Part 25 (1/2)
saying:--
”The denunciation of the Democratic Societies is one of the extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the faction of monocrats. It is wonderful indeed that the president should have permitted himself to be the organ of such an attack on the freedom of discussion, the freedom of writing, printing, and publis.h.i.+ng.” After making an ungenerous attack upon the Society of the Cincinnati, he proceeded: ”I here put out of sight the persons whose misbehavior has been taken advantage of to slander the friends of popular rights; and I am happy to observe that, as far as the circle of my observation and information extends, everybody has lost sight of them, and views the abstract attempt on their natural and const.i.tutional rights in all its nakedness. I have never heard, or heard of, a single expression or opinion which did not condemn it as an inexcusable aggression.”
Then, in full sympathy with the whiskey insurrectionists, he said: ”And with respect to the transactions against the excise law, it appears to me that you are all swept away in the torrent of governmental opinions, or that we do not know what these transactions have been. We know of none which, according to the definitions of the law, have been anything more than riotous. There was, indeed, a meeting to consult about a separation. But to consult on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the affirmative, still less to the acting on such a determination; but we shall see, I suppose, what the court lawyers, and courtly judges, and would-be emba.s.sadors will make of it. The excise law is an infernal one. The first error was to admit it by the const.i.tution; the second, to act on that admission; the third and last will be, to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union, and setting us all afloat to choose what part of it we will adhere to. The information of our militia returned from the westward is uniform, that though the people there let them pa.s.s quietly, they were objects of their laughter, not of their fear; that one thousand men could have cut off their whole force in a thousand places of the Alleghany; that their detestation of the excise law is universal, and has now a.s.sociated to it a detestation of the government; and that separation, which perhaps was a very distant and problematical event, is now near, and certain, and determined in the mind of every man. I expected to have seen some justification of arming one part of society against another; of declaring a civil war the moment before the meeting of that body which has the sole right of declaring war; of being so patient of the kicks and scoffs of our enemies, and rising at a feather against our friends; of adding a million to the public debt, and deriding us with recommendations to pay it if we can.”
But the medicines of most powerful friends could not cure the mortal malady that now afflicted the Democratic Societies. As it happened with Genet, their founder, so it now happened with these societies; the great ma.s.s of the people had learned to reprobate them. The denunciations of the president, co-operating with the downfall of the Jacobin clubs in France--kindred societies--soon produced their dissolution. Monroe, in an official despatch, had set in its true light the character of the Jacobin clubs, as interfering with the government; and in the United States, their _confreres_, the Democratic societies, soon sank into merited obscurity.
In his message, Was.h.i.+ngton announced that ”the intelligence from the army under the command of General Wayne was a happy presage to military operations against the hostile Indians north of the Ohio.” Wayne, as we have seen, had succeeded St. Clair after that veteran's unfortunate defeat in the autumn of 1791. He marched into the Indian country in 1793, and near the spot where St. Clair was surprised he built Fort Recovery. There he was attacked by the Indians at the close of June, 1794, but without receiving much damage. General Scott arrived there not long afterward from Kentucky, with eleven hundred volunteers, and then Wayne advanced to the confluence of the Maumee and Au Glaize rivers, ”the grand emporium,” as he called it, of the Indians. They fled precipitately; and there Wayne built a strong stockade, for the permanent occupation of that beautiful country, and called it Fort Defiance.
The main body of the Indians had retired down the Maumee about thirty miles, where they took a hostile att.i.tude. With about three thousand men, Wayne marched against them, and near the present Maumee City he fought and defeated them, on the twentieth of August. He then laid waste their country, and the trading establishment of the British agent in their midst was burned. There seemed little doubt that he had stirred up the savages against the Americans.
Wayne fell back to Fort Defiance three days after the battle; and at the beginning of November, after a successful campaign of three months, during which time he had marched three hundred miles along a road cut by his own army, gained an important victory, driven the Indians from their princ.i.p.al settlement, and left a strong post in the heart of their country, he placed his army into winter-quarters at Greenville. The western tribes were humbled and disheartened; and early in August, the following year, their princ.i.p.al chiefs and United States' commissioners met at Greenville and made a treaty of peace. The Indians ceded to the United States a large tract of land in the present states of Michigan and Indiana, and for more than ten years afterward the government had very little trouble with the western savages.
