too probable that the pending Revolution in France has sustained some serious blemishes." In another place he voiced the sentiments of the anti-French by saying that thus far no proof had come to light sufficient to establish a belief that the execution of the King was an act of national justice. But the French sympathisers thought otherwise. "If he was a traitor he ought to be punished as well as another man," wrote Madison to Jefferson, quoting the sentiment among the plain people of Virginia.

Public sentiment in the United States was thus crystallising into political parties on the policy to be pursued toward the new French Republic. One faction was of the opinion that the people of the United States were bound to aid the new sister not only by the sympathy of a common struggle for liberty, but by the still stronger bonds of gratitude for assistance in gaining their own freedom. They considered the alliance of 1778, which France had signed at the expense of a war with England, as still binding upon the United States. It pledged the United States to guarantee France in the possession of her West Indies, to admit her ships with prizes to American ports, to keep out those of the enemy, and to prohibit the enemy from using American ports to fit out privateers. From this last provision, some friends of France deduced the opinion that it tacitly gave her permission to fit out privateers by denying the right to her enemies.

Hamilton and others, who thought the French movement, begun for the sake of liberty, was deteriorating into a frenzied propaganda destructive of rights and property, insisted that the change of government in France had abrogated all claims which the alliance gave to monarchical France; that, even if this were not so, the United States was pledged to aid her only in a defensive war, and this war with England was entirely offensive on her part; that to give aid to the maddened revolutionists was to identify ourselves irrevocably with destructive fanatics, bloody regicides, and wild propagandists. These zealots, they said, had already pledged themselves to treat as enemies any people "who, refusing or renouncing liberty and equality, are desirous of preserving their prince or privileged castes, or of entering into an accommodation with them." Our forefathers had been satisfied with securing liberty for themselves without trying to impose it on all other nations. It was this proselyting spirit which caused their war against Britain. Hence, the anti-French element allied itself with England. That nation was rapidly being forced into a position where she alone would stand between French fanaticism and the disruption of all society. These pro-British were, in the eyes of the French sympathisers, base ingrates, as culpable as a nation would have been who sided with Great Britain during the Revolutionary War.

Divided into these hostile factions during this summer of 1792, the United States reached the first parting of the ways upon her foreign policy. Hitherto she had been of small moment to European nations, touching them only on boundary questions connected with the New World. But in the mighty struggle between one people bursting the bands of centuries of repression and monarchical rule, and another nation in authority who saw prerogative, property, and person in danger from the deluge, the United States would become important as a place for fitting out and as a base of food-supply. Belligerents in the heat of war are not inclined to be over-regardful of the rights of non-combatants. To maintain a strict neutrality had been well-nigh impossible in the history of European nations. In nearly every war of the past, kingdom after kingdom had become involved. The "armed neutrality," headed by Russia during the American Revolutionary War, was formed by non-maritime nations ostensibly to protect their commerce from the belligerents; but in reality to gather up the fragments of trade as they were scattered by the warring sea powers.

The United States was fortunately located for announcing and maintaining a new idea of neutrality, a nationality based on individual development through peaceful methods. Time alone was needed in their isolated geographical condition to develop an industrial strength more efficient in Europe than an armed force at that time As Washington said, just before issuing a proclamation warning all citizens of the United States neither to aid nor to carry contraband goods to either belligerent: "I believe it is the sincere wish of America to have nothing to do with the political intrigues or the squabbles of European nations; but, on the contrary, to exchange commodities and live in peace and amity with all the inhabitants of the earth." To another he made the prediction that "if we are permitted to improve without interruption the great advantages which nature and circumstances have placed within our reach, many years will not revolve before we may be ranked, not only among the most respectable, but among the happiest people on this globe." Notwithstanding the demands of the French sympathisers that the United States should anticipate the payments due on the French debt, should allow French privateers to be fitted out in American ports and prizes to be brought in and sold, and regardless of the insolent demands of the French Minister, Genet, and the haughty tone of the Republic he represented, President Washington issued the proclamation, April 22, 1793, warning the citizens of the United States to take no part in the war. He was aided in maintaining this neutrality by the continued trespass of each belligerent on American rights. If either had suddenly shown any regard for the neutral position of the young American Republic, sentiment would have demanded immediate war upon the other. But when England tried to cut off the supplies which France was receiving from America, France adopted similar tactics toward England. Each accused the other of instituting these war measures. Between the two millstones, American commerce bade fair to be ground to powder. Britain, in order to recruit her navy, revived her practice of retaking her seamen who had deserted, wherever they might be found. She took a large number of men from American vessels, some of whom claimed to be American citizens instead of British deserters. This system of impressment she continued until it resulted in the War of 1812. Her refusal to yield possession of the forts on the American side of the boundary line remained as an additional grievance.

