Volume Ii Part 16 (2/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
Alexander Hamilton.
From a painting by John Trumbull in the Trumbull Gallery at Yale College.
III. The Excise.--Unexpectedly productive as the tariff had proved, public income still fell short of what these vast operations required.
Direct taxation or a higher tariff being out of the question, Hamilton proposed, and Congress voted, an excise on spirits, from nine to twenty-five cents a gallon if from grain, from eleven to thirty if from imported material, as mola.s.ses. Excise was a hated form of tax, and this measure awakened great opposition in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and New England, and most of all in Pennsylvania, in whose western counties distilling was the staple industry.
Here, far from the seats of power, even the state government had a.s.serted itself little. The general Government was defied. A meeting in Was.h.i.+ngton County voted to regard as an enemy any person taking office under the excise law. September 6, 1791, a revenue officer was tarred and feathered. Other such cases followed. Secret societies were formed to oppose the law. Whippings and even murders resulted. At last there was a veritable reign of terror. The President proceeded slowly but with firmness, accounting this a good opportunity vividly to reveal to the people the might of the new Government. Militia and volunteers were called out, who arrived in the rebellious districts in November, 1794.
Happily, their presence sufficed. The opposition faded away before them, not a shot being fired on either side.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Several men working with a large still.]
Illicit Distillers warned of the Approach of Revenue Officers.
IV. The Bank.--The Secretary of the Treasury pleaded for a United States Bank as not only profitable to Government but indispensable to the proper administration of the national finances. Congress acquiesced, yet with so violent hostility on the part of many that before approving the Charter Act Was.h.i.+ngton required the written opinions of his official advisers. Jefferson powerfully opposed such an inst.i.tution as unconst.i.tutional, his acute argument being the a.r.s.enal whence close constructionists have gotten their weapons ever since. Randolph sided with Jefferson, Knox with Hamilton. The President at last signed, agreeing with Hamilton in the view that Congress, being the agent of a sovereignty, is not, within any sphere of action const.i.tutionally open to it, shut up to specific or enumerated modes of attaining its ends, but has choice among all those that nations customarily use. The Supreme Court has proceeded on this doctrine ever since. The bank proved vastly advantageous. Three-fourths of every private subscription to its stock had to be in government paper, which raised this to par, while it naturally became the interest of all stockholders to maintain and increase the stability and credit of the Government.
CHAPTER IV.
RELATIONS WITH ENGLAND
[1793]
In 1789 France adopted a const.i.tution. Provoked at this, the friends of absolute monarchy withdrew from France, and incited the other powers of Europe to interpose in effort to restore to Louis XVI. his lost power.
The result was that Louis lost his head as well as his power, and that France became a republic. War with all Europe followed, which elevated that matchless military genius, Napoleon Bonaparte, first to the head of France's armies, then to her throne, to be toppled thence in 1814, partly by his own indiscretions, partly by the forces combined against him.
From the beginning to the end of this revolutionary period abroad, European politics determined American politics, home as well as foreign, causing dangerous embarra.s.sment and complications. War having in February, 1793, been declared by England and France against each other, what att.i.tude the United States should a.s.sume toward each became a pressing question. Was.h.i.+ngton's proclamation of neutrality, April 22, 1793, in effect, though not so meant, annulled our treaty of 1778 with France, which bound us to certain armed services to that monarchy in case of a rupture between her and England. Was.h.i.+ngton's paper alleged that ”the duty and interests of the United States” required impartiality, and a.s.sumed ”to declare the disposition of the United States to observe” this.
”The proclamation,” wrote Jefferson, ”was in truth a most unfortunate error. It wounds the popular feelings by a seeming indifference to the cause of liberty. And it seems to violate the form and spirit of the Const.i.tution by making the executive magistrate the organ of the 'disposition' 'the duty' and 'the interest' of the nation in relation to war and peace--subjects appropriated to other departments of the Government.”
”On one side,” says Mr. Rives, in his ”Life of Madison,” ”the people saw a power which had but lately carried war and desolation, fire and sword, through their own country, and, since the peace, had not ceased to act toward them in the old spirit of unkindness, jealousy, arrogance, and injustice; on the other an ally who had rendered them the most generous a.s.sistance in war, had evinced the most cordial dispositions for a liberal and mutually beneficial intercourse in peace, and was now set upon by an unholy league of the monarchical powers of Europe, to overwhelm and destroy her, for her desire to establish inst.i.tutions congenial to those of America.”
The more sagacious opponents of the administration believed true policy as well as true honesty to demand rigid and p.r.o.nounced adherence to the letter of the French treaty. They were convinced from the outset that France would vanquish her enemies, and that close alliance with her was the sure and the only sure way to coerce either Great Britain to justice or Spain to a reasonable att.i.tude touching the navigation of the Mississippi; while by offending France, they argued, we should be forced to wrestle single-handed with England first, then with victorious France, meantime securing no concession whatever from Spain.
This was a shrewd forecast of the actual event. The Federalists, dest.i.tute of idealism, proved to have been overawed by the prestige of England and to have underestimated the might which freedom would impart to the French people. After Napoleon's great campaign of 1796-97, Pitt seeks peace, which the French Directory feels able to decline. In 1802 the Peace of Amiens is actually concluded, upon terms dictated by France. Had we been still in France's friends.h.i.+p, the two republics might have compelled England's abandonment of that course which evoked the war of 1812. As it was, ignored by England, to whom, as detailed below, we cringed in consenting to Jay's treaty, we were left to encounter the French navy alone, escaping open and serious war with France only by a readiness to negotiate which all but compromised our dignity. The Mississippi we had at last to open with money.
The federalist leaning toward Great Britain probably did not, to so great an extent as was then alleged and widely believed, spring from monarchical feeling. It was due rather to old memories, as pleasant as they were tenacious, that would not be dissociated from England; to the individualistic tendencies of republicanism, alarming to many; and to conservative habits of political thinking, the dread of innovation and of theory. The returned Tories had indeed all become Federalists, which fact, with many others, lent to this att.i.tude the appearance of deficient patriotism, of sycophancy toward our old foe and persecutor.
Great Britain had refused to surrender the western posts according to the peace treaty of 1783, unjustly pleading in excuse the treatment of loyalists by our States. Not only the presence but the active influence of the garrisons at these posts encouraged Indian hostilities. England had also seized French goods in American (neutral) vessels, though in pa.s.sage to the United States, and treated as belligerent all American s.h.i.+ps plying between France and her West Indian colonies, on the ground that this commerce had been opened to them only by the pressure of war.
The English naval officers were instructed to regard bread-stuffs as contraband if bound for France, even though owned by neutrals and in neutral s.h.i.+ps; such cargoes, however, to be paid for by England, or released on bonds being given to land them elsewhere than in France. In this practice England followed France's example, except that she actually paid for the cargoes, while France only promised.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
John Jay.
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