The keel of the Supreme Court was laid in 1789; and the vessel, launched, well officered, and manned, provided with new spars, anchors, and compass, was despatched from port to ride the turbulent seas of maritime strife and constitutional conflict, and to override laws and treaties which drift athwart the path of the Constitution. By and in it States could originally be pursued; but after submitting for about fifty years to the chase of individual plaintiffs, the States, headed by Georgia, roused to a sovereign indignation and ruffled pride by being compelled to answer for grievances inflicted by themselves on Indians, negroes, white persons, and such trash, procured the passage of a jealous amendment, relieving them from such embarrassments. Beautiful is the theory that States can do no wrong to their own citizens. Millennarian is the assumption that they are so ready to spring to their loads of duty, that no judicial whip, with a snapper of judgment and execution, is necessary to quicken their slackening consciences. As a beautiful corollary from these delightful premises, is the most comfortable practice of governments not to pay interest on claims against themselves, however hoar with age; for the government assumes to itself the virtue of being always ready, as the fons et origo justitæ, to pay, and is presumably always pressing its offers to pay upon its creditors.
At certain points we now touch the millennium.
At the next session of Congress, in 1790, Hamilton presented a report on that subject which, like the poor, is always with us,—the public debt. Of course every one thought that it was right to pay the creditors who were fortunate enough to live in Europe, who had, at whatever discount, taken our promises; but a great many people with caoutchouc principles doubted whether men silly enough to be born on this side the Atlantic had as good a right to be paid; just as some discriminate between their autographs affixed to notes held by their friends,—leaving such to the mercy of blood,—and those held by strangers, which they despatch from unpleasant remembrances by payment. Hamilton recognized no such thin, veneering logic over parts of the public chest; and he was honestly supported by Congress and their makers.
Philadelphia was made the national capital for the rest of the century; and here, for the coming seven years, Washington’s weekly receptions on Tuesdays, and his dinner-parties on Thursdays, created a stir among the disciples of Penn, and caused much green-looking ink to be shed from cavilling pens all through the country. Like congregations which look with a keen-edged criticism upon the social movements of their clergymen, the people thus early began to peer into the green-room of the President’s mansion, to count the silver spoons, to feel of the window-curtains, and to compare their silken qualities favorably with their own hangings, and the qualities of the Presidential tenant, as thereby affected, unfavorably with their own. A democratic people prefer to occupy the green-room themselves.
The honeymoon of our newly wedded constitutional government was not all roseate. Through the press a wonderful amount of good advice and double-tongued compliment as already given to the old gentleman, who was not likely to forget all the peccadillos he had, and to wonder why he had been restrained from the easy commission of others which he had not committed.
The French Revolution had now begun its series of bloody conundrums; and, not content with posing its European circle of listeners with perplexing questions, crossed the Atlantic, and thrust upon the administration and demanded immediate answers to some very bothering acrostics and puzzles. The grand riddle which they prided themselves upon, and required to be first answered, might be stated in the rule-of-three form thus: If France, with a population of seventeen millions, assisted America to gain her independence from 1778 to 1783, what aid should America, with a population of 3,927,827, give, in 1790, to the Constituent Assembly, assuming to act for France, against the monarchical adherents of Louis XVI. and the turbulent guillotining mob, struggling up into fierce, resentful power under Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins? This riddle was differently guessed by the leading members of our government. Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jay, now recognized as the leaders of a party for the first time called the Federal, put in the ready, safe, and wise answer, “None”; while Jefferson and Randolph, in the government, and Madison, Gallatin, and young Edward Livingston, out of it,—now the heads of the anti-Federal party,—spelled out from their general love of liberty and sympathy for those struggling against monarchical power, without regard to international rights or home duties, the response, “All that we can.”
Of course much could be said on each side, and of course much was said; for the Boston “News-Letter” had now a very vivacious following all over the thirteen States, many of which barked in chorus, even at the majestic figure of Washington. Very hard names, too, and even imputations of felonious attempts upon the person of Liberty herself, facetiously assumed by party zeal to be impersonated in the last uppermost French faction, were hissed out against the grand old chief of the nation by those long-billed, ganderous persons, who, in the warm days of politics, paddle around in dirty pools and splash, with noisy uproar, the black ooze upon the cleanest and purest who pass by.
Thus even the golden age had ugly quartz and soiling dirt interspecking it.
Congress, during the same session of 1790, passed the first act for counting the people of the United States,—an enumeration which, being paid for in certain years by the number of names taken, has sometimes resulted in “counting one’s chickens before they were hatched,”—the census-paper containing more names than owners of them.
A law was also passed setting in motion that large machine for manufacturing voters, commonly called a Naturalization Act, whereby a singular pat-riot paving is turned out, by which our polling-places are McIrishized with some very curious bricks, and our polls sometimes are made to suffer by brickbats.