So strong was the hostile feeling toward England, that if the French revolutionists had not plunged into such excesses as to compel their most ardent admirers to pause, the firm hand of Washington could scarcely have prevented a declaration of war against Britain instead of the temporary embargo which was adopted. As it was, a non-intercourse measure was killed in the Senate only by the deciding vote of Vice-President Adams. A war at this time, when the new Government had scarcely gotten upon its feet, when it was still obliged to borrow money from Holland to meet its expenses, when its borders were harassed by hostile savages and its forts occupied by the enemy, would have been ruinous if not suicidal. A foreign war would have been fatal to the adopted policy of a disinterested neutrality, not dependent upon force, and to an uninterrupted home development which was to continue for over a century. Neither the clamour nor defamation of the Democratic clubs, nor the insinuations of the opposition press that the President was biassed toward a monarchy because he wished eventually to transform his office into a kingship, could drive the cool Washington from his stand of neutrality. It was such self-control which drew from England's Minister, Canning, many years after, the tribute: "If I wished for a guide in a system of neutrality, I should take that laid down by America in the days of the presidency of Washington and the secretaryship of Jefferson."

Jefferson was worn out by the onerous duties of his office during this period of dominant foreign politics. He was harassed by constant complaints of impressments and seizures. He was placed in an unfortunate position by the presumptions of Genet. Distressed by the license into which liberty in France was plunging he received small comfort in contemplating the British monarchical tendency in America. He was greatly disappointed because Washington, whom he had pronounced at first "purely and zealously republican," had been so frequently influenced by Hamilton and Knox in the Cabinet, by John Adams in the Senate, and by John Jay in the Supreme Court. These were all Northern men and all in favour of effective government. Most statesmen cling more closely to the vessel during a time of party danger, but Jefferson chose to withdraw, believing his continuance in office useless, and trusting, as he said, that the people could not be permanently led away from the true principles of government. After his withdrawal, this monarchical tendency seemed to him to have no check. The President, instead of advising war upon Great Britain both to avenge her insults upon us and to aid the French Republic, sent John Jay to England as a special envoy to try to secure some concessions from her. Jay eventually sent home a treaty, which provided for the evacuation of the Western forts, for a commission to consider payment for the slaves carried away upon the evacuation of New York, and for the withdrawal of the discriminating tax on American shipping; but it purchased commercial entrance to the British West Indies at the expense of Southern commodities. Above all, it made no mention of impressment, of the search of American vessels, and the hindrance of their neutral trade.

"Further concessions," wrote Jay to his friends in America, "on the part of Great Britain cannot, in my opinion, be attained. If this treaty fails, I despair of another. I knew and know that no attainable settlement or treaty would give universal satisfaction. Men are more apt to think of what they wish to have than of what is in their power to obtain."

Hamilton, who had followed Jefferson's example and retired from Washington's Cabinet, yet virtually remained at the head of the party, advised the acceptance of the Jay treaty. "It closes," said he, "and upon the whole as reasonably as could have been expected, the controverted points between the two countries. The terms are in no way inconsistent with national honor."

Jefferson, Madison, and their followers believed, on the contrary, that the adoption of the treaty would violate all national honour in practically dissolving the French alliance of 1778 and would bind the United States to monarchical England warring on republican France. The proclamation of neutrality from Washington had not been so hard to bear, since it took sides with neither belligerent; but the Jay treaty, it was said, would array America against the cause of liberty. The French and British factions were resolved to put the matter to the test in the Senate. From this time may be dated the beginning of political parties in the United States. Feeling ran high. Jay was burned in effigy in many cities and the treaty ridiculed and villified in the Republican prints. Hamilton was mobbed in New York, and Vice-President John Adams armed himself against personal violence.

