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George Washington, Volume II

by Henry Cabot Lodge · English · Gutenberg #12653 · 718,536 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: George Washington, Volume II

Author: Henry Cabot Lodge


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #12653]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE WASHINGTON, VOLUME II ***

[Illustration: MARTHA WASHINGTON]

American Statesmen

STANDARD LIBRARY EDITION


[Illustration: Mount Vernon]


       *       *       *       *       *


GEORGE WASHINGTON

      BY

HENRY CABOT LODGE

  IN TWO VOLUMES
    VOL. II.

     1899


       *       *       *       *       *


CONTENTS

CHAPTER.

     I. WORKING FOR UNION
    II. STARTING THE GOVERNMENT
   III. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
    IV. FOREIGN RELATIONS
     V. WASHINGTON AS A PARTY MAN
    VI. THE LAST YEARS
   VII. GEORGE WASHINGTON

        INDEX




ILLUSTRATIONS


MARTHA WASHINGTON

From the painting by Gilbert Stuart in the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. This painting is owned by the Boston Athenæum and is known as
the Athenæum portrait.

Autograph from letter written from Valley Forge, March 7, 1778, now in
the possession of Hon. Winslow Warren.


The vignette of Mount Vernon is from a photograph.


WASHINGTON RESIGNING HIS COMMISSION AT ANNAPOLIS

From the original painting by Trumbull in the Art Gallery of Yale
University.


LAFAYETTE

From a contemporary French folio engraving in the Emmet collection,
New York Public Library, Lenox Building.


HENRY KNOX

From the original portrait by Gilbert Stuart in the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston.

Autograph from Winsor's "America."


NATHANAEL GREENE

From the original painting by C.W. Peale, by kind permission of its
present owner, Mrs. Wm. Brenton Greene, Jr., Princeton, N.J.

Autograph from Winsor's "America."


       *       *       *       *       *


GEORGE WASHINGTON




CHAPTER I

WORKING FOR UNION


Having resigned his commission, Washington stood not upon the order of
his going, but went at once to Virginia, and reached Mount Vernon the
next day, in season to enjoy the Christmas-tide at home. It was with
a deep sigh of relief that he sat himself down again by his own
fireside, for all through the war the one longing that never left his
mind was for the banks of the Potomac. He loved home after the fashion
of his race, but with more than common intensity, and the country life
was dear to him in all its phases. He liked its quiet occupations and
wholesome sports, and, like most strong and simple natures, he loved
above all an open-air existence. He felt that he had earned his rest,
with all the temperate pleasures and employments which came with it,
and he fondly believed that he was about to renew the habits which he
had abandoned for eight weary years. Four days after his return he
wrote to Governor Clinton: "The scene is at last closed. I feel myself
eased of a load of public care. I hope to spend the remainder of my
days in cultivating the affections of good men and in the practice of
the domestic virtues." That the hope was sincere we may well suppose,
but that it was more than a hope may be doubted. It was a wish, not a
belief, for Washington must have felt that there was still work which
he would surely be called to do. Still for the present the old life
was there, and he threw himself into it with eager zest, though age
and care put some of the former habits aside. He resumed his hunting,
and Lafayette sent him a pack of splendid French wolf-hounds. But they
proved somewhat fierce and unmanageable, and were given up, and after
that the following of the hounds was never resumed. In other respects
there was little change. The work of the plantation and the affairs of
the estate, much disordered by his absence, once more took shape and
moved on successfully under the owner's eye. There were, as of old,
the long days in the saddle, the open house and generous hospitality,
the quiet evenings, and the thousand and one simple labors and
enjoyments of rural life. But with all this were the newer and deeper
cares, born of the change which had been wrought in the destiny of the
country. The past broke in and could not be pushed aside, the future
knocked at the door and demanded an answer to its questionings.

He had left home a distinguished Virginian; he returned one of the
most famous men in the world, and such celebrity brought its usual
penalties. Every foreigner of any position who came to the country
made a pilgrimage to Mount Vernon, and many Americans did the same.
Their coming was not allowed to alter the mode of life, but they were
all hospitably received, and they consumed many hours of their host's
precious time. Then there were the artists and sculptors, who came
to paint his portrait or model his bust. "_In for a penny, in for
a pound_ is an old adage," he wrote to Hopkinson in 1785. "I am so
hackneyed to the touches of painters' pencils that I am now altogether
at their beck, and sit 'like patience on a monument,' whilst they are
delineating the lines of my face. It is a proof, among many others, of
what habit and custom can accomplish." Then there were the people who
desired to write his memoirs, and the historians who wished to have
his reminiscences, in their accounts of the Revolution. Some of these
inquiring and admiring souls came in person, while others assailed him
by letter and added to the vast flood of correspondence which poured
in upon him by every post. His correspondence, in fact, in the
needless part of it, was the most formidable waste of his time. He
seems to have formed no correct idea of his own fame and what it
meant, for he did not have a secretary until he found not only that he
could not arrange his immense mass of papers, but that he could not
even keep up with his daily letters. His correspondence came from all
parts of his own country, and of Europe as well. The French officers
who had been his companions in arms wrote him with affectionate
interest, and he was urged by them, one and all, and even by the king
and queen, to visit France. These were letters which he was only too
happy to answer, and he would fain have crossed the water in response
to their kindly invitation; but he professed himself too old, which
was a mere excuse, and objected his ignorance of the language, which
to a man of his temperament was a real obstacle. Besides these letters
of friendship, there were the schemers everywhere who sought his
counsel and assistance. The notorious Lady Huntington, for example,
pursued him with her project of Christianizing the Indians by means of
a missionary colony in our western region, and her persistent ladyship
cost him a good deal of time and thought, and some long and careful
letters. Then there was the inventor Kumsey, with his steamboat, to
which he gave careful attention, as he did to everything that seemed
to have merit. Another class of correspondents were his officers, who
wanted his aid with Congress and in a thousand other ways, and to
these old comrades he never turned a deaf ear. In this connection also
came the affairs of the Society of the Cincinnati. He took an active
part in the formation of the society, became its head, steered it
through its early difficulties, and finally saved it from the wreck
with which it was threatened by unreasoning popular prejudice. All
these things were successfully managed, but at much expense of time
and thought.

[Illustration: WASHINGTON RESIGNING HIS COMMISSION AT ANNAPOLIS]

Then again, apart from this mass of labor thrust upon him by
outsiders, there were his own concerns. His personal affairs required
looking after, and he regulated accounts, an elaborate business always
with him, put his farms in order, corresponded with his merchants
in England, and introduced agricultural improvements, which always
interested him deeply. He had large investments in land, of which from
boyhood he had been a bold and sagacious purchaser. These investments
had been neglected and needed his personal inspection; so in
September, 1784, he mounted his horse, and with a companion and a
servant rode away to the western country to look after his property.
He camped out, as in the early days, and heartily enjoyed it, although
reports that the Indians were moving in a restless and menacing manner
shortened his trip, and prevented his penetrating beyond his settled
lands to the wild tracts which he owned to the westward. Still he
managed to ride some six hundred and eighty miles and get a good taste
of that wild life which he never ceased to love, besides gathering a
stock of information on many points of deeper and wider interest than
his own property.

In the midst of all these employments, too, he attended closely to his
domestic duties. At frequent intervals he journeyed to Fredericksburg
to visit his mother, who still lived, and to whom he was always a
dutiful and affectionate son. He watched over Mrs. Washington's
grandchildren, and two or three nephews of his own, whose education
he had undertaken, with all the solicitude of a father, and at the
expense again of much thought and many wise letters of instruction and
advice.

Even from this brief list it is possible to gain some idea of the
occupations which filled Washington's time, and the only wonder is
that he dealt with them so easily and effectively. Yet the greatest
and most important work, that which most deeply absorbed his mind, and
which affected the whole country, still remains to be described. With
all his longing for repose and privacy, Washington could not separate
himself from the great problems which he had solved, or from the
solution of the still greater problems which he had done more than any
man to bring into existence. In reality, despite his reiterated wish
for the quiet of home, he never ceased to labor at the new questions
which confronted the country, and the old issues which were the legacy
of the Revolution.

In the latter class was the peace establishment, on which he advised
Congress, much in vain; for their idea of a peace establishment was
to get rid of the army as rapidly as possible, and retain only a
corporal's guard in the service of the confederation. Another question
was that concerning the western posts. As has been already pointed
out, Washington's keen eye had at once detected that this was the
perilous point in the treaty, and he made a prompt but unavailing
effort to secure these posts in the first flush of good feeling when
peace had just been made. After he had retired he observed with regret
the feebleness of Congress in this matter, and he continued to write
about it. He wrote especially to Knox, who was in charge of the war
department, and advised him to establish posts on our side, since we
could not obtain the withdrawal of the British. This deep anxiety as
to the western posts was due not merely to his profound distrust of
the intention of England, but to his extreme solicitude as to the
unsettled regions of the West. He repeatedly referred to the United
States, even before the close of the war, as an infant empire, and he
saw before any one else the destined growth of the country.

No man of that time, with the exception of Hamilton, ever grasped and
realized as he did the imperial future which stretched before the
United States. It was a difficult thing for men who had been born
colonists to rise to a sense of national opportunities, but Washington
passed at a single step from being a Virginian to being an American,
and in so doing he stood alone. He was really and thoroughly national
from the beginning of the war, at a time when, except for a few
oratorical phrases, no one had ever thought of such a thing as a
practical and living question. In the same way he had passed rapidly
to an accurate conception of the probable growth and greatness of
the country, and again he stood alone. Hamilton, born outside the
colonies, unhampered by local prejudices and attachments, and living
in Washington's family, as soon as he turned his mind to the subject,
became, like his chief, entirely national and imperial in his views;
but the other American statesmen of that day, with the exception
of Franklin, only followed gradually and sometimes reluctantly in
adopting their opinions. Some of them never adopted them at all, but
remained imbedded in local ideas, and very few got beyond the region
of words and actually grasped the facts with the absolutely clear
perception which Washington had from the outset. Thus it was that when
the war closed, one of the two ruling ideas in Washington's mind was
to assure the future which he saw opening before the country. He
perceived at a glance that the key and the guarantee of that future
were in the wild regions of the West. Hence his constant anxiety as to
the western posts, as to our Indian policy, and as to the maintenance
of a sufficient armed force upon our borders to check the aggressions
of Englishmen or of savages, and to secure free scope for settlement.
In advancing these ideas on a national scale, however, he was rendered
helpless by the utter weakness of Congress, which even his influence
was powerless to overcome. He therefore began, immediately after his
retreat to private life, to formulate and bring into existence such
practical measures as were possible for the development of the West,
believing that if Congress could not act, the people would, if any
opportunity were given to their natural enterprise.

The scheme which he proposed was to open the western country by means
of inland navigation. The thought had long been in his mind. It had
come to him before the Revolution, and can be traced back to the early
days when he was making surveys, buying wild lands, and meditating
very deeply, but very practically, on the possible commercial
development of the colonies. Now the idea assumed much larger
proportions and a much graver aspect. He perceived in it the first
step toward the empire which he foresaw, and when he had laid down
his sword and awoke in the peaceful morning at Mount Vernon, "with
a strange sense of freedom from official cares," he directed his
attention at once to this plan, in which he really could do something,
despite an inert Congress and a dissolving confederation. His first
letter on the subject was written in March, 1784, and addressed
to Jefferson, who was then in Congress, and who sympathized with
Washington's views without seeing how far they reached. He told
Jefferson how he despaired of government aid, and how he therefore
intended to revive the scheme of a company, which he had started in
1775, and which had been abandoned on account of the war. He showed
the varying interests which it was necessary to conciliate, asked
Jefferson to see the governor of Maryland, so that that State might
be brought into the undertaking, and referred to the danger of being
anticipated and beaten by New York, a chord of local pride which he
continued to touch most adroitly as the business proceeded. Very
characteristically, too, he took pains to call attention to the fact
that by his ownership of land he had a personal interest in the
enterprise. He looked far beyond his own lands, but he was glad to
have his property developed, and with his usual freedom from anything
like pretense, he drew attention to the fact of his personal
interests.

On his return from his tour in the autumn, he proceeded to bring
the matter to public attention and to the consideration of the
legislature. With this end in view he addressed a long letter to
Governor Harrison, in which he laid out his whole scheme. Detroit was
to be the objective point, and he indicated the different routes by
which inland navigation could thence be obtained, thus opening the
Indian trade, and affording an outlet at the same time for the
settlers who were sure to pour in when once the fear of British
aggression was removed. He dwelt strongly upon the danger of Virginia
losing these advantages by the action of other States, and yet at the
same time he suggested the methods by which Maryland and Pennsylvania
could be brought into the plan. Then he advanced a series of arguments
which were purely national in their scope. He insisted on the
necessity of binding to the old colonies by strong ties the Western
States, which might easily be decoyed away if Spain or England had the
sense to do it. This point he argued with great force, for it was now
no longer a Virginian argument, but an argument for all the States.

The practical result was that the legislature took the question up,
more in deference to the writer's wishes and in gratitude for his
services, than from any comprehension of what the scheme meant. The
companies were duly organized, and the promoter was given a hundred
and fifty shares, on the ground that the legislature wished to take
every opportunity of testifying their sense of "the unexampled merits
of George Washington towards his country." Washington was much touched
and not a little troubled by this action. He had been willing, as he
said, to give up his cherished privacy and repose in order to forward
the enterprise. He had gone to Maryland even, and worked to engage
that State in the scheme, but he could not bear the idea of taking
money for what he regarded as part of a great public policy. "I would
wish," he said, "that every individual who may hear that it was a
favorite plan of mine may know also that I had no other motive for
promoting it than the advantage of which I conceived it would be
productive to the Union, and to this State in particular, by cementing
the eastern and western territory together, at the same time that it
will give vigor and increase to our commerce, and be a convenience to
our citizens."

"How would this matter be viewed, then, by the eye of the world, and
what would be the opinion of it, when it comes to be related that
George Washington has received twenty thousand dollars and five
thousand pounds sterling of the public money as an interest therein?"
He thought it would make him look like a "pensioner or dependent"
to accept this gratuity, and he recoiled from the idea. There is
something entirely frank and human in the way in which he says "George
Washington," instead of using the first pronoun singular. He always
saw facts as they were; he understood the fact called "George
Washington" as perfectly as any other, and although he wanted
retirement and privacy, he had no mock modesty in estimating his own
place in the world. At the same time, while he wished to be rid of the
kindly gift, he shrank from putting on what he called the appearance
of "ostentatious disinterestedness" by refusing it. Finally he took
the stock and endowed two charity schools with the dividends. The
scheme turned out successfully, and the work still endures, like the
early surveys and various other things of a very different kind to
which Washington put his hand. In the greater forces which were
presently set in motion for the preservation of the future empire,
the inland navigation, started in Virginia, dropped out of sight, and
became merely one of the rills which fed the mighty river. But it was
the only really practical movement possible at the precise moment when
it was begun, and it was characteristic of its author, who always
found, even in the most discouraging conditions, something that could
be done. It might be only a very little something, but still that was
better than nothing to the strong man ever dealing with facts as they
actually were on this confused earth, and not turning aside because
things were not as they ought to be. Thus many a battle and campaign
had been saved, and so inland navigation played its part now. It
helped, among other things, to bring Maryland and Virginia together,
and their combination was the first step toward the Constitution of
the United States. There is nothing fanciful in all this. No one would
pretend that the Constitution of the United States was descended from
Washington's James River and Potomac River companies. But he worked at
them with that end in view, and so did what was nearest to his hand
and most practical toward union, empire, and the development of
national sentiment.

Ah, says some critic in critic's fashion, you are carried away by your
subject; you see in a simple business enterprise, intended merely to
open western lands, the far-reaching ideas of a statesman. Perhaps
our critic is right, for as one goes on living with this Virginian
soldier, studying his letters and his thoughts, one comes to believe
many things of him, and to detect much meaning in his sayings and
doings. Let us, however, show our evidence at least. Here is what he
wrote to his friend Humphreys a year after his scheme was afoot: "My
attention is more immediately engaged in a project which I think big
with great political as well as commercial consequences to the
States, especially the middle ones;" and then he went on to argue the
necessity of fastening the Western States to the Atlantic seaboard
and thus thwarting Spain and England. This looks like more than a
money-making scheme; in fact, it justifies all that has been said,
especially if read in connection with certain other letters of this
period. Great political results, as well as lumber and peltry, were
what Washington intended to float along his rivers and canals.

In this same letter to Humphreys he touched also on another point
in connection with the development of the West, which was of vast
importance to the future of the country, and was even then agitating
men's minds. He said: "I may be singular in my ideas, but they are
these: that, to open a door to, and make easy the way for those
settlers to the westward (who ought to advance regularly and
compactly), before we make any stir about the navigation of the
Mississippi, and before our settlements are far advanced towards that
river, would be our true line of policy." Again he wrote: "However
singular the opinion may be, I cannot divest myself of it, that the
navigation of the Mississippi, _at this time_ [1785], ought to be no
object with us. On the contrary, until we have a little time allowed
to open and make easy the ways between the Atlantic States and the
western territory, the obstructions had better remain." He was right
in describing himself as "singular" in his views on this matter, which
just then was exciting much attention.

At that time indeed much feeling existed, and there were many sharp
divisions about the Mississippi question. One party, for the sake of a
commercial treaty with Spain, and to get a troublesome business out of
the way, was ready to give up our claims to a free navigation of
the great river; and this was probably the prevalent sentiment in
Congress, for to most of the members the Mississippi seemed a very
remote affair indeed. On the other side was a smaller and more violent
party, which was for obtaining the free navigation immediately and
at all hazards, and was furious at the proposition to make such a
sacrifice as its opponents proposed. Finally, there was Spain herself
intriguing to get possession of the West, holding out free navigation
as a bait to the settlers of Kentucky, and keeping paid agents in that
region to foster her schemes. Washington saw too far and too
clearly to think for one moment of giving up the navigation of the
Mississippi, but he also perceived what no one else seems to have
thought of, that free navigation at that moment would give the western
settlements "the habit of trade" with New Orleans before they had
formed it with the Atlantic seaboard, and would thus detach them from
the United States. He wished, therefore, to have the Mississippi
question left open, and all our claims reserved, so that trade by
the river should be obstructed until we had time to open our inland
navigation and bind 'the western people to us by ties too strong to
be broken. The fear that the river would be lost by waiting did not
disturb him in the least, provided our claims were kept alive. He
wrote to Lee in June, 1786: "Whenever the new States become so
populous, and so extended to the westward, as really to need it,
there will be no power which can deprive them of the use of the
Mississippi." Again, a year later, while the convention was sitting in
Philadelphia, he said: "My sentiments with respect to the navigation
of the Mississippi have been long fixed, and are not dissimilar to
those which are expressed in your letter. I have ever been of opinion
that the true policy of the Atlantic States, instead of contending
prematurely for the free navigation of that river (which eventually,
and perhaps as soon as it will be our true interest to obtain it, must
happen), would be to open and improve the natural communications
with the western country." The event justified his sagacity in all
respects, for the bickerings went on until the United States were able
to compel Spain to give what was wanted to the western communities,
which by that time had been firmly bound to those of the Atlantic
coast.

