Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3.

by Benson John Lossing

At the South, equally hostile feelings toward the treaty and its friends were manifested. John Rutledge, then chief justice of South Carolina, denounced the treaty in violent language at a public meeting. He said it was destitute of a single article that could be approved, and reproached Jay with being either a knave or a fool—with corruption or stupidity—in having signed it. The stanch old patriot, Christopher Gadsden, denounced it in terms equally decisive; and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, at the close of a violent harangue, moved to request the president to take steps to have Jay impeached. “If he had not made this public exposure of his conduct and principles,” said Pinckney, “he might one day have been brought forward, among others, as a candidate for our highest office: but the general and deserved contempt which his negotiations have brought both his talents and principles into, would for ever, he trusted, secure his fellow-citizens from the dangerous and unwise use which such a man would have made of the powers vested in a president.”

The meeting appointed a committee of fifteen to report their sentiments at another gathering. It was done on the twenty-second of July. The report contained severe criticisms upon the several articles of the treaty, and recommended a memorial to the president, asking him not to ratify it. Meanwhile the populace trailed a British flag through the streets, and then burned it at the door of the British consul.

While these meetings were occurring in the principal cities, the opposition press all over the country was alive with the subject, and its denunciations were sometimes so violent that it was difficult to find words strong enough to express them. The Democratic Societies, vivified by the excitement, were also active with a sort of galvanic life. One of these in South Carolina resolved, “That we pledge ourselves to our brethren of the republican societies throughout the Union, as far as the ability and individual influence of a numerous society can be made to extend, that we will promote every constitutional mode to bring John Jay to trial and to justice. He shall not escape, if guilty, that punishment which will at once wipe off the temporary stain laid upon us, and be a warning to traitors hereafter how they sport with the interests and feelings of their fellow-citizens. He was instructed, or he was not: if he was, we will drop the curtain; if not, and he acted of and from himself, we shall lament the want of a guillotine.”

The Pendleton Society of the same state declared their “abhorrence and detestation of a treaty which gives the English government more power over us as states than it claimed over us as colonists—a treaty, involving in it pusillanimity, stupidity, ingratitude, and treachery.”

In Virginia, the grand panacea for all political evils of the federal government, disunion, was again presented. The following specimen of the prescription, taken from a Virginia newspaper, will suffice as an example:—

“Notice is hereby given, that in case the treaty entered into by that damned arch-traitor, John Jay, with the British tyrant should be ratified, a petition will be presented to the next general assembly of Virginia at their next session, praying that the said state may recede from the Union, and be under the government of one hundred thousand free and independent Virginians.

“P. S. As it is the wish of the people of the said state to enter into a treaty of amity, commerce, and navigation, with any other state or states of the present Union who are averse to returning again under the galling yoke of Great Britain, the printers of the (at present) United States are requested to publish the above notification.—Richmond, July 31, 1795.”

Even at that early period of the republic, neither newspaper editors, nor political combinations, nor gatherings of clamorous assemblies, could make any sensible impression on the real strength of the Union.

Nor did these individual or public demonstrations move Washington from his steady march in the line of duty, or in his allegiance to what he discerned to be truth and justice. On his way to his home on the Potomac, he was overtaken at Baltimore, on the eighteenth of July, by the committee from Boston, bearing to him the proceedings of the great public meeting there on the subject of the treaty. He immediately sent the papers back to Mr. Randolph, the secretary of state, with a request that he would confer upon the subject with the other two secretaries and the attorney-general, and transmit the opinion of the cabinet to him as early as possible. The whole affair, he had no doubt, was intended to place him “in an embarrassed situation.” The cabinet members, after consultation, wrote out replies to the Boston authorities in accordance with their views, and sent them to the president. He weighed them carefully, and on the twenty-eighth of July he addressed the following letter to the selectmen of Boston:—[82]

“In every act of my administration I have sought the happiness of my fellow-citizens. My system for the attainment of this object has uniformly been to overlook all personal, local, and partial considerations; to contemplate the United States as one great whole; to consider that sudden impressions, when erroneous, would yield to candid reflection; and to consult only the substantial and permanent interests of our country.