A fund was likewise established for sinking the national debt; but like the Irishman’s cork contrivance, put on to enable him to drown himself, the sinking fund, in practice under the statute device, became so buoyant that for several years the debt floated upwards instead of downwards.
The year 1791 was signalized by the birth of Vermont, as a State, into the Union,—a family event which at once added many venerable years and an historic solidity to the original members, who thenceforward became “The Old Thirteen.” A national bank was also ushered into existence, and was carefully wet-nursed by Hamilton, the government lending it $2,000,000, or one fifth of its capital,—a very comfortable christening present.
An Indian war which had broken out the preceding year within the present limits of Ohio,—as if to remind the country of its old irritating eruptions,—raged with some violence through 1791, reddening in spots into a rash and producing some congestion of officers at military head-quarters. General St. Clair, marching northwards with two thousand men, from Fort Washington, the future Cincinnati, then consisting of a rude stockade surrounded by a few wattled huts, and containing not exceeding thirty white settlers, the oldest not having been there three years, penetrated a district then obscure, but now even called Dark County, where he was disagreeably surprised by a party of Indians, and lost nearly three fourths of his troops. The war of course became chronic, lingering along until 1795, when it was finally got under by General Anthony Wayne, the old stormer of Stony Point.
Kentucky, wrought out of a small Boone settlement, in 1769, came forward in 1792, and was welcomed as the fifteenth State. Some wavy-notioned people imagine that her Bourbon, reinforcing her courage and spirits, emboldened her to make this early application; but this is a mistake which sober history is glad to correct.
Washington, although annoyed by the ganderous long-bills for his steady adherence to the neutrality of his country between the raging factions that were now quarrelling over the sanguinary conundrums, put forth by the civil war in France, finally consented, against his own wishes, to become a candidate for re-election as President. His consent was unanimously decreed to be the popular wish by the electoral colleges. John Adams, less fortunate than his chief, was content, however, with seventy-seven votes out of one hundred and twenty-seven, the other fifty being given to the Democratic candidate, George Clinton of New York.
About a month after the second inauguration of Washington, in 1793, that lively little Frenchman, Edmond Charles Genet, somewhat excited by the revolutionary dance about the scaffold of Louis XVI., and the rather wild scenes around the revolutionary tribunal in Paris, capered over on a visit to the people of this country, and landed at Charleston, South Carolina. Although commissioned by the French Convention, now the subject of its bloody master Robespierre, as a Minister to our government, Monsieur Genet took upon his arrival a sudden fancy to aquatic sports, and despatched on his own hook several cruisers to fish in the troubled waters of the Atlantic for any English, Spanish, or Dutch flying-fish that could be caught. The old American Squire did not at all relish this international fishing-party, which proposed to use American lines, hooks, sinkers, and bait for the benefit of French packers. Kindly but firmly he requested M. Genet’s forwarders to order him back again. There have always been Americans, born with magnifying spectacles fastened firmly on their noses, by which every form of freedom, individual or national, spelt out to them a clear license to help any party, fraction, or entirety of a people fighting, or claiming to fight, against the old governing power. “Wherever you see a crown, hit it,” is their one motto. In April, 1793, this class had many representatives, who thought that the French gentleman and his fishing-parties were all right.
In 1794 a Whiskey Rebellion arose, not in Kentucky nor among the Bourbonites, but in Pennsylvania. This insurrection defied for some time the cautionary, expostulating, and well-sealed proclamations of the President; but when the sharp military drum-beat, backed by fifteen thousand militia, with well-set bayonets, was heard in the western part of the State, its leaders and their weak followers reeled back into quiet and submission. Nothing so much shows the simplicity of that golden age of the Republic as this resistance to a whiskey tax. In our more debased but keener times, people distil much comfort from a heavy tax—far heavier than that of 1794—through taps and tubes placed in the obnoxious article, which is led off and around so circuitously and ingeniously as hardly to know where it is going, until all of a sudden it falls plump in large coin within the well-adjusted pockets of the non-complaining manufacturer. Instead of getting up insurrections in Pennsylvania against the high excise, he now forms combinations at Washington to raise it higher.
The Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.
(p. 338)
The year 1795 was the era of treaties,—establishing diplomatic lines to England,—which ever since the peace of 1783 had been uneasily bobbing up and down, neither fishing nor cutting bait; to Spain, whose American possessions of Florida and Louisiana were thereby staked and roped off from our greedy boundaries; to the dark Dey of Algiers, whose corsairs were thus enmeshed in the silken nets; and, finally, to the Northwestern Indian tribes, who, as usual, gave us a large piece of territory for a little piping peace with hot embers on the top. Through the Spanish treaty flowed, and ever since has continued to flow for us, the wide-elbowed Mississippi. The exertion of signing it exhausted the power of Spain in North America; for five years later she had not vitality enough to hold either of these possessions against Napoleon, and the orange and sugar States fell out of her ever-relaxing hand into the clutching and restless fingers of France. In 1796, Tennessee, making the sixteenth State, was welcomed into the household. Its capital, Nashville, settled in 1779, contained only a few cabins; but the folds of the Cumberland warmed them rapidly into life.