THE MANTLE OF WASHINGTON
The compromises of the Constitution, on whatever grounds they may be
criticized, were so far justified that they gained their end. That end
was the achievement of union; and union was achieved. This was not done
easily nor without opposition. In some cities anti-Constitutional riots
took place. Several States refused to ratify. The opposition had the
support of the great name of Patrick Henry, who had been the soul of the
resistance to the Stamp Act, and who now declared that under the
specious name of "Federation" Liberty had been betrayed. The defence was
conducted in a publication called _The Federalist_ largely by two men
afterwards to be associated with fiercely contending parties, Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison. But more persuasive than any arguments that
the ablest advocate could use were the iron necessities of the
situation. The Union was an accomplished fact. For any State, and
especially for a small State--and it was the small States that hesitated
most--to refuse to enter it would be so plainly disastrous to its
interests that the strongest objections and the most rooted suspicions
had eventually to give way. Some States hung back long: some did not
ratify the Constitution until its machinery was actually working, until
the first President had been chosen and the first Congress had met. But
all ratified it at last, and before the end of Washington's first
Presidency the complement of Stars and Stripes was made up.
The choice of a President was a foregone conclusion. Everyone knew that
Washington was the man whom the hour and the nation demanded. He was
chosen without a contest by the Electoral College, and would undoubtedly
have been chosen with the same practical unanimity by the people had
the choice been theirs. So long as he retained his position he retained
along with it the virtually unchallenged pre-eminence which all men
acknowledged. There had been cabals against him as a general, and there
were signs of a revival of them when his Presidency was clearly
foreshadowed. The impulse came mostly from the older and wealthier
gentry of his own State--the Lees for example--who tended to look down
upon him as a "new man." Towards the end of his political life he was to
some extent the object of attack from the opposite quarter; his fame was
assailed by the fiercer and less prudent of the Democratic publicists.
But, throughout, the great mass of the American people trusted him as
their representative man, as those who abused him or conspired against
him did so to their own hurt. A less prudent man might easily have worn
out his popularity and alienated large sections of opinion, but
Washington's characteristic sagacity, which had been displayed so
constantly during the war, stood him in as good stead in matters of
civil government. He propitiated Nemesis and gave no just provocation to
any party to risk its popularity by attacking him. While he was
President the mantle of his great fame was ample enough to cover the
deep and vital divisions which were appearing even in his own Cabinet,
and were soon to convulse the nation in a dispute for the inheritance of
his power.
His Secretary to the Treasury was Alexander Hamilton. This extraordinary
man presents in more than one respect a complex problem to the
historian. He has an unquestionable right to a place and perhaps to a
supreme place among the builders of the American Republic, and much of
its foundation-laying was his work. Yet he shows in history as a
defeated man, and for at least a generation scarcely anyone dared to
give him credit for the great work that he really did. To-day the
injustice is perhaps the other way. In American histories written since
the Civil War he is not only acclaimed as a great statesman, but his
overthrow at the hands of the Jeffersonians is generally pointed at as a
typical example of the folly and ingratitude of the mob. This version is
at least as unjust to the American people as the depreciation of the
Democrats was to him. The fact is that Hamilton's work had a double
aspect. In so far as it was directed to the cementing of a permanent
union and the building of a strong central authority it was work upon
the lines along which the nation was moving, and towards an end which
the nation really, if subconsciously, desired. But closely associated
with this object in Hamilton's mind was another which the nation did not
desire and which was alien to its instincts and destiny. All this second
part of his work failed, and involved him in its ruin.
Hamilton had fought bravely in the Revolutionary War, but for the ideals
which had become more and more the inspiration of the Revolution he
cared nothing, and was too honest to pretend to care. He had on the
other hand a strong and genuine American patriotism. Perhaps his origin
helped him to a larger view in this matter than was common among his
contemporaries. He was not born in any of the revolted colonies, but in
Bermuda, of good blood but with the bar sinister stamped upon his birth.
He had migrated to New York to seek his fortune, but his citizenship of
that State remained an accident. He had no family traditions tying him
to any section, and, more than any public man that appeared before the
West began to produce a new type, he felt America as a whole. He had
great administrative talents of which he was fully conscious, and the
anarchy which followed the conclusion of peace was hateful to his
instinct for order and strong government. But the strong government
which he would have created was of a different type from that which
America ultimately developed. Theoretically he made no secret of his
preference for a Monarchy over a Republic, but the suspicion that he
meditated introducing monarchical institutions into America, though
sincerely entertained by Jefferson and others, was certainly false.
