Part 3 (2/2)

In these organizations the voice of the disfranchised cla.s.ses was articulate for the first time. With unprecedented virulence these Democrats attacked not only policies but personalities. Was.h.i.+ngton was libeled in such scurrilous fas.h.i.+on that even his composure broke down on one occasion, so Jefferson records; and he declared in a pa.s.sion that by G.o.d! he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation.

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

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

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

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

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

Upon the news of the offensive orders in council of November, which reached Philadelphia in the following March, public feeling veered strongly toward war. At the same time with tales of new outrages at sea came a not very well authenticated but commonly accepted report of Lord Dorchester's speech to the Indians of the Northwest, in which he a.s.sured his dusky hearers that war was imminent between his country and the United States. Congress now began to prepare for the inevitable.

Appropriations were made for the fortification of harbors and the collection of military stores. The depredations of the Algerine pirates in the Mediterranean gave excuse for the building of six frigates. An embargo was laid upon commerce for thirty days and then extended over another thirty days. Dayton, of New Jersey, alarmed the administration party by proposing the sequestration of all British debts as an indemnity for the vessels which had been seized by British cruisers.

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

While Jay was pressing American grievances upon Lord Grenville, not the least of which was the retention of the Western posts by British garrisons, events occurred near one of the unsurrendered posts which might easily have brought on war. The humiliating defeat of St. Clair in 1791 had left the settlers beyond the Ohio at the mercy of the Indians. British authorities in Canada encouraged the Indians to believe that by combination they could check the advance of the whites. An Indian territory under British protection would have served the purposes of Great Britain admirably. To forestall these designs President Was.h.i.+ngton appointed to command in the Northwest Anthony Wayne--”Mad Anthony” of Revolutionary days. With a caution and thoroughness which belied his reputation, Wayne spent nearly two years in recruiting and drilling an army. Every effort in the mean time to conciliate the Indians was made futile by the machinations of their British advisers.

By the spring of 1794, Wayne had an army sufficiently trustworthy to undertake a forward movement. His route lay down the Maumee River, at the rapids of which Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe had built a fort and stationed a small garrison, in antic.i.p.ation of an American attack upon Detroit, which was supposed to be Wayne's objective. At a place known as Fallen Timber, a few miles south of the rapids, on August 18, Wayne found the Indians ready to offer battle. They had chosen their ground with considerable skill, but Wayne employed his cavalry and infantry so effectively that he drove the redskins from cover and pursued them with great slaughter almost to the walls of the British fort. The British commander demanded an explanation. Wayne replied with a taunt which amounted to a challenge and which was probably intended to be such; but the British refused to be drawn into hostilities. Had Wayne attacked and dispersed the British garrison, he would hardly stand condemned at the bar of history, for by the Treaty of Paris not he, but the British commander, was the intruder on foreign soil. Nevertheless, war at this time would have made Jay's mission futile and might have sacrificed the whole Mississippi Valley.

The Administration had hardly time to applaud Wayne's victory when it was greatly perturbed by an insurrectionary movement in western Pennsylvania. The st.u.r.dy Scotch-Irish people of the southwestern counties beyond the mountains had always felt their aloofness from the eastern counties. They were now still further disaffected because of the federal tax on spirituous liquors. They shared the feeling of the Continental Congress, which in 1774 had declared an excise ”the horror of all free states.” Even before the incidence of the tax was fully felt, protests were drafted at ma.s.s-meetings and federal collectors were roughly treated. The tax fell with heavy weight upon the small farmer.

Whiskey was not merely his chief marketable commodity: it was also his medium of exchange when money was scarce. A tax on his still seemed to be an unfair discrimination. Such was the pitch of public feeling in the year 1793 that farmers who complied with the law had their stills wrecked by masked men, popularly known as ”Whiskey Boys.”

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

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

The utter collapse of the Whiskey Rebellion made the whole affair seem ridiculous to those who gathered in the coffee-houses to hear the tales of the militiamen but the importance of the episode was not slight.

Hamilton is said to have remarked on one occasion that a government can never be said to be established ”until some signal display of force has manifested its power of military coercion.” The Federal Government had now demonstrated that it was equal to the emergency whenever the laws were opposed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by law. The days of Shays' Rebellion had gone, never to return.

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

Although Jay had presented his credentials in June, 1794, it was the 19th of November before a treaty was signed; and it was not until the 8th of June, 1795, that Was.h.i.+ngton could send an authentic copy to the Senate. The most dispa.s.sionate member of that body must have confessed privately to a sense of disappointment as he heard the terms for the first time. Listening intently for the redress of grievances, he seemed to hear only concessions. The United States was to a.s.sume the debts still unpaid to British merchants since the peace, so far as ”lawful impediments” had been put in the way of their collection; to open all ports to British s.h.i.+ps on the footing of the most favored nation; and to make rest.i.tution for losses and damages to the property of British subjects occasioned by French privateers in American waters, whenever compensation could not be obtained in the ordinary course of justice.

And for all these concessions what had been gained? The promise to evacuate the Western posts? That was but a tardy redemption of an old promise. No mention was made of the negroes carried away by British armies during the war. Nothing was said about the impressment of American seamen. To be sure, the ports of the East Indies were to be opened to direct commerce with the United States; but no American vessel might engage in the coasting trade of these East India dependencies. As for the West India trade, only vessels of seventy tons burden might partic.i.p.ate, and even that concession was yielded on the express understanding that mola.s.ses, sugar, coffee, cocoa, and cotton should not be exported from the United States to any part of the world. After hearing this obnoxious twelfth article, few Senators could preserve a fair mind on the remaining provisions of the treaty.

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

property or contraband.

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

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

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

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

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

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