Chapter II

CONSTRUCTION; OR, WASHINGTON’S ADMINISTRATION.
1789–1797.

How the Thirteen Colonial Children crept into their New Bed.—The
Upholstering described.—Why Rhode Island was last in.—Who tucked her
up.—Washington as Superintendent, and John Adams as First
Assistant.—The Family low in Credit.—Amount of their Indebtedness
compared with ours.—Washington’s Inaugural.—His Exemption, from
Office Beggars, Committees, Pugilistic M. C.’s, boring
Place-Seekers, enterprising Donors, etc.—Washington as a Spirit.—His
Capacity to select a Cabinet.—Who they were.—Of Henry Knox.—The
Chief Justice and Attorney-General.—Amendments to a perfect
Constitution.—The Supreme Court as a Sound, Seaworthy Tribunal.—Why
States cannot be sued by Individuals.—How Governments get around
paying Interest on Principle.—Streaks of the Millennium.—Of the
Public Debt.—Discrimination among Creditors.—Misfortune of being a
Cisatlantic Holder of American Bonds.—Alexander Hamilton’s
Notions.—Washington’s Receptions and Dinner-Parties.—The Political
Color of the President’s Silver Spoons and Window Curtains.—The
Honeymoon of the new Government disturbed.—Ganderous Long-bills
splash Washington.—The French Revolution and its Conundrums.—How
answered by Washington and the Federals; how by Jefferson and the
Anti-Federals.—The Census Act procures names without Owners.—The
Naturalization Laws and their Pat-riot Products.—Polls and
Polling-Places.—A Sinking Fund that did not sink.—How Vermont made
the Thirteen States old.—An Indian War.—Cincinnati begins.—Kentucky
starts.—Mistakes about Bourbon.—Washington’s second Term.—What Genet
did, and how he was done for.—Helpful Americans.—The Whiskey
Rebellion of 1794.—The Year of Treaties; how they enlarged while
they tied us.—Tennessee the Sixteenth State.—Nashville gets
warm.—Washington’s Farewell, and its cheap Imitations.—The Shades of
Office.—Who crept in and who stepped into the Sunshine.

The thirteen colonial children, emancipated from parental mis-government in 1783, tired of sleeping together in the same old, rickety confederate bed, which had been hastily put together in 1777, and whose cords they found so small and hard as to cut through the thin mattress above, and so weak as to creak and threaten to go down under them, whenever they stirred or even spoke above a whisper, at last, in 1789, obtained a new first-class constitutional bedstead. It was wide and roomy, with even, strong springs, and was easy to get in and out of, as well as very comely in shape, and well polished externally.

This new article was, however, not decided upon by all the thirteen immediately. It was spoken for in 1787, and, during that and the next year, eleven signified their preference for it over the old tumble-down rumbly. Little Rhody was the baby in the old family, and, fearing to be overlaid and perhaps smothered by her larger bedfellows, did not crawl under the sheets of the newly upholstered bed until 1790; and not until New York and Virginia had agreed to be content with a fixed amount of bedclothing, instead of claiming, for themselves, that large Western comforter, those earth-colored strips, of the empire pattern, extending to the Pacific side of the bed, and large enough to cut up into a dozen good-sized State counterpanes.

It was not necessary that this youngster,—nor yet North Carolina, who got in the year before,—should consent, in order to complete the change of arrangements from the old Confederate to the new Constitutional system; but as it was an affectionate and generous-hearted family, there was a general desire to conciliate all the members. And so when little Rhody got in and curled up, she was joyfully tucked in by that good old faithful American “help,” Washington, a great favorite, who had been so long in the family that he was loved by every one, and so generous and right-minded that, although several of the other domestics, such as Major John Armstrong and others, who had worked on very low wages with him through the war, proposed to him to take the house himself as proprietor, he indignantly refused so to use or abuse the affectionate trust of the household.

Washington was, however, unanimously chosen Chief Superintendent, and our short, stout, resolute acquaintance, John Adams, whom we met at the top of the hill, July 4, 1776, was made his first assistant.

