Those who had prophesied that the overwhelming majority of Washington would result in a series of re-elections during his life, or that the expiration of each term would find the country in some danger which would demand his continuance, had been silenced by a farewell address declaring his intention to retire. The pattern of two terms which he set no President has ever dared attempt to exceed. The opponents of his administration, those who had foreseen the coming royal reception in the simple levee which marked his social life, or who objected to the growing custom of celebrating his birthday as if he were a monarch, were compelled to cease their evil prophecies when he attended, as a spectator, the inauguration of his successor in the room of the House of Representatives adjacent to old Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the fourth day of March, 1797. As the incoming President wrote to his wife, the multitude was as great as the space would contain and not a dry eye but Washington's. Like the formative influence of a good parent extending from generation to generation, the precedent of Washington's voluntary retirement from the Presidency has been a rich heritage to the American people. It may be safely said that it is largely the cause of the pleasing contrast which exists between the changes of administration in the United States and those in the other American republics.
CHAPTER XII
SUPPRESSING THE FRENCH SYMPATHISERS
The only cloud on the horizon the day that John Adams became President lay in the direction of France and was caused by the Jay Treaty. It seemed impossible to keep peace with both belligerents abroad or with their factions at home. Adams would probably be more scrupulous of the rights of the individual than Hamilton; yet drastic measures were likely to become necessary if the pro-British and the pro-French agitators were to be muzzled and their clamour hushed. Such a censorship of speech was a thing not to be lightly contemplated in America.
Freedom of speech and the press had been inherited as a privilege of Englishmen, wrested from those in authority by years of contest, and maintained only by constant vigilance. A guarantee that it should not be restricted by the State had been placed in many of the State constitutions. A similar prohibition formed the first amendment to the Federal Constitution. Freedom of movement is closely akin to freedom of speech. Not even in the heyday of State sovereignty had any serious attempt been made to prevent the movement of unobjectionable free people from one State to another. The Constitution guaranteed to citizens of each State all privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States. The same instrument allowed Congress to establish a uniform rule of naturalisation in making United States citizens out of foreign immigrants; but the right of declaring who should be citizens of the States, having been assumed by the State constitutions, was left to them individually. State and national citizenship were thus separate from the beginning. For these reasons it could happen, as pointed out in the Dred Scott decision many years later, that a State could make an alien into a citizen of the State, entitled to all its rights and privileges, but he might still be an alien in the United States and deprived of national citizenship.
The first Congress recognised its constitutional obligation to provide a uniform law for national citizenship by allowing an alien who had resided two years within its jurisdiction and one year within any State to take an oath before any court of common-law record to support the Constitution and thereby become a citizen. Five years later, Congress feared that the warring powers of Europe would send undesirable aliens to the United States. "Coming from a quarter of the world so full of disorder and corruption," said a speaker in the House, "they might contaminate the purity and simplicity of the American character." A new naturalisation law was passed, requiring an alien to give three years' notice of his intention to change his allegiance—a kind of period of repentance. The required time of residence was then raised to five years for the nation and one for the State. During that time he must maintain a good moral character, must abjure allegiance to all other sovereigns, and must renounce all hereditary titles and orders of nobility. In this way one speaker said he hoped to shut out those refugees from the twenty thousand French nobility, who might choose to fly to the United States. Another expected to see an equally large number of the peerage arrive from Britain, as soon as the correct principles of government should take root there.
Little alarm need have been felt about those members of the deposed nobility of France who did arrive. They were more concerned with getting daily bread than acquiring citizenship or retaining their titles. Prince, marquis and marquise, vicomte, and bishop, alike must keep body and soul together by turning wig-maker, baker, or milliner, until the madness of the French people should pass. By and by, the changes of fortune in France began to send over Constitutionalists, Thermidorians, Fructidorians, and the like, to plot and intrigue. "They kept their eyes fixed on France," said a French volunteer, who had returned to America to secure the pay due him since Revolutionary days, "to which all expected to return sooner or later and recommence what each called his great work, for there were exactly the same number of political systems as there were refugees." The French sympathisers in America mingled with these émigrés and were more or less concerned with their plans. The press offered the opportunity to vent much of their spleen on Washington and to express their opinions of the "British United States Government," as they called it.
Added to these scribblers were certain other agitators, preachers, and writers, refugees from England and Scotland, driven out by the British Government in its effort to keep the sentiments of the French propagandists from taking root in British soil. More libel suits had been instituted in the courts of England during a single year of the French Revolution than in any two previous decades. Among those banished was Thomas Paine, who had returned to London, after lending his pen to the American cause, and had written the famous, or infamous, as some called it, Rights of Man. Many of these aliens in America were scribblers who had picked up a few current phrases and lofty sentiments about liberty and equality. They were of varying ability as writers, but uniform in their venomous abuse and hatred of England and all her sympathisers. In the rapid increase of newspapers, which marked this first period of prosperity and the birth of political parties, many of these writers found precarious employment; a few found remunerative occupations. Of the two hundred newspapers published in the United States when John Adams became President, it was estimated that at least twenty-five were edited by men of alien birth.
At few later periods have political parties brought out such scurrilous abuse in the press as in these early days. Although the number of newspapers has so increased that irresponsible and vulgar men are to be found among editors, although the restraints of law upon the press have been greatly loosened, yet the tone of the leading newspapers to-day is immeasurably better than it was a century ago. As the opposition to the Administration gradually crystallised into a party, few suffered more from the pens of its writers than did the first President. The abuse, which included such grave charges as that he had murdered a French envoy near Fort DuQuesne years before, that he had taken money illegally from the United States Treasury, and that he hoped to turn his Presidency into a monarchical reign, followed him to the end of his administration. Washington's replies to the numerous addresses of societies and public meetings which had greeted his entrance to office eight years before breathed a spirit of toleration. It was his eminent desire, as he said in one reply, to have every association and community make such use of the auspicious years of peace, liberty, and free inquiry, as they should hereafter rejoice in having done.
At the same time, the mind of Washington, the exclusive Virginia gentleman, could easily make a distinction between liberty and license. He attributed the insurrection against the excise almost entirely to the unbridled utterances of the Democratic clubs, their "first formidable fruits," as he put it. Nor did he fail, in reporting the suppression of the rebellion to the next Congress, to express his opinion of these "self-created societies" who disseminated suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole Government. Jefferson, still believing in the original doctrine of the rights of man, called this allusion of the President "the greatest error of his political life." The societies would have soon died out if left alone, he said. Coercion would make them thrive. "It is wonderful," continued Jefferson to Madison, "that the President should have permitted himself to be the organ of such an attack on the freedom of discussion, freedom of writing, printing, and publishing." He pronounced it almost incredible that the freedom of association and of the press should be attacked in the fifth year of the new Government, a step which England, fast advancing to an absolute monarchy, had not yet attempted.