Volume III Part 30 (2/2)

Marshall writes not one line or word of Was.h.i.+ngton's power and activities at this critical moment. He merely observes, concerning ratification, that ”the intrinsic merits of the instrument would not have secured” the adoption of the Const.i.tution, and that even in some of the States that accepted it ”a majority of the people were in the opposition.”[716]

He tells of the pressure on Was.h.i.+ngton to accept the Presidency. To these appeals and Was.h.i.+ngton's replies, he actually gives ten times more s.p.a.ce than he takes to describe the formation, submission, and ratification of the Const.i.tution itself.[717] After briefly telling of Was.h.i.+ngton's election to the Presidency, Marshall employs twenty pages in describing his journey to New York and his inauguration.

Then, with quick, bold strokes, he lays the final color on his picture of the state of the country before the new government was established, and darkens the tints of his portrayal of those who were opposing the Const.i.tution and were still its enemies. In swift contrast he paints the beginnings of better times, produced by the establishment of the new National Government: ”The new course of thinking which had been inspired by the adoption of a const.i.tution that was understood to prohibit all laws impairing the obligation of contracts, had in a great measure restored that confidence which is essential to the internal prosperity of nations.”[718]

He sets out adequately the debates over the first laws pa.s.sed by Congress,[719] and is generous in his description of the characters and careers of both Jefferson and Hamilton when they accepted places in Was.h.i.+ngton's first Cabinet.[720] He joyfully quotes Was.h.i.+ngton's second speech to Congress, in which he declares that ”to be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace”; and in which the people are adjured ”to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness.”[721]

An a.n.a.lysis of Hamilton's First Report on the Public Credit follows.

The measures flowing from it ”originated the first regular and systematic opposition to the principles on which the affairs of the union were administered.”[722] In condensing the momentous debate over the establishment of the American financial system, Marshall gives an excellent summary of the arguments on both sides of that controversy. He states those of the Nationalists, however, more fully than the arguments of those who opposed Hamilton's plan.[723]

While attributing to Hamilton's financial measures most of the credit for improved conditions, Marshall frankly admits that other causes contributed to the new-found prosperity: By ”progressive industry, ...

the influence of the const.i.tution on habits of thinking and acting,” and especially by ”depriving the states of the power to impair the obligation of contracts, or to make any thing but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts, the conviction was impressed on that portion of society which had looked to the government for relief from embarra.s.sment, that personal exertions alone could free them from difficulties; and an increased degree of industry and economy was the natural consequence.”[724]

Perhaps the most colorful pages of Marshall's entire work are those in which he describes the effect of the French Revolution on America, and the popular hostility to Was.h.i.+ngton's Proclamation of Neutrality[725]

and to the treaty with Great Britain negotiated by John Jay.[726]

In his treatment of these subjects he reveals some of the sources of his distrust of the people. The rupture between the United States and the French Republic is summarized most inadequately. The greatest of Was.h.i.+ngton's state papers, the immortal ”Farewell Address,”[727] is reproduced in full. The account of the X. Y. Z. mission is provokingly incomplete; that of American preparations for war with France is less disappointing. Was.h.i.+ngton's illness and death are described with feeling, though in stilted language; and Marshall closes his literary labors with the conventional a.n.a.lysis of Was.h.i.+ngton's character which the world has since accepted.[728]

Marshall's fifth volume was received with delight by the disgruntled Federalist leaders. A letter of Chancellor James Kent is typical of their comments. ”I have just finished ... the last Vol. of Was.h.i.+ngton's Life and it is worth all the rest. It is an excellent History of the Government and Parties in this country from Vol. 3 to the death of the General.”[729]

Although it had appeared too late to do them any harm at the election of 1804, the Republicans and Jefferson felt outraged by Marshall's history of the foundation period of the Government. Jefferson said nothing for a time, but the matter was seldom out of his thoughts. Barlow, it seems, had been laggard in writing a history from the Republican point of view, as Jefferson had urged him to do.