In his message, Was.h.i.+ngton urged the adoption of some definite plan for the redemption of the public debt. ”Nothing,” he said, ”can more promote the permanent welfare of the nation, and nothing would be more grateful to our const.i.tuents.” At his request, Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury, prepared a plan, digested and arranged on the basis of the actual revenues for the further support of the public credit. It was one of the ablest state papers of the many that had proceeded from his pen during his official career. It was reported on the twentieth of January, 1795, and this was Hamilton's last official act. He had, on the first of December, immediately after his return from western Pennsylvania, addressed the following letter to the president:--
”I have the honor to inform you that I have fixed upon the last of January next, as the day for my resignation of my office of secretary of the treasury. I make this communication now, that there may be time to mature such an arrangement as shall appear to you proper to meet the vacancy when it occurs.”
Mr. Hamilton resigned his office on the thirty-first of January. It was with deep regret, as in the case of Mr. Jefferson, that Was.h.i.+ngton found himself deprived of the services of so able an officer. ”After so long an experience of your public services,” he said in a note to Hamilton on the second of February, ”I am naturally led, at this moment of your departure from office (which it has always been my wish to prevent), to review them. In every relation which you have borne to me, I have found that my confidence in your talents, exertions, and integrity, has been well placed. I the more freely render this testimony of my approbation, because I speak from opportunities of information which can not deceive me, and which furnish satisfactory proof of your t.i.tle to public regard.”
To this Hamilton replied on the following day, saying, ”My particular acknowledgments are due for your very kind letter of yesterday. As often as I may recall the vexations I have endured, your approbation will be a great and precious consolation. It was not without a struggle that I yielded to the very urgent motives which compelled me to relinquish a station in which I could hope to be, in any degree, instrumental in promoting the success of an administration under your direction; a struggle which would have been far greater had I supposed that the prospect of future usefulness was proportioned to the sacrifices made.”
Justice to a growing family was the chief cause of Hamilton's resignation. ”The penurious provision made for those who filled the high executive departments in the American government,” says Marshall, ”excluded from a long continuance in office all those whose fortunes were moderate, and whose professional talents placed a decent independence within their reach. While slandered as the acc.u.mulator of thousands by illicit means, Colonel Hamilton had wasted in the public service great part of the property acquired by his previous labors, and had found himself compelled to decide on retiring from his political station.”[73]
Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut, who had been the federal comptroller under Hamilton for some time, was appointed to succeed that officer; and General Knox, who had offered his resignation as secretary of war at the close of the year, was succeeded by Timothy Pickering, who was at that time the postmaster-general. ”After having served my country nearly twenty years,” wrote Knox in his letter tendering his resignation on the twenty-eighth of December, ”the greatest portion of which under your immediate auspices, it is with extreme reluctance that I find myself constrained to withdraw from so honorable a station. But the natural and powerful claims of a numerous family will no longer permit me to neglect their essential interests. In whatever situation I shall be, I shall recollect your confidence and kindness with all the fervor and purity of affection of which a grateful heart is susceptible.”
Was.h.i.+ngton always loved Knox. His frankness and good nature, his eminent integrity and unswerving faithfulness in every period of his public career, endeared him to the president; and it was with sincere sorrow that he experienced the official separation. ”The considerations which you have often suggested to me,” Was.h.i.+ngton wrote in reply to Knox, ”and which are repeated in your letter as requiring your departure from your present office, are such as to preclude the possibility of my urging your continuance in it. This being the case, I can only wish it was otherwise. I can not suffer you, however, to close your public service without uniting with the satisfaction which must arise in your own mind from a conscious rect.i.tude, my most perfect persuasion that you have deserved well of your country. My personal knowledge of your exertions, whilst it authorizes me to hold this language, justifies the sincere friends.h.i.+p which I have ever borne for you, and which will accompany you in every situation in life.”
The last session of the third Congress closed on the third of March, 1795. For a little while, Was.h.i.+ngton's mind was relieved in a degree from the pressure of political duties, and a matter of different but interesting nature occupied it at times. It will be remembered that the legislature of Virginia presented to Was.h.i.+ngton, as a testimony of their grat.i.tude for his public services, fifty shares in the Potomac company, and one hundred shares in the James River company--corporations created for promoting internal navigation in Virginia--and that he accepted them with the understanding that he should not use them for his own private benefit, but apply them to some public purpose.
