DEMOCRACY IN POWER; OR, JEFFERSON’S ADMINISTRATION.
1801–1809.
Few Removals by Mr. Jefferson from the Ungilt, Official Chairs.—Mr.
Smith gets into the Navy.—Who started long Messages to Congress; and
the Difficulty of finding an End to them.—War with Tripoli; and the
Complexion with which the Bey ended it.—Decatur and his Mediterranean
Travels.—Ohio in 1802.—The early Danger it ran of being all cut up
into City Lots.—How the Exodus of its Population was the Genesis of
its Growth.—Of Westering Caravans.—Bonaparte sells Louisiana, and what
a Sell it was.—How we were saved an extra Volume of Supreme Court
Decisions.—The Murder of Alexander Hamilton.—A Ghost-Story about Aaron
Burr.—The public Estimate of his Character unchanged by Biographical
varnishing.—A South Carolina Conceit.—The Play of Lear in
Tripoli.—Peculiar Mussulman Habits; the Author of Don
Quixote.—Michigan escapes the Cuppings of Eastern States.—Her
lymphatic Temperament.—Lake Michigan as a Breakwater against
Chicago.—Burr tried for Treason, “not proven” guilty, and
surrendered—to himself.—Of Bonaparte and other Usurpers.—The Oldest
dislike the Youngest.—History of the Attempts of George III. and
Bonaparte to blockade without Ships.—Once a Bull always a Bull.—Search
of American Ships for Seamen.—The Unwisdom of Half-Apologies.—The
American Embargo and its Popularity with Unmarried Girls.
The advent of the first Democratic brave to the dispensing patronage and
to the right of taking official scalps, was not followed by a general
emptying of official chairs and the massacre of official enemies. The
thirty-five ballotings in the House of Representatives between Mr.
Jefferson and Aaron Burr made men anxious, not hungry and thirsty. The
fair-minded Madison was appointed to the State Department; Albert
Gallatin, the golden-mouthed, to the Treasury; and Robert, not John
Smith, to the Navy. Few changes were made in the ungilt places; although
the innocent public of that day were not a little excited, at the bare
suspicion that a few dozen Federalists were removed for their political
opinions. The guilt of differing politically from the administration was
not considered by the President so flagrant as to be adequately punished
only by exile from office.
Upon Mr. Jefferson must, however, be laid the crime of beginning the
practice of sending to Congress messages in writing,—a beginning which,
like the messages themselves, seems to have no end. Since the flood
human life is far too short for these Presidential essays, even without
the accompanying documents.
A war with that dusky corsair, the Bey of Tripoli, clouded the very
commencement of the new administration, breaking finally, after lasting
three years, into a heavy shower, February 9, 1804, from the cannonading
guns of young Decatur’s ship, the “Intrepid”,—a shower followed by
blue-skied peace. Commodore Preble, who with his fleet had been dealing
with Morocco, assisted in tanning, by some of Bellona’s
bleaching-powders, the sable-peltried Tripolitan. The result was that
the Bey turned to another complexion in his treatment of Christian
captives.
In 1802 Ohio doffed the pantalets and appeared around the Union board as
a full-grown State. Some of her settlements had grown so fast, and so
threatened to absorb the land into building-lots, that it was feared for
a time that the surface would be insufficient for farming purposes. The
exodus of population farther westward, however, relieved the anxieties
of its genesis, and marked the first chapter of its growth. The bivouac
that had encamped on her grandly rolling rivers began soon to join the
westering caravan which pitched their tents across the Mississippi
against the sunsettings. A Hoosier who borrows money at two per cent a
month to buy land with may be trusted to pay it back in a short time.
Two to nothing that he will add from his generosity a bonus with the
return of the loan.