Whatever his theoretic preferences, he was intensely alive to the logic
of facts, and must have known that a brand-new American monarchy would
have been as impossible as it would have been ludicrous. In theory and
practice, however, he really was anti-democratic. Masses of men seemed
to him incapable alike of judgment and of action, and he thought no
enduring authority could be based upon the instincts of the "great
beast," as he called the mob. He looked for such authority and what
seemed to him the example of history, and especially to the example of
England. He knew how powerful both at home and abroad was the governing
machine which the English aristocracy had established after the
revolution of 1689; and he realized more fully than most men of that
age, or indeed of this, that its strength lay in a small but very
national governing class wielding the people as an instrument. Such a
class he wished to create in America, to connect closely, as the English
oligarchy had connected itself closely, with the great moneyed
interests, and to entrust with the large powers which in his judgment
the central government of the Federation needed.
Jefferson came back from France in the winter of 1789, and was at once
offered by Washington the Secretaryship of State. The offer was not a
very welcome one, for he was hot with the enthusiasm of the great French
struggle, and would gladly have returned to Paris and watched its
progress. He felt, however, that the President's insistence laid upon
him the duty of giving the Government the support of his abilities and
popularity. He had accepted the Constitution which he had no share in
framing, not perhaps as exactly what he would have desired, but
certainly in full good faith and without reserve. It probably satisfied
him at least as well as it satisfied Hamilton, who had actually at one
time withdrawn from the Convention in protest against its refusal to
accept his views. Jefferson's criticisms, such as they were, related
mostly to matters of detail: some of them were just and some were
subsequently incorporated in amendments. But there is ample evidence
that for none of them was he prepared to go the length of opposing or
even delaying the settlement. It is also worth noting that none of them
related to the balance of power between the Federal and State
Governments, upon which Jefferson is often loosely accused of holding
extreme particularist views. As a fact he never held such views. His
formula that "the States are independent as to everything within
themselves and united as to everything respecting foreign nations" is
really a very good summary of the principles upon which the
Constitution is based, and states substantially the policy which all the
truest friends of the Union have upheld. But he was committed out and
out to the principle of popular government, and when it became obvious
that the Federalists under Hamilton's leadership were trying to make the
central government oligarchical, and that they were very near success,
Jefferson quite legitimately invoked and sought to confirm the large
powers secured by the Constitution itself to the States for the purpose
of obstructing their programme.
It was some time, however, before the antagonism between the two
Secretaries became acute, and meanwhile the financial genius of Hamilton
was reducing the economic chaos bequeathed by the war to order and
solvency. All of his measures showed fertility of invention and a
thorough grasp of his subject; some of them were unquestionably
beneficial to the country. But a careful examination will show how
closely and deliberately he was imitating the English model which we
know to have been present to his mind. He established a true National
Debt similar to that which Montague had created for the benefit of
William of Orange. In this debt he proposed to merge the debts of the
individual States contracted during the War of Independence. Jefferson
saw no objection to this at the time, and indeed it was largely through
his favour that a settlement was made which overcame the opposition of
certain States.
This settlement had another interest as being one of the perennial
geographical compromises by means of which the Union was for so long
preserved. The support of Hamilton's policy came mainly from the North;
the opposition to it from the South. It so happened that coincidentally
North and South were divided on another question, the position of the
projected Capital of the Federation. The Southerners wanted it to be on
the Potomac between Virginia and Maryland; the Northerners would have
preferred it further north. At Jefferson's house Hamilton met some of
the leading Southern politicians, and a bargain was struck. The
Secretary's proposal as to the State debts was accepted, and the South
had its way in regard to the Capital. Hamilton probably felt that he
had bought a solid advantage in return for a purely sentimental
concession. Neither he nor anyone else could foresee the day of peril
when the position of Washington between the two Southern States would
become one of the gravest of the strategic embarrassments of the Federal
Government.
Later, when Hamilton's policy and personality had become odious to him,
Jefferson expressed remorse for his conduct of the occasion, and blamed
his colleague for taking advantage of his ignorance of the question. His
sincerity cannot be doubted, but it will appear to the impartial
observer that his earlier judgment was the wiser of the two. The
assumption of State debts had really nothing "monocratic" or
anti-popular about it--nothing even tending to infringe the rights and
liberties of the several States--while it was clearly a statesmanlike
measure from the national standpoint, tending at once to restore the
public credit and cement the Union. But Jefferson read backwards into
this innocuous and beneficent stroke of policy the spirit which he
justly perceived to inform the later and more dubious measures which
proceeded from the same author.
