The comic history of the United States, from a period prior to the discovery of America to times long subsequent to the present

by John D. Sherwood

It was not necessary that this youngster,—nor yet North Carolina, who got in the year before,—should consent, in order to complete the change of arrangements from the old Confederate to the new Constitutional system; but as it was an affectionate and generous-hearted family, there was a general desire to conciliate all the members. And so when little Rhody got in and curled up, she was joyfully tucked in by that good old faithful American “help,” Washington, a great favorite, who had been so long in the family that he was loved by every one, and so generous and right-minded that, although several of the other domestics, such as Major John Armstrong and others, who had worked on very low wages with him through the war, proposed to him to take the house himself as proprietor, he indignantly refused so to use or abuse the affectionate trust of the household.

Washington was, however, unanimously chosen Chief Superintendent, and our short, stout, resolute acquaintance, John Adams, whom we met at the top of the hill, July 4, 1776, was made his first assistant.

The family now set up housekeeping. Like most families in the United States, they were at the outset poor. They were especially low in credit; for in consequence of the issue by the Continental Congresses, during the war, of about $300,000,000 of paper money, its value had so depreciated that it became of little use except to line trunks or to patch up chambers as ruinous as itself. They were also greatly in debt, owing at home and abroad $79,463,476,—a debt which, instead of being paid off or even reduced, grew, in spite of every economy, good judgment, and excellent management, for the next seventeen years, and was not fully discharged until 1824. This debt amounted to about nineteen dollars per head for every man, woman, and child of all colors in the United States at that period. Still, they were not in circumstances as discouraging as are we, their descendants, eighty years later; for, estimating our population now at thirty-eight millions, each man, woman and child now owns a right to pay as his share of the national debt, sixty-eight dollars, besides a large, comfortable sum for State, county, city, and town indebtedness, which never figured themselves upon the purses or imaginations of our golden-aged ancestors. This latter ownership is so much the more wonderful as it represents shares in obligations, not wrought from outlays of blood or money in the country’s service, but blood and money sucked by corporate and private straws from our ever-troubled and ever-bubbling public treasuries.

Washington, after a laborious journey, reached New York, and, on the 30th of April, 1789, took the oath of office as President, on the spot now covered by the United States Treasury in Wall Street. The bulls and bears of that day,—mere calves and cubs,—not strengthened by the pushing horns and large squeezing powers which have added such force to their descendants, might have heard, in the intervals of their rough play, the solid, honest, heart-felt words of his Inaugural, in which, among other things, he uttered those now strange, old-fashioned wishes and expectations, that “all employed in the administration of the Government would execute faithfully and with success the functions allotted to their charge.”

No crowds of patriotic office-seekers stepped over the sills of the new President. Quires and tons of papers, now quadrienially rolled into the Presidential warehouse, containing uncounted autographic testimonials to the transcendent abilities and spotless purity of at least one man in thirty of our entire population for suffering places, were then left to the innocent uses of book-keepers and book-makers. We search in vain for any records of enterprising committees, State or county, pressing upon the uninformed intelligence of the first office appointer the names of persons, otherwise left in native obscurity, for Cabinet seats and responsible missions, which might possibly in thoughtless liberality turn the drippings of their high eaves into their own hungry pails. So far as our examination has discovered, there were no old battered political hulks, their rigging split by the gales of speculation or the contrary winds of local indignation, which put into the Presidential port in stress of weather.

Gentlemen waited to be sent for, and did not bore through Washington’s bedroom wall to present handsome reminders of services to be yet gratefully performed, or to leave their photographs and a solar microscope, in order that he might by the latter descry something in the former and in their originals.

Could that modest, slow-minded chief be now permitted, through the conjury of a medium, to sit by the side of his successors, during the honeymoon of their official marriages to the state, and see the procession of great men for whom offices wait pass by with their directories of certificates to high intellectual power and eminent fitness for—everything official, he would certainly divide his surprise between two great convictions,—the scandalous waste to which unclaimed virtue runs in this prodigal land, and the terrible contrasts between all the past performances of the ins and the easy, liberal promises of the outs.

President Washington had no difficulty, even unaided by pugilistic M. C.’s or other metallic “rings,” in selecting gentlemen to fill the three newly created executive departments of Foreign Affairs, Treasury, and War. Thomas Jefferson, forty-six years old, was requested to assist in managing our foreign relations and friends. Alexander Hamilton, in his thirty-second year, was solicited to pump something into that very dry cistern, the treasury. To the red-leaved portfolio of war was summoned General Henry Knox,—the Sherman of the Revolution. It was thought that the man who had, in times of Revolutionary discontent, wisely allayed the complaints of an army whose courage in the field he could nobly stimulate, and who had stroked the right way the rising fur of a disbanded soldiery, could deal justly with the approaching pension lists, and would fairly adjust the burdens of the seven lean years of war, to and through the many rank and good years which now appeared in the visions of our American Pharaohs. The new Secretary felt, in taking his place on the war bench, that he was summoned to a sort of military coroner’s inquest on the dead body of the late Revolution, which had served well in active duty, but which, like every such thing in our hurrying country,—old people, worn-out utensils, and other ex-useful machines,—was considered a respectable encumbrance.

To the post of chief justice of the newly created Supreme Court President Washington nominated John Jay, and for Attorney-General, Edmund Randolph of Virginia. It is to be noted that the President, Secretary of State, and Attorney-General were all from the same State,—the greatest Cabinet-making, State-bureau manufactory in the Union. If Connecticut, Pennsylvania, or North Carolina sent any delegates to the President to remonstrate against the appointment of two gentlemen from the same State, the reporters of that time have shunned the bare mention of it.

Nothing on earth, not even in the United States, is perfect; and in the United States especially things most perfect are always in order to be amended. Within the very first year of the ratification of the Constitution, ten amendments were proposed and carried, making it an old knife with new blades, and finishing it up into what some people, with great novelty, proclaim it to be, the most perfect instrument ever invented.