Benson John Lossing

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meeting of congress—washington's message—his views of the whiskey insurrection—denunciation of the democratic societies—debates in congress on the subject—weakness of the opposition—jefferson's angry letter to madison—decline of the democratic societies—wayne's success—end of the indian war—hamilton and knox retire from office—correspondence between them and washington—their successors—close of the third congress—a national university proposed—washington's views—his disposition of navigation companies' shares.

The members of Congress came tardily to the federal capital in the autumn of 1794; and it was not until the nineteenth of November, sixteen days after the time appointed for the commencement of the session, that they were ready to listen to the president's sixth annual message. As he had intimated to Mr. Jay that he should, Washington, in that message, dwelt at considerable length on the subject of the late insurrection, taking a complete outline survey of all the facts and circumstances, and drawing conclusions therefrom.

“While there is cause to lament,” he said, “that occurrences of this nature should have disgraced the name, or interrupted the tranquillity, of any part of our community, or should have diverted to a new application any portion of the public resources, there are not wanting real and substantial consolations for the misfortune. It has demonstrated that our prosperity rests on solid foundations, by furnishing an additional proof that my fellow-citizens understand the true principles of government and liberty; that they feel their inseparable union; that, notwithstanding all the devices which have been used to sway them from their interest and duty, they are now as ready to maintain the authority of the laws against licentious invasions, as they were to defend their rights against usurpation. It has been a spectacle displaying to the highest advantage the value of republican government, to behold the most and the least wealthy of our citizens standing in the same ranks as private soldiers, pre-eminently distinguished by being the army of the constitution—undeterred by a march of three hundred miles over rugged mountains, by the approach of an inclement season, or by any other discouragement. Nor ought I to omit to acknowledge the efficacious and patriotic co-operations which I have experienced from the chief magistrates of the states to which my requisitions have been addressed.

“To every description of citizens, indeed, let praise be given. But let them persevere in their affectionate vigilance over that precious depository of American happiness, the constitution of the United States. Let them cherish it, too, for the sake of those who, from every clime, are daily seeking a dwelling in our land. And when, in the calm moments of reflection, they shall have traced the origin and progress of the insurrection, let them determine whether it has not been fomented by combinations of men, who, careless of consequences, and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse can not always appease a civil convulsion, have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole government.”

The boldness of Washington was conspicuous in thus officially denouncing the Democratic Societies, because he well knew that his words of severe reprobation would arouse their hottest resentment. But, conscious of his own integrity, and well assured of the support of all good men, he hesitated not a moment. Some democratic members of the senate, the most prominent of whom were Burr and Jackson, showed great ill feeling; but the majority in that body gave it their approval. In the lower house it created a good deal of angry altercation, for the opposition were powerful there. They exhibited their disapprobation on the first draft of their answer to the president's message, by passing the matter over in silence. To this draft an amendment was offered, reprobating the “self-created societies,” which, “by deceiving and inflaming the ignorant and weak, may naturally be supposed to have stimulated the insurrection.” It then denounced them as “institutions not strictly unlawful, yet not less fatal to good order and true liberty, and reprehensible in the degree that our system of government approaches to perfect political freedom.”

It was this amendment that caused the debate. Those who opposed it did so cautiously, and exhibited their sense of the waning popularity of these societies, by taking care to disclaim their own personal connection with them. It was contended that the term “self-created societies” involved all voluntary associations whatever; that the right of censure was sacred; and that the societies would retort. Others contended that the question was not, whether the societies were legal, but whether they were mischievous. If they were so, the representatives of the people, presumed to be the guardians of the republic, ought to declare it, and not, by silence, give an implied contradiction to the president's statements.