The family now set up housekeeping. Like most families in the United States, they were at the outset poor. They were especially low in credit; for in consequence of the issue by the Continental Congresses, during the war, of about $300,000,000 of paper money, its value had so depreciated that it became of little use except to line trunks or to patch up chambers as ruinous as itself. They were also greatly in debt, owing at home and abroad $79,463,476,—a debt which, instead of being paid off or even reduced, grew, in spite of every economy, good judgment, and excellent management, for the next seventeen years, and was not fully discharged until 1824. This debt amounted to about nineteen dollars per head for every man, woman, and child of all colors in the United States at that period. Still, they were not in circumstances as discouraging as are we, their descendants, eighty years later; for, estimating our population now at thirty-eight millions, each man, woman and child now owns a right to pay as his share of the national debt, sixty-eight dollars, besides a large, comfortable sum for State, county, city, and town indebtedness, which never figured themselves upon the purses or imaginations of our golden-aged ancestors. This latter ownership is so much the more wonderful as it represents shares in obligations, not wrought from outlays of blood or money in the country’s service, but blood and money sucked by corporate and private straws from our ever-troubled and ever-bubbling public treasuries.

Washington, after a laborious journey, reached New York, and, on the 30th of April, 1789, took the oath of office as President, on the spot now covered by the United States Treasury in Wall Street. The bulls and bears of that day,—mere calves and cubs,—not strengthened by the pushing horns and large squeezing powers which have added such force to their descendants, might have heard, in the intervals of their rough play, the solid, honest, heart-felt words of his Inaugural, in which, among other things, he uttered those now strange, old-fashioned wishes and expectations, that “all employed in the administration of the Government would execute faithfully and with success the functions allotted to their charge.”

No crowds of patriotic office-seekers stepped over the sills of the new President. Quires and tons of papers, now quadrienially rolled into the Presidential warehouse, containing uncounted autographic testimonials to the transcendent abilities and spotless purity of at least one man in thirty of our entire population for suffering places, were then left to the innocent uses of book-keepers and book-makers. We search in vain for any records of enterprising committees, State or county, pressing upon the uninformed intelligence of the first office appointer the names of persons, otherwise left in native obscurity, for Cabinet seats and responsible missions, which might possibly in thoughtless liberality turn the drippings of their high eaves into their own hungry pails. So far as our examination has discovered, there were no old battered political hulks, their rigging split by the gales of speculation or the contrary winds of local indignation, which put into the Presidential port in stress of weather.

Gentlemen waited to be sent for, and did not bore through Washington’s bedroom wall to present handsome reminders of services to be yet gratefully performed, or to leave their photographs and a solar microscope, in order that he might by the latter descry something in the former and in their originals.

Could that modest, slow-minded chief be now permitted, through the conjury of a medium, to sit by the side of his successors, during the honeymoon of their official marriages to the state, and see the procession of great men for whom offices wait pass by with their directories of certificates to high intellectual power and eminent fitness for—everything official, he would certainly divide his surprise between two great convictions,—the scandalous waste to which unclaimed virtue runs in this prodigal land, and the terrible contrasts between all the past performances of the ins and the easy, liberal promises of the outs.

President Washington had no difficulty, even unaided by pugilistic M. C.’s or other metallic “rings,” in selecting gentlemen to fill the three newly created executive departments of Foreign Affairs, Treasury, and War. Thomas Jefferson, forty-six years old, was requested to assist in managing our foreign relations and friends. Alexander Hamilton, in his thirty-second year, was solicited to pump something into that very dry cistern, the treasury. To the red-leaved portfolio of war was summoned General Henry Knox,—the Sherman of the Revolution. It was thought that the man who had, in times of Revolutionary discontent, wisely allayed the complaints of an army whose courage in the field he could nobly stimulate, and who had stroked the right way the rising fur of a disbanded soldiery, could deal justly with the approaching pension lists, and would fairly adjust the burdens of the seven lean years of war, to and through the many rank and good years which now appeared in the visions of our American Pharaohs. The new Secretary felt, in taking his place on the war bench, that he was summoned to a sort of military coroner’s inquest on the dead body of the late Revolution, which had served well in active duty, but which, like every such thing in our hurrying country,—old people, worn-out utensils, and other ex-useful machines,—was considered a respectable encumbrance.