Three years had pa.s.sed since the request had been made, and Barlow was leaving for Paris upon his diplomatic mission. Jefferson writes his congratulations, ”yet ... not unmixed with regret. What is to become of our past revolutionary history? Of the antidotes of truth to the misrepresentations of Marshall?”[730]

Time did not lessen Jefferson's bitterness: ”Marshall has written libels on one side,”[731] he writes Adams, with whom a correspondence is opening, the approach of old age having begun to restore good relations between these former enemies. Jefferson's mind dwells on Marshall's work with increasing anxiety: ”On the subject of the history of the American Revolution ... who can write it?” he asks. He speaks of Botta's ”History,”[732] criticizing its defects; but he concludes that ”the work is nevertheless a good one, more judicious, more chaste, more cla.s.sical, and more true than the party diatribe of Marshall. Its greatest fault is in having taken too much from him.”[733]

Marshall's ”party diatribe” clung like a burr in Jefferson's mind and increased his irritation with the pa.s.sing of the years. Fourteen years after Marshall's last volume appeared, Justice William Johnson of the Supreme Court published an account of the period[734] covered by Marshall's work, and it was severely criticized in the _North American Review_. Jefferson cheers the despondent author and praises his ”inestimable” history: ”Let me ... implore you, dear Sir, to finish your history of parties.... We have been too careless of our future reputation, while our tories will omit nothing to place us in the wrong.” For example, Marshall's ”Was.h.i.+ngton,” that ”five-volumed libel, ... represents us as struggling for office, and not at all to prevent our government from being administered into a monarchy.”[735]

In his long introduction to the ”Anas,” Jefferson explains that he would not have thought many of his notes ”worth preserving but for their testimony against the only history of that period which pretends to have been compiled from authentic and unpublished doc.u.ments.” Had Was.h.i.+ngton himself written a narrative of his times from the materials he possessed, it would, of course, have been truthful: ”But the party feeling of his biographer, to whom after his death the collection was confided, has culled from it a composition as different from what Genl.

Was.h.i.+ngton would have offered, as was the candor of the two characters during the period of the war.

”The partiality of this pen is displayed in lavishments of praise on certain military characters, who had done nothing military, but who afterwards, & before he wrote, had become heroes in party, altho' not in war; and in his reserve on the merits of others, who rendered signal services indeed, but did not earn his praise by apostatising in peace from the republican principles for which they had fought in war.”

Marshall's frigidity toward liberty ”shews itself too,” Jefferson continues, ”in the cold indifference with which a struggle for the most animating of human objects is narrated. No act of heroism ever kindles in the mind of this writer a single aspiration in favor of the holy cause which inspired the bosom, & nerved the arm of the patriot warrior.

No gloom of events, no lowering of prospects ever excites a fear for the issue of a contest which was to change the condition of man over the civilized globe.

”The sufferings inflicted on endeavors to vindicate the rights of humanity are related with all the frigid insensibility with which a monk would have contemplated the victims of an _auto da fe_. Let no man believe that Gen. Was.h.i.+ngton ever intended that his papers should be used for the suicide of the cause, for which he had lived, and for which there never was a moment in which he would not have died.”

Marshall's ”abuse of these materials,” Jefferson charges, ”is chiefly however manifested in the history of the period immediately following the establishment of the present const.i.tution; and nearly with that my memorandums [the ”Anas”] begin. Were a reader of this period to form his idea of it from this history alone, he would suppose the republican party (who were in truth endeavoring to keep the government within the line of the Const.i.tution, and prevent it's being monarchised in practice) were a mere set of grumblers, and disorganisers, satisfied with no government, without fixed principles of any, and, like a British parliamentary opposition, gaping after loaves and fishes, and ready to change principles, as well as position, at any time, with their adversaries.”[736]

Jefferson denounces Hamilton and his followers as ”monarchists,”

”corruptionists,” and other favorite Jeffersonian epithets, and Marshall is again a.s.sailed: ”The horrors of the French revolution, then raging, aided them mainly, and using that as a raw head and b.l.o.o.d.y bones they were enabled by their stratagems of X. Y. Z. in which this historian was a leading mountebank, their tales of tub-plots, Ocean ma.s.sacres, b.l.o.o.d.y buoys, and pulpit lyings, and slanderings, and maniacal ravings of their Gardiners, their Osgoods and Parishes, to spread alarm into all but the firmest b.r.e.a.s.t.s.”[737]

Criticisms of Marshall's ”Life of Was.h.i.+ngton” were not, however, confined to Jefferson and the Republicans. Plumer thought the plan of the work ”preposterous.”[738] The Reverend Samuel Cooper Thatcher of Boston reviewed the biography through three numbers of the _Monthly Anthology_.[739] ”Every reader is surprized to find,” writes Mr.

Thatcher, ”the history of North America, instead of the life of an individual.... He [Was.h.i.+ngton] is always presented ... in the pomp of the military or civil costume, and never in the ease and undress of private life.” However, he considers Marshall's fifth volume excellent.

”We have not heard of a single denial of his fidelity.... In this respect ... his work [is] _unique_ in the annals of political history.”

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