A motion to strike out the words “self-constituted societies” elicited a warm debate. “It has been argued,” said one of the members (Sedgwick) who traced the origin of these societies to Genet, “that to censure them might be construed into an attack on the freedom of public discussion. He was sorry,” he said, “to see a disposition to confound freedom and licentiousness. Was there not an obvious distinction between a cool, dispassionate, honest, and candid discussion, and a false, wicked, seditious misrepresentation of public men and public measures? The former was within the province of freemen; it was, indeed, their duty; the latter was inconsistent with moral rectitude, and tended to the destruction of freedom and to the production of every evil that could afflict a community.” The speaker then described the Democratic Societies as “self-created, without delegation or control, not emanating from the people, or responsible to them; not open in their deliberations; not admitting any but those of their own political opinions; permanent in their constitution, and of unlimited duration.” These, he said, “modestly assumed the character of popular instructors, guardians of the people, guardians of the government. Every man in the administration who had assented to its acts they had loaded with every species of calumny—slanders—which they knew to be such. They had not even spared that character supposed to have been clothed with inviolability—not the paltry inviolability of constitutional proscription, but an inviolability infinitely more respectable, founded on the public gratitude, and resulting from disinterested and invaluable services.”

The motion upon which this debate arose was finally carried in committee of the whole, but by a very small majority. The struggle was renewed when it was reported to the house. Finally, a compromise was effected by inserting in the address a declaration of great concern on the part of the house, “that any misrepresentations whatever of the government and its proceedings, either by individuals or combinations of men, should have been made, and so far have been credited as to foment the flagrant outrage which had been committed on the laws.”

It was very evident, from the debates and the votes on this and other questions brought up by the president's message, that the government was growing stronger, and the opposition in Congress weaker. Jefferson, the father of the opposition, who had declared that his retiracy from the political world should be profound, was alarmed at these manifestations of the declining strength of his party, and he was moved to let his voice be heard once more. On the twenty-eighth of December he wrote to Madison, the republican leader in the lower house, an angry letter concerning the president's remarks about the “self-created societies,” saying:—

Then, in full sympathy with the whiskey insurrectionists, he said: “And with respect to the transactions against the excise law, it appears to me that you are all swept away in the torrent of governmental opinions, or that we do not know what these transactions have been. We know of none which, according to the definitions of the law, have been anything more than riotous. There was, indeed, a meeting to consult about a separation. But to consult on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the affirmative, still less to the acting on such a determination; but we shall see, I suppose, what the court lawyers, and courtly judges, and would-be embassadors will make of it. The excise law is an infernal one. The first error was to admit it by the constitution; the second, to act on that admission; the third and last will be, to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union, and setting us all afloat to choose what part of it we will adhere to. The information of our militia returned from the westward is uniform, that though the people there let them pass quietly, they were objects of their laughter, not of their fear; that one thousand men could have cut off their whole force in a thousand places of the Alleghany; that their detestation of the excise law is universal, and has now associated to it a detestation of the government; and that separation, which perhaps was a very distant and problematical event, is now near, and certain, and determined in the mind of every man. I expected to have seen some justification of arming one part of society against another; of declaring a civil war the moment before the meeting of that body which has the sole right of declaring war; of being so patient of the kicks and scoffs of our enemies, and rising at a feather against our friends; of adding a million to the public debt, and deriding us with recommendations to pay it if we can.”

But the medicines of most powerful friends could not cure the mortal malady that now afflicted the Democratic Societies. As it happened with Genet, their founder, so it now happened with these societies; the great mass of the people had learned to reprobate them. The denunciations of the president, co-operating with the downfall of the Jacobin clubs in France—kindred societies—soon produced their dissolution. Monroe, in an official despatch, had set in its true light the character of the Jacobin clubs, as interfering with the government; and in the United States, their confrÉres, the Democratic societies, soon sank into merited obscurity.

In his message, Washington announced that “the intelligence from the army under the command of General Wayne was a happy presage to military operations against the hostile Indians north of the Ohio.” Wayne, as we have seen, had succeeded St. Clair after that veteran's unfortunate defeat in the autumn of 1791. He marched into the Indian country in 1793, and near the spot where St. Clair was surprised he built Fort Recovery. There he was attacked by the Indians at the close of June, 1794, but without receiving much damage. General Scott arrived there not long afterward from Kentucky, with eleven hundred volunteers, and then Wayne advanced to the confluence of the Maumee and Au Glaize rivers, “the grand emporium,” as he called it, of the Indians. They fled precipitately; and there Wayne built a strong stockade, for the permanent occupation of that beautiful country, and called it Fort Defiance.