Much as Washington thought about holding fast the western country,
there was yet one idea that overruled it as well as all others. There
was one plan which he knew would be a quick solution of the dangers
and difficulties for which inland navigation and trade connections
were at best but palliatives. He had learned by bitter experience, as
no other man had learned, the vital need and value of union. He felt
it as soon as he took command of the army, and it rode like black care
behind him from Cambridge to Yorktown. He had hoped something from the
confederation, but he soon saw that it was as worthless as the utter
lack of system which it replaced, and amounted merely to substituting
one kind of impotence and confusion for another. Others might be
deceived by phrases as to nationality and a general government, but
he had dwelt among hard facts, and he knew that these things did not
exist. He knew that what passed for them, stood in their place and
wore their semblance, were merely temporary creations born of the
common danger, and doomed, when the pressure of war was gone, to fall
to pieces in imbecility and inertness. To the lack of a proper
union, which meant to his mind national and energetic government, he
attributed the failures of the campaigns, the long-drawn miseries, and
in a word the needless prolongation of the Revolution. He saw, too,
that what had been so nearly ruinous in war would be absolutely so in
peace, and before the treaty was actually signed he had begun to call
attention to the great question on the right settlement of which the
future of the country depended.

To Hamilton he wrote on March 4, 1783: "It is clearly my opinion,
unless Congress have powers competent to all general purposes, that
the distresses we have encountered, the expense we have incurred, and
the blood we have spilt, will avail us nothing." Again he wrote to
Hamilton, a few weeks later: "My wish to see the union of these States
established upon liberal and permanent principles, and inclination
to contribute my mite in pointing out the defects of the present
constitution, are equally great. All my private letters have teemed
with these sentiments, and whenever this topic has been the subject
of conversation, I have endeavored to diffuse and enforce them." His
circular letter to the governors of the States at the close of the
war, which was as eloquent as it was forcible, was devoted to urging
the necessity of a better central government. "With this conviction,"
he said, "of the importance of the present crisis, silence in me would
be a crime. I will therefore speak to your Excellency the language of
freedom and of sincerity without disguise.... There are four things
which I humbly conceive are essential to the well-being, I may
even venture to say, to the existence, of the United States, as an
independent power:--

"First. An indissoluble union of the States under one federal head.

"Second. A regard to public justice.

"Third. The adoption of a proper peace establishment; and,

"Fourth. The prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among
the people of the United States, which will induce them to forget
their local prejudices and policies; to make those mutual concessions
which are requisite to the general prosperity; and in some instances
to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the
community." The same appeal went forth again in his last address to
the army, when he said: "Although the general has so frequently given
it as his opinion, in the most public and explicit manner, that unless
the principles of the federal government were properly supported, and
the powers of the Union increased, the honor, dignity, and justice of
the nation would be lost forever; yet he cannot help repeating on
this occasion so interesting a sentiment, and leaving it as his last
injunction to every soldier, who may view the subject in the same
serious point of light, to add his best endeavors to those of his
worthy fellow-citizens towards effecting those great and valuable
purposes on which our very existence as a nation so materially
depends."

These two papers were the first strong public appeals for union. The
letter to the governors argued the question elaborately, and was
intended for the general public. The address to the army was simply a
watchword and last general order; for the army needed no arguments to
prove the crying need of better government. Before this, Hamilton had
written his famous letters to Duane and Morris, and Madison was
just beginning to turn his thoughts toward the problem of federal
government; but with these exceptions Washington stood alone. In
sending out these two papers he began the real work that led to the
Constitution. What he said was read and heeded throughout the country,
for at the close of the war his personal influence was enormous, and
with the army his utterances were those of an oracle. By his appeal he
made each officer and soldier a missionary in the cause of the Union,
and by his arguments to the governors he gave ground and motive for
a party devoted to procuring better government. Thus he started the
great movement which, struggling through many obstacles, culminated in
the Constitution and the union of the States. No other man could
have done it, for no one but Washington had a tithe of the influence
necessary to arrest public attention; and, save Hamilton, no other
man then had even begun to understand the situation which Washington
grasped so easily and firmly in all its completeness.

He sent out these appeals as his last words to his countrymen at the
close of their conflict; but he had no intention of stopping there.
He had written and spoken, as he said, to every one on every occasion
upon this topic, and he continued to do so until the work was done. He
had no sooner laid aside the military harness than he began at once to
push on the cause of union. In the bottom of his heart he must have
known that his work was but half done, and with the same pen with
which he reiterated his intention to live in repose and privacy, and
spend his declining years beneath his own vine and fig-tree, he wrote
urgent appeals and wove strong arguments addressed to leaders in
every State. He had not been at home five days before he wrote to the
younger Trumbull, congratulating him on his father's vigorous message
in behalf of better federal government, which had not been very well
received by the Connecticut legislature. He spoke of "the jealousies
and contracted temper" of the States, but avowed his belief that
public sentiment was improving. "Everything," he concluded, "my dear
Trumbull, will come right at last, as we have often prophesied.
My only fear is that we shall lose a little reputation first." A
fortnight later he wrote to the governor of Virginia: "That the
prospect before us is, as you justly observe, fair, none can deny; but
what use we shall make of it is exceedingly problematical; not but
that I believe all things will come right at last, but like a young
heir come a little prematurely to a large inheritance, we shall wanton
and run riot until we have brought our reputation to the brink of
ruin, and then like him shall have to labor with the current of
opinion, when compelled, perhaps, to do what prudence and common
policy pointed out as plain as any problem in Euclid in the first
instance." The soundness of the view is only equaled by the accuracy
of the prediction. He might five years later have repeated this
sentence, word for word, only altering the tenses, and he would have
rehearsed exactly the course of events.

While he wrote thus he keenly watched Congress, and marked its sure
and not very gradual decline. He did what he could to bring about
useful measures, and saw them one after the other come to naught. He
urged the impost scheme, and felt that its failure was fatal to the
financial welfare of the country, on which so much depended. He
always was striving to do the best with existing conditions, but the
hopelessness of every effort soon satisfied him that it was a waste of
time and energy. So he turned again in the midst of his canal schemes
to renew his exhortations to leading men in the various States on the
need of union as the only true solution of existing troubles.

To James McHenry, of Maryland, he wrote in August, 1785: "I confess to
you candidly that I can foresee no evil greater than disunion; than
those unreasonable jealousies which are continually poisoning our
minds and filling them with imaginary evils for the prevention of real
ones." To William Grayson of Virginia, then a member of Congress,
he wrote at the same time: "I have ever been a friend to adequate
congressional powers; consequently I wish to see the ninth article of
the confederation amended and extended. Without these powers we cannot
support a national character, and must appear contemptible in the eyes
of Europe. But to you, my dear Sir, I will candidly confess that in
my opinion it is of little avail to give them to Congress." He was
already clearly of opinion that the existing system was hopeless, and
the following spring he wrote still more sharply as to the state of
public affairs to Henry Lee, in Congress. "My sentiments," he said,
"with respect to the federal government are well known. Publicly and
privately have they been communicated without reserve; but my opinion
is that there is more wickedness than ignorance in the conduct of the
States, or, in other words, in the conduct of those who have too
much influence in the government of them; and until the curtain is
withdrawn, and the private views and selfish principles upon which
these men act are exposed to public notice, I have little hope of
amendment without another convulsion."

He did not confine himself, however, to letters, important as the work
done in this way was, but used all his influence toward practical
measures outside of Congress, of whose action he quite despaired. The
plan for a commercial agreement between Maryland and Virginia was
concerted at Mount Vernon, and led to a call to all the States to
meet at Annapolis for the same object. This, of course, received
Washington's hearty approval and encouragement, but he evidently
regarded it, although important, as merely a preliminary step to
something wider and better. He wrote to Lafayette describing the
proposed gathering at Annapolis, and added: "A general convention
is talked of by many for the purpose of revising and correcting the
defects of the federal government; but whilst this is the wish of
some, it is the dread of others, from an opinion that matters are
not yet sufficiently ripe for such an event." This expressed his own
feeling, for although he was entirely convinced that only a radical
reform would do, he questioned whether the time had yet arrived, and
whether things had become bad enough, to make such a reform either
possible or lasting. He was chiefly disturbed because he felt that
there was "more wickedness than ignorance mixed in our councils,"
and he grew more and more anxious as public affairs declined without
apparently producing a reaction. The growing contempt shown by foreign
nations and the arrogant conduct of Great Britain especially alarmed
him, while the rapid sinking of the national reputation stung him to
the quick. "I do not conceive," he wrote to Jay, in August, 1786, "we
can exist long as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power
which will pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the
authority of the state governments extends over the several States."
Thus with unerring judgment he put his finger on the vital point in
the whole question, which was the need of a national government that
should deal with the individual citizens of the whole country and
not with the States. "To be fearful," he continued, "of investing
Congress, constituted as that body is, with ample authorities for
national purposes, appears to me the very climax of popular absurdity
and madness.... Requisitions are actually little better than a jest
and a byword throughout the land. If you tell the legislatures they
have violated the treaty of peace, and invaded the prerogatives of the
confederacy, they will laugh in your face.... It is much to be feared,
as you observe, that the better kind of people, being disgusted with
the circumstances, will have their minds prepared for any revolution
whatever.... I am told that even respectable characters speak of
a monarchical government without horror. From thinking proceeds
speaking; thence to acting is often but a single step. But how
irrevocable and tremendous! What a triumph for our enemies to verify
their predictions!... It is not my business to embark again upon a sea
of troubles. Nor could it be expected that my sentiments and opinions
would have much weight on the minds of my countrymen. They have been
neglected, though given as a last legacy in the most solemn manner. I
had then perhaps some claims to public attention. I consider myself as
having none at present."

It is interesting to observe the ease and certainty with which, in
dealing with the central question, he grasped all phases of the
subject and judged of the effect of the existing weakness with regard
to every relation of the country and to the politics of each State.
He pointed out again and again the manner in which we were exposed
to foreign hostility, and analyzed the designs of England, rightly
detecting a settled policy on her part to injure and divide where she
had failed to conquer. Others were blind to the meaning of the
English attitude as to the western posts, commerce, and international
relations. Washington brought it to the attention of our leading men,
educating them on this as on other points, and showing, too, the
stupidity of Great Britain in her attempt to belittle the trade of a
country which, as he wrote Lafayette in prophetic vein, would one day
"have weight in the scale of empires."

He followed with the same care the course of events in the several
States. In them all he resisted the craze for issuing irredeemable
paper money, writing to his various correspondents, and urging
energetic opposition to this specious and pernicious form of public
dishonesty. It was to Massachusetts, however, that his attention was
most strongly attracted by the social disorders which culminated in
the Shays rebellion. There the miserable condition of public affairs
was bearing bitter fruit, and Washington watched the progress of the
troubles with profound anxiety. He wrote to Lee: "You talk, my
good sir, of employing influence to appease the present tumults in
Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or,
if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders.
_Influence_ is not _government_. Let us have a government by which our
lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the
worst at once." Through "all this mist of intoxication and folly,"
however, Washington saw that the Shays insurrection would probably be
the means of frightening the indifferent, and of driving those who
seemed impervious to every appeal to reason into an active support
of some better form of government. He rightly thought that riot and
bloodshed would prove convincing arguments.

In order to understand the utter demoralization of society, politics,
and public opinion at that time, the offspring of a wasting civil war
and of colonial habits of thought, it is interesting to contrast the
attitude of Washington with that of another distinguished American in
regard to the Shays rebellion. While Washington was looking solemnly
at this manifestation of weakness and disorder, and was urging strong
measures with passionate vehemence, Jefferson was writing from Paris
in the flippant vein of the fashionable French theorists, and uttering
such ineffable nonsense as the famous sentence about "once in twenty
years watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants." There
could be no better illustration of what Washington was than this
contrast between the man of words and the man of action, between the
astute leader of a party, the shrewd manager of men, and the silent
leader of armies, the master builder of states and governments.

I have followed Washington through the correspondence of this time
with some minuteness, because it is the only way by which his work in
overcoming the obstacles in the path to good government can be seen.
He held no public office; he had no means of reaching the popular ear.
He was neither a professional orator nor a writer of pamphlets, and
the press of that day, if he had controlled it, had no power to mould
or direct public thought. Yet, despite these obstacles, he set himself
to develop public opinion in favor of a better government, and he
worked at this difficult and impalpable task without ceasing, from
the day that he resigned from the army until he was called to the
presidency of the United States. He did it by means of private
letters, a feeble instrument to-day, but much more effective then.
Jefferson never made speeches nor published essays, but he built up a
great party, and carried himself into power as its leader by means
of letters. In the same fashion Washington started the scheme for
internal waterways, in order to bind the East and the West together,
set on foot the policy of commercial agreements between the States,
and argued on the "imperial theme" with leading men everywhere. A
study of these letters reveals a strong, logical, and deliberate
working towards the desired end. There was no scattering fire. Whether
he was writing of canals, or the Mississippi, or the Western posts,
or paper money, or the impost, or the local disorders, he always was
arguing and urging union and an energetic central government. These
letters went to the leaders of thought and opinion, and were quoted
and passed from hand to hand. They brought immediately to the cause
all the soldiers and officers of the army, and they aroused and
convinced the strongest and ablest men in every State. Washington's
personal influence was very great, something we of this generation,
with a vast territory and seventy millions of people, cannot readily
understand. To many persons his word was law; to all that was best in
the community, everything he said had immense weight. This influence
he used with care and without waste. Every blow he struck went home.
It is impossible to estimate just how much he effected, but it is safe
to say that it is to Washington, aided first by Hamilton and then
by Madison, that we owe the development of public opinion and the
formation of the party which devised and carried the Constitution.
Events of course worked with them, but they used events, and did not
suffer the golden opportunities, which without them would have been
lost, to slip by.

When Washington wrote of the Shays rebellion to Lee, the movement
toward a better union, which he had begun, was on the brink of
success. That ill-starred insurrection became, as he foresaw, a
powerful spur to the policy started at Mount Vernon, and adopted by
Virginia and Maryland. From this had come the Annapolis convention,
and thence the call for another convention at Philadelphia. As soon
as the word went abroad that a general convention was to be held, the
demand for Washington as a delegate was heard on all sides. At first
he shrank from it. Despite the work which he had been doing, and which
he must have known would bring him once more into public service, he
still clung to the vision of home life which he had brought with him
from the army. November 18, 1786, he wrote to Madison, that from a
sense of obligation he should go to the convention, were it not that
he had declined on account of his retirement, age, and rheumatism to
be at a meeting of the Cincinnati at the same time and place. But
no one heeded him, and Virginia elected him unanimously to head
her delegation at Philadelphia. He wrote to Governor Randolph,
acknowledging the honor, but reiterating what he had said to Madison,
and urging the choice of some one else in his place. Still Virginia
held the question open, and on February 3 he wrote to Knox that his
private intention was not to attend. The pressure continued, and, as
usual when the struggle drew near, the love of battle and the sense of
duty began to reassert themselves. March 8 he again wrote to Knox that
he had not meant to come, but that the question had occurred to him,
"Whether my non-attendance in the convention will not be considered
as dereliction of republicanism; nay, more, whether other motives may
not, however injuriously, be ascribed for my not exerting myself
on this occasion in support of it;" and therefore he wished to be
informed as to the public expectation on the matter. On March 28 he
wrote again to Randolph that ill-health might prevent his going, and
therefore it would be well to appoint some one in his place. April 2
he said that if representation of the States was to be partial, or
powers cramped, he did not want to be a sharer in the business. "If
the delegates assemble," he wrote, "with such powers as will enable
the convention to probe the defects of the constitution to the bottom
and point out radical cures, it would be an honorable employment;
otherwise not." This idea of inefficiency and failure in the
convention had long been present to his mind, and he had already said
that, if their powers were insufficient, the convention should go
boldly over and beyond them and make a government with the means of
coercion, and able to enforce obedience, without which it would be, in
his opinion, quite worthless. Thus he pondered on the difficulties,
and held back his acceptance of the post; but when the hour of action
drew near, the rheumatism and the misgivings alike disappeared before
the inevitable, and Washington arrived in Philadelphia, punctual as
usual, on May 13, the day before the opening of the convention.

The other members were by no means equally prompt, and a week elapsed
before a bare quorum was obtained and the convention enabled to
organize. In this interval of waiting there appears to have been some
informal discussion among the members present, between those who
favored an entirely new Constitution and those who timidly desired
only half-way measures. On one of these occasions Washington is
reported by Gouverneur Morris, in a eulogy delivered twelve years
later, to have said: "It is too probable that no plan we propose will
be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If,
to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can
we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the
wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God." The
language is no doubt that of Morris, speaking from memory and in a
highly rhetorical vein, but we may readily believe that the quotation
accurately embodied Washington's opinion, and that he took this high
ground at the outset, and strove from the beginning to inculcate upon
his fellow-members the absolute need of bold and decisive action.
The words savor of the orator who quoted them, but the noble and
courageous sentiment which they express is thoroughly characteristic
of the man to whom they were attributed.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is necessary to say a few words in regard to this
quotation of Washington's words made by Morris, because both Mr.
Bancroft (_History of the Constitution_, ii. 8) and Mr. John Fiske
(_The Critical Period of American History_, p. 232) quote them as if
they were absolutely and verbally authentic. It is perfectly certain
that from May 25 to September 17 Washington spoke but once; that
is, he spoke but once in the convention after it became such by
organization. This point is determined by Madison's statement (Notes,
in. 1600), that when Washington took the floor in behalf of Gorham's
amendment, "it was the only occasion on which the president entered _at
all_ into the discussions of the convention." (The italics are mine.)
I have examined the manuscript at the State Department, and these
words are written in Madison's own hand in the body of the text and
inclosed in brackets. Madison was the most accurate of men. His notes
are only abstracts of what was said, but he was never absent from
the convention, and there can be no question that if Washington had
uttered the words attributed to him by Morris, a speech so important
would have been given as fully as possible, and Madison would not have
said distinctly that the Gorham amendment was the only occasion when
the president entered into the discussions of the convention.