The ratification of the Jay treaty by exactly the required two-thirds vote in the Senate showed the relative strength of the two parties at the time, although the Senate changes more slowly than the House. The success of the treaty advocates allowed Washington to close his eight years in peace with England. Pinckney, whom he had sent to Madrid at the same time he sent Jay to London, succeeded in securing a treaty with Spain. Nearly twenty years had been spent in gaining this first acknowledgment from the Castilian. It provided for establishing a permanent boundary-line between the United States and the Spanish Floridas, arranged a control over the troublesome Indians living near the line, and assured to American traders the privilege of using the port of New Orleans as a place of trans-shipment for their produce. If the port of New Orleans should be closed, another port was to be opened to them. The Americans seemed to have succeeded, after more than ten years' effort, in getting the privilege of using the lower Mississippi.

This Treaty of 1795 with Spain, although overshadowed by the contemporaneous Jay Treaty, was extremely important in American diplomatic history. Not only did it quiet the discontent of the Western people and terminate foreign intrigue in that quarter, but it affected, strangely enough, the future history of the lower Mississippi. From the time of the Pinckney Treaty, France was unceasing in her efforts to persuade Spain to give over to her care the Louisiana province, which embraced New Orleans, insisting that she was the only power strong enough to check the advance of the United States and save the rest of the Spanish possessions in America. Three years later these arguments prevailed. Louisiana was transferred to France, and very soon fell into the hands of the Americans.

Washington had closed some of the most troublesome foreign questions which he had inherited from Confederation days. The new republic was beginning to make a place for itself among the nations. Treaties of amity and commerce had been made with all the maritime nations. American ministers were to be seen at the principal European Courts. Britain, France, Spain, and Holland had honoured the new power by sending representatives to Philadelphia. The entire diplomatic horizon was clear except in the French portion, where the Jay Treaty was bound to give offence. Under its tacit permission, as the French sympathisers claimed, more than three hundred American vessels were captured within the next twelvemonth, and over one thousand American seamen impressed by Britain. During the same period only three vessels and a few sailors were taken by France.

In its domestic relations, also, the United States, as the time of Washington's second term drew to a close, was exceedingly prosperous. The new Government was in full operation. No one longer questioned its success or its fitness for the task before it. Fears for individual rights had been quieted by the adoption of ten amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing the continuance of such birthrights as freedom of conscience, trial by jury, free possession of property, and habeas corpus. The Union had come off victorious in its first case of discipline. It had made practical demonstration that its laws would be enforced and that it could use State militia regardless of State lines in enforcing them. Its system of judges and marshals extended over the entire domain. Its Supreme Court had sustained the claim of a citizen of South Carolina against the State of Georgia. State sovereignty had received a blow and national supremacy an impulse. The Superior Court had also declared that a treaty of the United States predominated over a State law, and that no State could confiscate a debt owed to a British subject. According to another decision, the United States District Courts were sustained in their admiralty jurisdiction over the State courts. The validity and authority of a presidential proclamation was established by the prosecution in the circuit court at Richmond of an offender against Washington's neutrality proclamation. But the decision during Washington's administration which especially made for the Union was in the case of Penhallow v. Doane's executors, which sustained all the actions of the old Congress both during the Revolutionary period and under the Articles, and made its decisions final in cases of appeal from State tribunals. Thus was the national sovereignty, by a single decision, extended backward over local government to the very beginnings of independency and, at the same time, established for the future so long as the National Government should exist.

Not only in the intangible shape of Supreme Court decisions, but in a thousand practical particulars, the central agency was making itself manifest to the people and gaining friends among them. The general condition of the country was prosperous. Over ten million dollars had been paid on the national debt. A dependable revenue was being collected in scores of United States custom-houses scattered through the different States. During Washington's last year in office, their receipts had amounted to twelve and a half million dollars. The National Government was expending a part of this money in rendering commerce safe. It was purchasing lighthouses from the maritime States and erecting new ones. Sites for these buildings were being ceded by the various States along the sea-coast. Beacons, buoys, and public piers were being established by the revenue service. Sixteen harbours within the several States were being fortified at national expense. Plans for the improvement of certain rivers were being considered. The Congress under the Confederation had declared navigable waterways in the Northwest Territory leading into the Mississippi and St. Lawrence to be free highways, and the new Congress extended this inestimable guarantee to all waters of the public domain. Its extension to the States would come later from a Supreme Court decision. The improvement of these rivers at national expense would result in time from the westward expansion of the people.

