Part 22 (1/2)
Jefferson's official connection with Was.h.i.+ngton was now drawing to a close. He had consented to remain in the cabinet until the end of the current year. With the completion and submission of some able state papers he finished his career as secretary of state. One of them was an elaborate report called for by a resolution of Congress adopted in February, 1791, on the state of trade of the United States with different countries; the nature and extent of exports and imports, and the amount of tonnage of American s.h.i.+pping. It also specified the various restrictions and prohibitions by which American commerce was embarra.s.sed and greatly injured, and recommended the adoption of discriminating duties, as against Great Britain, to compel her to put the United States on a more equal footing, she having thus far persistently declined to enter into any treaty stipulations on the subject.
Jefferson's last official act was the administration of a deserved rebuke to Genet. That meddling functionary had sent to him translations of the instructions given him by the executive council of France, desiring the president to lay them officially before both houses of Congress, and proposing to transmit, from time to time, other papers to be laid before them in like manner. ”I have it in charge to observe,”
said Jefferson to Genet in a letter on the thirty-first of December, ”that your functions as the minister of a foreign nation here are confined to the transactions of the affairs of your nation with the executive of the United States; that the communications which are to pa.s.s between the executive and legislative branches can not be a subject for your interference; and that the president must be left to judge for himself what matters his duty, or the public good, may require him to propose to the deliberations of Congress. I have, therefore, the honor of returning you the copies sent for distribution, and of being, with great respect, sir, your most obedient and most humble servant.”
Even this did not keep Genet quiet.
Throughout all the storm that had agitated his cabinet, and the hostility of Jefferson and his party to the measures of the administration, Was.h.i.+ngton never withheld from the secretary of state his confidence in his wisdom and patriotism; and the latter left office with the happy consciousness that he carried with him into retirement the friends.h.i.+p of one, of whom he said in after years, ”His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friends.h.i.+p or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, and good, and great man”[62]
On the last day of the year, Mr. Jefferson offered his resignation in the following letter to the president: ”Having had the honor of communicating to you, in my letter of the last of July, my purpose of retiring from the office of secretary of state at the end of the month of September, you were pleased, for particular reasons, to wish its postponement to the close of the year. That time being now arrived, and my propensities to retirement daily more and more irresistible, I now take the liberty of resigning the office into your hands. Be pleased to accept with it my sincere thanks for all the indulgences which you have been so good as to exercise toward me in the discharge of its duties.
Conscious that my need of them have been great, I have still ever found them greater, without any other claim on my part than a firm pursuit of what has appeared to me to be right, and a thorough disdain of all means which were not as open and honorable as their object was pure. I carry into my retirement a lively sense of your goodness, and shall continue gratefully to remember it.
”With very sincere prayers for your life, health, and tranquillity, I pray you to accept the homage of great and constant respect and attachment.”
To this Was.h.i.+ngton replied the next day as follows: ”I yesterday received, with sincere regret, your resignation of the office of secretary of state. Since it has been impossible to prevail upon you to forego any longer the indulgence of your desire for private life, the event, however anxious I am to avert it, must be submitted to.
”But I can not suffer you to leave your station without a.s.suring you that the opinion which I had formed of your integrity and talents, and which dictated your original nomination, has been confirmed by the fullest experience, and that both have been eminently displayed in the discharge of your duty.
”Let a conviction of my most earnest prayers for your happiness accompany you in your retirement; and while I accept, with the warmest thanks, your solicitude for my welfare, I beg you to believe that I always am, dear sir, &c.”
Edmund Randolph, the attorney-general, took Jefferson's place in the cabinet, and his own was filled by William Bradford, of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Jefferson left the seat of government as soon as possible after withdrawing from public life; and a fortnight after his resignation he arrived at Monticello, his beautiful home in the interior of Virginia, in full view of the Blue Ridge along a continuous line of almost sixty miles. He was then fifty years of age. His whole family, with all his servants, were at his home to receive him; and so delightful was this, his first experience of private life for many long years, that he resolved to abandon himself to it entirely.
He boasted, almost a month after he left Philadelphia, that he had not seen a newspaper since his flight from the cares of government, and he declared that he thought of never taking one again. ”I think it is Montaigne,” he wrote to Edmund Randolph on the third of February, ”who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. I am sure it is true, as to anything political, and shall endeavor to estrange myself to everything of that character.” But his hatred of Hamilton, and his persistence in regarding the political friends of that gentleman as necessarily corrupt, would not allow party feud to sleep in his mind, and he added, in the next sentence, ”I indulge myself on one political topic only; that is, in declaring to my countrymen the shameless corruption of a portion of the representatives to the first and second Congress, and their implicit devotion to the treasury.”
Meanwhile, the report of Jefferson on commercial affairs was eliciting warm debates in Congress. In that report he had suggested two methods for modifying or removing commercial restrictions: first, by amicable arrangements with foreign powers; and, secondly, by counteracting acts of the legislature. With the design, as we have seen, of distressing France by cutting off her supplies, two orders in council were issued by the British government, one in June and the other in November, which bore heavily upon the commercial prosperity of the United States. By the first order, British cruisers were instructed to stop all s.h.i.+ps laden with corn, flour, or meal (corn-s.h.i.+ps already alluded to), bound to any French port, and send them to any convenient port, home or continental, where the cargoes might be purchased in behalf of the British government. By the second, British s.h.i.+ps-of-war and privateers were required to detain all vessels laden with goods produced in any colony belonging to France, or with provisions for any such colony, and bring them to adjudication before British courts of admiralty. These were such flagrant outrages upon the rights of neutrals, that the United States government strongly remonstrated against them as unjust in principle and injurious in their practical effects. It was to these orders in council and their effects that the president pointed in his annual message, when urging the necessity of placing the country in a state of defense, and in a position to a.s.sert its just rights.[63]
Mr. Jefferson's report gave rise to a series of resolutions offered, by Mr. Madison on the third of January, 1794, the leading idea of which was that of opposing commercial resistance to commercial injury, and to enforce a perfect equality by retaliating impositions on the a.s.sumption that the commercial system of Great Britain was hostile to that of the United States. This scheme embodied the idea of a proposition made by Madison in the first Congress. His resolutions now took wider range, however, than did his proposition then. It was now proposed to impose restrictions and additional duties on the manufactures and navigation of nations which had no commercial treaties with the United States, and a reduction of duties on the tonnage of vessels belonging to nations with which such treaties existed.