The main body of the Indians had retired down the Maumee about thirty miles, where they took a hostile attitude. With about three thousand men, Wayne marched against them, and near the present Maumee City he fought and defeated them, on the twentieth of August. He then laid waste their country, and the trading establishment of the British agent in their midst was burned. There seemed little doubt that he had stirred up the savages against the Americans.

Wayne fell back to Fort Defiance three days after the battle; and at the beginning of November, after a successful campaign of three months, during which time he had marched three hundred miles along a road cut by his own army, gained an important victory, driven the Indians from their principal settlement, and left a strong post in the heart of their country, he placed his army into winter-quarters at Greenville. The western tribes were humbled and disheartened; and early in August, the following year, their principal chiefs and United States' commissioners met at Greenville and made a treaty of peace. The Indians ceded to the United States a large tract of land in the present states of Michigan and Indiana, and for more than ten years afterward the government had very little trouble with the western savages.

In his message, Washington urged the adoption of some definite plan for the redemption of the public debt. “Nothing,” he said, “can more promote the permanent welfare of the nation, and nothing would be more grateful to our constituents.” At his request, Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury, prepared a plan, digested and arranged on the basis of the actual revenues for the further support of the public credit. It was one of the ablest state papers of the many that had proceeded from his pen during his official career. It was reported on the twentieth of January, 1795, and this was Hamilton's last official act. He had, on the first of December, immediately after his return from western Pennsylvania, addressed the following letter to the president:—

Mr. Hamilton resigned his office on the thirty-first of January. It was with deep regret, as in the case of Mr. Jefferson, that Washington found himself deprived of the services of so able an officer. “After so long an experience of your public services,” he said in a note to Hamilton on the second of February, “I am naturally led, at this moment of your departure from office (which it has always been my wish to prevent), to review them. In every relation which you have borne to me, I have found that my confidence in your talents, exertions, and integrity, has been well placed. I the more freely render this testimony of my approbation, because I speak from opportunities of information which can not deceive me, and which furnish satisfactory proof of your title to public regard.”

1795

To this Hamilton replied on the following day, saying, “My particular acknowledgments are due for your very kind letter of yesterday. As often as I may recall the vexations I have endured, your approbation will be a great and precious consolation. It was not without a struggle that I yielded to the very urgent motives which compelled me to relinquish a station in which I could hope to be, in any degree, instrumental in promoting the success of an administration under your direction; a struggle which would have been far greater had I supposed that the prospect of future usefulness was proportioned to the sacrifices made.”

Justice to a growing family was the chief cause of Hamilton's resignation. “The penurious provision made for those who filled the high executive departments in the American government,” says Marshall, “excluded from a long continuance in office all those whose fortunes were moderate, and whose professional talents placed a decent independence within their reach. While slandered as the accumulator of thousands by illicit means, Colonel Hamilton had wasted in the public service great part of the property acquired by his previous labors, and had found himself compelled to decide on retiring from his political station.”[73]

Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut, who had been the federal comptroller under Hamilton for some time, was appointed to succeed that officer; and General Knox, who had offered his resignation as secretary of war at the close of the year, was succeeded by Timothy Pickering, who was at that time the postmaster-general. “After having served my country nearly twenty years,” wrote Knox in his letter tendering his resignation on the twenty-eighth of December, “the greatest portion of which under your immediate auspices, it is with extreme reluctance that I find myself constrained to withdraw from so honorable a station. But the natural and powerful claims of a numerous family will no longer permit me to neglect their essential interests. In whatever situation I shall be, I shall recollect your confidence and kindness with all the fervor and purity of affection of which a grateful heart is susceptible.”

Washington always loved Knox. His frankness and good nature, his eminent integrity and unswerving faithfulness in every period of his public career, endeared him to the president; and it was with sincere sorrow that he experienced the official separation. “The considerations which you have often suggested to me,” Washington wrote in reply to Knox, “and which are repeated in your letter as requiring your departure from your present office, are such as to preclude the possibility of my urging your continuance in it. This being the case, I can only wish it was otherwise. I can not suffer you, however, to close your public service without uniting with the satisfaction which must arise in your own mind from a conscious rectitude, my most perfect persuasion that you have deserved well of your country. My personal knowledge of your exertions, whilst it authorizes me to hold this language, justifies the sincere friendship which I have ever borne for you, and which will accompany you in every situation in life.”

The last session of the third Congress closed on the third of March, 1795. For a little while, Washington's mind was relieved in a degree from the pressure of political duties, and a matter of different but interesting nature occupied it at times. It will be remembered that the legislature of Virginia presented to Washington, as a testimony of their gratitude for his public services, fifty shares in the Potomac company, and one hundred shares in the James River company—corporations created for promoting internal navigation in Virginia—and that he accepted them with the understanding that he should not use them for his own private benefit, but apply them to some public purpose.

An opportunity for such application, that commended itself to Washington's judgment, had not occurred until this time, when a plan for the establishment of a university at the federal capital, on the Potomac, was talked of. “It has always been a source of serious reflection and sincere regret with me,” he said in a letter to the commissioners of the federal city on the twenty-eighth of January, “that the youth of the United States should be sent to foreign countries for the purpose of education. Although there are doubtless many, under these circumstances, who escape the danger of contracting principles unfavorable to republican government, yet we ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds from being too strongly and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own.

“For this reason, I have greatly wished to see a plan adopted, by which the arts, sciences, and belles-lettres, could be taught in their fullest extent, thereby embracing all the advantages of European tuition, with the means of acquiring the liberal knowledge which is necessary to qualify our citizens for the exigencies of public as well as private life; and (which with me is a consideration of great magnitude) by assembling the youths from the different parts of this republic, contributing, from their intercourse and interchange of information, to the removal of prejudices, which might, perhaps, sometimes arise from local circumstances.”

Washington then suggested the federal city as the most eligible place for such an institution; at the same time offering, in the event of the university being established upon a scale as extensive as he described, and the execution of it being commenced under favorable auspices in a reasonable time, to “grant in perpetuity fifty shares in the navigation of the Potomac river towards the endowment of it.”

About four weeks after this, Washington received a letter from Mr. Jefferson, on the subject that had a bearing upon the disposition of his shares, the former having on some occasion asked the advice of the latter concerning the appropriation of them. Mr. Jefferson now informed Washington that the college at Geneva, in Switzerland, had been destroyed, and that Mr. D'Ivernois, a Genevan scholar who had written a history of his country, had proposed the transplanting of that college to America. It was proposed to have the professors of the college come over in a body, it being asserted that most of them spoke the English language well.

Jefferson was favorable to the establishment of the proposed new college within the state of Virginia; but Washington, with practical sagacity, concluded that it would not be wise to have two similar institutions. He preferred having one excellent institution, and that at the federal capital, and gave his reasons at length for his opinion, at the same time adding—after stating to Mr. Jefferson the fact that he had offered the fifty shares of the Potomac company to the commissioners—“My judgment and my wishes point equally strong to the application of the James River shares [one hundred] to the same object at the same place; but, considering the source from whence they were derived, I have, in a letter I am writing to the executive of Virginia on this subject, left the application of them to a seminary within the state, to be located by the legislature.”

In his letter to Governor Brooke, above referred to, Washington said: “The time is come when a plan of universal education ought to be adopted in the United States. Not only do the exigencies of public life demand it, but, if it should be apprehended that prejudice would be entertained in one part of the Union against another, an efficacious remedy will be to assemble the youth from every part, under such circumstances as will, by the freedom of intercourse and collision of sentiment, give to their minds the direction of truth, philanthropy, and mutual conciliation.” He then expressed his preference of the proposed university at the federal capital, as the object of his appropriation, but left the matter at the disposal of the legislature. That body, in resolutions, approved of his appropriation of the fifty shares in the Potomac company to the proposed university, and requested him to appropriate the hundred shares in the James River company “to a seminary at such place in the upper country, as he may deem most convenient to a majority of the inhabitants thereof.”[74]