The domain under the complete control of the Federal Government had been increased by a cession from South Carolina. The States of Kentucky and Tennessee had been carved out of the "territory south of the Ohio," and, with the State of Vermont, had been admitted to equal membership in the Union by the sole action of the Federal Government. The national post-routes had been extended in eight years from three thousand to sixteen thousand miles, and the number of post-offices had been increased to seven hundred. By severe penalties, the Government had taught the people to respect as well as to be grateful for this branch of its activities. It had also regulated trade with Indians not residing within the jurisdiction of a State, and, by scattering its troops along the border, was attempting to protect the savage from the encroachments and debauchment of the white man, as well as to shield the white man from the barbarity of the savage.

The presidential election machinery had been tried a third time and had worked smoothly. Electors had been chosen in each State without the predicted revolution and bloodshed. They had cast seventy-one votes for John Adams and sixty-eight for Thomas Jefferson. The former, having received the highest number of votes, was declared President and the latter Vice-President. Perhaps some of those who had voted for Adams may have thought the Vice-Presidency a place of training for the higher office, and its incumbent in the line of promotion. But on examining the geographical distribution of the vote, one sees that sectionalism influenced the result of this third presidential election, as it did a majority of later ones. The vote for Adams came almost entirely from the Northern States; that for Jefferson from the Southern. Adams stood for Federalism, for centralisation, for a continuation of the policy of the present Administration. He and Hamilton were close friends. They broke only when Hamilton found that he could not influence President Adams as he had President Washington. Electors who voted for Jefferson thought he stood for principles exactly opposite to those of Adams. His antipathy to Hamilton was the best guarantee against centralisation being continued under his management.

Those who had prophesied that the overwhelming majority of Washington would result in a series of re-elections during his life, or that the expiration of each term would find the country in some danger which would demand his continuance, had been silenced by a farewell address declaring his intention to retire. The pattern of two terms which he set no President has ever dared attempt to exceed. The opponents of his administration, those who had foreseen the coming royal reception in the simple levee which marked his social life, or who objected to the growing custom of celebrating his birthday as if he were a monarch, were compelled to cease their evil prophecies when he attended, as a spectator, the inauguration of his successor in the room of the House of Representatives adjacent to old Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the fourth day of March, 1797. As the incoming President wrote to his wife, the multitude was as great as the space would contain and not a dry eye but Washington's. Like the formative influence of a good parent extending from generation to generation, the precedent of Washington's voluntary retirement from the Presidency has been a rich heritage to the American people. It may be safely said that it is largely the cause of the pleasing contrast which exists between the changes of administration in the United States and those in the other American republics.



CHAPTER XII

SUPPRESSING THE FRENCH SYMPATHISERS



The only cloud on the horizon the day that John Adams became President lay in the direction of France and was caused by the Jay Treaty. It seemed impossible to keep peace with both belligerents abroad or with their factions at home. Adams would probably be more scrupulous of the rights of the individual than Hamilton; yet drastic measures were likely to become necessary if the pro-British and the pro-French agitators were to be muzzled and their clamour hushed. Such a censorship of speech was a thing not to be lightly contemplated in America.

Freedom of speech and the press had been inherited as a privilege of Englishmen, wrested from those in authority by years of contest, and maintained only by constant vigilance. A guarantee that it should not be restricted by the State had been placed in many of the State constitutions. A similar prohibition formed the first amendment to the Federal Constitution. Freedom of movement is closely akin to freedom of speech. Not even in the heyday of State sovereignty had any serious attempt been made to prevent the movement of unobjectionable free people from one State to another. The Constitution guaranteed to citizens of each State all privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States. The same instrument allowed Congress to establish a uniform rule of naturalisation in making United States citizens out of foreign immigrants; but the right of declaring who should be citizens of the States, having been assumed by the State constitutions, was left to them individually. State and national citizenship were thus separate from the beginning. For these reasons it could happen, as pointed out in the Dred Scott decision many years later, that a State could make an alien into a citizen of the State, entitled to all its rights and privileges, but he might still be an alien in the United States and deprived of national citizenship.