It is, therefore, certain that Washington said nothing in the
convention except on the occasion of the Gorham amendment, and Mr.
Bancroft rightly assigns the Morris quotation to some time during the
week which elapsed between the date fixed for the assembling of the
convention and that on which a quorum of States was obtained. The
words given by Morris, if uttered at all, must have been spoken
informally in the way of conversation before there was any convention,
strictly speaking, and of course before Washington was chosen
president. Mr. Fiske, who devotes a page to these sentences from the
eulogy, describes Washington as rising from his president's chair and
addressing the convention with great solemnity. There is no authority
whatever to show that he rose from the chair to address the other
delegates, and, if he used the words quoted by Morris, he was
certainly not president of the convention when he did so. The latter
blunder, however, is Morris's own, and in making it he contradicts
himself. These are his words: "He is their president. It is a question
previous to their first meeting what course shall be pursued." In
other words, he was their president before they had met and chosen a
president. This is a fair illustration of the loose and rhetorical
character of the passage in which Washington's admonition is quoted.
The entire paragraph, with its mixture of tenses arising from the use
of the historical present which Morris's classical fancies led him to
employ, is, in fact, purely rhetorical, and has only the authority
due to performances of that character. It seems to me impossible,
therefore, to fairly suppose that the words quoted by Morris were
anything more than his own presentation of a sentiment which he, no
doubt, heard Washington urge frequently and forcibly. Even in this
limited acceptation his account is both interesting and valuable,
as indicating Washington's opinion and the tone he took with his
fellow-members; but this, I think, is the utmost weight that can be
attached to it. I have discussed the point thus minutely because two
authorities so distinguished as Mr. Bancroft and Mr. Fiske have laid
so much stress on the words given by Morris, and have seemed to me to
accord to them a greater weight and a higher authenticity than the
facts warrant. Morris's eulogy on Washington was delivered in New
York, and may be found most readily in a little volume entitled
_Washingtoniana_ (p. 110), published at Lancaster in 1802.]

When a quorum was finally obtained, Washington was unanimously chosen
to preside over the convention; and there he sat during the sessions
of four months, silent, patient, except on a single occasion,[1]
taking no part in debate, but guiding the business, and using all his
powers with steady persistence to compass the great end. The debates
of that remarkable body have been preserved in outline in the full and
careful notes of Madison. Its history has been elaborately written,
and the arguments and opinions of its members have been minutely
examined and unsparingly criticised. We are still ignorant, and shall
always remain ignorant, of just how much was due to Washington for the
final completion of the work. His general views and his line of action
are clearly to be seen in his letters and in the words attributed to
him by Morris. That he labored day and night for success we know, and
that his influence with his fellow-members was vast we also know, but
the rest we can only conjecture. There came a time when everything
was at a standstill, and when it looked as if no agreement could
be reached by the men representing so many conflicting interests.
Hamilton had made his great speech, and, finding the vote of his State
cast against him by his two colleagues on every question, had gone
home in a frame of mind which we may easily believe was neither very
contented nor very sanguine. Even Franklin, most hopeful and buoyant
of men, was nearly ready to despair. Washington himself wrote to
Hamilton, on July 10: "When I refer you to the state of the counsels
which prevailed at the period you left this city, and add that they
are now, if possible, in a worse train than ever, you will find but
little ground on which the hope of a good establishment can be formed.
In a word, I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue to the
proceedings of our convention, and do therefore repent having had any
agency in the business." Matters were certainly in a bad state when
Washington could write in this strain, and when his passion for
success was so cooled that he repented of agency in the business.
There was much virtue, however, in that little word "almost." He did
not quite despair yet, and, after his fashion, he held on with grim
tenacity. We know what the compromises finally were, and how they were
brought about, but we can never do exact justice to the iron will
which held men together when all compromises seemed impossible, and
which even in the darkest hour would not wholly despair. All that can
be said is, that without the influence and the labors of Washington
the convention of 1787, in all probability, would have failed of
success.

[Footnote 1: Just at the close of the convention, when the
Constitution in its last draft was in the final stage and on the eve
of adoption, Mr. Gorham of Massachusetts moved to amend by reducing
the limit of population in a congressional district from forty to
thirty thousand. Washington took the floor and argued briefly and
modestly in favor of the change. His mere request was sufficient, and
the amendment was unanimously adopted.]

At all events it did not fail, and after much tribulation the work was
done. On September 17, 1787, a day ever to be memorable, Washington
affixed his bold and handsome signature to the Constitution of the
United States. Tradition has it that as he stood by the table, pen in
hand, he said: "Should the States reject this excellent Constitution,
the probability is that opportunity will never be offered to cancel
another in peace; the next will be drawn in blood." Whether the
tradition is well or ill founded, the sentence has the ring of truth.
A great work had been accomplished. If it were cast aside, Washington
knew that the sword and not the pen would make the next Constitution,
and he regarded that awful alternative with dread. He signed first,
and was followed by all the members present, with three notable
exceptions. Then the delegates dined together at the city tavern, and
took a cordial leave of each other. "After which," the president of
the convention wrote in his diary, "I returned to my lodgings, did
some business with, and received the papers from, the secretary of the
convention, and retired to meditate upon the momentous work which had
been executed." It is a simple sentence, but how much it means! The
world would be glad to-day to know what the thoughts were which
filled Washington's mind as he sat alone in the quiet of that summer
afternoon, with the new Constitution lying before him. But he was then
as ever silent. He did not go alone to his room to exhibit himself on
paper for the admiration of posterity. He went there to meditate for
his own guidance on what had been done for the benefit of his country.
The city bells had rung a joyful chime when he arrived four months
before. Ought they to ring again with a new gladness, or should they
toll for the death of bright hopes, now the task was done? Washington
was intensely human. In that hour of silent thought his heart must
have swelled with a consciousness that he had led his people through
a successful Revolution, and now again from the darkness of political
confusion and dissolution to the threshold of a new existence. But at
the same time he never deceived himself. The new Constitution was but
an experiment and an opportunity. Would the States accept it? And
if they accepted it, would they abide by it? Was this instrument of
government, wrought out so painfully, destined to go to pieces after
a few years of trial, or was it to prove strong enough to become the
charter of a nation and hold the States together indissolubly against
all the shocks of politics and revolution? Washington, with his
foresight and strong national instinct, plainly saw these momentous
questions, somewhat dim then, although clear to all the world to-day.
We can guess how solemnly he thought about them as he meditated alone
in his room on that September afternoon. Whatever his reflections, his
conclusions were simple. He made up his mind that the only chance for
the country lay in the adoption of the new scheme, but he was sober
enough in his opinions as to the Constitution itself. He said of it to
Lafayette the day after the signing: "It is the result of four months'
deliberation. It is now a child of fortune, to be fostered by some and
buffeted by others. What will be the general opinion or the reception
of it is not for me to decide; nor shall I say anything for or against
it. If it be good, I suppose it will work its way; if bad, it will
recoil on the framers." We catch sight here of the old theory that his
public life was at an end, and now, when this exceptional duty had
been performed, that he would retire once more to remote privacy. This
fancy, as well as the extremely philosophical mood about the fate of
the Constitution, apparent in this letter, soon disappeared. Within a
week he wrote to Henry, in whom he probably already suspected the
most formidable opponent of the new plan in Virginia: "I wish the
Constitution, which is offered, had been more perfect; but I sincerely
believe it is the best that could be obtained at this time, and as a
constitutional door is opened for amendments hereafter, the adoption
of it under the present circumstances of the Union is, in my opinion,
desirable." Copies of this letter were sent to Harrison and Nelson,
and the correspondence thus started soon increased rapidly. He wrote
to Hamilton and Madison to counsel with them as to the prospects of
the Constitution, and to Knox to supply him with arguments and
urge him to energetic work. By January of the new year the tone of
indifference and doubt manifested in the letter to Lafayette had quite
gone, and we find him writing to Governor Randolph, in reply to that
gentleman's objections: "There are some things in the new form, I will
readily acknowledge, which never did, and I am persuaded never will,
obtain my cordial approbation, but I did then conceive and do now most
firmly believe that in the aggregate it is the best Constitution that
can be obtained at this epoch, and that this or a dissolution of the
Union awaits our choice, and is the only alternative before us. Thus
believing, I had not, nor have I now, any hesitation in deciding on
which to lean."

Thus the few letters to a few friends extended to many letters to many
friends, and traveled into every State. They all urged the necessity
of adopting the Constitution as the best that could be obtained. What
Washington's precise objections to the Constitution were is not clear.
In a general way it was not energetic enough to come up to his ideal,
but he never particularized in his criticisms. He may have admitted
the existence of defects in order simply to disarm opposition, and
doubtless he, like most of the framers, was by no means completely
satisfied with his work. But he brushed all faults aside, and drove
steadily forward to the great end in view. He was as far removed as
possible from that highly virtuous and very ineffective class of
persons who will not support anything that is not perfect, and who
generally contrive to do more harm than all the avowed enemies of
sound government. Washington did not stop to worry over and argue
about details, but sought steadily to bring to pass the main object
at which he aimed. As he had labored for the convention, so he now
labored for the Constitution, and his letters to his friends not
only had great weight in forming a Federal party and directing its
movements, but extracts from them were quoted and published, thus
exerting a direct and powerful influence on public opinion.

He made himself deeply felt in this way everywhere, but of course more
in his own State than anywhere else. His confidence at first in regard
to Virginia changed gradually to an intense and well-grounded anxiety,
and he not only used every means, as the conflict extended, to
strengthen his friends and gain votes, but he received and circulated
personally copies of "The Federalist," in order to educate public
opinion. The contest in the Virginia convention was for a long time
doubtful, but finally the end was reached, and the decision was
favorable. Without Washington's influence, it is safe to say that the
Constitution would have been lost in Virginia, and without Virginia
the great experiment would probably have failed. In the same spirit he
worked on after the new scheme had secured enough States to insure
a trial. The Constitution had been ratified; it must now be made to
work, and Washington wrote earnestly to the leaders in the various
States, urging them to see to it that "Federalists," stanch friends
of the Constitution, were elected to Congress. There was no vagueness
about his notions on this point. A party had carried the Constitution
and secured its ratification, and to that party he wished the
administration and establishment of the new system to be intrusted.
He did not take the view that, because the fight was over, it was
henceforth to be considered that there had been no fight, and that all
men were politically alike. He was quite ready to do all in his power
to conciliate the opponents of union and the Constitution, but he did
not believe that the momentous task of converting the paper system
into a living organism should be confided to any hands other than
those of its tried and trusty friends.

But while he was looking so carefully after the choice of the right
men to fill the legislature of the new government, the people of the
country turned to him with the universal demand that he should stand
at the head of it, and fill the great office of first President of the
Republic. In response to the first suggestion that came, he recognized
the fact that he was likely to be again called upon for another
great public service, and added simply that at his age it involved a
sacrifice which admitted of no compensation. He maintained this tone
whenever he alluded to the subject, in response to the numerous
letters urging him to accept. But although he declined to announce any
decision, he had made up his mind to the inevitable. He had put his
hand to the plough, and he would not turn back. His only anxiety was
that the people should know that he shrank from the office, and would
only leave his farm to take it from a sense of overmastering duty.
Besides his reluctance to engage in a fresh struggle, and his fear
that his motives might be misunderstood, he had the same diffidence in
his own abilities which weighed upon him when he took command of the
armies. His passion for success, which determined him to accept the
presidency, if it was deemed indispensable that he should do so, made
him dread failure with an almost morbid keenness, although his courage
was too high and his will too strong ever to draw back. Responsibility
weighed upon his spirits, but it could not daunt him. He wrote to
Trumbull in December, 1788, that he saw "nothing but clouds and
darkness before him," but when the hour came he was ready. The
elections were favorable to the Federalists. The electoral colleges
gave Washington their unanimous vote, and on April 16, having been
duly notified by Congress of his election, he left Mount Vernon for
New York, to assume the conduct of the government, and stand at the
head of the new Union in its first battle for life.

From the early day when he went out to seek Shirley and win redress
against the assumptions of British officers, Washington's journeys
to the North had been memorable in their purposes. He had traveled
northward to sit in the first continental congress, to take command of
the army, and to preside over the constitutional convention. Now
he went, in the fullness of his fame, to enter upon a task less
dangerous, perhaps, than leading armies, but more beset with
difficulties, and more perilous to his reputation and peace of mind,
than any he had yet undertaken. He felt all this keenly, and noted in
his diary: "About ten o'clock I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private
life, and to domestic felicity; and with a mind oppressed with more
anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, set
out for New York, with the best disposition to render service to my
country, in obedience to its call, but with less hope of answering its
expectations."

The first stage of his journey took him only to Alexandria, a few
miles from his home, where a public dinner was given to him by his
friends and neighbors. He was deeply moved when he rose to reply to
the words of affection addressed to him by the mayor as spokesman of
the people. "All that now remains for me," he said, "is to commit
myself and you to the care of that beneficent Being who, on a former
occasion, happily brought us together after a long and distressing
separation. Perhaps the same gracious Providence will again indulge
me. But words fail me. Unutterable sensations must then be left to
more expressive silence, while from an aching heart I bid all my
affectionate friends and kind neighbors farewell."

So he left his home, sad at the parting, looking steadily, but not
joyfully, to the future, and silent as was his wont. The simple dinner
with his friends and neighbors at Alexandria was but the beginning of
the chorus of praise and Godspeed which rose higher and stronger as he
advanced. The road, as he traveled, was lined with people, to see him
and cheer him as he passed. In every village the people from the farm
and workshop crowded the streets to watch for his carriage, and the
ringing of bells and firing of guns marked his coming and his going.
At Baltimore a cavalcade of citizens escorted him, and cannon roared a
welcome. At the Pennsylvania line Governor Mifflin, with soldiers and
citizens, gathered to greet him. At Chester he mounted a horse, and
in the midst of a troop of cavalry rode into Philadelphia, beneath
triumphal arches, for a day of public rejoicing and festivity. At
Trenton, instead of snow and darkness, and a sudden onslaught upon
surprised Hessians, there was mellow sunshine, an arch of triumph,
and young girls walking before him, strewing flowers in his path, and
singing songs of praise and gratitude. When he reached Elizabethtown
Point, the committees of Congress met him, and he there went on board
a barge manned by thirteen pilots in white uniform, and was rowed to
the city of New York. A long procession of barges swept after him with
music and song, while the ships in the harbor, covered with flags,
fired salutes in his honor. When he reached the landing he declined
to enter a carriage, but walked to his house, accompanied by Governor
Clinton. He was dressed in the familiar buff and blue, and, as the
people caught sight of the stately figure and the beloved colors, hats
went off and the crowd bowed as he went by, bending like the ripened
grain when the summer wind passes over it, and breaking forth into
loud and repeated cheers.

From Mount Vernon to New York it had been one long triumphal march.
There was no imperial government to lend its power and military
pageantry. There were no armies, with trophies to dazzle the eyes
of the beholders; nor were there wealth and luxury to give pomp and
splendor to the occasion. It was the simple outpouring of popular
feeling, untaught and true, but full of reverence and gratitude to a
great man. It was the noble instinct of hero-worship, always keen
in humanity when the real hero comes to awaken it to life. Such an
experience, rightly apprehended, would have impressed any man, and it
affected Washington profoundly. He was deeply moved and touched, but
he was neither excited nor elated. He took it all with soberness,
almost with sadness, and when he was alone wrote in his diary:--

"The display of boats which attended and joined us on this occasion,
some with vocal and some with instrumental music on board; the
decorations of the ships, the roar of cannon and the loud acclamations
of the people, which rent the skies as I passed along the wharves,
filled my mind with sensations as painful (considering the reverse of
this scene, which may be the case after all my labors to do good) as
they were pleasing."

In the very moment of the highest personal glory, the only thought is
of the work which he has to do. There is neither elation nor cynicism,
neither indifference nor self-deception, but only deep feeling and a
firm, clear look into the future of work and conflict which lay silent
and unknown beyond the triumphal arches and the loud acclaim of the
people.

On April 30 he was inaugurated. He went in procession to the hall, was
received in the senate chamber, and thence proceeded to the balcony
to take the oath. He was dressed in dark brown cloth of American
manufacture, with a steel-hilted sword, and with his hair powdered and
drawn back in the fashion of the time. When he appeared, a shout went
up from the great crowd gathered beneath the balcony. Much overcome,
he bowed in silence to the people, and there was an instant hush over
all. Then Chancellor Livingston administered the oath. Washington laid
his hand upon the Bible, bowed, and said solemnly when the oath was
concluded, "I swear, so help me God," and, bending reverently, kissed
the book. Livingston stepped forward, and raising his hand cried,
"Long live George Washington, President of the United States!" Then
the cheers broke forth again, the cannon roared, and the bells rang
out. Washington withdrew to the hall, where he read his inaugural
address to Congress, and the history of the United States of America
under the Constitution was begun.




CHAPTER II

STARTING THE GOVERNMENT


Washington was deeply gratified by his reception at the hands of the
people from Alexandria to New York. He was profoundly moved by the
ceremonies of his inauguration, and when he turned from the balcony to
the senate chamber he showed in his manner and voice how much he felt
the meaning of all that had occurred. His speech to the assembled
Congress was solemn and impressive, and with simple reverence he
acknowledged the guiding hand of Providence in the fortunes of the
States. He made no recommendations to Congress, but expressed his
confidence in their wisdom and patriotism, adjured them to remember
that the success of republican government would probably be finally
settled by the success of their experiment, reminded them that
amendments to the Constitution were to be considered, and informed
them that he could not receive any pecuniary compensation for his
services, and expected only that his expenses should be paid as in the
Revolution. This was all. The first inaugural of the first President
expressed only one thought, but that thought was pressed home with
force. Washington wished the Congress to understand as he understood
the weight and meaning of the task which had been imposed upon them,
for he felt that if he could do this all would be well. How far he
succeeded it would be impossible to say, but there can be no doubt as
to the wisdom of his position. To have attempted to direct the first
movements of Congress before he had really grasped the reins of the
government would have given rise, very probably, to jealousy and
opposition at the outset. When he had developed a policy, then it
would be time to advise the senators and representatives how to carry
it out. Meanwhile it was better to arouse their patriotism, awaken
their sense of responsibility, and leave them free to begin their work
under the guidance of these impressions.

As for himself, his feelings remained unchanged. He had accepted the
great post with solemn anxiety, and when the prayers had all been
said, and the last guns fired, when the music had ceased and the
cheers had died away, and the illuminations had flickered and gone
out, he wrote that in taking office he had given up all expectation
of private happiness, but that he was encouraged by the popular
affection, as well as by the belief that his motives were appreciated,
and that, thus supported, he would do his best. In a few words,
written some months later, he tersely stated what his office meant to
him, and what grave difficulties surrounded his path.