To the post of chief justice of the newly created Supreme Court President Washington nominated John Jay, and for Attorney-General, Edmund Randolph of Virginia. It is to be noted that the President, Secretary of State, and Attorney-General were all from the same State,—the greatest Cabinet-making, State-bureau manufactory in the Union. If Connecticut, Pennsylvania, or North Carolina sent any delegates to the President to remonstrate against the appointment of two gentlemen from the same State, the reporters of that time have shunned the bare mention of it.

Nothing on earth, not even in the United States, is perfect; and in the United States especially things most perfect are always in order to be amended. Within the very first year of the ratification of the Constitution, ten amendments were proposed and carried, making it an old knife with new blades, and finishing it up into what some people, with great novelty, proclaim it to be, the most perfect instrument ever invented.

The keel of the Supreme Court was laid in 1789; and the vessel, launched, well officered, and manned, provided with new spars, anchors, and compass, was despatched from port to ride the turbulent seas of maritime strife and constitutional conflict, and to override laws and treaties which drift athwart the path of the Constitution. By and in it States could originally be pursued; but after submitting for about fifty years to the chase of individual plaintiffs, the States, headed by Georgia, roused to a sovereign indignation and ruffled pride by being compelled to answer for grievances inflicted by themselves on Indians, negroes, white persons, and such trash, procured the passage of a jealous amendment, relieving them from such embarrassments. Beautiful is the theory that States can do no wrong to their own citizens. Millennarian is the assumption that they are so ready to spring to their loads of duty, that no judicial whip, with a snapper of judgment and execution, is necessary to quicken their slackening consciences. As a beautiful corollary from these delightful premises, is the most comfortable practice of governments not to pay interest on claims against themselves, however hoar with age; for the government assumes to itself the virtue of being always ready, as the _fons et origo justitæ_, to pay, and is presumably always pressing its offers to pay upon its creditors.

At certain points we now touch the millennium.

At the next session of Congress, in 1790, Hamilton presented a report on that subject which, like the poor, is always with us,—the public debt. Of course every one thought that it was right to pay the creditors who were fortunate enough to live in Europe, who had, at whatever discount, taken our promises; but a great many people with caoutchouc principles doubted whether men silly enough to be born on this side the Atlantic had as good a right to be paid; just as some discriminate between their autographs affixed to notes held by their friends,—leaving such to the mercy of blood,—and those held by strangers, which they despatch from unpleasant remembrances by payment. Hamilton recognized no such thin, veneering logic over parts of the public chest; and he was honestly supported by Congress and their makers.

Philadelphia was made the national capital for the rest of the century; and here, for the coming seven years, Washington’s weekly receptions on Tuesdays, and his dinner-parties on Thursdays, created a stir among the disciples of Penn, and caused much green-looking ink to be shed from cavilling pens all through the country. Like congregations which look with a keen-edged criticism upon the social movements of their clergymen, the people thus early began to peer into the green-room of the President’s mansion, to count the silver spoons, to feel of the window-curtains, and to compare their silken qualities favorably with their own hangings, and the qualities of the Presidential tenant, as thereby affected, unfavorably with their own. A democratic people prefer to occupy the green-room themselves.

The honeymoon of our newly wedded constitutional government was not all roseate. Through the press a wonderful amount of good advice and double-tongued compliment as already given to the old gentleman, who was not likely to forget all the peccadillos he had, and to wonder why he had been restrained from the easy commission of others which he had not committed.