Bonaparte, now Consul for life, and in sore need of money, sold to us,
for $15,000,000, that tract of country stretching undefinedly towards
the Pacific, and called Louisiana. Some of the wits of that day raised
the question whether the purchase lawfully included alligators of such
length that they stretched over the boundary lines. Neither this great
question, nor the secondary one of the right of our government to buy
foreign territory, was mooted in the Supreme Court, and thus we were
spared an extra volume of majority essays and longer dissenting
opinions. The foreign pill was too sugar-coated to cause any wry faces.
It was a very big sell—for France.
In July, 1804, Aaron Burr, Vice-President, murdered Alexander Hamilton
at Hoboken. Some biographers have attempted, since the death of the
future exile and fugitive from justice, to lighten the heavy burden
which he carried for thirty-three years afterwards, but in vain. The
public rarely reverses its first verdict. They can seldom be made to
believe that its first look at the piece was on the wrong side, and no
new napping or glossing will convince it that the other is the right
side.
The Presidency took such a fancy to Mr. Jefferson that, at his
re-election, in 1804, he received 162 out of 176 votes cast; C. C.
Pinckney, Esquire, of South Carolina getting the other 14. South
Carolina then had the pleasant little conceit of voting for herself,—a
harmless pastime that kept up her peculiar idea of resistance to Federal
subjugation, and made a variety for the tellers in counting the contents
of the electoral urn.
During 1805 Mr. Eaton, the American consul at Tunis, made an agreeable
arrangement with Hamet Caramelli, the legitimate but exiled Bashaw of
Tripoli, for his restoration to his seat, badly filled by his brother;
and to carry out the plan, he started from Alexandria, in Egypt, in
company with the sable Hamet, seventy American seamen and four hundred
and thirty Arabs. After traversing a thousand miles of desert sands, he
fought two severe battles, took Derne, the capital city of the chief
province of Tripoli, and would have deposed the cruel reigning Bashaw,
and opened the prison doors shut on hundreds of innocent Christian
captives,—Eaton’s principal object in the romantic expedition,—but for a
hasty, jealous, and disreputable treaty got up between Tobias Lear,
Consul-General of the United States, and the Bey, whereby we agreed to
pay the crowned bandit $60,000 in silver, instead of in leaden pieces,
for the ransom of our sailors enmeshed, like flies, in the old spider’s
web.
The nation never liked that play of Lear. They always thought of this
its principal act, with the Earl of Kent:—
“There is division,
Although as yet the face of it be covered
With mutual cunning ’twixt Albany and Cornwall.”
Had these successive and armed protests by America against the Barbary
habit of enslaving white Christian captives, taken in war, been properly
seconded by the European powers, the dusk Mussulman of Northern Africa
would have been then converted from the old Roman practices to which
they willingly succeeded,—practices which the author of Don Quixote,
himself an Algerine captive for five years, had punctured with his sharp
quill over two centuries before, and which Lord Exmouth, with a British
fleet, so riddled with shotted logic, in 1816, as to silence forever.
While the play of Lear was so badly acted on the shores of the
Mediterranean, Michigan, toddling up from between the lake coasts that
bordered her double peninsula, left her ancient name of Wayne County and
the protecting hand of Indiana, and assumed an independent territorial
_status_. Her lymphatic temperament enabled her to suck up through her
many aquatic ducts an arterial circulation which helped her to stand
pretty successfully the dry-cuppings of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New
York. In straits often she has worked her way with moderate success
through her Superior Lakes and water-courses to the open paths of
seaboard trade. The pictured rocks of her great northern lake illustrate
in lithography, rarely copied, some traits which she shares with no
others. Fortunately for her future independence, the intervention of
Lake Michigan prevents her territory from being laid out in city lots by
Chicago.
The American Cain, restless and uneasy, haunted by the pale ghost of
Hoboken, set on foot in 1806 an expedition designed either to slice off
a piece of American territory west of the Alleghanies, and to give it as
a _morceau_ to Aaron the First, to be crowned at New Orleans, his future
capital; or to rid Mexico of a part of her troublesome northern
possessions and to establish over it the dynasty of the Burrs. Tried at
Richmond, Virginia, in 1807, before Chief Justice Marshall, he had the
honor of being enclosed in the superb amber vase of Wirt’s rhetoric for
immortal preservation, but the misfortune to be dismissed on
insufficient proof to the chained companionship of the dreaded ghost.