"The establishment of our new government," he said, "seemed to be the
last great experiment for promoting human happiness by a reasonable
compact in civil society. It was to be, in the first instance, in
a considerable degree, a government of accommodation as well as
a government of laws. Much was to be done by prudence, much by
conciliation, much by firmness. Few who are not philosophical
spectators can realize the difficult and delicate part which a man in
my situation had to act. All see, and most admire, the glare which
hovers round the external happiness of elevated office. To me there
is nothing in it beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its
connection with a power of promoting human felicity. In our progress
towards political happiness my station is new, and, if I may use the
expression, I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely an action
the motive of which may not be subject to a double interpretation.
There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be
drawn into precedent. If, after all my humble but faithful endeavors
to advance the felicity of my country and mankind, I may indulge a
hope that my labors have not been altogether without success, it will
be the only real compensation I can receive in the closing scenes of
life."

There is nothing very stimulating to the imagination in this soberness
of mind and calmness of utterance. The military conquerors and the
saviors of society, with epigrammatic sayings, dramatic effects and
rhythmic proclamations, are much more exciting and dazzle the fancy
much better. But it is this seriousness of mind, coupled with
intensity of purpose and grim persistence, which has made the
English-speaking race spread over the world and carry successful
government in its train. The personal empire of Napoleon had crumbled
before he died an exile in St. Helena, but the work of Washington
still endures. Just what that work was, and how it was achieved, is
all that still remains to be considered.

The policies set on foot and carried through under the first federal
administration were so brilliant and so successful that we are apt
to forget that months elapsed before the first of them was even
announced. When Washington, on May 1, 1789, began his duties, there
was absolutely nothing of the government of the United States in
existence but a President and a Congress. The imperfect and broken
machinery of the confederation still moved feebly, and performed some
of the absolutely necessary functions of government. But the new
organization had nothing to work with except these outworn remnants of
a discarded system. There were no departments, and no arrangements for
the collection of revenue or the management of the postal service. A
few scattered soldiers formed the army, and no navy existed. There
were no funds and no financial resources. There were not even
traditions and forms of government, and, slight as these things may
seem, settled methods of doing public business are essential to its
prompt and proper transaction. These forms had to be devised and
adopted first, and although they seem matters of course now, after
a century of use, they were the subject of much thought and of some
sharp controversy in 1789. The manner in which the President was to be
addressed caused some heated discussion even before the inauguration.
America had but just emerged from the colonial condition, and the
colonial habits were still unbroken. In private letters we find
Washington referred to as "His Highness," and in some newspapers as
"His Highness the President-General," while the Senate committee
reported in favor of addressing him as "His Highness the President of
the United States and Protector of their Liberties." In the House,
however, the democratic spirit was strong, there was a fierce attack
upon the proposed titles, and that body ended by addressing Washington
simply as the "President of the United States," which, as it happened,
settled the question finally. Washington personally cared little for
titles, although, as John Adams wrote to Mrs. Warren, he thought them
appropriate to high office. But in this case he saw that there was a
real danger lurking in the empty name, and so he was pleased by the
decision of the House. Another matter was the relation between the
President and the Senate. Should he communicate with them in writing
or orally, being present during their deliberations as if they formed
an executive council? It was promptly decided that nominations should
be made in writing; but as to treaties, it was at first thought best
that the President should deliver them to the Senate in person, and
it was arranged with minute care where he should sit, beside
the Vice-President, while the matter was under discussion. This
arrangement, however, was abandoned after a single trial, and it was
agreed that treaties, like nominations, should come with written
messages.

Last and most important of all was the question of the mode of conduct
and the etiquette to be established with regard to the President
himself. In this, as in the matter of titles, Washington saw a real
importance in what many persons might esteem only empty forms, and he
proceeded with his customary thoroughness in dealing with the subject.
What he did would be a precedent for the future as well as a target
for present criticism, and he determined to devise a scheme which
would resist attack, and be worthy to stand as an example for his
successors. He therefore wrote to Madison: "The true medium, I
conceive, must lie in pursuing such a course as will allow him (the
President) time for all the official duties of his station. This
should be the primary object. The next, to avoid as much as may be the
charge of superciliousness, and seclusion from information, by too
much reserve and too great a withdrawal of himself from company on
the one hand, and the inconveniences, as well as a diminution of
respectability, from too free an intercourse and too much familiarity
on the other." This letter, with a set of queries, was also sent to
the Vice-President, to Jay, and to Hamilton. They all agreed in the
general views outlined by Washington. Adams, fresh from Europe, was
inclined to surround the office, of which he justly had a lofty
conception, with a good deal of ceremony, because he felt that these
things were necessary in our relations with foreign nations. In the
main, however, the advice of all who were consulted was in favor
of keeping the nice line between too much reserve and too much
familiarity, and this line, after all the advising, Washington of
course drew for himself. He did it in this way. He decided that he
would return no calls, and that he would receive no general visits
except on specified days, and official visitors at fixed hours.
The third point was in regard to dinner parties. The presidents of
Congress hitherto had asked every one to dine, and had ended by
keeping a sort of public table, to the waste of both time and dignity.
Many persons, disgusted with this system, thought that the President
ought not to ask anybody to dinner. But Washington, never given to
extremes, decided that he would invite to dinner persons of official
rank and strangers of distinction, but no one else, and that he would
accept no invitations for himself. After a time he arranged to have a
reception every Tuesday, from three to four in the afternoon, and Mrs.
Washington held a similar levee on Fridays. These receptions, with a
public dinner every week, were all the social entertainments for which
the President had either time or health.

By these sensible and apparently unimportant arrangements, Washington
managed to give free access to every one who was entitled to it, and
yet preserved the dignity and reserve due to his office. It was one
of the real although unmarked services which he rendered to the new
government, and which contributed so much to its establishment, for it
would have been very easy to have lowered the presidential office by a
false idea of republican simplicity. It would have been equally easy
to have made it odious by a cold seclusion on the one hand, or by pomp
and ostentation on the other. With his usual good judgment and perfect
taste, Washington steered between the opposing dangers, and yet
notwithstanding the wisdom of his arrangements, and in spite of
their simplicity, he did not escape calumny on account of them. One
criticism was that at his reception every one stood, which was thought
to savor of incipient monarchy. To this Washington replied, with the
directness of which he was always capable, that it was not usual to
sit on such occasions, and, if it were, he had no room large enough
for the number of chairs that would be required, and that, as the
whole thing was perfectly unceremonious, every one could come and go
as he pleased. Fault was also found with the manner in which he bowed,
an accusation to which he answered with an irony not untinged with
bitterness and contempt: "That I have not been able to make bows to
the taste of poor Colonel B. (who, by the by, I believe never saw one
of them) is to be regretted, especially too, as, upon those occasions,
they were indiscriminately bestowed, and the best I was master of.
Would it not have been better to throw the veil of charity over
them, ascribing their stiffness to the effects of age, or to the
unskillfulness of my teacher, rather than to pride and dignity of
office, which God knows has no charms for me?"

As party hostility developed, these attacks passed from the region of
private conversation to the columns of newspapers and the declamation
of mob orators, and an especial snarl was raised over the circumstance
that at some public ball the President and Mrs. Washington were
escorted to a sofa on a raised platform, and that guests passed before
them and bowed. Much monarchy and aristocracy were perceived in this
little matter, and Jefferson carefully set it down in that collection
of withered slanders which he gave to an admiring posterity, after the
grave had safely covered both him and those whom he feared and hated
in his lifetime. This incident, however, was but an example of
the political capital which was sought for in the conduct of the
presidential office. The celebration of the birthday, the proposition
to put Washington's head upon the coins, and many other similar
trifles, were all twisted to the same purpose. The dynasty of Cleon
has been a long one, so long that even the succession of the Popes
seems temporary beside it, and it flourished in Washington's time as
rankly as it did in Athens, or as it does to-day. The object of the
assault varies, but the motives and the purpose are as old and as
lasting as human nature. Envy and malice will always find a convenient
shelter in pretended devotion to the public weal, and will seek
revenge for their own lack of success by putting on the cloak of the
tribune of the people, and perverting the noblest of offices to the
basest uses.

But time sets all things even. The demagogues and the critics who
assailed Washington's demeanor and behavior are forgotten, while the
wise and simple customs which he established and framed for the great
office that he honored, still prevail by virtue of their good sense.
We part gladly with all remembrance of those bold defenders of liberty
who saw in these slight forms forerunners of monarchy. We would even
consent to drop into oblivion the precious legacy of Jefferson. But
we will never part with the picture drawn by a loving hand of that
stately figure, clad in black velvet, with the hand on the hilt of the
sword, standing at one of Mrs. Washington's levees, and receiving with
gentle and quiet dignity, full of kindliness but untinged by cheap
familiarity, the crowd that came to pay their respects. It was well
for the republic that at the threshold of its existence it had for
President a man who, by the kindness of his heart, by his good sense,
good manners, and fine breeding, gave to the office which he held and
the government he founded the simple dignity which was part of himself
and of his own high character.

Thus the forms and shows, important in their way, were dealt with,
while behind them came the sterner realities of government, demanding
regulation and settlement. At the outset Washington knew about the
affairs of the government, especially for the last six years, only
in a general way. He felt it to be his first duty, therefore, to
familiarize himself with all these matters, and, although he was in
the midst of the stir and bustle of a new government, he nevertheless
sent for all the papers of each department of the confederation
since the signature of the treaty of peace, went through them
systematically, and made notes and summaries of their contents. This
habit he continued throughout his presidency in dealing with all
official documents. The natural result followed. He knew more at the
start about the facts in each and every department of the public
business than any other one man, and he continued to know more
throughout his administration. In this method and this capacity for
taking infinite pains is to be found a partial explanation at least
of the easy mastery of affairs which he always showed, whether on the
plantation, in the camp, or in the cabinet. It was in truth a striking
instance of that "long patience" which the great French naturalist
said was genius.

While he was thus regulating forms of business, and familiarizing
himself with public questions, it became necessary to fix the manner
of dealing with foreign powers. There were not many representatives of
foreign nations present at the birth of the republic, but there was
one who felt, and perhaps not without reason, that he was entitled
to peculiar privileges. The Count de Moustier, minister of France,
desired to have private access to the President, and even to discuss
matters of business with him. Washington's reply to this demand was,
in its way, a model. After saying that the only matter which could
come up would relate to commerce, with which he was unfamiliar, he
continued: "Every one, who has any knowledge of my manner of acting in
public life, will be persuaded that I am not accustomed to impede
the dispatch or frustrate the success of business by a ceremonious
attention to idle forms. Any person of that description will also be
satisfied that I should not readily consent to lose one of the most
important functions of my office for the sake of preserving an
imaginary dignity. But perhaps, if there are rules of proceeding which
have originated from the wisdom of statesmen, and are sanctioned by
the common consent of nations, it would not be prudent for a young
state to dispense with them altogether, at least without some
substantial cause for so doing. I have myself been induced to think,
possibly from habits of experience, that in general the best mode of
conducting negotiations, the detail and progress of which might be
liable to accidental mistakes or unintentional misrepresentations, is
by writing. This mode, if I was obliged by myself to negotiate with
any one, I should still pursue. I have, however, been taught to
believe that there is in most polished nations a system established
with regard to the foreign as well as the other great departments,
which, from the utility, the necessity, and the reason of the thing,
provides that business should be digested and prepared by the heads of
those departments."

The Count de Moustier hastened to excuse himself on the ground that
he expressed himself badly in English, which was over-modest, for he
expressed himself extremely well. He also explained and defended his
original propositions by trying to show that they were reasonable and
usual; but it was labor lost. Washington's letter was final, and the
French minister knew it. The count was aware that he was dealing with
a good soldier, but in statecraft he probably felt he had to do with a
novice. His intention was to take advantage of the position of France,
secure for her peculiar privileges, and put her in the attitude of
patronizing inoffensively but effectively the new government founded
by the people she had helped to free. He found himself turned aside
quietly, almost deferentially, and yet so firmly and decidedly that
there was no appeal. No nation, he discovered, was to have especial
privileges. France was the good friend and ally of the United States,
but she was an equal, not a superior. It was also fixed by this
correspondence that the President, representing the sovereignty of
the people, was to have the respect to which that sovereignty was
entitled. The pomp and pageant of diplomacy in the old world were
neither desired nor sought in America; yet the President was not to be
approached in person, but through the proper cabinet officer, and all
diplomatic communications after the fashion of civilized governments
were to be in writing. Thus within a month France, and in consequence
other nations, were quietly given to understand that the new republic
was to be treated like other free and independent governments, and
that there was to be nothing colonial or subservient in her attitude
to foreign nations, whether those nations had been friends or foes in
the past.

It required tact, firmness, and a sure judgment to establish proper
relations with foreign ministers. But once done, it was done for all
time. This was not the case with another and far more important
class of people, whose relation to the new administration had to be
determined at the very first hour of its existence. Indeed, before
Washington left Mount Vernon he had begun to receive letters from
persons who considered themselves peculiarly well fitted to serve the
government in return for a small but certain salary. In a letter to
Mrs. Wooster, for whom as the widow of an old soldier he felt the
tenderest sympathy, he wrote soon after his arrival in New York: "As
a public man acting only with reference to the public good, I must be
allowed to decide upon all points of my duty, without consulting my
private inclinations and wishes. I must be permitted, with the best
lights I can obtain, and upon a general view of characters and
circumstances, to nominate such persons alone to offices as in my
judgment shall be the best qualified to discharge the functions of
the departments to which they shall be appointed." This sentiment in
varying forms has been declared since 1789 by many Presidents and many
parties. Washington, however, lived up exactly to his declarations.
At the same time he did not by any means attempt to act merely as an
examining board.

Great political organizations, as we have known them since, did not
exist at the beginning of the government, but there were nevertheless
two parties, divided by the issue which had been settled by the
adoption of the Constitution. Washington took, and purposed to take,
his appointees so far as he could from those who had favored the
Constitution and were friends of the new system. It is also clear
that he made every effort to give the preference to the soldiers
and officers of the army, toward whom his affectionate thought ever
turned. Beyond this it can only be said that he was almost nervously
anxious to avoid any appearance of personal feeling in making
appointments, as was shown in the letter refusing to make his nephew
Bushrod a district attorney, and that he resented personal pressure
of any kind. He preferred always to reach his conclusions so far as
possible from a careful study of written testimony. These principles,
rigidly adhered to, his own keen perception of character, and his
knowledge of men, resulted in a series of appointments running through
eight years which were really marvelously successful. The only
rejection, outside the special case of John Rutledge, was that of
Benjamin Fishbourn for naval officer of the port of Savannah, which
was due apparently to the personal hostility of the Georgia senators.
Washington, conscious of his own painstaking, was not a little
provoked by this setting aside of an old soldier. He sent in a sharp
message on the subject, pointing out the trouble he took to make sure
of the fitness of an appointment, and intimated that the same effort
would not come amiss in the Senate when they rejected one of his
nominees. In view of the fact that it was a new government, the
absence of mistakes in the appointments is quite extraordinary,
and the value of such success can be realized by considering the
disastrous consequences which would have come from inefficient
officers or malfeasance in office when the great experiment was just
put on trial, and was surrounded by doubters and critics ready and
eager to pick flaws and find faults.

The general tone of the government and its reputation at widely
scattered points depended largely on the persons appointed to the
smaller executive offices. Important, however, as these were, the
fate of the republic under the new Constitution was infinitely more
involved in the men whom Washington called about him in his cabinet,
to decide with him as to the policies which were to be begun, and
on which the living vital government was to be founded. Congress,
troubled about many things, and struggling with questions of revenue
and taxation, managed in the course of the summer to establish and
provide for three executive departments and for an attorney-general.
To the selection of the men to fill these high offices Washington
gave, of course, the most careful thought, and succeeded in forming
a cabinet which, in its aggregate ability, never has been equaled in
this country.

Edmund Randolph was appointed attorney-general. Losing his father at
an early age, and entering the army, he had been watched over and
protected by Washington with an almost paternal care, and at the time
of his appointment he was one of the most conspicuous men in public
life, as well as a leading lawyer at the bar of Virginia. He came from
one of the oldest and strongest of the Virginian families, and had
been governor of his State, and a leader in the constitutional
convention, where he had introduced what was known as the Virginian
plan. He had refused to sign the Constitution, but had come round
finally to its support, largely through Washington's influence. There
was then, and there can be now, no question as to Randolph's really
fine talents, or as to his fitness for his post. His defect was a lack
of force of character and strength of will, which was manifested by a
certain timidity of action, and by an infirmity of purpose, such as
had appeared in his course about the Constitution. He performed the
duties of his office admirably, but in the decision of the momentous
questions which came before the cabinet he showed an uncertainty of
opinion which was felt by all his colleagues.[1]

[Footnote 1: This passage was written before the recent appearance of
Mr. Conway's _Life of Randolph_. That ample biography, in my opinion,
confirms the view of Randolph here given. If, in the light of this new
material, I have erred at all, it is, I think, on the charitable side.
Mr. Conway, in order to vindicate Randolph, has sacrificed so far as
he could nearly every conspicuous public man of that period. From
Washington, whom he charges with senility, down, there is hardly a
man who ever crossed Randolph's path whom he has not assailed. Yet he
presents no reason, so far as I can see, to alter the present opinion
of Randolph.]

Henry Knox of Massachusetts was head of the War Department under the
confederacy, and was continued in office by Washington, who appointed
him secretary of war under the new arrangement. It was a natural and
excellent selection. Knox was a distinguished soldier, he had served
well through the Revolution, and Washington was warmly attached to
him. He was not a statesman by training or habit of mind, nor was he
possessed of commanding talents. But he was an able man, sound in his
views and diligent in his office, devoted to his chief and unswerving
in his loyalty to the administration and all its measures. There was
never any doubt as to the attitude of Henry Knox, and Washington found
him as faithful and efficient in the cabinet as he had always been in
the field.

Second in rank, but first in importance, was the secretaryship of the
treasury. "Finance! Ah, my friend, all that remains of the American
Revolution grounds there." So Gouverneur Morris had written to Jay. So
might he have written again of the American Union, for the fate of the
experiment rested at the outset on the Treasury Department. Yet there
was probably less hesitation as to the proper man for this place than
for any other. Washington no doubt would have been glad to give it to
Robert Morris, whose great services in the Revolution he could never
forget. But this could not be, and acting on his own judgment,
fortified by that of Morris himself, he made Alexander Hamilton
secretary of the treasury.