The first Congress recognised its constitutional obligation to provide a uniform law for national citizenship by allowing an alien who had resided two years within its jurisdiction and one year within any State to take an oath before any court of common-law record to support the Constitution and thereby become a citizen. Five years later, Congress feared that the warring powers of Europe would send undesirable aliens to the United States. "Coming from a quarter of the world so full of disorder and corruption," said a speaker in the House, "they might contaminate the purity and simplicity of the American character." A new naturalisation law was passed, requiring an alien to give three years' notice of his intention to change his allegiance—a kind of period of repentance. The required time of residence was then raised to five years for the nation and one for the State. During that time he must maintain a good moral character, must abjure allegiance to all other sovereigns, and must renounce all hereditary titles and orders of nobility. In this way one speaker said he hoped to shut out those refugees from the twenty thousand French nobility, who might choose to fly to the United States. Another expected to see an equally large number of the peerage arrive from Britain, as soon as the correct principles of government should take root there.

Little alarm need have been felt about those members of the deposed nobility of France who did arrive. They were more concerned with getting daily bread than acquiring citizenship or retaining their titles. Prince, marquis and marquise, vicomte, and bishop, alike must keep body and soul together by turning wig-maker, baker, or milliner, until the madness of the French people should pass. By and by, the changes of fortune in France began to send over Constitutionalists, Thermidorians, Fructidorians, and the like, to plot and intrigue. "They kept their eyes fixed on France," said a French volunteer, who had returned to America to secure the pay due him since Revolutionary days, "to which all expected to return sooner or later and recommence what each called his great work, for there were exactly the same number of political systems as there were refugees." The French sympathisers in America mingled with these emigres and were more or less concerned with their plans. The press offered the opportunity to vent much of their spleen on Washington and to express their opinions of the "British United States Government," as they called it.

Added to these scribblers were certain other agitators, preachers, and writers, refugees from England and Scotland, driven out by the British Government in its effort to keep the sentiments of the French propagandists from taking root in British soil. More libel suits had been instituted in the courts of England during a single year of the French Revolution than in any two previous decades. Among those banished was Thomas Paine, who had returned to London, after lending his pen to the American cause, and had written the famous, or infamous, as some called it, Rights of Man. Many of these aliens in America were scribblers who had picked up a few current phrases and lofty sentiments about liberty and equality. They were of varying ability as writers, but uniform in their venomous abuse and hatred of England and all her sympathisers. In the rapid increase of newspapers, which marked this first period of prosperity and the birth of political parties, many of these writers found precarious employment; a few found remunerative occupations. Of the two hundred newspapers published in the United States when John Adams became President, it was estimated that at least twenty-five were edited by men of alien birth.

At few later periods have political parties brought out such scurrilous abuse in the press as in these early days. Although the number of newspapers has so increased that irresponsible and vulgar men are to be found among editors, although the restraints of law upon the press have been greatly loosened, yet the tone of the leading newspapers to-day is immeasurably better than it was a century ago. As the opposition to the Administration gradually crystallised into a party, few suffered more from the pens of its writers than did the first President. The abuse, which included such grave charges as that he had murdered a French envoy near Fort DuQuesne years before, that he had taken money illegally from the United States Treasury, and that he hoped to turn his Presidency into a monarchical reign, followed him to the end of his administration. Washington's replies to the numerous addresses of societies and public meetings which had greeted his entrance to office eight years before breathed a spirit of toleration. It was his eminent desire, as he said in one reply, to have every association and community make such use of the auspicious years of peace, liberty, and free inquiry, as they should hereafter rejoice in having done.

At the same time, the mind of Washington, the exclusive Virginia gentleman, could easily make a distinction between liberty and license. He attributed the insurrection against the excise almost entirely to the unbridled utterances of the Democratic clubs, their "first formidable fruits," as he put it. Nor did he fail, in reporting the suppression of the rebellion to the next Congress, to express his opinion of these "self-created societies" who disseminated suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole Government. Jefferson, still believing in the original doctrine of the rights of man, called this allusion of the President "the greatest error of his political life." The societies would have soon died out if left alone, he said. Coercion would make them thrive. "It is wonderful," continued Jefferson to Madison, "that the President should have permitted himself to be the organ of such an attack on the freedom of discussion, freedom of writing, printing, and publishing." He pronounced it almost incredible that the freedom of association and of the press should be attacked in the fifth year of the new Government, a step which England, fast advancing to an absolute monarchy, had not yet attempted.