An opportunity for such application, that commended itself to Was.h.i.+ngton's judgment, had not occurred until this time, when a plan for the establishment of a university at the federal capital, on the Potomac, was talked of. ”It has always been a source of serious reflection and sincere regret with me,” he said in a letter to the commissioners of the federal city on the twenty-eighth of January, ”that the youth of the United States should be sent to foreign countries for the purpose of education. Although there are doubtless many, under these circ.u.mstances, who escape the danger of contracting principles unfavorable to republican government, yet we ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds from being too strongly and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own.
”For this reason, I have greatly wished to see a plan adopted, by which the arts, sciences, and belles-lettres, could be taught in their fullest extent, thereby embracing all the advantages of European tuition, with the means of acquiring the liberal knowledge which is necessary to qualify our citizens for the exigencies of public as well as private life; and (which with me is a consideration of great magnitude) by a.s.sembling the youths from the different parts of this republic, contributing, from their intercourse and interchange of information, to the removal of prejudices, which might, perhaps, sometimes arise from local circ.u.mstances.”
Was.h.i.+ngton then suggested the federal city as the most eligible place for such an inst.i.tution; at the same time offering, in the event of the university being established upon a scale as extensive as he described, and the execution of it being commenced under favorable auspices in a reasonable time, to ”grant in perpetuity fifty shares in the navigation of the Potomac river towards the endowment of it.”
About four weeks after this, Was.h.i.+ngton received a letter from Mr.
Jefferson, on the subject that had a bearing upon the disposition of his shares, the former having on some occasion asked the advice of the latter concerning the appropriation of them. Mr. Jefferson now informed Was.h.i.+ngton that the college at Geneva, in Switzerland, had been destroyed, and that Mr. D'Ivernois, a Genevan scholar who had written a history of his country, had proposed the transplanting of that college to America. It was proposed to have the professors of the college come over in a body, it being a.s.serted that most of them spoke the English language well.
Jefferson was favorable to the establishment of the proposed new college within the state of Virginia; but Was.h.i.+ngton, with practical sagacity, concluded that it would not be wise to have two similar inst.i.tutions. He preferred having one excellent inst.i.tution, and that at the federal capital, and gave his reasons at length for his opinion, at the same time adding--after stating to Mr. Jefferson the fact that he had offered the fifty shares of the Potomac company to the commissioners--”My judgment and my wishes point equally strong to the application of the James River shares [one hundred] to the same object at the same place; but, considering the source from whence they were derived, I have, in a letter I am writing to the executive of Virginia on this subject, left the application of them to a seminary within the state, to be located by the legislature.”
In his letter to Governor Brooke, above referred to, Was.h.i.+ngton said: ”The time is come when a plan of universal education ought to be adopted in the United States. Not only do the exigencies of public life demand it, but, if it should be apprehended that prejudice would be entertained in one part of the Union against another, an efficacious remedy will be to a.s.semble the youth from every part, under such circ.u.mstances as will, by the freedom of intercourse and collision of sentiment, give to their minds the direction of truth, philanthropy, and mutual conciliation.” He then expressed his preference of the proposed university at the federal capital, as the object of his appropriation, but left the matter at the disposal of the legislature. That body, in resolutions, approved of his appropriation of the fifty shares in the Potomac company to the proposed university, and requested him to appropriate the hundred shares in the James River company ”to a seminary at such place in the upper country, as he may deem most convenient to a majority of the inhabitants thereof.”[74]
FOOTNOTES:
[73] Life of Was.h.i.+ngton, ii, 356
[74] See page 48 of this volume.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
JAY'S MISSION TO ENGLAND--ITS SPECIFIC OBJECTS--HIS ARRIVAL IN LONDON--HIS JUDICIOUS CONDUCT THERE--DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF NEGOTIATION--JAY'S ENCOURAGING LETTER TO WAs.h.i.+NGTON--HIS LETTER TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE--THE PROVISIONS OF THE TREATY--ITS RECEPTION BY WAs.h.i.+NGTON--HE KEEPS ITS PROVISIONS SECRET--OPPOSITION TO THE TREATY--MEETING OF THE SENATE--THE TREATY DISCUSSED AND ITS RATIFICATION RECOMMENDED--A SYNOPSIS OF ITS CONTENTS MADE PUBLIC.