The French Revolution had now begun its series of bloody conundrums; and, not content with posing its European circle of listeners with perplexing questions, crossed the Atlantic, and thrust upon the administration and demanded immediate answers to some very bothering acrostics and puzzles. The grand riddle which they prided themselves upon, and required to be first answered, might be stated in the rule-of-three form thus: If France, with a population of seventeen millions, assisted America to gain her independence from 1778 to 1783, what aid should America, with a population of 3,927,827, give, in 1790, to the Constituent Assembly, assuming to act for France, against the monarchical adherents of Louis XVI. and the turbulent guillotining mob, struggling up into fierce, resentful power under Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins? This riddle was differently guessed by the leading members of our government. Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jay, now recognized as the leaders of a party for the first time called the Federal, put in the ready, safe, and wise answer, “None”; while Jefferson and Randolph, in the government, and Madison, Gallatin, and young Edward Livingston, out of it,—now the heads of the anti-Federal party,—spelled out from their general love of liberty and sympathy for those struggling against monarchical power, without regard to international rights or home duties, the response, “All that we can.”

Of course much could be said on each side, and of course much was said; for the Boston “News-Letter” had now a very vivacious following all over the thirteen States, many of which barked in chorus, even at the majestic figure of Washington. Very hard names, too, and even imputations of felonious attempts upon the person of Liberty herself, facetiously assumed by party zeal to be impersonated in the last uppermost French faction, were hissed out against the grand old chief of the nation by those long-billed, ganderous persons, who, in the warm days of politics, paddle around in dirty pools and splash, with noisy uproar, the black ooze upon the cleanest and purest who pass by.

Thus even the golden age had ugly quartz and soiling dirt interspecking it.

Congress, during the same session of 1790, passed the first act for counting the people of the United States,—an enumeration which, being paid for in certain years by the number of names taken, has sometimes resulted in “counting one’s chickens before they were hatched,”—the census-paper containing more names than owners of them.

A law was also passed setting in motion that large machine for manufacturing voters, commonly called a Naturalization Act, whereby a singular pat-riot paving is turned out, by which our polling-places are McIrishized with some very curious bricks, and our polls sometimes are made to suffer by brickbats.

A fund was likewise established for sinking the national debt; but like the Irishman’s cork contrivance, put on to enable him to drown himself, the sinking fund, in practice under the statute device, became so buoyant that for several years the debt floated upwards instead of downwards.

The year 1791 was signalized by the birth of Vermont, as a State, into the Union,—a family event which at once added many venerable years and an historic solidity to the original members, who thenceforward became “The Old Thirteen.” A national bank was also ushered into existence, and was carefully wet-nursed by Hamilton, the government lending it $2,000,000, or one fifth of its capital,—a very comfortable christening present.

An Indian war which had broken out the preceding year within the present limits of Ohio,—as if to remind the country of its old irritating eruptions,—raged with some violence through 1791, reddening in spots into a rash and producing some congestion of officers at military head-quarters. General St. Clair, marching northwards with two thousand men, from Fort Washington, the future Cincinnati, then consisting of a rude stockade surrounded by a few wattled huts, and containing not exceeding thirty white settlers, the oldest not having been there three years, penetrated a district then obscure, but now even called Dark County, where he was disagreeably surprised by a party of Indians, and lost nearly three fourths of his troops. The war of course became chronic, lingering along until 1795, when it was finally got under by General Anthony Wayne, the old stormer of Stony Point.

Kentucky, wrought out of a small Boone settlement, in 1769, came forward in 1792, and was welcomed as the fifteenth State. Some wavy-notioned people imagine that her Bourbon, reinforcing her courage and spirits, emboldened her to make this early application; but this is a mistake which sober history is glad to correct.

Washington, although annoyed by the ganderous long-bills for his steady adherence to the neutrality of his country between the raging factions that were now quarrelling over the sanguinary conundrums, put forth by the civil war in France, finally consented, against his own wishes, to become a candidate for re-election as President. His consent was unanimously decreed to be the popular wish by the electoral colleges. John Adams, less fortunate than his chief, was content, however, with seventy-seven votes out of one hundred and twenty-seven, the other fifty being given to the Democratic candidate, George Clinton of New York.