There was small probability that this abuse from the Jacobin clubs and presses would cease with the retirement of Washington. When he gave out his farewell address, written by "the President's president," as they called Hamilton, a Vermont editor regretted that he had not retired four years before, which would have saved the country from having been so debauched by its mistress, England. The day of his departure for Mount Vernon was celebrated by a scurrilous attack in the Aurora, which a defender of his memory vindicated by an assault upon its editor.

John Adams, as Vice-President, had long been pilloried as "the dangerous Vice," for his theories upon inherited talent, a doctrine in direct contradiction to the tenets of democracy. He also appeared in the Jacobin prints as "President Crispin," the son of a shoemaker, and as "the President of three votes," alluding to the narrow majority of Adams over Jefferson in the recent election. Many went so far as to charge that the election of Adams had been accomplished by prematurely closing the polls in a Maryland election district and by the action of a Pennsylvania postmaster, who held back the returns. Franklin's recent death had plunged the people of two hemispheres into mourning. His memory was not sacred enough to prevent an accusation that he had once pocketed the money for two hundred thousand stand of arms, which had been intended as a present to the United States from the King of France. The oft-repeated scandal of the lost million francs was freshly ventilated. Yet so precious was freedom of speech in America that even those attacked hesitated to follow British pattern in placing a censor over the press. Even Patrick Henry, being rapidly won to the support of the experiment which he had formerly opposed, declared: "Although I am a Democrat myself, I like not the late Democratic societies. As little do I like their suppression by law."

President Adams had years before placed himself on record concerning the freedom of the press. Long a fulsome contributor to the newspapers on political questions, he had said: "There is not in any nation of the world so unlimited a freedom of the press as is now established in every State of the American Union, both by law and practice. There is nothing that the people dislike that they do not attack."

Entertaining such liberal opinions, an unforgiving enemy to Britain, an admirer of the French people since first he came into contact with them, John Adams entered the Presidency prepared to save the press from the storm gathering about it. But the partisans would not stop their abuse long enough to examine his predilections or to forecast the attitude he was likely to assume in his conduct of foreign affairs. They were enraged by the advantage apparently given to Britain in the Jay Treaty, disappointed in the continued repression of every effort to aid France, and emboldened by the high tone of the French Directory after the sympathetic Monroe had been ordered home to be replaced by the Federalist, Pinckney. They sneered at Adams's inaugural address where he admitted a personal esteem for the French nation, formed during seven years spent abroad and chiefly in Paris, and expressed a sincere desire to preserve the friendship which had been so much to the honour and interest of both nations.

Notwithstanding these cordial words, President Adams, within three months, was calling together the first extra session of Congress in the history of the Government, and informing them in vigorous language that Pinckney, an American Minister, had been refused cards of hospitality by the Executive Directory at the head of the Republic of France, had been threatened by the police, and had finally been practically ordered out of the country. The right to reject an ambassador was recognised by the law of nations. But "a refusal to receive him until we have acceded to their demands without discussion and without investigation," said the President, "is to treat us neither as allies nor as friends, nor as a sovereign state." The warlike message advised strengthening the army and navy, perfecting the coast defences, preventing further building of foreign cruisers in the United States, and the raising of revenue sufficient for these purposes. Although closing with a promise of continued effort toward neutrality, this hostile address from the first statesman-President forms a strong contrast with the mild messages of the first soldier-President. The granite rock of New England had been reached and it gave no evidence of yielding. The response to the defensive tone of the President varied according to foreign affiliations. Parties in America were as yet reflections of European wars. The pro-British faction, strong in all parts of the National Government except the executive, were as eager for a trial at arms with France as they had been reluctant for war with England two years before. Hamilton wrote columns for the daily press to prove that the assistance which France gave to us during our struggle for independence was based on purely selfish motives. We were bound by no ties of gratitude to yield to her pique at the Jay Treaty. "Those who can justify displeasure in France on this account," said he, "are not Americans but Frenchmen. They are not fit for being members of an independent nation."

