The elder pre-Adamite epoch in our history was past. New, more fiery, and eruptive elements, anti-Federal or Republican, upheaving and disrupting the old strata below, broke the settled upper crust of our political world.
In France, the Directory of Five, succeeding to the Convention, and its powerful national forces,—now welded to Napoleon by the fusing heats of Monte Notte, Arcoli, and Rivoli,—ejected out upon us those red-hot diplomatic stones, Fauchet and Adet. The French conundrums thickened. Genet’s successors out-geneted Genet. They not only equipped cruisers from American ports, but—displeased with a treaty which our government had seen fit to make with England, stipulating for the neutrality of America in the pending war between France on the one side, and England, Holland, Spain, and Rome on the other—authorized the capture and confiscation of American ships. In fact, the French envoys seemed determined to show the absurdity of the old-fashioned rule, that it took two to make a bargain.
Mr. Pinckney, the American minister to France, was obliged to leave that American paradise, Paris, without a fig-leaf of excuse to cover the naked results of his mission.
That comic body, Congress, was convened to look into the French conundrums. Of course they talked so much that they forgot what they came together for; and no one was any wiser when the speaker’s gavel[gavel] fell and sent them home. The puzzled President despatched three commissioners to get a new statement of the riddle. The Directory told these gentlemen—as legislative bodies now reply to applicants for relief—that they could only see them through gold-mounted spectacles. Such a spectacle the American people were not prepared to become. Knowing the sympathy of the anti-Federal party in America with their principles, the French Directory slammed the door abruptly in the face of the two commissioners with Federal leanings, and held the envoy with Republican tendencies, like another Joseph, by his skirts.
In spite of party feeling, however, American indignation now rose to the gorge. A small standing army was raised. The keel of our navy was laid, and a Navy Department created, over which was placed Benjamin Stodart. The alien law, authorizing the President to elbow out of the country disagreeable foreigners, and the sedition act, to fine and imprison any one writing too freely against the government,—measures which marked the distance of Americans of that day from the political millennium,—were first passed by Congress, and afterwards passed, without any fear, by everybody else. The wise old General at Mount Vernon was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army; and there was a fair chance that the American Captain might yet be obliged to cut the comb of that strutting French cock, which had lately scratched and crowed on so many Italian dung-hills that he fancied himself a full-fledged eagle.
Peace commissioners, however, settled the difficulties, as old ladies do tea, by a long chat around a covered table. Bonaparte, who had made a flying military trip to Egypt, had got the Pyramids to look down on him from their stony, century-crusted tops, while he slaughtered the Mamelukes at their feet, had pushed across the desert with the mirage of empire ever rising upon his unslaked sight, had made a disagreeable tour of the Holy Land, and had attempted twenty-three times in vain to take St. Jean D’Acre, came back to Paris to be made First Consul in December, 1799,—a Roman office, which he filled like a Roman, by subjugating all Europe by arms and insolence. The gristle of the Corsican had at last stiffened into the bone of a ruler of a large, consolidated empire; and the concentration of power in his hands enabled him to concede to the justice of America what the shifting authority of constituted assemblies, conventions, legislative assemblies, and directories were too weak to dare. Bonaparte met the American commissioners around the round table, himself as round in power as it in shape, and in September, 1800, gave his autograph to a treaty of peace which shielded American independence of action from the insults of the envoys of a nation hitherto friendly,—a nation which had in a timely and efficient way, mainly to help itself against an old rival, helped us, but which, for the preceding ten years, had claimed, and offensively insisted in return, not from our gratitude, but as a right, that we should give our assistance to their ever-shifting schemes, with many of which we had no sympathy, and at a time when to furnish aid was almost to ruin our young strength.
While the Frenchman was thus bestriding Europe, putting England to her straits, and in fact even to such despair as to find relief in the Pitt, our American Colossus fell before the only foe which was ever permitted to be his conqueror.
Washington died December 14, 1799.
The year following the seat of government was removed to the District of Columbia, where, by frequent patching since, it has been made to stand much wear and tear. The city named after Washington is still the greatest atlas in the United States, its large geography requiring the most patient study to find out what one is looking for. Many die without accomplishing it, some by it. The wheel-shaped city has rotated off from its periphery so many different officials, that, although like a velocipede it is very hard riding, it cannot well be stopped without considerable injury to its Federal rider.
The wide region called Mississippi, embracing the present State of that name and also Alabama,—the latter no longer apprehending any new petticoat insurrection in Mobile from the descendants of the insurgents of 1706, which with French slowness in swelling the census had only in ninety-five years become two hundred and fifty, and these balanced by an equal number of blacks,—this Mississippi region, now separated from Georgia, was put into that pantaleted territorial condition in which a community finds itself, like a young girl-lady at sixteen, who goes to school, lives at home, is governed partly by herself and partly by her parents, acquires pocket-money from the old people, and notions from circumstances, and drifts vigorously on through an unsettled perplexity into an early and settled independence. Such in this year of grace 1869 are Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington, whose quickly doubling populations are rapidly pursuing their education through a university where sharp, practical studies are urged with bullet speed; mining silver, gold, and lead by day, and spending most of it in gambling saloons by night; rolling their residences on wheels from one ranch to another; practising high gymnastics with the Indians, by a method better than Dio Lewis’s; taking frequent lessons in bar-rooms, and pretty sure to make and be a mark for some one in every quarter.