THE STRUGGLE AND FALL OF FEDERALISM; OR, JOHN ADAMS’S ADMINISTRATION.
1797–1801.
The Pre-Adamite Epoch: its Upheavals and Disruptions in America, and the
red-hot diplomatic Stones, Fauchet and Adet, ejected from France upon
us.—The new French Acrostics; and the Attempts by our Commissioners
and Congress to solve them.—Gold-mounted Spectacles offered us by
France; and our Inability to see our Interests or Duty through
them.—Why and when the Keel of the American Navy was laid.—Of the
Alien and Sedition Laws; why passed and how passed by.—General
Washington and the Gallic Cock; a Crow never crowed out.—Napoleon’s
Tour in Egypt and Palestine described; and its Results on the Treaty
of Peace deduced.—Of the Office and Offices of Consul.—A Review and
new View of our Difficulties with France from 1790 to 1800.—What a
Pitt England fell into.—The City of Washington as a Geographical
Study.—About Mississippi, Alabama, and the French Growth of
Mobile.—The Territorial Condition illustrated.—The Introduction of
Vaccine and other Virus.—Why some Things first break out in
Boston.—State of Parties in 1801.—Why the first Adams was banished
from the Presidential Eden; and the Flaming Swords which prevented his
Return.
The elder pre-Adamite epoch in our history was past. New, more fiery,
and eruptive elements, anti-Federal or Republican, upheaving and
disrupting the old strata below, broke the settled upper crust of our
political world.
In France, the Directory of Five, succeeding to the Convention, and its
powerful national forces,—now welded to Napoleon by the fusing heats of
Monte Notte, Arcoli, and Rivoli,—ejected out upon us those red-hot
diplomatic stones, Fauchet and Adet. The French conundrums thickened.
Genet’s successors out-geneted Genet. They not only equipped cruisers
from American ports, but—displeased with a treaty which our government
had seen fit to make with England, stipulating for the neutrality of
America in the pending war between France on the one side, and England,
Holland, Spain, and Rome on the other—authorized the capture and
confiscation of American ships. In fact, the French envoys seemed
determined to show the absurdity of the old-fashioned rule, that it took
two to make a bargain.
Mr. Pinckney, the American minister to France, was obliged to leave that
American paradise, Paris, without a fig-leaf of excuse to cover the
naked results of his mission.
That comic body, Congress, was convened to look into the French
conundrums. Of course they talked so much that they forgot what they
came together for; and no one was any wiser when the speaker’s gavel
fell and sent them home. The puzzled President despatched three
commissioners to get a new statement of the riddle. The Directory told
these gentlemen—as legislative bodies now reply to applicants for
relief—that they could only see them through gold-mounted spectacles.
Such a spectacle the American people were not prepared to become.
Knowing the sympathy of the anti-Federal party in America with their
principles, the French Directory slammed the door abruptly in the face
of the two commissioners with Federal leanings, and held the envoy with
Republican tendencies, like another Joseph, by his skirts.
In spite of party feeling, however, American indignation now rose to the
gorge. A small standing army was raised. The keel of our navy was laid,
and a Navy Department created, over which was placed Benjamin Stodart.
The alien law, authorizing the President to elbow out of the country
disagreeable foreigners, and the sedition act, to fine and imprison any
one writing too freely against the government,—measures which marked the
distance of Americans of that day from the political millennium,—were
first passed by Congress, and afterwards passed, without any fear, by
everybody else. The wise old General at Mount Vernon was appointed
Commander-in-Chief of the army; and there was a fair chance that the
American Captain might yet be obliged to cut the comb of that strutting
French cock, which had lately scratched and crowed on so many Italian
dung-hills that he fancied himself a full-fledged eagle.