It is one of the familiar marks of greatness to know how to choose the
right men to perform the tasks which no man, either in war or peace,
can complete single-handed. Napoleon's marshals were conspicuous
proofs of his genius, and Washington had a similar power of selection.
The generals whom he trusted were the best generals, the statesmen
whom he consulted stand highest in history. He was fallible, as other
mortals are fallible. He, too, had his Varus, and the time was coming
when he could echo the bitter cry of the great emperor for his lost
legions. But the mistakes were the exceptions. He chose with the
sureness of a strong and penetrating mind, and the most signal example
of this capacity was his secretary of the treasury. He knew Hamilton
well. He had known him as his staff officer, active, accomplished, and
efficient. He had seen him leave his side in a tempest of boyish rage,
and he had watched him charging with splendid gallantry the Yorktown
redoubts. He was familiar with Hamilton's extraordinary mastery of
financial and political problems, and he had found him a powerful
leader in the work of forming the Constitution. He understood
Hamilton's strength, and he knew where his dangers lay. Now he called
him to his cabinet, and gave into his hands the department on which
the immediate success of the government hinged. It was a brilliant
choice. The mark in his lifetime for all the assaults of his political
opponents, the leader and the victim of the schism which rent his own
party, Hamilton, after his death, was made the target for attack and
reprobation by his political foes, who for nearly sixty years, with
few intermissions, controlled the government. His work, however, could
not be undone, and as passions have subsided his fame has proved to
be of that highest and rarest kind which broadens and rises with the
lapse of years, until in the light of history it overtops that of any
of our statesmen, except of his own great chief and Abraham Lincoln.
The work to which he was called was that of organizing a national
government, and in the performance of this work he showed that he
belonged to the highest type of constructive statesmen, and was one of
the rare men who build, and whose building stands the test of time.

Last to be mentioned, but first in rank, was the Department of State.
For this high place Washington chose Thomas Jefferson, who was then
our minister in Paris, and who did not return to take up his official
duties until the following March. Of the four cabinet offices, this
was the only one where Washington proceeded entirely on public
grounds. He took Jefferson on account of his wide reputation, his
unquestioned ability, his standing before the country, and his
experience in our foreign relations. With the other three there was
a strong element of personal friendship and familiarity. With the
secretary of state his intercourse had been, so far as we can judge,
almost wholly of a public character, and, so far as can be inferred
from an expression of some years before, the selection was made by
Washington in deference simply to what he believed to be the public
interest. The only allusion to Jefferson in all the printed volumes of
correspondence prior to 1789 occurs in a letter to Robert Livingston,
of January 8, 1783. He there said: "What office is Mr. Jefferson
appointed to that he has, you say, lately accepted? If it is that of
commissioner of peace, I hope he will arrive too late to have any hand
in it." There is no indication that their personal relations were then
or afterwards other than pleasant. Yet this brief sentence is a
strong expression of distrust, and especially so from the fact that
Washington was not at all given to criticising other people in his
letters. What he distrusted was not Jefferson's ability, for that
no man could doubt, still less his patriotism. But Washington read
character well, and he felt that Jefferson might be lacking in the
qualities of boldness and determination, so needful in a negotiation
like that which resulted in the acknowledgment of our independence.

The truth was that the two men were radically different, and never
could have been sympathetic. Washington was strong, direct, masculine,
and at times fierce in anger. Jefferson was adroit, subtle, and
feminine in his sensitiveness. Washington was essentially a fighting
man, tamed by a stern self-control from the recklessness of his early
days, but always a fighter. Jefferson was a lover of peace, given to
quiet, hating quarrels and bloodshed, and at times timid in dealing
with public questions. Washington was deliberate and conservative,
after the fashion of his race. Jefferson was quick, impressionable,
and always fascinated by new notions, even if they were somewhat
fantastic. A thoroughly liberal and open-minded man, Washington never
turned a deaf ear to any new suggestion, whether it was a public
policy or a mechanical invention, but to all alike he gave careful
consideration before he adopted them. To Jefferson, on the other hand,
mere novelty had a peculiar charm, and he jumped at any device, either
to govern a state or improve a plough, provided that it had the
flavor of ingenuity. The two men might easily have thought the same
concerning the republic, but they started from opposite poles, and no
full communion of thought and feeling was possible between them. That
Washington chose fitly from purely public and outside considerations
can not be questioned, but he made a mistake when he put next to
himself a man for whom he did not have the personal regard and
sympathy which he felt for his other advisers. The necessary result
finally came, after many troubles in the cabinet, in dislike and
distrust, if not positive alienation.

Looking at the cabinet, however, as it stood in the beginning, we can
only admire the wisdom of the selection and the high abilities which
were thus brought together for the administration and construction of
a great national government. It has always been the fashion to speak
of this first cabinet as made up without reference to party, but the
idea is a mistaken one from any point of view. Washington himself gave
it color, for he felt very rightly that he was the choice of the whole
people and not of a party. He wished to rise above party, and in fact
to have no party, but a devotion of all to the good of the country.
The time came when he sorrowed for and censured party bitterness and
party strife, but it is to be observed that the party feeling which he
most deplored was that which grew up against his own policies and his
own administration. The fact was that Washington, who rose above party
more than any other statesman in our history, was nevertheless, like
most men of strong will and robust mind, and like all great political
leaders, a party man, as we shall have occasion to see further on.
It is true that his cabinet contained the chiefs and founders of two
great schools of political thought, which have ever since divided
the country; but when these parties were once fairly developed, the
cabinet became a scene of conflict and went to pieces, only to be
reformed on party lines. When it was first made up, the two parties of
our subsequent history, with which we are familiar, did not exist, and
it was in the administration of Washington that they were developed.
Yet the cabinet of 1789 was, so far as there were parties, a partisan
body. The only political struggle that we had had was over the
adoption of the Constitution. The parties of the first Congress were
the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, the friends and the enemies
of the Constitution. Among those who opposed the Constitution were
many able and distinguished men, but Washington did not invite Sam
Adams, or George Mason, or Patrick Henry, or George Clinton to enter
his cabinet. On the contrary, he took only friends and supporters
of the Constitution. Hamilton was its most illustrious advocate.
Randolph, after some vacillation, had done very much to turn the
wavering scale in Virginia in its favor. Knox was its devoted friend;
and Jefferson, although he had carped at it and criticised it in
his letters, was not known to have done so, and was considered, and
rightly considered, to be friendly to the new system. In other words,
the cabinet was made up exclusively of the party of the Constitution,
which was the victorious party of the moment. This was of course
wholly right, and Washington was too great and wise a leader to have
done anything else. The cabinet was formed with regard to existing
divisions, and, when those divisions changed, the cabinet which gave
birth to them changed too.

Outside the cabinet, the most weighty appointments were those of the
Supreme Court. No one then quite appreciated, probably, the vast
importance which this branch of the government was destined to assume,
or the great part it was to play in the history of the country and the
development of our institutions. At the same time no one could fail to
see that much depended on the composition of the body which was to be
the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution. The safety of the entire
scheme might easily have been imperiled by the selection of men as
judges who were lacking in ability or character. Washington chose with
his wonted sureness. At the head of the court he placed John Jay, one
of the most distinguished of the public men of the day, who gave to
the office at once the impress of his own high character and spotless
reputation. With him were associated Wilson of Pennsylvania, Cushing
of Massachusetts, Blair of Virginia, Iredell of North Carolina, and
Rutledge of South Carolina. They were all able and well-known
men, sound lawyers, and also, be it noted, warm friends of the
Constitution.

Thus the business of organizing the government in the first great and
essential points was completed. It was the work of the President, and,
anxious and arduous as it was, it is worth remembering, too, that
it was done, and thoroughly done, in the midst of severe physical
suffering. Just after the inauguration, Washington was laid up with an
anthrax or carbuncle in his thigh, which brought him at one time very
near death. For six weeks he could lie only on one side, endured the
most constant and acute pain, and was almost incapable of motion. He
referred to his illness at the time in a casual and perfectly simple
way, and mind and will so prevailed over the bodily suffering that
the great task of organizing the government was never suspended nor
interrupted.

When the work was done and Congress had adjourned, Washington, feeling
that he had earned a little rest and recreation, proceeded to carry
out a purpose, which he had formed very early in his presidency, of
visiting the Eastern States. This was the first part of a general plan
which he had conceived of visiting while in office all portions of
the Union. The personal appearance of the President, representing
the whole people, would serve to bring home to the public mind the
existence and reality of a central government, which to many if not to
most persons in the outlying States seemed shadowy and distant. But
General Washington was neither shadowy nor distant to any one. Every
man, woman, and child had heard of and loved the leader of the
Revolution. To his countrymen everywhere, his name meant political
freedom and victory in battle; and when he came among them as the
head of a new government, that government took on in some measure the
character of its chief. His journey was a well-calculated appeal, not
for himself but for his cause, to the warm human interest which a man
readily excites, but which only gathers slowly around constitutions
and forms of government. The world owes a good deal to the right kind
of hero-worship, and the United States have been no exception.

The journey itself was uneventful, and was carried out with
Washington's usual precision. It served its purpose, too, and brought
out a popular enthusiasm which spoke well for the prospects of the
federal government, and which was the first promise of the loyal
support which New England gave to the President, as she had already
given it to the general. In the succession of crowds and processions
and celebrations which marked the public rejoicing, one incident of
this journey stands out as still memorable, and possessed of real
meaning. Mr. John Hancock was governor of Massachusetts. There is
no need to dwell upon him. He was a man of slender abilities,
large wealth, and ready patriotism, with a great sense of his own
importance, and a fine taste for impressive display. Every external
thing about him, from his handsome house and his Copley portrait to
his imposing gout and his immortal signature, was showy and effective.
He was governor of Massachusetts, and very proud of that proud old
commonwealth as well as of her governor. Within her bounds he was the
representative of her sovereignty, and he felt that deference was due
to him from the President of the United States when they both stood on
the soil of Massachusetts. He did not meet Washington on his arrival,
and Washington thereupon did not dine with the governor as he had
agreed to do. It looked a little stormy. Here was evidently a man with
some new views as to the sovereignty of States and the standing of the
union of States. It might have done for Governor Hancock to allow the
President of Congress to pass out of Massachusetts without seeing its
governor, and thereby learn a valuable lesson, but it would never
do to have such a thing happen in the case of George Washington, no
matter what office he might hold. A little after noon on Sunday,
October 26, therefore, the governor wrote a note to the President,
apologizing for not calling before, and asking if he might call
in half an hour, even though it was at the hazard of his health.
Washington answered at once, expressing his pleasure at the prospect
of seeing his excellency, but begging him, with a touch of irony, not
to do anything to endanger his health. So in half an hour Hancock
appeared. Picturesque, even if defeated, he was borne up-stairs on
men's shoulders, swathed in flannels, and then and there made his
call. The old house in Boston where this happened has had since then a
series of successors, but the ground on which it stood has been duly
remembered and commemorated. It is a more important spot than we are
wont to think; for there it was settled, on that autumn Sunday, that
the idea that the States were able to own and to bully the Union they
had formed was dead, and that the President of the new United States
was henceforth to be regarded as the official superior of every
governor in the land. It was a mere question of etiquette, nothing
more. But how the general government would have sunk in popular
estimation if the President had not asserted, with perfect dignity and
yet entire firmness, its position! Men are governed very largely by
impressions, and Washington knew it. Hence his settling at once and
forever the question of precedence between the Union and the States.
Everywhere and at all times, according to his doctrine, the nation was
to be first.[1]

[Footnote 1: The most lately published contemporary account of
this affair with Hancock can be found in the _Magazine of American
History_, June, 1888, p. 508, entitled "Incidents in the Life of John
Hancock, as related by Dorothy Quincy Hancock Scott (from the Diary of
Gen. W.H. Sumner)."]

So the President traveled on to the North, and then back by another
road to New York, and that excellent bit of work in familiarizing the
people with their federal government was accomplished. Meantime the
wheels had started, the machine was in motion, and the chief officers
were at their places. The preliminary work had been done, and the next
step was to determine what policies should be adopted, and to find out
if the new system could really perform the task for which it had been
created.




CHAPTER III

DOMESTIC AFFAIRS


To trace in detail the events of Washington's administration would be
to write the history of the country during that period. It is only
possible here to show, without much regard to chronological sequence,
the part of the President in developing the policy of the government
at home, and his attitude toward each question as it arose. We are
concerned here merely with the influence and effect of Washington in
our history, and not with the history itself. What did he do, and what
light do we get on the man himself from his words and deeds? These are
the only questions that a brief study of a career so far-reaching can
attempt to answer.

Congress came together for the first time with the government actually
organized on January 4, 1790. On the day when the session opened,
Washington drove down to the hall where the Congress met, alone in his
own coach drawn by four horses. He was preceded by Colonel Humphreys
and Major Jackson, mounted on his two white horses, while immediately
behind came his chariot with his private secretaries, and Mr. Lewis on
horseback. Then followed in their own coaches the chief justice and
the secretaries of war and of the treasury. When the President reached
the hall he was met at the entrance by the doorkeeper of the Congress,
and was escorted to the Senate chamber. There he passed between the
members of each branch, drawn up on either hand, and took his seat by
the Vice-President. When order and silence were obtained, he rose and
spoke to the assembled representatives of the people standing before
him. Having concluded his speech, he bowed and withdrew with his
suite as he had come. Jefferson killed this simple ceremonial, and
substituted for it the written message, sent by a secretary and read
by a clerk in the midst of talk and bustle, which is the form we
have to-day. Jefferson's change was made, of course, in the name of
liberty, and also because he was averse to public speaking. From the
latter point of view, it was reasonable enough, but the ostensible
cause was as hollow and meaningless as any of the French notions to
which it was close akin. It is well for the head of the state to meet
face to face the representatives of the same people who elected him.
For more than a century this has been the practice in Massachusetts,
to take a single instance, and liberty in that commonwealth has not
been imperiled, nor has the State been obliged to ask Federal aid to
secure to her a republican form of government because of her adherence
to this ancient custom.

The forms adopted by Washington had the grave and simple dignity which
marked all he did, and it was senseless to abandon what his faultless
taste and patriotic feeling approved. Forms are in their way important
things: they may conceal perils to liberty, or they may lend dignity
and call forth respect to all that liberty holds most dear. The net
result of all this business has been very curious. Jefferson's
written message prevails; and yet at the same time we inaugurate
our Presidents with a pomp and parade to which those of the dreaded
Federalists seem poor and quiet, and which would make the hero of the
message-in-writing fancy that the air was darkened by the shadows of
monarchy and despotism. The author of the Declaration of Independence
was a patriotic man and lover of freedom, but he who fought out the
Revolution in the field was quite as safe a guardian of American
liberty; and his clear mind was never confused by the fantasies of
that Parisian liberty which confused facts with names, and ended in
the Terror and the first Empire. The people of the United States
to-day surround the first office of the land with a respect and
dignity which they deem equal to the mighty sovereignty that it
represents, and in this is to be found the genuine American feeling
expressed by Washington in the plain and simple ceremonial which he
adopted for his meetings with the Congress.

In this first speech, thus delivered, Washington indicated the
subjects to which he wished Congress to direct their attention, and
which in their development formed the policies of his administration.
His first recommendation was to provide for the common defense by a
proper military establishment. His last and most elaborate was in
behalf of education, for which he invoked the aid of Congress and
urged the foundation of a national university, a scheme he had much at
heart, and to which he constantly returned. The history of these
two recommendations is soon told. Provision was made for the army,
inadequate enough, as Washington thought, but still without dispute,
and such additional provision was afterwards made from time to time as
the passing exigency of the moment demanded. For education nothing
was done, and the national university has never advanced beyond the
recommendation of the first President.

He also advised the adoption of a uniform standard of coinage,
weights, and measures. In two years a mint was duly established after
an able report from Hamilton, and out of his efforts and those of
Jefferson came our decimal system. There was debate over the devices
on the coins in which the ever-vigilant Jeffersonians scented
monarchical dangers, but with this exception the country got its
uniform coinage peacefully enough. The weights and measures did not
fare so well. They obtained a long report from Jefferson, and a still
longer and more learned disquisition from John Quincy Adams thirty
years later. But that was all. We still use the rule of thumb systems
inherited from our English ancestors, and Washington's uniform
standard, except for the two reports, has gone no further than the
national university.

Another recommendation to the effect that invention ought to be
encouraged and protected bore fruit in this same year in patent and
copyright laws, which became the foundation of our present system. The
same good fortune befell the recommendation for a uniform rule for
naturalization, and the law of 1790 was quietly enacted, no one then
imagining that its alteration less than ten years later was destined
to form part of a policy which, after a fierce struggle, settled
the fate of parties and decided the control of the government. The
post-office was also commended to the care of Congress, and for that,
as for the army, provision was duly made, insufficient at the outset,
but growing steadily from this small beginning, as it was called upon
to meet the spread and increase of population.

Provision was also made gradually, and with much occasional conflict,
for a diplomatic service such as the President advised. But this was
merely the machinery to carry out our foreign policy on which, in a
few years, our political history largely turned, and which will demand
a chapter by itself.

A paragraph devoted to Indian affairs informed Congress that measures
were on foot to establish pacific relations with our savage neighbors,
but that it would be well to be prepared to use force. This brief
sentence was the beginning of an important policy, which, in its
consequences and effects, played a large part in the history of the
next eight years.

These various matters thus disposed of, there remained only the
request to the House to provide for the revenue and the public credit.
From this came Hamilton's financial policy which created parties,
and with it was interwoven in the body of the speech the general
recommendation to make all proper effort for the advancement of
manufactures, commerce, and agriculture.

The speech as a whole, short though it was, drew the outline of
a vigorous system, which aimed at the establishment of a strong
government with enlarged powers. It cut at a blow all ties between the
new government and the feeble strivings of the dead confederation. It
displayed a broad conception of the duties of the government under
the Constitution, and in every paragraph it breathed the spirit of a
robust nationality, calculated to touch the people directly in every
State of the Union.

Before taking up the financial question, which became the great issue
in our domestic affairs, it will be well to trace briefly the story of
our relations with the Indians. The policy of the new administration
in this respect was peculiarly Washington's own, and, although it
affected more or less the general course of events at that period, it
did not directly become the subject of party differences. The "Indian
problem" is still with us, but it is now a very mild problem indeed.
Within a few years, it is true, we have had Indian wars, conducted by
the forces of the United States, and ever-recurring outbreaks between
savages and frontiersmen. But it has been a very distant business. To
the great mass of the American people it has been little more than
interesting news, to be leisurely scanned in the newspaper without
any sense of immediate and personal concern. Moreover, the popular
conception of the Indian has for a long time been wildly inaccurate.
We have known him in various capacities, as the innocent victim of
corrupt agents and traders, and as the brutal robber and murderer with
the vices and force of the Western frontiersman, but without any of
the latter's redeeming virtues. Last and most important of all, we
have known him as the rare hero and the conventional villain of
romance, ranging from the admirable stories of Cooper to the last
production of the "penny dreadful." The result has been to create in
the public mind a being who probably never existed anywhere except in
the popular imagination, and who certainly is not the North American
Indian.