Of these the most important was the creation of the first United States
Bank. Here Hamilton was quite certainly inspired by the example of the
English Whigs. He knew how much the stability of the settlement made in
1689 had owed to the skill and foresight with which Montague, through
the creation of the Bank of England, had attached to it the great
moneyed interests of the City. He wished, through the United States
Bank, to attach the powerful moneyed interests of the Eastern and Middle
States in the same fashion to the Federal Government. This is how he and
his supporters would have expressed it. Jefferson said that he wished to
fill Congress with a crowd of mercenaries bound by pecuniary ties to the
Treasury and obliged to lend it, through good and evil repute, a
perennial and corrupt support. The two versions are really only
different ways of stating the same thing. To a democrat such a standing
alliance between the Government and the rich will always seem a corrupt
thing--nay, the worst and least remediable form of corruption. To a man
of Hamilton's temper it seemed merely the necessary foundation of a
stable political equilibrium. Thus the question of the Bank really
brought the two parties which were growing up in the Cabinet and in the
nation to an issue which revealed the irreconcilable antagonism of their
principles.
The majority in Congress was with Hamilton; but his opponents appealed
to the Constitution. They denied the competency of Congress under that
instrument to establish a National Bank. When the Bill was in due course
sent to Washington for signature he asked the opinions of his Cabinet on
the constitutional question, and both Hamilton and Jefferson wrote very
able State Papers in defence of their respective views. After some
hesitation Washington decided to sign the Bill and to leave the question
of constitutional law to the Supreme Court. In due course it was
challenged there, but Marshal, the Chief Justice, was a decided
Federalist, and gave judgment in favour of the legality of the Bank.
The Federalists had won the first round. Meanwhile the party which
looked to Jefferson as leader was organizing itself. It took the name of
"Republican," as signifying its opposition to the alleged monarchical
designs of Hamilton and his supporters. Later, when it appeared that
such a title was really too universal to be descriptive, the
Jeffersonians began to call themselves by the more genuinely
characteristic title of "Democratic Republicans," subsequently
abbreviated into "Democrats." That name the party which, alone among
American parties, can boast an unbroken historic continuity of more than
a century, retains to this day.
At the end of his original term of four years, Washington was prevailed
upon to give way to the universal feeling of the nation and to accept a
second term. No party thought of opposing him, but a significant
division appeared over the Vice-Presidency. The Democrats ran Clinton
against John Adams of Massachusetts, and though they failed there
appeared in the voting a significant alliance, which was to determine
the politics of a generation. New York State, breaking away from her
Northern neighbours, voted with the Democratic South for Clinton. And
the same year saw the foundation in New York City of that dubious but
very potent product of democracy, which has perhaps become the best
abused institution in the civilized world, yet has somehow or other
contrived to keep in that highly democratic society a power which it
could never retain for a day without a genuine popular backing--Tammany
Hall.
Meanwhile the destinies of every nation of European origin, and of none
perhaps more, in spite of their geographical remoteness, than of the
United States, were being profoundly influenced by the astonishing
events that were shaping themselves in Western Europe. At first all
America was enthusiastic for the French Revolution. Americans were
naturally grateful for the aid given them by the French in their own
struggle for freedom, and saw with eager delight the approaching
liberation of their liberators. But as the drama unrolled itself a
sharp, though very unequal, division of opinion appeared. In New
England, especially, there were many who were shocked at the proceedings
of the French, at their violence, at their Latin cruelty in anger, and,
above all perhaps, at that touch of levity which comes upon the Latin
when he is face to face with death. Massacres and _carmagnoles_ did not
strike the typical Massachusetts merchant as the methods by which
God-fearing men should protest against oppression. The strict military
government which succeeded to, controlled and directed in a national
fashion the violent mood of the people--that necessary martial law which
we call "the Terror"--seemed even less acceptable to his fundamentally
Whiggish political creed. Yet--and it is a most significant fact--the
bulk of popular American opinion was not shocked by these things. It
remained steadily with the French through all those events which
alienated opinion--even Liberal opinion--in Europe. It was perhaps
because European opinion, especially English opinion, even when Liberal,
was at bottom aristocratic, while the American people were already a
democracy. But the fact is certain. By the admission of those American
writers who deplore it and fail to comprehend it, the great mass of the
democracy of America continued, through good and evil repute, to extend
a vivid and indulgent sympathy to the democracy of France.
The division of sympathies which had thus become apparent was converted
into a matter of practical politics by the entry of England into the war
which a Coalition was waging against the French Republic. That
intervention at once sharpened the sympathies of both sides and gave
them a practical purpose. England and France were now arrayed against
each other, and Americans, though their Government remained neutral,
arrayed themselves openly as partisans of either combatant. The division
followed almost exactly the lines of the earlier quarrel which had begun
to appear as the true meaning of Hamilton's policy discovered itself.
