The "Independent Chronicle" of Boston was so excited that it called on "legislators, Governors, and magistrates and their ELECTORS" to suppress the Cincinnati because it "is concerted to establish a complete and perpetual personal discrimination between" its members "and the whole remaining body of the people who will be styled Plebeians."[907]
John Marshall was a member of this absurdly traduced patriotic fraternity. So were his father and fellow officers of our War for Independence. Washington was its commander. Were the grotesque charges against these men the laurels with which democracy crowned those who had drawn the sword for freedom? Was this the justice of liberty? Was this the intelligence of the masses? Such must have been the queries that sprang up in the minds of men like Marshall. And, indeed, there was sound reason for doubt and misgiving. For the nightmares of men like Burke and Mirabeau were pleasant dreams compared with the horrid visions that the people conjured.
Nor did this popular tendency to credit the most extraordinary tale, believe the most impossible and outrageous scandal, or accept the most impracticable and misshapen theory, end only in wholesome hatred of rank and distinction. Among large numbers there was the feeling that equality should be made real by a general division of property. Three years after peace had been established, Madison said he "strongly suspected" that many of the people contemplated "an abolition of debts public & private, and a new division of property."[908] And Jay thought that "a reluctance to taxes, an impatience of government, a rage for property, and little regard to the means of acquiring it, together with a desire for equality in all things, seem to actuate the mass of those who are uneasy in their circumstances."[909] The greed and covetousness of the people is also noted by all travelers.[910]
Very considerable were the obligations "public and private" which Madison wrote his father that he "strongly suspected" a part of the country intended to repudiate. The public debt, foreign and domestic, of the Confederation and the States, at the close of the Revolutionary War, appeared to the people to be a staggering sum.[911] The private debt aggregated a large amount.[912] The financial situation was chaos. Paper money had played such havoc with specie that, in Virginia in 1786, as we have seen, there was not enough gold and silver to pay current taxes.[913] The country had had bitter experience with a fictitious medium of exchange. In Virginia by 1781 the notes issued by Congress "fell to 1000 for 1," records Jefferson, "and then expired, as it had done in other States, without a single groan."[914]
Later on, foreigners bought five thousand dollars of this Continental scrip for a single dollar of gold or silver.[915] In Philadelphia, toward the end of the Revolution, the people paraded the streets wearing this make-believe currency in their hats, with a dog tarred and covered with paper dollars instead of feathers.[916] For land sold by Jefferson before paper currency was issued he "did not receive the money till it was not worth Oak leaves."[917]
Most of the States had uttered this fiat medium, which not only depreciated and fluctuated within the State issuing it, but made trade between citizens of neighboring States almost impossible. Livingston found it a "loss to shop it in New York with [New] Jersey Money at the unconscionable discount which your [New York] brokers and merchants exact; and it is as damnifying to deal with our merchants here [New Jersey] in that currency, since they proportionably advance the price of their commodities."[918] Fithian in Virginia records that: "In the evening I borrowed of Ben Carter 15/—I have plenty of money with me but it is in Bills of Philadelphia Currency and will not pass at all here."[919]
Virginia had gone through her trial of financial fiction-for-fact, ending in a law fixing the scale of depreciation at forty to one, and in other unique and bizarre devices;[920] and finally took a determined stand against paper currency.[921] Although Virginia had burned her fingers, so great was the scarcity of money that there was a formidable agitation to try inflation again.[922] Throughout the country there once more was a "general rage for paper money."[923] Bad as this currency was, it was counterfeited freely.[924] Such coin as existed was cut and clipped until Washington feared that "a man must travel with a pair of money scales in his pocket, or run the risk of receiving gold of one fourth less by weight than it counts."[925]
If there was not money enough, let the Government make more—what was a government for if not for that? And if government could not make good money, what was the good of government? Courts were fine examples of what government meant—they were always against the common people. Away with them! So ran the arguments and appeals of the demagogues and they found an answer in the breasts of the thoughtless, the ignorant, and the uneasy. This answer was broader than the demand for paper money, wider than the protest against particular laws and specific acts of administration. This answer also was, declared General Knox, "that the property of the United States ... ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice, and ought to be swept from off the face of the earth." Knox was convinced that the discontented were "determined to annihilate all debts, public and private."[926]
Ideas and purposes such as these swayed the sixteen thousand men who, in 1787, followed Daniel Shays in the popular uprising in Massachusetts against taxes, courts, and government itself.[927] "The restlessness produced by the uneasy situation of individuals, connected with lax notions concerning public and private faith, and erroneous[928] opinions which confound liberty with an exemption from legal control, produced ... unlicensed conventions, which, after voting on their own constitutionality, and assuming the name of the people, arrayed themselves against the legislature," was John Marshall's summary of the forces that brought about the New England rebellion.