We are always loath to admit that our conceptions are formed by
fiction, but in the case of people remote from our daily observation
it plays in nine instances out of ten a leading part, and it has
certainly done so here. In this way we have been provided with two
types simple and well defined, which represent the abnormally good on
the one hand and the inconceivably bad on the other. The Indian hero
is a person of phenomenal nobility of character, and of an
ability which would do credit to the training of a highly refined
civilization. He is the product of the orator, the novelist, or the
philanthropist, and has but slight and distant relation to facts. The
usual type, however, and the one which has entered most largely into
the popular mind, is the Indian villain. He is portrayed invariably
as cunning, treacherous, cruel, and cowardly, without any relieving
quality. In this there is of course much truth. As a matter of fact,
Indians are cunning, treacherous, and cruel, but they are also bold
fighters. The leading idea of the Indian that has come down from
Cooper's time, and which depicts him as a "cowardly redskin," unable
to stand for a moment against a white man in fair fight, is a complete
delusion designed to flatter the superior race. It has been in a large
measure dissipated by Parkman's masterly histories, but the ideas born
of popular fiction die hard. They are due in part to the theory that
cruelty implies cowardice, just as we say that a bully must be a
coward, another mistaken bit of proverbial wisdom.

As a matter of fact, the records show that the North American Indian
is one of the most remarkable savage warriors of whom we have any
knowledge; and the number of white men killed for each Indian slain
in war exhibits an astonishing disproportion of loss. Captain James
Smith, for many years a captive, and who figured in most of the
campaigns of the last century, estimated that fifty of our people were
killed to one of theirs. This of course includes women and children;
and yet even in the battle of the Big Kanawha, the Virginia riflemen,
although they defeated the Indians with an inferior force, lost two
to one, and a similar disproportion seems to have continued to the
present day.

The Indian, moreover, not only fought well and to the death, if
surrounded, but he had a discipline and plan of battle which were
most effective for the wilderness. It seems probable that, if the
experiment had been properly tried, the Indians might have been turned
into better soldiers than the famous Sikhs; and the French, who
used the red men skillfully, if without much discipline, found them
formidable and effective allies. They cut off more than one English
and American army, and the fact that they resorted to ambush and
surprise does not detract from their exploits. It was a legitimate
mode of warfare, and was used by them with terrible effect. They have
fought more than one pitched battle against superior numbers when the
victory hung long in the balance, and they have carried on guerrilla
wars for years against overwhelming forces with extraordinary
persistence and success. There is no savage, except the Zulu or Maori,
who has begun to exhibit the natural fighting quality of the American
Indian; and although the Zulu appears to have displayed greater dash,
the Indian, by his mastery of the tactics of surprise, has shown a
far better head. In a word, the Indian has always been a formidable
savage, treacherous, cruel, and cunning to an extreme degree, no
doubt, but a desperate and dogged fighter, with a natural instinct for
war. It must be remembered, too, that he was far more formidable
in 1790 than he is to-day, with the ever-rising tide of civilized
population flowing upon him and hemming him in. When the Constitution
came into being, the Indians were pretty well out of the Atlantic
States, but beyond the Alleghanies all was theirs, and they had the
unbroken wilderness as their ally and their refuge. There they lay
like a dark line on the near frontier, threatening war and pillage
and severe check to the westward advance of our people. They were
a serious matter to a new government, limited in resources and
representing only three millions of people.

Fortunately the President was of all men best fitted to deal with
this grave question, for he knew the Indians thoroughly. His earliest
public service had been to negotiate with them, and from that time on
he had been familiar with them in peace and in diplomacy, while he had
fought with them in war over and over again. He was not in the least
confused in his notions about them, but saw them, as he did most
facts, exactly as they were. He had none of the false sentimentality
about the noble and injured red man, which in later days has been at
times highly mischievous, nor on the other hand did he take the purely
brutal view of the fighting scout or backwoodsman. He knew the Indian
as he was, and understood him as a dangerous, treacherous,
fighting savage. Better than any one else he appreciated
the difficulties of Indian warfare when an army had to be
launched into the wilderness and cut off from a base of supplies.
He was well aware, too, that the western tribes were a constant
temptation to England and Spain on either border, and might be used
against us with terrible effect. In taking up the question for
solution, he believed first, as was his nature, in justice, and he
resolved to push every pacific measure, and strive unremittingly by
fair dealing and binding treaties to keep a peace which was of great
moment to the young republic. But he also felt that pacific measures
were an uncertain reliance, and that sharp, decisive blows were often
the only means of maintaining peace and quiet on the frontier, and
of warding off English and Spanish intrigue. This was the policy he
indicated in the brief sentences of his first speech, and it only
remains to see how he carried it out.

The outlook in regard to the Indians, when Washington assumed the
presidency, was threatening enough. The Continental Congress had shown
in this respect most honorable intention and some vigor, but their
honest purposes had been in large measure thwarted by the action of
the various States, which they were unable to control. In New York
peace reigned, despite some grumbling; for the Six Nations had made a
general treaty, and also two special treaties, not long before, which
were on the whole just and satisfactory. At the same time a general
treaty had been made with the western Indians, which modified some of
the injustices of the treaties of 1785, and which were also fair and
reasonable. In this treaty, however, the tribes of the Wabash were not
included, and they therefore were engaged in war with the Kentucky
people. Those hardy backwoodsmen were quick enough to retaliate, and
they generally proceeded on the simple backwoods principle that tribal
distinctions were futile, and that every Indian was an enemy. This
view, it must be admitted, saved a good deal of thought, but it led
the Kentuckians in their raids to kill many Indians who did not belong
to the Wabash tribes, but to those protected by treaty. The result
of this impartiality was, that, besides the chronic Wabash troubles,
there was every probability that a general war with all the western
and northwestern tribes might break out at any moment.

South of the Ohio, matters were even worse. The Choctaws, it is
true, owing to their distance from our frontier settlements, were on
excellent terms with our government. But the Cherokees had just
been beaten and driven back by Sevier and his followers from the
short-lived state of Franklin, and had taken refuge with the Creeks.
These last were a formidable people. Not only were they good fighters,
but they were also well armed, thanks to their alliance with the
Spaniards, from whom they obtained not only countenance, but guns,
ammunition, and supplies. They were led also by a chief of remarkable
ability, a Scotch half-breed, educated at Charlestown, and named
Alexander McGillivray. With a tribe so constituted and commanded, it
was not difficult to bring on trouble, as soon proved to be the case.
Georgia had claimed and seized certain lands under treaties which she
alleged had been made, whereupon the Creeks denied the validity of
these treaties and went to war, in which they were highly successful.
The Georgians had already asked assistance from their neighbors, and
they now demanded it from the new general government. Thereupon, under
an act of Congress, Washington appointed as commissioners to arrange
the difficulties General Lincoln, Colonel Humphrey, and David Griffin
of Virginia, all remote from the scene of conflict, and all judicious
selections. The Creeks readily met the new commissioners, but when
they found that no lands were to be given up, they declined to treat
further, and said they would await a new negotiation.

Washington attributed this failure, and no doubt correctly, to the
intrigues and influence of Spain. On the day the report of the
commissioners went to Congress, he wrote to Governor Pinckney of South
Carolina: "For my own part I am entirely persuaded that the present
general government will endeavor to lay the foundations for its
proceedings in national justice, faith, and honor. But should the
government, after having attempted in vain every reasonable pacific
measure, be obliged to have recourse to arms for the defense of its
citizens, I am also of opinion that sound policy and good economy will
point to a prompt and decisive effort, rather than to defensive and
lingering operations." "Lingering" had been the curse of our Indian
policy, and it was this above all things that Washington was
determined to be rid of. Whether peace or war, there was to be quick
and decisive action. He therefore, in this spirit, at once sent
southward another commissioner, Colonel Willett, who very shrewdly
succeeded in getting McGillivray and his chiefs to agree to accompany
him to New York. Thither they accordingly came in due time, the Scotch
half-breed and twenty-eight of his chiefs. They were entertained and
well treated at the seat of government, and there, with Knox acting
for the United States, they made a treaty which involved concessions
on both sides. The Creeks gave up all claims to lands north and east
of the Oconee, and the United States, under a recent general act
regulating trade and intercourse with the Indians, gave up all lands
south and west of the same river, and agreed to make the tribes an
annual present. Then Washington gave them wampum and tobacco, and
shook hands with them, and the chiefs went home. There was grumbling
on both sides, especially among the Georgians, but nevertheless the
treaty held for a time at least, and there was peace.

Washington's policy of justice had succeeded, and the Indians got an
idea of the power and fair dealing of the new government, which was of
real value. More valuable still was the lesson to the people of the
United States that this central government meant to deal justly
with the Indians, and would try to prevent any single State from
frustrating by bad faith the policy designed to benefit the whole
country. Trouble soon began again in this direction, and in later days
States inflated with state-right doctrines carried this resistance in
Indian affairs to a much greater extent, and flouted the acts of the
federal government. This, however, does not detract from the wisdom of
the President, who inaugurated the policy of acting justly toward
the Indians, and of overruling the selfish injustice of the State
immediately affected. If the policy of justice and firmness adopted by
Washington had never been abandoned, it would have been better for the
honor and the interest both of the nation and the separate States.

The same pacific policy which had succeeded in the south was tried in
the west and failed. The English, with their usual thoughtfulness,
incited the Indians to claim the Ohio as their boundary, which meant
war and murderous assaults on all our people traveling on the river.
Retaliation, of course, followed, and in April, 1790, Colonel Harmer
with a body of Kentucky militia invaded the Indian country, burned a
deserted village, and returned without having accomplished anything
substantial. The desultory warfare of murder and pillage went on for a
time, and then Washington felt that the moment had come for the other
branch of his policy. At all events there should be no lingering, and
there should be action. Peaceful measures having failed, there should
be war and a settlement in some fashion.

Accordingly, in the fall of 1790, soon after his successful Creek
negotiation, he ordered out some three hundred regulars and eleven
hundred militia from Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and sent them under
Harmer into the Miami country. The expedition burned a village on the
Scioto; and then Colonel Hardin, detached with some hundred and
fifty men in pursuit of the Indians, was caught in an ambush and
his regulars cut off, the militia running away apparently quite
successfully. Thereupon Harmer retreated; but, changing his mind in a
day or two, advanced again, and again sent out Hardin with a larger
force than before. Then the advance was again surprised, and the
regulars nearly all killed, while the militia, who stood their ground
better this time, lost about a hundred men. The end was the repulse
of the whites after a pretty savage fight. Then Harmer withdrew
altogether, declaring, with a strange absence of humor, if of no more
important quality, that he had won a victory. After reaching home,
this mismanaged expedition caused much crimination and heart-burning,
followed by courts-martial on Hardin and Harmer, who were both
acquitted, and by the resignation of the latter.

This defeat of course simply made worse the state of affairs in
general, and the Six Nations, who had hitherto been quiet, became
uneasy and were kept so by the ever-kind incitement of the English.
Various mediations with these powerful tribes failed; but Colonel
Pickering, appointed a special commissioner, managed at last to
appease their discontents. To the southward also the Cherokees began
to move and threaten, but were pacified by the exertions of Governor
Blount of the Southwest Territory. Meantime an act had been passed to
increase the army, and Arthur St. Clair was appointed major-general.
Washington, who had been greatly disturbed by the failure of Harmer,
was both angered and disheartened by the conduct of the States and of
the frontier settlers. "Land-jobbing, the intermeddling of the States,
and the disorderly conduct of the borderers, who were indifferent as
to the killing of an Indian," were in his opinion the great obstacles
in the way of success. Yet these very men who shot Indians at sight
and plundered them of their lands, as well as the States immediately
concerned, were the first to cry out for aid from the general
government when a war, brought about usually by their own violation of
the treaties of the United States, was upon them. On the other hand,
the Indians themselves were warlike and quarrelsome, and they were
spurred on by England and Spain in a way difficult to understand at
the present day.

In all this perplexity, however, one thing was now clear to
Washington. There could not longer be any doubt that the western
troubles must be put down vigorously and by the armed hand. Even while
he was negotiating in the north and south, therefore, he threw himself
heart and soul into the preparation of St. Clair's expedition, pushing
forward all necessary arrangements, and planning the campaign with a
care and foresight made possible by his military ability and by his
experience as an Indian fighter. While the main army was thus
getting ready, two lesser expeditions, one under Scott and one under
Wilkinson, were sent into the Indian country; but beyond burning some
deserted villages and killing a few stray savages both were fruitless.

At last all was ready. St. Clair had an interview with Washington, in
which the whole plan of campaign was gone over, and especial warning
given against ambuscades. He then took his departure at once for the
west, and late in September left Cincinnati with some two thousand
men. The plan of campaign was to build a line of forts, and
accordingly one named Fort Hamilton was erected twenty-four miles
north on the Miami, and then Fort Jefferson was built forty-four miles
north of that point. Thence St. Clair pushed slowly on for twenty-nine
miles until he reached the head-waters of the Wabash. He had been
joined on the march by some Kentucky militia, who were disorderly
and undisciplined. Sixty of them promptly deserted, and it became
necessary to send a regiment after them to prevent their plundering
the baggage trains. At the same time some Chickasaw auxiliaries, with
the true rat instinct, deserted and went home. Nevertheless St. Clair
kept on, and finally reached what proved to be his last camp, with
about fourteen hundred men. The militia were on one side of the
stream, the regulars on the other. At sunrise the next day the
Indians surprised the militia, drove them back on the other camp, and
shattered the first line of the regulars. The second line stood their
ground, and a desperate fight ensued; but it was all in vain. The
Indians charged up to the guns, and, though they were repulsed by the
bayonet, St. Clair, who was ill in his tent, was at last forced to
order a retreat. The retreat soon became a rout, and the broken army,
leaving their artillery and throwing away their arms, fled back to
Fort Jefferson, where they left their wounded, and hurried on to their
starting-point at Fort Washington. It was Braddock over again. General
Butler, the second in command, was killed on the field, while the
total loss reached nine hundred men and fifty-nine officers, and of
these six hundred were killed. The Indians do not appear to have
numbered much more than a thousand. No excuse for such a disaster and
such murderous slaughter is possible, for nothing but the grossest
carelessness could have permitted a surprise of that nature upon
an established camp. The troops, too, were not only surprised, but
apparently utterly unprepared to fight, and the battle was merely a
wild struggle for life.

Washington was above all things a soldier, and his heart was always
with his armies whenever he had one in the field. In this case
particularly he hoped much, for he looked to this powerful expedition
to settle the Indian troubles for a time, and give room for that
great western movement which always was in his thoughts. He therefore
awaited reports from St. Clair with keen anxiety, but in this case
the ill tidings did not attain their proverbial speed. The battle was
fought on November 4, and it was not until the close of a December
day that the officer carrying dispatches from the frontier reached
Philadelphia. He rode at once to the President's house, and Washington
was called out from dinner, where he had company. He remained away
some time, and on returning to the table said nothing as to what
he had heard, talked with every one at Mrs. Washington's reception
afterwards, and gave no sign. Through all the weary evening he was as
calm and courteous as ever. When the last guest had gone he walked up
and down the room for a few minutes and then suddenly broke out:
"It's all over--St. Clair's defeated--routed; the officers nearly all
killed, the men by wholesale; the rout complete--too shocking to think
of--and a surprise into the bargain." He paused and strode up and down
the room; stopped again and burst forth in a torrent of indignant
wrath: "Here on this very spot I took leave of him; I wished him
success and honor; 'You have your instructions,' I said, 'from the
secretary of war; I had a strict eye to them, and will add but one
word--Beware of a surprise! I repeat it--_beware of a surprise_! You
know how the Indians fight us.' He went off with that as my last
solemn warning thrown into his ears. And yet, to suffer that army to
be cut to pieces, hacked, butchered, tomahawked, by a surprise, the
very thing I guarded him against! O God, O God, he's worse than a
murderer! How can he answer it to his country! The blood of the slain
is upon him, the curse of widows and orphans, the curse of Heaven!"

His secretary was appalled and silent, while Washington again strode
fiercely up and down the room. Then he sat down, collected himself,
and said, "This must not go beyond this room." Then a long silence.
Then, "General St. Clair shall have justice. I looked hastily through
the dispatches, saw the whole disaster, but not all the particulars;
I will receive him without displeasure; I will hear him without
prejudice; he shall have full justice." The description of this scene
by an eye-witness has been in print for many years, and yet we find
people who say that Washington was cold of heart and lacking in human
sympathy. What could be more intensely human than this? What a warm
heart is here, and what a lightning glimpse of a passionate nature
bursting through silence into burning speech! Then comes the iron will
which has mastered all the problems of his life. "He shall have full
justice;" and St. Clair had justice. He had been an unfortunate
choice, but as a Revolutionary soldier and governor of the Northwest
Territory his selection had been natural. He had never been a
successful general, for it was not in him to be so. Something he
lacked, energy, decision, foresight, it matters not what. But at least
he was brave. Broken by sickness, he had displayed the utmost personal
courage on that stricken field; and for this Washington would always
forgive much. He received the unfortunate general kindly. He could not
order a court martial, for there were no officers of sufficient rank
to form one; but he gave St. Clair every opportunity for vindication,
and a committee of Congress investigated the campaign and exculpated
the leader. His personal bravery saved him and his reputation, but
nothing can alter the fact that the surprise was unpardonable and the
disaster awful.

Immediate results of the St. Clair defeat were not so bad as might
have been expected. Panic, of course, ran rampant along the frontier,
reaching even to Pittsburg; but the Indians failed to follow up
their advantage, and did not come. Still the alarm was there, and
Pennsylvania and Virginia ordered troops to be raised, while Congress
also took action. Another increase of the army was ordered, with
consequent increase of appropriation, so that this Indian victory
entered at this point into the great current of the financial policy,
and thus played its part in the events on which parties were dividing,
and history was being made.

No matter what happened, however, there was to be neither lingering
nor delay in this business. The President set to work at once to
organize a fresh army, and fight out a settlement of the troubles. His
first thought for a new commander was of Henry Lee of Virginia, but
considerations of rank deterred him. He then selected and appointed
Wayne, who recently had got into politics and been deprived, on a
contested election, of his seat in the House. No little grumbling
ensued over this appointment, especially in Virginia, but it was
unheeded by the President, and its causes now are not very clear.
The event proved the wisdom of the choice, as so often happened with
Washington, and it is easy to see the reason for it. Wayne was one
of the shining figures of our Revolution, appealing strongly to the
imagination of posterity. He was not a great general in the highest
sense, but he was a brilliant corps-commander, capable of daring feats
of arms like the storming of Stony Point. He was capable also of
dashing with heedless courage into desperate places, and incurring
thereby defeat and consequent censure, but escaping entire ruin
through the same quickness of action which had involved him in
trouble. He was well fitted for the bold and rapid movement
required in Indian warfare, and with him Washington put well-chosen
subordinates, selected evidently for their fighting capacity, for he
clearly was determined that this should be at all events a fighting
campaign.