Bonaparte, tired of his consulate for life, and anointed Emperor
December 2, 1804, by a priest whom he called from Rome to Paris for that
purpose, known as Pope Pius VII., had raised against himself and his
family pretensions the more ancient usurpers of Europe, whose equally
bold seizure of the right to govern people, and to take their money
whereon to live in ease, was veiled and historically disguised by a few
score years of unrighteous possession. Of course the ancient usurpers
despised and made faces at the newest. Armies composed of thousands of
common people—farmers, mechanics, and poor laborers—padded in
bright-colored clothes out of moneys borrowed on their credit and to be
repaid by their children, were hurled by these usurpers at each other at
Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena; and after the smoke of the shocks rolled off,
it was found that all the crowned graspers were badly shaken up and
shattered, and had limped away exceedingly hurt in pride and limb,
excepting England only, which, mistress of the water by the victory of
Nelson at Trafalgar, in 1805, thrust her hated trident into the face of
the master of the land. The sea-tossings of the combatants became
profitable to our neutral commerce, which picked up out of the ports of
each the articles needed by the other, and laid them down on the rival
wharves. England had become too much of a trader and shopkeeper to see
such results with complacency, even if, as a belligerent, she could not
participate in the dividends. And so, in May, 1806, she attempted to
inaugurate against France—in addition to actual hostilities—a paper
blockade, by declaring, in a well-sealed and highly respectable looking
document, about two thirds of the Continent of Europe, including the
French territory and its dependencies, in a state of blockade. Without a
blockading squadron to deliver this document and to enforce the
blockade, this declaration was an empty bravado, and a fraud on the
rights of neutrals. This dog-in-the-manger device to stop the trade it
could not supply provoked the newest usurper to a like policy. Napoleon,
equally blinded by his resentments, and equally unconscientious in his
handling of international law, issued from Berlin a counter document,
also well sealed and incapable of delivery, declaring the British Isles
in a state of blockade. Without ships—those marine constables—to serve
papers and bring offenders within maritime jurisdiction, these orders
and decrees became mischievous threats, making lawful trade piracy, and
subjecting neutral merchant vessels to arrest, detention, search, and
condemnation. England now put forth another pretension. As by the feudal
law it was held that “once a subject always a subject,” of course a
fortunate Bull remained a Bull, even when seeking work or protection on
an American vessel. American ships were thus required to stop on the
high seas and be searched for truant English stock. Such a bull England
might make of herself; but she was so angry as not to see that neutrals
would not become such silly calves as to be driven off by these
big-looking shouts.
The question was sharply stated by the Leopard, a British man-of-war, to
the Chesapeake, an American frigate, on board of which it was claimed
were four British seamen. The refusal to permit the ship’s hold to be
looked into not pleasing the Leopard, she fell unexpectedly upon the
little frigate and tore the supposed bulls with horny claws out of the
grasp of the American. The sight offended all America, especially as it
turned out that three of the four seamen were American citizens.
President Jefferson expressed the national resentment in a proclamation
interdicting all British ships entering our ports. Great Britain made
another bull by half apologizing and delivering up two of the four
seamen. The lesson of the stamp duties had not illuminated the density
of George III. He had not learned that half-apologies are confessions of
wrong, but no atonement.
Further experiments were mutually made by the two enraged fighters on
neutral rights and international decencies. In November Great Britain
forbade any one trading with France; and France, equally enterprising,
ordered the stoppage of all trade with England. Our government replied
to these illegal proceedings by an embargo on all vessels in our ports,
foreign and domestic. From December, 1807, until March, 1809, marine
beaux were abundant, and young ladies joyous. When the embargo was
raised the hopes of the latter sank. They became more desponding still
when the government forbade all commercial correspondence with France
and England.