FOOTNOTES:
[62] Letter to Doctor Walter Jones, January 2, 1814.
[63] In allusion to the annual and special messages of Was.h.i.+ngton at this time, the eminent Charles James Fox made the following remarks in the British parliament on the thirty-first of January, 1794:--
”And here, sir, I can not help alluding to the president of the United States, General Was.h.i.+ngton, a character whose conduct has been so different from that which has been pursued by ministers of this country. How infinitely wiser must appear the spirit and principles manifested in his late addresses to Congress than the policy of modern European courts! Ill.u.s.trious man! deriving honor less from the splendor of his situation than from the dignity of his mind; before whom all borrowed greatness sinks into insignificance, and all the potentates of Europe (excepting the members of our own royal family) become little and contemptible! He has had no occasion to have recourse to any tricks of policy or arts of alarm; his authority has been sufficiently supported by the same means by which it was acquired, and his conduct has uniformly been characterized by wisdom, moderation, and firmness. Feeling grat.i.tude to France for the a.s.sistance received from her in that great contest which secured the independence of America, he did not choose to give up the system of neutrality. Having once laid down that line of conduct, which both grat.i.tude and policy pointed out as most proper to be pursued, not all the insults and provocations of the French minister, Genet, could turn him from his purpose.
Intrusted with the welfare of a great people, he did not allow the misconduct of another with respect to himself, for one moment, to withdraw his attention from their interest. He had no fear of the Jacobins; he felt no alarm for their principles, and considered no precaution as necessary in order to stop their progress.
”The people over whom he presided he knew to be acquainted with their rights and their duties. He trusted to their own good sense to defeat the effect of those arts which might be employed to inflame or mislead their minds; and was sensible that a government could be in no danger while it retained the attachment and confidence of its subjects; attachment, in this instance, not blindly adopted--confidence not implicitly given, but arising from the conviction of its excellence, and the experience of its blessings. I can not, indeed, help admiring the wisdom and fortune of this great man. By the phrase 'fortune,' I mean not in the smallest degree to derogate from his merit. But, notwithstanding his extraordinary talent and exalted integrity, it must be considered as singularly fortunate that he should have experienced a lot which so seldom falls to the portion of humanity, and have pa.s.sed through such a variety of scenes without stain and reproach.
It must indeed create astonishment, that, placed in circ.u.mstances so critical, and filling for a series of years a station so conspicuous, his character should never once have been called in question; that he should in no one instance have been accused either of improper insolence or of mean submission in his transactions with foreign nations. For him it has been reserved to run the race of glory, without experiencing the smallest interruption to the brilliancy of his career.”
CHAPTER XXV.
DEBATES ON MADISON'S RESOLUTIONS--THEIR FATE--PROCEEDINGS IN REGARD TO ALGERINE CORSAIRS--COMMENCEMENT OF A NAVY--FIRST COMMITTEE OF WAYS AND MEANS--FRIGATES ORDERED TO BE BUILT--NAVAL OFFICERS APPOINTED--GENET RECALLED--ARRIVAL OF HIS SUCCESSOR--GENET MARRIES AND BECOMES AN AMERICAN CITIZEN--EXCITEMENT AGAINST GREAT BRITAIN--APPOINTMENT OF A SPECIAL ENVOY TO THE BRITISH COURT DISCUSSED--JOHN JAY APPOINTED--BELLIGERENT ACTION IN CONGRESS--JAMES MONROE APPOINTED MORRIS'S SUCCESSOR IN FRANCE--ADJOURNMENT OF CONGRESS--WAs.h.i.+NGTON VISITS MOUNT VERNON--REBELLIOUS MOVEMENTS IN KENTUCKY--WAs.h.i.+NGTON'S COMMENTS THEREON.
Madison's resolutions elicited very warm, and at times, violent debates.
The subject was of a purely commercial nature; but the questions it involved were so interwoven with political considerations, that the debates inevitably a.s.sumed a political and partisan aspect. The federalists plainly saw that the recommendations in Jefferson's report, and in the resolutions of Madison, hostility to England and undue favor toward France, neither position being warranted by a wise policy, nor consistent with neutrality. The republicans, on the other hand, regarded the scheme as equitable in itself, and as absolutely necessary for the a.s.sertion of the rights of neutral nations, and the protection of American commerce from insult, aggression, and plunder. These debates, which commenced on the thirteenth of January, continued until the third of February, with few intermissions; and the house was so nearly equally divided in sentiment, that the first resolution, authorizing commercial restrictions, was pa.s.sed by a majority of only five. This was subsequently rejected in the senate by the casting vote of the vice-president, and the further consideration of the whole subject was postponed until March. When it was resumed, the progress of events had given such new complexion to the whole matter, that it was indefinitely postponed.
A new and important subject for legislation was brought up at this time.