Peace commissioners, however, settled the difficulties, as old ladies do
tea, by a long chat around a covered table. Bonaparte, who had made a
flying military trip to Egypt, had got the Pyramids to look down on him
from their stony, century-crusted tops, while he slaughtered the
Mamelukes at their feet, had pushed across the desert with the _mirage_
of empire ever rising upon his unslaked sight, had made a disagreeable
tour of the Holy Land, and had attempted twenty-three times in vain to
take St. Jean D’Acre, came back to Paris to be made First Consul in
December, 1799,—a Roman office, which he filled like a Roman, by
subjugating all Europe by arms and insolence. The gristle of the
Corsican had at last stiffened into the bone of a ruler of a large,
consolidated empire; and the concentration of power in his hands enabled
him to concede to the justice of America what the shifting authority of
constituted assemblies, conventions, legislative assemblies, and
directories were too weak to dare. Bonaparte met the American
commissioners around the round table, himself as round in power as it in
shape, and in September, 1800, gave his autograph to a treaty of peace
which shielded American independence of action from the insults of the
envoys of a nation hitherto friendly,—a nation which had in a timely and
efficient way, mainly to help itself against an old rival, helped us,
but which, for the preceding ten years, had claimed, and offensively
insisted in return, not from our gratitude, but as a right, that we
should give our assistance to their ever-shifting schemes, with many of
which we had no sympathy, and at a time when to furnish aid was almost
to ruin our young strength.
While the Frenchman was thus bestriding Europe, putting England to her
straits, and in fact even to such despair as to find relief in the Pitt,
our American Colossus fell before the only foe which was ever permitted
to be his conqueror.
Washington died December 14, 1799.
The year following the seat of government was removed to the District of
Columbia, where, by frequent patching since, it has been made to stand
much wear and tear. The city named after Washington is still the
greatest atlas in the United States, its large geography requiring the
most patient study to find out what one is looking for. Many die without
accomplishing it, some by it. The wheel-shaped city has rotated off from
its periphery so many different officials, that, although like a
velocipede it is very hard riding, it cannot well be stopped without
considerable injury to its Federal rider.
The wide region called Mississippi, embracing the present State of that
name and also Alabama,—the latter no longer apprehending any new
petticoat insurrection in Mobile from the descendants of the insurgents
of 1706, which with French slowness in swelling the census had only in
ninety-five years become two hundred and fifty, and these balanced by an
equal number of blacks,—this Mississippi region, now separated from
Georgia, was put into that pantaleted territorial condition in which a
community finds itself, like a young girl-lady at sixteen, who goes to
school, lives at home, is governed partly by herself and partly by her
parents, acquires pocket-money from the old people, and notions from
circumstances, and drifts vigorously on through an unsettled perplexity
into an early and settled independence. Such in this year of grace 1869
are Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and
Washington, whose quickly doubling populations are rapidly pursuing
their education through a university where sharp, practical studies are
urged with bullet speed; mining silver, gold, and lead by day, and
spending most of it in gambling saloons by night; rolling their
residences on wheels from one ranch to another; practising high
gymnastics with the Indians, by a method better than Dio Lewis’s; taking
frequent lessons in bar-rooms, and pretty sure to make and be a mark for
some one in every quarter.
It may not be beneath the dignity of history to state that, while the
new century was inoculated with _virus_ taken from various sources, pure
and impure, political, monetary, and social, its first year witnessed
the earliest introduction of vaccination for small-pox in this country,
to which it worked its way four years after its first discovery by
Edward Jenner in England.
Of course it first took near Boston, where it has since continued to
break out in various eruptions, whose vesicles, always surrounded by a
rose-hued areola in the eyes of home nurses, it never allowed any one
but itself to puncture.
Meanwhile, however, the political crust, broken and cracked in 1797,
again heaved anew; muttered thunder rolled off from the press; party
lava reddened the sides of the political Vesuvius, over whose cindered
lips soon poured the hot melted streams of rage, which left, as they
cooled, nothing of the late Federal party but scoria and ashes.
The first Adams was banished from his much-loved Presidential Eden, and
a flaming sword with many blades—alien law, sedition act, personal
desire for office, supposed sympathy with England, and suspected
antipathy to France—was set at the door, turning every way, and
prohibiting his return any way.