The Hamiltonians were for England. The Jeffersonians were for France.
A war of pamphlets and newspapers followed, into the details of which it
is not necessary to go. The Federalists, with the tide going steadily
against them, had the good luck to secure the aid of a pen which had no
match in Europe. The greatest master of English controversial prose that
ever lived was at that time in America. Normally, perhaps, his
sympathies would have been with the Democrats. But love of England was
ever the deepest and most compelling passion of the man who habitually
abused her institutions so roundly. The Democrats were against his
fatherland, and so the supporters of Hamilton found themselves defended
in a series of publications over the signature of "Peter Porcupine" with
all the energy and genius which belonged only to William Cobbett.
A piquancy of the contest was increased by the fact that it was led on
either side by members of the Administration. Washington had early put
forth a Declaration of Neutrality, drawn up by Randolph, who, though
leaning if anything to Jefferson's side, took up a more or less
intermediate position between the parties. Both sides professed to
accept the principle of neutrality, but their interpretations of it were
widely different. Jefferson did not propose to intervene in favour of
France, but he did not think that Americans were bound to disguise their
moral sympathies. They would appear, he thought, both ungrateful and
false to the first principles of their own commonwealth if, whatever
limitation prudence might impose in their action, they did not _desire_
that France should be victorious over the Coalition of Kings. The great
majority of the American people took the same view. When Genet, the
envoy of the newly constituted Republic, arrived from France, he
received an ovation which Washington himself at the height of his glory
could hardly have obtained. Nine American citizens out of ten hastened
to mount the tricolour cockade, to learn the "Marseillaise," and to take
their glasses to the victory of the sister Republic. So strong was the
wave of popular enthusiasm that the United States might perhaps have
been drawn into active co-operation with France had France been better
served by her Minister.
Genet was a Girondin, and the Girondins, perhaps through that defect in
realism which ruined them at home, were not good diplomatists. It is
likely enough that the warmth of his reception deranged his judgment; at
any rate he misread its significance. He failed to take due account of
that sensitiveness of national feeling in a democracy which, as a
Frenchman of that time, he should have been specially able to
appreciate. He began to treat the resources of the United States as if
they had already been placed at the disposal of France, and, when very
properly rebuked, he was foolish enough to attempt to appeal to the
nation against its rulers. The attitude of the Secretary of State ought
to have warned him of the imprudence of his conduct. No man in America
was a better friend to France than Jefferson; but he stood up manfully
to Genet in defence of the independent rights of his country, and the
obstinacy of the ambassador produced, as Jefferson foresaw that it must
produce, a certain reaction of public feeling by which the Anglophil
party benefited.
At the close of the year 1793, Jefferson, weary of endless contests with
Hamilton, whom he accused, not without some justification, of constantly
encroaching on his colleague's proper department, not wholly satisfied
with the policy of the Government and perhaps feeling that Genet's
indiscretions had made his difficult task for the moment impossible,
resigned his office. He would have done so long before had not
Washington, sincerely anxious throughout these troubled years to hold
the balance even between the parties, repeatedly exerted all his
influence to dissuade him. The following year saw the "Whiskey
Insurrection" in Pennsylvania--a popular protest against Hamilton's
excise measures. Jefferson more than half sympathized with the rebels.
Long before, on the occasion of Shay's insurrection, he had expressed
with some exaggeration a view which has much more truth in it than those
modern writers who exclaim in horror at his folly could be expected to
understand--the view that the readiness of people to rebel against their
rulers is no bad test of the presence of democracy among them. He had
even added that he hoped the country would never pass ten years without
a rebellion of some sort. In the present case he had the additional
motives for sympathy that he himself disapproved of the law against
which Pennsylvania was in revolt, and detested its author. Washington
could not be expected to take the same view. He was not anti-democratic
like Hamilton; he sincerely held the theory of the State set forth in
the Declaration of Independence. But he was something of an aristocrat,
and very much of a soldier. As an aristocrat he was perhaps touched with
the illusion which was so fatal to his friend Lafayette, the illusion
that privilege can be abolished and yet the once privileged class
partially retain its ascendancy by a sort of tacit acknowledgment by
others of its value. As a soldier he disliked disorder and believed in
discipline. As a commander in the war he had not spared the rod, and had
even complained of Congress for mitigating the severity of military
punishments. It may be that the "Whiskey Insurrection," which he
suppressed with prompt and drastic energy, led him for the first time to
lean a little to the Hamiltonian side. At any rate he was induced,
though reluctantly and only under strong pressure, to introduce into a
Message to Congress a passage reflecting on the Democratic Societies
which were springing up everywhere and gaining daily in power; and in
return found himself attacked, sometimes with scurrility, in the more
violent organs of the Democracy.