About a month after the second inauguration of Washington, in 1793, that lively little Frenchman, Edmond Charles Genet, somewhat excited by the revolutionary dance about the scaffold of Louis XVI., and the rather wild scenes around the revolutionary tribunal in Paris, capered over on a visit to the people of this country, and landed at Charleston, South Carolina. Although commissioned by the French Convention, now the subject of its bloody master Robespierre, as a Minister to our government, Monsieur Genet took upon his arrival a sudden fancy to aquatic sports, and despatched on his own hook several cruisers to fish in the troubled waters of the Atlantic for any English, Spanish, or Dutch flying-fish that could be caught. The old American Squire did not at all relish this international fishing-party, which proposed to use American lines, hooks, sinkers, and bait for the benefit of French packers. Kindly but firmly he requested M. Genet’s forwarders to order him back again. There have always been Americans, born with magnifying spectacles fastened firmly on their noses, by which every form of freedom, individual or national, spelt out to them a clear license to help any party, fraction, or entirety of a people fighting, or claiming to fight, against the old governing power. “Wherever you see a crown, hit it,” is their one motto. In April, 1793, this class had many representatives, who thought that the French gentleman and his fishing-parties were all right.

In 1794 a Whiskey Rebellion arose, not in Kentucky nor among the Bourbonites, but in Pennsylvania. This insurrection defied for some time the cautionary, expostulating, and well-sealed proclamations of the President; but when the sharp military drum-beat, backed by fifteen thousand militia, with well-set bayonets, was heard in the western part of the State, its leaders and their weak followers reeled back into quiet and submission. Nothing so much shows the simplicity of that golden age of the Republic as this resistance to a whiskey tax. In our more debased but keener times, people distil much comfort from a heavy tax—far heavier than that of 1794—through taps and tubes placed in the obnoxious article, which is led off and around so circuitously and ingeniously as hardly to know where it is going, until all of a sudden it falls plump in large coin within the well-adjusted pockets of the non-complaining manufacturer. Instead of getting up insurrections in Pennsylvania against the high excise, he now forms combinations at Washington to raise it higher.

THE WHISKEY REBELLION IN 1794.
(p. 338)
]

The year 1795 was the era of treaties,—establishing diplomatic lines to England,—which ever since the peace of 1783 had been uneasily bobbing up and down, neither fishing nor cutting bait; to Spain, whose American possessions of Florida and Louisiana were thereby staked and roped off from our greedy boundaries; to the dark Dey of Algiers, whose corsairs were thus enmeshed in the silken nets; and, finally, to the Northwestern Indian tribes, who, as usual, gave us a large piece of territory for a little piping peace with hot embers on the top. Through the Spanish treaty flowed, and ever since has continued to flow for us, the wide-elbowed Mississippi. The exertion of signing it exhausted the power of Spain in North America; for five years later she had not vitality enough to hold either of these possessions against Napoleon, and the orange and sugar States fell out of her ever-relaxing hand into the clutching and restless fingers of France. In 1796, Tennessee, making the sixteenth State, was welcomed into the household. Its capital, Nashville, settled in 1779, contained only a few cabins; but the folds of the Cumberland warmed them rapidly into life.

Washington, then sixty-four years of age, announced in September, 1796, his intention to retire to the sunshine of private life. His farewell was the blessing of a ripe sage upon a sorrowing people. It was none the less genuine, rich, and good, because comically imitated by a few of his successors. Even Andrew Johnson’s did not belittle it.

Several gentlemen, it was discovered, had a fancy to try the official shades which the great American was so glad to quit. Of course Virginia supposed that the rotation in the office should, like charity, begin at home. Such, too, was the opinion of sixty-eight electors; but as seventy-one disagreed with them, the short, stout, well-grained “column of Congress” was transferred, for the four following years, into the executive post.