Wayne, after his appointment, betook himself to Pittsburg, and
proceeded with characteristic energy to raise and organize his army,
a work of no little difficulty because he wished to have picked men.
Washington did all that could be done to help him, and at the same
time pushed negotiations with admirable patience, but with very
varying success. Kirkland brought chiefs of the Six Nations to
Congress with good results, and the Cherokees were pacified by
additional presents. On the other hand, the Creeks were restless,
stirred up always by Spain, and two brave officers, sent to try
for peace with the western tribes, were murdered in cold blood.
Nevertheless, treaties were patched up with some of them, and a great
council was held in the fall of 1792, the Six Nations acting as
mediators, which resulted in a badly kept armistice, but in nothing of
lasting value. The next year Congress passed a general act regulating
trade and intercourse with the Indians, and Washington appointed yet
another commission to visit the northwestern tribes, more to
satisfy public opinion than with any hope of peace. Indeed, these
commissioners never succeeded in even meeting the Indians, who
rejected in advance all proposals which would not concede the Ohio as
the boundary. English influence, it was said, was at the bottom of
this demand, and there seems to be little doubt that such was the
case, for England and France were now at war, and England thereupon
had redoubled her efforts to injure the United States by every sort of
petty outrage both on sea and land. This masterly policy had perhaps
reasons for its existence which pass beyond the average understanding,
but, so far as any one can now discover, it seems to have had no
possible motive except to feed an ancient grudge and drive the country
into the arms of France. Carried on for a long time in secret,
this Indian intrigue came to the surface in a speech made by Lord
Dorchester to the western tribes, in which he prophesied a speedy
rupture with the United States and urged his hearers to continue war.
It is worth remembering that for five years, covertly or openly,
England did her best to keep an Indian war with all that it implied
alive upon our borders,--the borders of a friendly nation with whom
she was at peace.

But while Washington persistently negotiated, he as persistently
prepared to fight, not trusting overmuch either the savages or the
English. Wayne, with similar views, moved his army forward in the
autumn of 1793 to a point six miles beyond Fort Jefferson, and then
went into winter quarters. Early in the spring of 1794 he was in
motion again and advanced to St. Clair's battlefield, where he built
Fort Recovery, and where he was attacked by the Indians, whom he
repulsed after two days' fighting. He then marched in an unexpected
direction and struck the central villages at the junction of the Au
Glaize and Maumee. The surprised savages fled, and Wayne burned their
village, laid waste their extensive fields, and built Fort Defiance.
To the Indians, who had retreated thirty miles down the Maumee to the
shelter of a British post, he sent word that he was ready to treat.
The reply came back asking for a delay of ten days; but Wayne at once
advanced, and found the Indians prepared for battle near the English
fort. The ground was unfavorable, especially for cavalry, but Wayne
made good arrangements and attacked. The Indians gave way before the
bayonet, and were completely routed, the American loss being only one
hundred and seven men. The army was not averse to storming the English
fort; but Wayne, with unusual caution, contented himself with a sharp
correspondence with the commandant, and then withdrew after a most
successful campaign. The next year, strengthened by his victory and by
the surrender of the British posts under the Jay treaty, Wayne made
a treaty with the western tribes by which vast tracts of disputed
territory were ceded to the United States, and peace was established
in that long troubled region.

On the southern frontier there were no such fortunate results. While
Washington was negotiating and fighting in the north and west, all
his patient efforts were frustrated in the south by the conduct of
Georgia. The borderers kept assailing the Indians, peaceful tribes
being generally chosen for the purpose; and the State itself broke
through and disregarded all treaties and all arrangements made by the
United States. The result was constant disquiet and chronic war, with
the usual accompaniments of fire, murder, and pillage.

On the whole, however, when Washington left the presidency, his
Indian policy had been a marked success. In place of uncertainty and
weakness, a definite general system had been adopted. The northern
and western tribes had been beaten and pacified, and the southern
incursions and disorders had been much checked. The British posts, the
most dangerous centres of Indian intrigue, had been abandoned, and the
great regions of the west and northwest had been opened to the tide of
settlement. These results were due to a well-defined plan, and above
all to the persistent vigor which pushed steadily forward to its
object without swinging, as had been done before, between feverish and
often misdirected activity on the one side and complete and
feeble inaction on the other. They were achieved, too, amid many
difficulties, for there was anything but a unanimous support of the
government in its Indian affairs. The opposition grumbled at the
expense, and said that money needlessly raised by taxation was
squandered in Indian wars, while the great body of the people, living
safely along the eastern coast, thought but little about the frontier.
Some persons took the sentimental view and considered the government
barbarous to make causeless war. Others believed that altogether
too much of the public time and money were wasted in looking after
outlying settlements. The borderers themselves, on the other hand,
thought that the general government was in league with the savages,
and broke through treaties, and destroyed so far as they could the
national policy. St. Clair was hissed and jeered as he traveled home,
but a wakeful opposition turned from the unsuccessful general to a
vain attempt to prove that ambushed savages and sleeping sentries were
due to a weak war department and a corrupt and inefficient treasury.
The mass of moderate people, no doubt, desired tranquillity on the
frontier, and sustained the President's labors for that end, but for
the most part they were silent. The voices that Washington heard most
loudly joined in a discordant chorus of disapproval around his Indian
policy. No one understood that here was an important part of a scheme
to build up a nation, to make all the movements of the United States
broad and national, and to open the vast west to the people who were
to make it theirs. Washington heard all the criticism and saw all the
opposition, and still pressed forward to his goal, not attaining all
he wished, but fighting in a very clear and manful spirit, and not
laboring in vain.

The Indian question in its management touched, as has been seen, at
various points our financial policy and our foreign relations, on
which the history of the country really turned in those years. The
latter had not risen to their later importance when the government
began, but the former was knocking importunately at the door of
Congress when it first assembled. The condition of affairs is soon
told. The Revolution narrowly escaped shipwreck on the financial
reefs, and the shaky government of the confederation had there gone to
pieces. The country, as a political organism, was bankrupt. It owed
sums of money, which were vast in amount for those days, both at
home and abroad, and it could not pay these debts, nor was there any
provision for them. All interest was in arrears, there were no means
provided for meeting it, and the national credit everywhere was
dishonored and gone. The continental currency had disappeared, and the
circulating medium was represented by a confused jumble of foreign
coins and worthless scrip. Many of the States were up to their eyes in
schemes of inflation, paper money, and repudiation. There was no money
in the treasury to pay the ordinary charges of government; there was
no revenue and no policy for raising one, or for funding the debt.
This picture is darkly drawn, but it is not exaggerated. That high
spirit of public honor, which seventy-five years later rose above the
ravages of war and the temptings of dishonesty to pay the debt and the
interest, dollar for dollar in gold, seemed in 1789 to be wellnigh
extinct. But it was not dead. It was confused and overclouded in the
minds of the people, but it was still there, and it was strong, clear,
and determined in Washington and those who followed him.

Congress grappled with the financial difficulties in the most
courageous and honest way, but it struggled with them rather
helplessly despite its good disposition. It could lay taxes in one way
or another so as to get money, but this was plainly insufficient. It
could not formulate a coherent policy, which was the one essential
thing, nor could it settle the thousand and one perplexing questions
which hedged the subject on every side. The members turned, therefore,
with a sigh of relief to the new Secretary of the Treasury, asked him
the questions which were troubling them, and having directed him to
make various reports, adjourned.

The result is well known. The great statesman to whom the task was
confided assumed it with the boldness and ease of conscious power,
and when Congress reassembled it listened to the first report on
the public credit. In that great state paper all the confusions
disappeared, and in terse sentences an entire scheme for funding the
debt, disposing of the worthless currency, and raising the necessary
revenue came out clear and distinct, so that all men could comprehend
it. The provision for the foreign debt passed without resistance. That
for the domestic debt excited much debate, and also passed. Last came
the assumption of the state debts, and over that there sprang up
a fierce struggle. It was carried by a narrow majority, and then
defeated by the votes of the North Carolina members, who had just
taken their seats. Washington strongly favored this hotly contested
measure. He defended it in a letter to David Stuart, and again
to Jefferson, at a later time, when that statesman was trying to
undermine Hamilton by wailing about a "corrupt squadron" in Congress.

To Washington, assumption seemed as obviously just as it does to
posterity. All the debts had been incurred in a common cause, he said,
why should they not be cared for by the common government? He had
no patience with the sectional argument that assumption was unfair,
because some States got more out of it than others. Some States had
suffered more than others, but all shared in the freedom that had been
won.[1] He saw in it, moreover, as Hamilton had seen, something far
more important than a mere provision for the debts and for the payment
of money to this community or to that. Assumption was essentially a
union measure. The other debts were incurred by the central government
directly, but the state debts were incurred by the States for a common
cause. If the United States assumed them, it showed to the people and
to the world that there were no state lines when the interests of the
whole country were involved. It was therefore a national measure, a
breeder of national sentiment, a new bond to fasten the States to each
other and to the Union. This was enough to assure Washington's hearty
approval; but the measure was saved and carried finally by the famous
arrangement between Hamilton and Jefferson, which took the capital
to the Potomac and made the war debts of the States a part of the
national debt. Washington was more than satisfied with this solution,
for both sides of the agreement pleased him, and there was nothing in
the compromise which meant sacrifice on his part. He rejoiced in
the successful adoption of the great financial policy of his
administration, and he was much pleased to have the capital, in which
he was intensely interested, placed near to his own Mount Vernon, in
the very region he would have selected if he had had the power of
fixing it.

[Footnote 1: Sparks, _Writings of Washington_, x. 98.]

The next great step in the development of the financial policy was the
establishment of the national bank, and on this there arose another
bitter contest in Congress and in the newspapers. A sharp opposition
had developed by this time, and the supporters of the Secretary of the
Treasury became on their side correspondingly ardent. In this debate
much stress was laid on the constitutional point that Congress had no
power to charter a bank. Nevertheless, the bill passed and went to the
President, with the constitutional doubts following it and pressed
home in this last resort. As has been seen from his letters written
just after the Philadelphia convention, Washington was not a blind
worshiper of the Constitution which he had helped so largely to make;
but he believed it would work, and every day confirmed his belief. He
felt, moreover, that one great element of its lasting success lay
in creating a genuine reverence for it among the people, and it was
therefore of the utmost importance that this reverence should begin
among those to whom the management of the government had been
intrusted. For this reason he exercised a jealous care in everything
touching the organic law of the Union, and he was peculiarly sensitive
to constitutional objections to any given measure. In the case of the
national bank, the objections were strongly as well as vigorously
urged, and Washington paused, before signing, to the utmost limit of
the time allowed. He turned to Jefferson and Randolph, both opposed
to the bill, and asked them for their objections to its
constitutionality. They gave him in response two able reports. These
he sent to Hamilton, who returned them with that most masterly
argument, in which he not only defended the bank charter, but
vindicated, in a manner never afterwards surpassed, the new doctrine
of the implied powers of the Constitution. With both sides thus before
him, Washington considered the question, and signed the bill.

Rives, in his "Life of Madison," intimates that Washington had doubts
even after signing, but of this there is no evidence of any weight. He
was not a man who indulged in doubts after he had made up his mind and
rendered a decision, and it was not in his nature to fret over what
had been done and was past, whether in war or peace. The story that he
was worried about his action in this instance arose from his delay in
signing, and from the disappointment of those who had hoped much
from his hesitation. This pause, however, was both natural and
characteristic. Washington had approved Morris's bank policy in the
Revolution, and remembered the service it rendered. He was familiar
with Hamilton's views on the subject, and knew that they were the
result of long study and careful thought. He must also have known that
any financial policy devised by his Secretary of the Treasury would
contain as an integral part a national bank. There can be no doubt
that both the plan for the bank and the report which embodied it were
submitted to him before they went in to Congress, but the violence of
the objections raised there on constitutional grounds awakened
his attention in a new direction. He saw at once the gravity of a
question, which involved not merely the incorporation of a bank,
but which opened up a new field of constitutional powers and
constitutional construction. When such far-reaching results were
involved he paused and reflected, and, as was always the case with him
under such circumstances, listened to and examined all the arguments
on both sides. This done he decided, and with his national feeling
he could not have decided otherwise than he did. The doctrine of the
implied powers of the Constitution was the greatest weapon possible
for those whose leading thought was to develop the union of States
into a great and imperial nation; and we may well believe that it was
this feeling, and not merely faith in the bank as a financial engine,
which led Washington to sign the bill. When he did so he assented to
the charter of a national bank, but he also assented to the doctrine
of the implied powers and gave to that far-reaching construction of
the Constitution the great weight of his name and character. It was,
perhaps, the most important single act of his presidency.

It is impossible here, even were it necessary, to follow Washington's
action in regard to all the details which went to make up and to
sustain Hamilton's policy, to which, as a whole, Washington gave his
hearty approval and support. The revenue system, the public lands,
the arrangement of loans, the mint, all alike met with his active
concurrence. He was too great a man not to value rightly Hamilton's
work, and the way in which that work brought order, credit, honor, and
prosperity out of a chaos of debt and bankruptcy appealed peculiarly
to his own love for method, organization, and sound business
principles. He met every criticism on Hamilton's policy without
concession, and defended it when it was attacked. To Hamilton's genius
that policy must be credited, but it gained its success and strength
largely from the firm support of Washington.

There are two matters, however, connected with the Treasury
Department, which cannot be passed over in this general way. One was
a policy reasoned out and published by Hamilton, but never during his
lifetime put into the form of law in the broad and systematic manner
which he desired. The other was a consequence of his financial policy
as adopted, but which reached far beyond the bounds of financial
arrangements. The first was the policy set forth in Hamilton's Report
on Manufactures. The second was the enforcement of the excise and its
results.

The defense of our commerce against foreign discriminations was a
proximate cause of the movement which resulted in the Constitution of
the United States, and closely allied to it was the anxious wish to
develop our internal resources and our domestic industry. This idea
was not at all new. Sporadic attempts to start and carry on various
industries had been made during the colonial period. They had all
failed, either because the watchful mother-country took pains to
stifle them, or because lack of capital and experience, in addition to
foreign competition, killed them almost at their birth. The idea of
developing American industries was generally diffused for the
first time when the colonists strove to bring England to terms by
non-intercourse acts. The Americans then thought that they could carry
their points by making war upon the British pocket, and excluding
English merchants from their markets. The next step, of course, was
to supply their own markets themselves; and the non-intercourse
agreements, which were economically prohibitory tariff acts, gave a
fitful impulse to various simple industries. In the clash of arms this
idea naturally dropped out of the popular mind, but it began to revive
soon after the return of peace. The government of the confederation
was too feeble to adopt any policy in this or any other matter, but
in the first Congress the desire to develop American industries found
expression. The first tariff was laid primarily to raise the revenue
so sorely needed at that moment. But the effort to do this gave rise
to a debate in which the policy of protection, strongly advocated by
the Pennsylvanian members, was freely discussed. Nobody, however, at
that time, had any comprehensive plan or general system, so that the
efforts for protection were incoherent, and resulted only in certain
special protective features in the tariff bill, and not in a broad
and well-rounded measure. Still the protective idea was there; it was
recognized in the preamble of the act, and the constitutionality of
the policy was affirmed by the framers and contemporaries of the
Constitution.

Hamilton, of course, watched all these movements intently. His guiding
thought in all things was the creation of a great nation. For this he
strove for national unity and national sentiment, and he saw of course
that one essential condition of national greatness was industrial
independence, in addition to the political independence already won.
One of the greatest thinkers of the time on all matters of public
finance and political economy, he perceived at once that the irregular
attempts of Congress to encourage home industries could have at best
but partial results. He saw that a system broad, just, and continental
in its scope must take the place of the isolated industries which
now and again obtained an uncertain protection under the haphazard
measures of Congress. With these views and purposes he wrote and sent
to Congress his Report on Manufactures. In that great state paper he
made an argument in behalf of protection, as applied to the United
States and to the development of home industries, which has never been
overthrown. The system which he proposed was imperial in its range and
national in its design, like everything that proceeded from Hamilton's
mind. He argued, of course, with reference to existing economic
conditions, and in behalf only of what he then sought,--industrial
independence and the establishment and diversification of industries.
The social side of the question, which to-day overshadows all others,
was not visible a hundred years ago. The Report, however, bore no
immediate fruit, and Hamilton had been in his grave for years before
the country turned from this practice of accidental protection, and
tried to replace it by a broad, coherent system as set forth by the
great Secretary.

But although it had no result at the moment, the Report on
Manufactures, which laid the foundation of the American protective
system, and which has so powerfully influenced American political
thought, was one of the very greatest events of Washington's
administration. To trace its effects and history through the
succeeding century would be wholly out of place here. All that
concerns us is Washington's relation to this far-reaching policy of
his Secretary. If we had not a word or a line on the subject from his
pen, we should still know that the policy of Hamilton was his policy
too, for Washington was the head of his own administration, and was
responsible and meant to be responsible for all its acts and policies.
With his keen foresight he saw the full import of the Report on
Manufactures, and we may be sure that when it went forth it was with
his full and cordial approval, and after that minute consideration
which he gave to all public questions. But we are not left to
inference. We have Washington's views and feelings on this matter set
forth again and again, and they show that the principle of the Report
on Manufactures was as near and dear to him, and as full of meaning,
as it was to Hamilton.

Washington was brought up and had lived all his life under a system
which came as near as possible to the ideal of the modern free-trader.
The people of Virginia were devoted almost entirely to a single
interest, tobacco-growing, that being the occupation in which they
could most profitably engage. No legislative artifices had been
employed to enable them to diversify their industries or to establish
manufactures. They bought in the cheapest market every luxury and
most of the necessities of life. British merchants supplied all their
wants, carried their tobacco, and advanced them money. Cheap labor, a
single staple with wide fluctuations of value, a credit system, entire
dependence on foreigners, and absolute free trade according to the
Manchester theories, should have produced an earthly paradise. As a
matter of fact, the Virginia planters had little ready money and were
deeply in debt. Bankruptcy, as has been already said, seems to have
come to them about once in a generation. The land, rapidly exhausted
by tobacco, was prodigally wasted, and the general prosperity
declined. Washington, with his strong sense and perfect business
methods, personally escaped most of these evils, but he saw the
mischief of the system all the more clearly. It was bad enough in
his time, but he did not live to see Virginia with her wasted and
exhausted lands stand still, while her sister States to the north
passed her with giant strides in the race for wealth and population.
He did not live to see her become, as a result of her colonial system,
a mere breeder of slaves for the plantations of the Gulf States. But
he saw enough, and the lesson taught him by the results of industrial
dependence was well learned.