The opponents to this attitude—those whom Hamilton called "the servile minions of France, who have no sensibility to injury but when it comes from Great Britain, and who are unconscious of any rights to be protected against France," were equally clamorous for forbearance. They asked Adams, in this crisis, to send a sympathetic man, say Jefferson, who would be acceptable to France and would soothe French pride and avert the threatened war. Although Jay had been taken by Washington from the Supreme Bench to be sent as envoy to England, Adams thought the Vice-President too dignified a person to be used in this manner. Such an action would also imperil the presidential succession. Yet he was desirous of seeking some kind of an accommodation to preserve neutrality. Although France had "inflicted a wound in the American breast," as he put it in his message, he appointed three special envoys to renew negotiations. Their number would protect American interests and show to France the gravity of the situation. Pinckney, the rejected Minister, was made quite justly one of the three. John Marshall, the second member, like Pinckney, belonged to the anti-French faction. Gerry, the third envoy, was a former Anti-Federalist and a sympathiser with France.

The treatment which these three envoys received in France caused the tempest in a teapot commonly known as "the X Y Z affair." By discrediting the French faction, it hastened the day of their attempted suppression by the Government of the United States. With the mysterious methods current during the days of the contemptible Directory then at the head of the Government of France, certain supposed go-betweens approached the American envoys with suggestions that "money, lots of money," would be necessary to heal the wounds inflicted on the French heart by the Jay Treaty and by the recent words of President Adams. This gold, it was said, was necessary as a pre-requisite for opening negotiations. Part of it was to constitute a loan to carry on the war with England, and the rest was understood to be a douceur for the pockets of the members of the Directory. "We loaned you money in your hour of need," Pinckney was told by a mysterious Frenchwoman, who figured in the affair. "Why should not you lend to us?"



In the reports of these envoys which John Adams sent to Congress as rapidly as received, the name of Hubbard, who had introduced the three to the go-betweens, was indicated by the letter "W," Horttinguer by "X," Bellamy by "Y," and Hauteval, who acted as interpreter, by "Z." It was useless for Jefferson, Madison, and the French sympathisers in America to point out that douceur meant a gift and not a bribe, and that the supposed go-betweens were discredited and their action disavowed by Talleyrand and the Directory. It was believed and is currently stated in America that an attempt was made to bribe these dignified representatives of the American people. The national spirit was aroused. Unionism received such an impulse as years of domestic relationship could not produce. The war microbe was loosed among the people. One of those sudden outbursts of national rage, as unexpected as violent, ran the length and breadth of the land. A broadside was circulated, with stanzas beginning:

"At length the Envoys deign to tell us They had to deal with scurvey fellows— With Autun and the five-head beast And half the alphabet, at least."

For perhaps the only time in his life, John Adams tasted the sweets of a widespread popularity. His birthday, like that of his predecessor, was generally celebrated. The sympathetic French following was swept off its feet. "Exultation on one side and a certainty of victory; while the other is petrified with astonishment," was Jefferson's admission. In reporting to Congress that Pinckney and Marshall had indignantly withdrawn from France, and that Gerry, who lingered, had been officially notified by his Government that no loans of any kind would be made, President Adams used a sentence which immediately became current: "I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation."

The British faction had at last an opportunity of crushing the French sympathisers, and they accepted it most willingly. In their intolerance, they went almost as far as the other side had gone a few years before. A South Carolinian, visiting in New York, was assaulted in the circus because he refused to take off his hat when the President of the United States entered. A "reign of terror" was instituted against the pro-French office-holders. It was even claimed by them that a general massacre had been arranged for the Pennsylvania fast-day, and Bache, the editor of the Aurora, made a show of garrisoning his house with an armed body of his friends. A Senator in debate was reported to have declared his willingness to vote for a law punishing every citizen of America who educated his children in the study of the French language.

Hamilton and those who wished to give new precedent to the National Government along lines of its foreign relations where patriotism would support strong measures, were delighted with the response on the part of the people. Theatre crowds demanded encores of the President's March and hissed French airs when played. Merchants of New York and other seaports worked voluntarily on the neglected coast-defences. A song was put to the air of True Hearts of Oak in order to "cheer those unused to spade and barrow, who might tire of working on the several forts." It began: