American Experiment (18 page)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The amendments were ratified by the end of 1791. The American people had their Bill of Rights. What would they do with it?

Newspaper editors knew what to do with it. By 1790 the nation had almost a hundred newspapers, most of them weeklies, but a few semi-weeklies and eight dailies. Pressed down a page at a time on a crude block of type by human labor, printed on rough rag paper with a drab grayish or bluish cast, produced at the rate of about two hundred copies an hour, these two- or four-page newssheets were not much to look at. Many papers were short-lived, as editors found they could not make up with job printing for lack of subscribers, high costs of paper and mailing. But these newspapers had an immense vitality. They played up foreign and national news at the expense of local, in part because filching material from foreign newspapers and quoting verbatim from congressional debates were cheap ways of filling their columns. The result was the spread of an immense amount of political news throughout the states.

These newspapers were by no means “objective.” While few editors published their views as editorials, their biases so infused their news columns as to stamp most papers as clearly Federalist or Republican. Many editors were themselves politicians, or unabashedly sponsored and even financed by politicians. The most famous of these arrangements came to be Jefferson’s sponsorship of Philip Freneau’s
National Gazette
and Hamilton’s of John Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States.
Hamilton saw to it that his
Gazette
received printing contracts from the Treasury Department; and Jefferson arranged for the publication of his
Gazette
by providing Freneau with a State Department post that allowed for plenty of time off. Each stung
by the gibes in the other man’s paper, both Hamilton and Jefferson appealed to Washington, who admonished his two cabinet members to make “mutual yieldings.” Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson would yield. They were operating amid rising political tensions. The editors were not encouraging a politics of accommodation. Raucous, venal, often libelous, yet committed and strong-minded, they went their way, now shielded by the Bill of Rights.

The early 1790s were indeed a period of political tumult, but even more, of political paradox. George Washington presided over a government of national unity, but his administration was rife with internal conflict. Men addressed one another face to face or in correspondence in the most exquisitely courteous terms—one gentleman writing to another would end his letter, even if he hated his correspondent, with a painfully written out “I have the honor to be with the highest respect, sir, Your most Obedt. & mot: hble Servant”—but public political discourse was conducted in the most extreme language. The men around Washington were building a national governmental structure in a cooperative, soldierly, and workmanlike way, yet they differed violently over banks, tariffs, slavery, fiscal policy, foreign policy, presidential power, congressional prerogative, the permanent location of the national capital, and over a multitude of philosophical issues, such as representation, revolution, responsibility, and the protection of liberty.

Above all, political leaders at local, state, and national levels were buttressing freedoms of speech and press and assembly, without a clear concept of just how these liberties related to the role of government and opposition, faction and interest, majority and minority party. The leaders in fact feared, spurned, and despised the idea of faction and party even as they took part in factions and shaped embryonic parties. They did not consider and firmly articulate the role of government party and opposition party. Leaders as varied in outlook as Washington, Paine, Adams, Jefferson, and Henry agreed on one thing—the evil of organized factional or party opposition. Such an opposition, indeed, took on a strongly sinister, subversive cast, and became an alien threat to republican government and hence something to be extirpated. The political leadership, in short, had no theory of party. Hence the future of parties would be shaped far more by events than by design.

One of the more benign of these events occurred in May 1791, when Jefferson and Madison took off on a “botanical expedition” up the Hudson. After tarrying in New York City a couple of days, they left for Albany by carriage and boat. New York Federalists eyed them narrowly. What could these two Republicans be up to? Practical politicians could not
believe it, but the two Virginians were actually interested mainly in the flowers and fish, the trees, game, insects, soil, streams, lakes, scenery, and battlefields rather than in the political flora and fauna. However, they probably did visit Governor Clinton in Albany, before pursuing their journey up Lake George to Champlain, down through Vermont to Bennington, overland to the Connecticut Valley, and finally across the Sound to Long Island. They had a chance to compare notes on Republican politics in the “Eastern” states, and doubtless word seeped out to the surrounding countryside that the celebrated Virginians had passed through.

It was evident that as long as George Washington stayed in office political conflict would be kept within bounds, and by late 1792 it was evident that he would be President for another four years. He had talked much about quitting after his first term, but when leaders in the different factions urged him to run again—“North & South will hang together, if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told him—the President allowed electors to be chosen for him. His popularity was still at a high pitch, and he had bolstered it even more when he took a sea voyage to Rhode Island, where he spoke in favor of tolerance to representatives of the Jewish Congregation of Newport, and when he toured Georgia and the Carolinas in 1791.He carried the electoral college unanimously the following year. John Adams was also re-elected, but once again votes were diverted from him, this time mainly by Republicans. Washington, managing as always to stay above the election battle, did not intervene to help his Vice-President.

The hero worship for Washington had its limits. When it was proposed in Congress that the head of the President be stamped on the new coin of the United States, republicans warned of monarchical tendencies and future Caesars, Neros, and Caligulas, and the move was defeated. Instead Congress ordered that the coins be adorned with the female figure of
LIBERTY
.

George Washington seemed to be a relaxed and happy man at the ball given in his honor on the occasion of his sixty-second birthday, ten days before the second inaugural. With military bearing and punctilio, he marched in with Martha Washington at his side, to the airs of “The President’s March.” He liked the Philadelphia belles who were there, he liked the words “Long live the President” in Latin or French they had woven into their hair bandeaux, and he liked his old friends from Revolutionary days, among whom he moved easily, remembering old campaigns and humorous war stories. Political talk he brushed aside. Precisely at the
moment of the ball’s end, he and the First Lady rose, the band struck up a reprise of “The President’s March,” and the couple paraded out, amid cheers.

The President had good reason to feel content. He had wanted above all to nurture and symbolize a united nation, and he seemed to have done so, in appointing a balanced Cabinet, in his travels, and always in furbishing his carefully shaped image of benign authority. He had followed up his northeastern tour with a journey to the South in the spring of 1791, where as usual he had been showered with endless tributes but where he had also talked with farmers and woodsmen in the taverns along the way. He concluded: “Tranquility reigns among the people.”

The man who took the oath of office ten days later, however, seemed a changed man, almost an angry man. He proceeded to the Senate alone in a coach, entered the chamber with minimal ceremony, gave an address of 136 words in which he said that if he knowingly violated the Constitution he should be impeached and upbraided, took the oath of office, and returned to his residence. The reason, rumor had it, was an attack in Freneau’s
National Gazette
on the birthday ball as a “monarchical farce” promoted by sinister types close to the President and opposed to freemen’s liberties. More likely, the attack reminded Washington of more basic divisions in the country—of the party and factional rivalries that had broken out even within his official family, the hostility to Hamilton’s excise tax out in the hinterland, the battles between the first Americans and the settlers that erupted fitfully along the long frontier to the west.

Increasingly the West was exciting the interest of the public and posing problems for the government. Settlers were moving toward the Ohio and the Mississippi, with the help of the land speculators. About the time of Washington’s first inaugural certain citizens of Pennsylvania and New Jersey were receiving, on a confidential basis, an “invitation” that read:

“Several Gentlemen who propose to make settlements in the Western Country mean to reconnoitre & survey the same the ensuing winter. All farmers, Tradesmen &c of good characters, who wish to unite in this scheme & to visit the Country under my direction, shall be provided with boats & provisions for the purpose, free of expence, on signing an agreement.…The boats which will be employed on this expedition are proposed to be from 40 to 60 feet long, to row with 20 oars each, & to carry a number of Swivels. Each man to provide himself with a good firelock or rifle, ammunition & one blanket or more if he pleases. Such as choose tents or other conveniences must provide them themselves. Every person who accompanies me on this undertaking shall be entitled to 320 acres of land, at 1/8 of a dollar per acre.… All persons who settle with me at New Madrid,
& their posterity will have the free navigation of the Mississippi & a Market at New Orleans free from duties for all the produce from their lands, where they may receive payment in Mexican Dollars for their flour, tobacco &c.…”

Buffalo and other game would be plentiful in the area, it was promised; settlers would be helped in clearing ground, building a house, and obtaining livestock; schoolmasters would be engaged and ministers encouraged to come. The new city would be built on a high bank of the Mississippi, near the mouth of the Ohio, in the “richest & most healthy part of the Western Country.”

This kind of advertisement was helping swell a vast movement of population over the Appalachians and into the West. Amid intense state jealousies and fierce political combat, the original states had been adjusting to the pressures of western expansion. Before and after the Revolution, Virginians and Marylanders were moving as far as the forks of the Ohio, joining Pennsylvanians and others. New Englanders and New Yorkers were also moving west. After the Revolution the streams of settlers swelled to torrents.

State lands were reorganized as people legislated with their feet. In 1783 Virginia had agreed to cede its lands north of the Ohio, provided it could reserve for itself a district to satisfy military grants made during the Revolution. Virginia had held back its land south of the Ohio, which would be organized as the state of Kentucky. In 1785 Massachusetts gave up its claim to a stretch of land crossing the (present) states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and the following year Connecticut ceded some of its western land, withholding a tract in northern Ohio—the Western Reserve—for the relief of Connecticut victims of destruction of property by the British. Other states too let go of their lands, which gave to the Confederation—and later to the United States—a huge public domain.

Into this domain swarmed the settlers, crowding the roads year after year, especially during the months of spring to fall, moving singly, by families, or by groups. Usually it was a family, its belongings packed into one covered wagon, leading a horse or cow or mule. Others traveled by two-wheeled carts, still others on horseback or even on foot. With luck they could boat down rivers, but sometimes luck failed, as overloaded craft upset in rapids or “savages” shot arrows from the high banks. Preceding, accompanying, or following the migrants were other possible dangers—claim jumpers, squatters and fugitives from justice, merchants and other middlemen looking for quick profits in monopolistic situations, and land sellers and speculators not unwilling to lure poor farmers and mechanics west with grandiose promises of cheap land, rich harvests, and big money.
On the face of it, the “invitation” to New Madrid looked like such a real estate scheme.

But James Madison put a far more ominous gloss on the document when he sent a copy of it to George Washington late in March 1789. “It is the most authentic & precise evidence of the Spanish project that has come to my knowledge.” The Spanish project! For decades Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Englishmen had contended for control of the lower Mississippi. For years Americans on the southwest frontier had chafed under Spanish control of the lower Mississippi and had resented the Northeasterner who seemed to care so little about settlers’ rights in the Southwest. Patrick Henry, trying to mobilize Kentuckians against the 1787 Constitution, charged that the new federal government would surrender navigation of the Mississippi to Spain in exchange for concessions that would mean little to the frontiersmen. James Wilkinson, a Revolutionary War general, actually accepted Spanish gold in return for information and other services to the Spanish. By the end of the 1780s the Southwest was a conspiracy theorist’s heaven, alive with intrigue, suspicion of the new federal government, and plots for secession. Land speculators were believed to be aiding and abetting the conspiracies.

The question of the Southwest was one more flammable issue in the politics of the 1790s, and one more stimulus to party rivalry, with Republicans generally more sympathetic to southwestern fears and hopes than were Federalists based in the Northeast. The Southwest intensified rather than transcended political conflict. And the Southwest—indeed the whole frontier from Florida through the Southwest and up through the Northwest to the Canadian border in the Northeast—involved another “foreign power” who aroused among some Americans the deepest anxieties and hatreds of all—the American Indian.