Washington's personal ascendancy was, however, sufficient to prevent the
storm from breaking while he was President. It was reserved for his
successor. In 1797 his second term expired. He had refused a third,
thereby setting an important precedent which every subsequent President
has followed, and bade farewell to politics in an address which is among
the great historical documents of the Republic. The two points
especially emphasized were long the acknowledged keynotes of American
policy: the avoidance at home of "sectional" parties--that is, of
parties following geographical lines--and abroad the maintenance of a
strict independence of European entanglements and alliances.
Had a Presidential election then been what it became later, a direct
appeal to the popular vote, it is probable that Jefferson would have
been the second President of the United States. But the Electoral
College was still a reality, and its majority leant to Federalism.
Immeasurably the ablest man among the Federalists was Hamilton, but for
many reasons he was not an "available" choice. He was not a born
American. He had made many and formidable personal enemies even within
the party. Perhaps the shadow on his birth was a drawback; perhaps also
the notorious freedom of his private life--for the strength of the party
lay in Puritan New England. At any rate the candidate whom the
Federalists backed and succeeded in electing was John Adams of
Massachusetts. By the curiously unworkable rule, soon repealed, of the
original Constitution, which gave the Vice-Presidency to the candidate
who had the second largest number of votes, Jefferson found himself
elected to that office under a President representing everything to
which he was opposed.
John Adams was an honest man and sincerely loved his country. There his
merits ended. He was readily quarrelsome, utterly without judgment and
susceptible to that mood of panic in which mediocre persons are readily
induced to act the "strong man." During his administration a new quarrel
arose with France--a quarrel in which once again those responsible for
that country's diplomacy played the game of her enemies. Genet had
merely been an impracticable and impatient enthusiast. Talleyrand, who
under the Directory took charge of foreign affairs, was a scamp; and,
clever as he was, was unduly contemptuous of America, where he had
lived for a time in exile. He attempted to use the occasion of the
appearance of an American Mission in Paris to wring money out of
America, not only for the French Treasury, but for his own private
profit and that of his colleagues and accomplices. A remarkable
correspondence, which fully revealed the blackmailing attempt made by
the agents of the French Government on the representatives of the United
States, known as the "X.Y.Z." letters, was published and roused the
anger of the whole country. "Millions for defence but not a cent for
tribute" was the universal catchword. Hamilton would probably have
seized the opportunity to go to war with France with some likelihood of
a national backing. Adams avoided war and thereby split his party, but
he did not avoid steps far more certain than a war to excite the
hostility of democratic America. His policy was modelled upon the worst
of the panic-bred measures by means of which Pitt and his colleagues
were seeking to suppress "Jacobinism" in England. Such a policy was
odious anywhere; in a democracy it was also insane. Further the Aliens
Law and the Sedition Law which he induced Congress to pass were in
flagrant and obvious violation of the letter and spirit of the
Constitution. They were barely through Congress when the storm broke on
their authors. Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello, saw that his hour
was come. He put himself at the head of the opposition and found a whole
nation behind him.
Kentucky, carved out of the western territory and newly grown to
Statehood, took the lead of resistance. For her legislature Jefferson
drafted the famous "Kentucky Resolutions," which condemned the new laws
as unconstitutional (which they were) and refused to allow them to be
administered within her borders. On the strength of these resolutions
Jefferson has been described as the real author of the doctrine of
"Nullification": and technically this may be true. Nevertheless there is
all the difference in the world between the spirit of the Kentucky
Resolutions and that of "Nullification," as South Carolina afterwards
proclaimed its legitimacy. About the former there was nothing sectional.
It was not pretended that Kentucky had any peculiar and local objection
to the Sedition Law, or was standing against the other States in
resisting it. She was vindicating a freedom common to all the States,
valued by all and menaced in all. She claimed that she was making
herself the spokesman of the other States in the same fashion as Hampden
made himself the spokesman of the other great landed proprietors in
resisting taxation by the Crown.
The event amply justified her claim. The oppression laws which the
Federalists had induced Congress to pass were virtually dead letters
from the moment of their passing. And when the time came for the nation
to speak, it rose as one man and flung Adams from his seat. The
Federalist party virtually died of the blow. The dream of an
oligarchical Republic was at an end, and the will of the people,
expressed with unmistakable emphasis, gave the Chief Magistracy to the
author of the Declaration of Independence.