When the war came and he was carrying the terrible burden of the
Revolution, he learned the same lesson in a new and more bitter way.
Nothing went so near to wreck the American cause as lack of all the
supplies by which war was carried on, for the United States produced
little or nothing of what was then needed. The resources of the
northern colonies were soon exhausted, and the South had none. Powder,
cannon, muskets, clothing, medical stores, all were lacking, and the
fate of the nation hung trembling in the balance on account of the
dependence in which the colonies had been kept by the skillful policy
of England. These were teachings that a lesser man than Washington
would have taken to heart and pondered deeply. In the midst of the
struggle he wrote to James Warren (March 31, 1779): "Let vigorous
measures be adopted, ... to punish speculators, forestallers, and
extortioners, and, above all, to sink the money by heavy taxes,
to promote public and private economy, and _to encourage
manufactures_.[1] Measures of this sort, gone heartily into by the
several States, would strike at once at the root of all our evils,
and give the _coup de grâce_ to the British hope of subjugating this
continent either by their arms or their acts."

[Footnote 1: The italics are mine.]

To Lafayette he wrote in 1789: "Though I would not force the
introduction of manufactures by extravagant encouragements and to the
prejudice of agriculture, yet I conceive much might be done in
that way by women, children, and others, without taking one really
necessary hand from tilling the earth. Certain it is, great savings
are already made in many articles of apparel, furniture, and
consumption. Equally certain it is, that no diminution in agriculture
has taken place at this time, when greater and more substantial
improvements in manufactures are making than were ever before known in
America."

In the same year he wrote to Governor Randolph, favoring bounties, the
strongest form of protection; and this encouragement he wished to have
given to that industry which a hundred years later has been held up as
one of the least deserving of all that have received the assistance of
legislation. He said in this letter: "From the original letter, which
I forward herewith, your Excellency will comprehend the nature of a
proposal for introducing and establishing the woolen manufacture
in the State of Virginia. In the present stage of population and
agriculture, I do not pretend to determine how far that plan may be
practicable and advisable; or, in case it should be deemed so, whether
any or what public encouragement ought to be given to facilitate
its execution. _I have, however, no doubt as to the good policy
of increasing the number of sheep in every state_.[1] By a little
legislative encouragement the farmers of Connecticut have, in two
years past, added one hundred thousand to their former stock. If a
greater quantity of wool could be produced, and if the hands which are
often in a manner idle could be employed in manufacturing it, a spirit
of industry might be promoted, a great diminution might be made in
the annual expenses of individual families, and the public would
eventually be exceedingly benefited." The only hesitation is as to the
time of applying the policy. There is no doubt as to the wisdom of the
policy itself, of giving protection and encouragement in every proper
legislative form to domestic industry.

[Footnote 1: The italics are mine.]

In his first speech to Congress he recommended measures for the
advancement of manufactures, having already affixed his signature to
the bill which declared their encouragement to be one of its objects.
At the same time he wrote, in reply to an address: "The promotion
of domestic manufactures will, in my conception, be among the first
consequences which may naturally be expected to flow from an energetic
government." In 1791 he consulted Hamilton as to the advisability of
urging Congress to offer bounties for the culture of cotton and hemp,
his only doubts being as to the power of the general government in
this respect, and as to the temper of the time in regard to such an
expenditure of public money. The following year Hamilton's Report
on Manufactures was given to the country, finally establishing the
position of the administration as to our economic policy.

The general drift of legislation, although it was not systematized,
followed the direction pointed out by the administration. But this did
not satisfy Washington. In his speech to Congress, December 7, 1796,
he said: "Congress has repeatedly, and not without success, directed
their attention to the encouragement of manufactures. _The object is
of too much consequence not to insure a continuance of their efforts
in every way which shall appear eligible._"[1] He then goes on to
argue at some length that, although manufacturing on the public
account is usually inexpedient, it should be established and carried
on to supply all that was needed for the public force in time of war.
This was his last address to Congress, and his last word on this
matter was to approve the course of Congress in following the
recommendation of his first speech. All his utterances and all his
opinions on the subject were uniform. Washington had never been a
student of public finance or political economy like Hamilton, and he
lived before the days of the Manchester school and its new gospel
of procuring heaven on earth by special methods of transacting the
country's business. But Washington was a great man, a state-builder
who fought wars and founded governments. He knew that nations were
raised up and made great and efficient, and that civilization was
advanced, not by _laissez aller_ and _laissez faire_, but by much
patient human striving. He had fought and conquered, and again he had
fought and been defeated, and through all he had come to victory, and
to certain conclusive results both in peace and war. He had not done
this by sitting still and letting each man go his way, but by strong
brain and strong will, and by much organization and compulsion. He had
set his hand to the building of a nation. He had studied his country
and understood it, and with calm, far-seeing eyes he had looked
forward into the future of his people. Neither the study nor the
outlook were vain, and both told him that political independence
was only part of the work, and that national sentiment, independent
thinking, and industrial independence also must be reached. The
first two, time alone could bring. The last, wise laws could help
to produce; and so he favored protection by legislation to American
industry and manufactures, threw all his potent influence into the
scale, and gave his support to the protective policy set forth by his
Secretary.

[Footnote 1: The italics are mine.]

Two matters connected with the treasury, I have said, deserved
fuller consideration than a general review could give. The one just
described, the policy of the Report on Manufactures, came, as has been
seen, to no clear and immediate result. The other reached a very
sharp and definite conclusion, not without great effect on the new
government of the United States, both at the moment and in the future.
When Hamilton "struck the rock of the national resources," the stream
of revenue which he sought at the outset was that flowing from duties
on imports, for this, in his theory, was not only the first source,
but the best. He would fain have had it the only one; but the
situation drove him forward. The assumption of the state debts, a
part of the legacy of the Revolution, and the continuing and at first
increasing expenses of unavoidable Indian wars, made additional
revenue absolutely essential. He turned therefore to the excise on
domestic spirits to furnish what was needed.

Washington approved assumption. It was a measure of honesty, it would
raise the public credit, and above all, it was thoroughly national in
its operation and results. The appropriations for Indian wars he of
course approved, for their energetic prosecution was part of the
vigorous policy toward our wild neighbors upon which he was so
determined. It followed, of course, that he did not shrink from
imposing the taxes thus made necessary; and to raise the money from
domestic spirits seemed to him, under the existing exigency, to be
what it was,--thoroughly proper and reasonable both in form and
subject.

It would seem, however, that neither Washington nor Hamilton realized
the unpopularity of this mode of getting revenue. The frontier
settlers along the line of the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, Virginia,
and North Carolina, who distilled whiskey, were not very familiar,
perhaps, with Johnson's dictionary, but they would have cordially
accepted his definition of an excise. To them it was indeed a "hateful
tax," and nothing else. In fact, the word was one disliked throughout
the States, for it brought up evil memories, and excited much jealous
hostility and prejudice. The first excise law, therefore, when it went
into force, was the signal for a general outburst of opposition; and
in the Alleghany region, as might have been expected, the resistance
was immediate and most bitter. State legislatures passed resolutions,
public meetings were held and more resolutions were passed, while
in the wilder parts of the country threats of violence were freely
uttered. All these murmurings and menaces came on the passage of the
first bill in 1791. The administration, however, had no desire to
precipitate an uncalled-for strife, and so the law was softened and
amended in the following year, the tax being lowered and the most
obnoxious features removed. The result was general acquiescence
throughout most of the States, and renewed opposition in the western
counties of Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In the former a meeting
was held denouncing the law, pledging the people to "boycott" the
officers, and hinting at forcible resistance. If the people engaged in
this business had stopped to consider the men with whom they had
to deal, they would have been saved a great deal of suffering and
humiliation. The President and his Secretary of the Treasury were not
men who could be frightened by opposition or violent speeches. But
angry frontiersmen, stirred up by demagogues, are not given to much
reflection, and they meant to have their own way.

Washington was quite clear in his policy from the beginning. He was
ready to make every proper concession, but when this was done he meant
on his side to have his own way, which was the way of law and order
and good government. He wrote to Hamilton in August, 1792: "If, after
these regulations are in operation, opposition to the due exercise of
the collection is still experienced, and peaceable procedure is no
longer effectual, the public interests and my duty will make it
necessary to enforce the laws respecting this matter; and however
disagreeable this would be to me, it must nevertheless take place."

Meantime the disorders went on, and the officers were insulted and
thwarted in the execution of their duty. Washington's next letter
(September 7) has a touch of anger. He hated disorder and riot
anywhere, but he was disgusted when they came from the very people for
whose defense the Indian war was pushed and the excise made necessary.
He approved of Hamilton's sending out an officer to examine into the
survey, and said: "If, notwithstanding, opposition is still given to
the due execution of the law, I have no hesitation in declaring, if
the evidence of it is clear and unequivocal, that I shall, however
reluctantly I exercise them, exert all the legal powers with which the
executive is invested to check so daring and unwarrantable a spirit.
It is my duty to see the laws executed. To permit them to be trampled
upon with impunity would be repugnant to it; nor can the government
longer remain a passive spectator of the contempt with which they are
treated. Forbearance, under a hope that the inhabitants of that
survey would recover from the delirium and folly into which they
were plunged, seems to have had no other effect than to increase the
disorder."

A few weeks later he issued a proclamation, declaring formally and
publicly what he had already said in private. He warned the people
engaged in resistance to the law that the law would be enforced, and
exhorted them to desist. The proclamation was effective in the south,
and the opposition died out in North Carolina. Not so in Pennsylvania.
There the Scotch-Irish borderers who lived in the western counties
were bent on having their way. A brave, self-willed, hotheaded,
turbulent people, they were going to have their fight out. They
had ridden rough-shod over the Quaker and German government in
Pennsylvania before this, and they no doubt thought they could do the
same with this new government of the United States. They merely made a
mistake about the man at the head of the government; nothing more than
that. Such mistakes have been made before. The Paris mob, for example,
made a similar blunder on the 13th Vendémiaire, when Bonaparte settled
matters by the famous whiff of grape-shot. There is some excuse for
the error of our Scotch-Irish borderers in their past experience, more
excuse still in the drift of other events that touched all men just
then with the madness of France, and gave birth to certain democratic
societies which applauded any resistance to law, even if the cause was
no nobler than a whiskey still.

Perhaps, too, the Pennsylvanians were encouraged by the moderation
and deliberate movement of the government. A lull came after the
proclamation of 1792. Then every effort was made to settle the
troubles by civil processes and by personal negotiation, but all
proved vain. The disturbances went on increasing for two years, until
law was at an end in the insurgent counties. The mails were stopped
and robbed, there were violence, bloodshed, rioting, attacks on the
officers of the United States, and meetings threatening still worse
things.

Meanwhile Washington had waited and watched, and bided his time. He
felt now that the moment had come when, if ever, public opinion must
be with him, and that the hour had arrived when he must put his
fortune to the touch, and "try if it were current gold indeed." On
August 7 he issued a second proclamation, setting forth the outrages
committed, and announcing his power to call out the militia, and his
intention to do so if unconditional submission did not follow at once.
As he wrote to a friend three days later: "Actual rebellion exists
against the laws of the United States." On the crucial point, however,
he felt safe. He was confident that all the public opinion worth
having was now on his side, and that the people were ready to stand by
the government. The quick and unconditional submission did not come,
and on September 25 he issued a third proclamation, reciting the facts
and calling out the militia of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and
Virginia.

Washington had judged rightly. The States responded, and the troops
came to the number of fifteen thousand, for he was in the habit of
doing things thoroughly, and meant to have an overwhelming force.
To Governor Lee of Virginia the command of the combined forces was
intrusted. "I am perfectly in sentiment with you, that the
business we are drawn out upon should be effectually executed,
and that the daring and factious spirit which threatens to
overturn the laws and to subvert the Constitution ought to be
subdued." Thus he wrote to Morgan, while the commissioners from the
insurgents were politely received, and told that the march of the
troops could not be countermanded. Washington would fain have gone
himself, in command of the army, but he felt that he could not leave
the seat of government for so long a time with propriety. He went as
far as Bedford with the troops, and then parted from them. When he
took leave, he wrote a letter to Lee, to be read to the army, in which
he said: "No citizen of the United States can ever be engaged in a
service more important to their country. It is nothing less than to
consolidate and to preserve the blessings of that revolution which
at much expense of blood and treasure constituted us a free and
independent nation." Thus admonished, the army marched, Hamilton going
with them in characteristic fashion to the end. They did their work
thoroughly. The insurrection disappeared, and resistance dropped
suddenly out of sight. The Scotch-Irish of the border, with all their
love of fighting, found too late that they were dealing with a power
very different from that of their own State. The ringleaders of the
insurrection were arrested and tried by civil process, the disorders
ceased, law reigned once more, and the "hateful tax" was duly paid and
collected.

The "Whiskey Rebellion" has never received due weight in the history
of the United States. Its story has been told in the utmost detail,
but its details are unimportant. As a fact, however, it is full of
meaning, and this meaning has been too much overlooked. That this
should be so, is not to be wondered at, for everything has conspired
to make it seem, after a century has gone by, both mean and trivial.
Its very name suggests ridicule and contempt, and it collapsed so
utterly that people laughed at it and despised it. Its leaders, with
the exception of Gallatin, were cheap and talkative persons of
little worth, and the cause itself was neither noble, romantic, nor
inspiriting. Nevertheless, it was a dangerous and formidable business,
for it was the first direct challenge to the new government. It was
the first clear utterance of the stern question asked of every people
striving to live as a nation, Have you a right to live? Have you a
government able to fight and to endure? Have you men ready to take up
the challenge? These questions were put by rough frontier settlers,
and put in the name and for the sake of distilling whiskey unvexed by
law. But they were there, they had to be answered, and on the reply
the existence of the government was at stake. If it failed, all was
over. If the States did not respond to this first demand, that they
should put down disorder and dissension within the borders of one of
their number, the experiment had failed. It came, as it almost always
does come, to one man to make the answer. That man took up the
challenge. He did not move too soon. He waited with unerring judgment,
as Lincoln waited with the Proclamation of Emancipation, until he had
gathered public opinion behind him by his firmness and moderation.
Then he struck, and struck so hard that the whole fabric of
insurrection and riot fell helplessly to pieces, and wiseacres looked
on and laughed, and thought it had been but a slight matter after all.
The action of the government vindicated the right of the United States
to live, because they had proved themselves able to keep order. It
showed to the American people that their government was a reality
of force and power. If it had gone wrong, the history of the United
States would not have differed widely from that of the confederation.
No mistake was made, and people regarded the whole thing as an
insignificant incident, and historians treat it as an episode. There
could be no greater tribute to the strong and silent man who did the
work and bore the stress of waiting for nearly five years. He did his
duty so well and so completely that it seems nothing now, and yet the
crushing of that insurrection in the western counties of Pennsylvania
was one of the turning-points in a nation's life.




CHAPTER IV

FOREIGN RELATIONS


Our present relations with foreign nations fill as a rule but a slight
place in American politics, and excite generally only a languid
interest, not nearly so much as their importance deserves. We have
separated ourselves so completely from the affairs of other people
that it is difficult to realize how commanding and disproportionate a
place they occupied when the government was founded. We were then a
new nation, and our attitude toward the rest of the world was wholly
undefined. There was, therefore, among the American people much
anxiety to discover what that attitude would be, for the unknown is
always full of interest. Moreover, Europe was still our neighbor, for
England, France, and Spain were all upon our borders, and had large
territorial interests in the northern half of the New World. Within
fifteen years we had been colonies, and all our politics, except those
which were purely local and provincial, had been the politics of
Europe; for during the eighteenth century we had been drawn into and
had played a part in every European complication, and every European
war in which England had the slightest share. Thus the American people
came to consider themselves a part of the European system, and looked
to Europe for their politics, which was a habit of thought both
natural and congenial to colonists. We ceased to be colonists when
the Treaty of Paris was signed; but treaties, although they settle
boundaries and divide nations, do not change customs and habits of
thought by a few strokes of the pen. The free and independent people
of the United States, as there has already been occasion to point out,
when they set out to govern themselves under their new Constitution,
were still dominated by colonial ideas and prejudices. They felt,
no doubt, that the new system would put them in a more respectable
attitude toward the other nations of the earth. But this was probably
the only definite popular notion on the subject. What our actual
relations with other nations should be, was something wholly vague,
and very varying ideas were entertained about it by communities and
by individuals, according to their various prejudices, opinions, and
interests.

The one idea, however, that the American people did not have on this
subject was, that they should hold themselves entirely aloof from the
politics of the Old World, and have with other nations outside the
Americas no relations except those born of commerce. It had not
occurred to them that they should march steadily forward on a course
which would drive out European governments, and sever the connections
of those governments with the North American continent. After a
century's familiarity, this policy looks so simple and obvious that
it is difficult to believe that our forefathers could even have
considered any other seriously; but in 1789 it was so strange that no
one dreamed of it, except perhaps a few thinkers speculating on the
future of the infant nation. It was something so novel that when
it was propounded it struck the people like a sudden shock of
electricity. It was so broad, so national, so thoroughly American,
that men still struggling in the fetters of colonial thought could not
comprehend it. But there was one man to whom it was neither strange
nor speculative. To Washington it was not a vague idea, but a
well-defined system, which he had been long maturing in his mind.

Before he had been chosen President, he wrote to Sir Edward Newenham:
"I hope the United States of America will be able to keep disengaged
from the labyrinth of European politics and wars; and that before long
they will, by the adoption of a good national government, have become
respectable in the eyes of the world, so that none of the maritime
powers, especially none of those who hold possessions in the New
World or the West Indies, shall presume to treat them with insult or
contempt. It should be the policy of the United States to administer
to their wants without being engaged in their quarrels. And it is
not in the power of the proudest and most polite people on earth to
prevent us from becoming a great, a respectable, and a commercial
nation if we shall continue united and faithful to ourselves." This
plain statement shows his fixed belief that in an absolute breaking
with the political affairs of other peoples lay the most important
part of the work which was to make us a nation in spirit and in truth.
He carried this belief with him when he took up the Presidency, and it
was the chief burden of the last words of counsel which he gave to his
countrymen when he retired to private life. To have begun and carried
on to a firm establishment this policy of a separation from Europe
would have required time, skill, and patience even under the calmest
and most favorable conditions. But it was the fate of the new
government to be born just on the eve of the French Revolution. The
United States were at once caught up and tossed by the waves of that
terrific storm, and it was in the midst of that awful hurly-burly,
when the misdeeds of centuries of wrong-doing were brought to an
account, that Washington opened and developed his foreign policy. It
was a great task, and the manner of its performance deserves much and
serious consideration.

His first act in foreign affairs, on entering the Presidency, was to
make the minister of France understand that the government of the
United States was to be treated with due formality and respect.
His second was to examine the whole mass of foreign correspondence
collected in the State Department of the confederation, and he did
this, as has been said, pencil in hand, making notes and abstracts as
he went. It was well worth doing, for he learned much, an

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