The last production, whereof we shall speak, was that great American Joss, money, which was set up as an idol in many households, but which had not yet been installed in municipal halls, fashionable churches, and State capitals. Beautiful to the sight at first were its golden hands and feet, and almost kissable the wand which it drew before the glistering eyes of its frantic worshippers. Of course no one was believed then, any more than now, who called attention to the cruel steel knives which it hid in its dollar-embossed breast, and against whose sharp points he pressed those who yielded to his fatal embrace.
The American Joss.
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CHAPTER VI.
DEMOCRACY IN POWER; OR, JEFFERSON’S ADMINISTRATION.
1801–1809.
Few Removals by Mr. Jefferson from the Ungilt, Official Chairs.—Mr. Smith gets into the Navy.—Who started long Messages to Congress; and the Difficulty of finding an End to them.—War with Tripoli; and the Complexion with which the Bey ended it.—Decatur and his Mediterranean Travels.—Ohio in 1802.—The early Danger it ran of being all cut up into City Lots.—How the Exodus of its Population was the Genesis of its Growth.—Of Westering Caravans.—Bonaparte sells Louisiana, and what a Sell it was.—How we were saved an extra Volume of Supreme Court Decisions.—The Murder of Alexander Hamilton.—A Ghost-Story about Aaron Burr.—The public Estimate of his Character unchanged by Biographical varnishing.—A South Carolina Conceit.—The Play of Lear in Tripoli.—Peculiar Mussulman Habits; the Author of Don Quixote.—Michigan escapes the Cuppings of Eastern States.—Her lymphatic Temperament.—Lake Michigan as a Breakwater against Chicago.—Burr tried for Treason, “not proven” guilty, and surrendered—to himself.—Of Bonaparte and other Usurpers.—The Oldest dislike the Youngest.—History of the Attempts of George III. and Bonaparte to blockade without Ships.—Once a Bull always a Bull.—Search of American Ships for Seamen.—The Unwisdom of Half-Apologies.—The American Embargo and its Popularity with Unmarried Girls.
The advent of the first Democratic brave to the dispensing patronage and to the right of taking official scalps, was not followed by a general emptying of official chairs and the massacre of official enemies. The thirty-five ballotings in the House of Representatives between Mr. Jefferson and Aaron Burr made men anxious, not hungry and thirsty. The fair-minded Madison was appointed to the State Department; Albert Gallatin, the golden-mouthed, to the Treasury; and Robert, not John Smith, to the Navy. Few changes were made in the ungilt places; although the innocent public of that day were not a little excited, at the bare suspicion that a few dozen Federalists were removed for their political opinions. The guilt of differing politically from the administration was not considered by the President so flagrant as to be adequately punished only by exile from office.
Upon Mr. Jefferson must, however, be laid the crime of beginning the practice of sending to Congress messages in writing,—a beginning which, like the messages themselves, seems to have no end. Since the flood human life is far too short for these Presidential essays, even without the accompanying documents.
A war with that dusky corsair, the Bey of Tripoli, clouded the very commencement of the new administration, breaking finally, after lasting three years, into a heavy shower, February 9, 1804, from the cannonading guns of young Decatur’s ship, the “Intrepid”,—a shower followed by blue-skied peace. Commodore Preble, who with his fleet had been dealing with Morocco, assisted in tanning, by some of Bellona’s bleaching-powders, the sable-peltried Tripolitan. The result was that the Bey turned to another complexion in his treatment of Christian captives.
In 1802 Ohio doffed the pantalets and appeared around the Union board as a full-grown State. Some of her settlements had grown so fast, and so threatened to absorb the land into building-lots, that it was feared for a time that the surface would be insufficient for farming purposes. The exodus of population farther westward, however, relieved the anxieties of its genesis, and marked the first chapter of its growth. The bivouac that had encamped on her grandly rolling rivers began soon to join the westering caravan which pitched their tents across the Mississippi against the sunsettings. A Hoosier who borrows money at two per cent a month to buy land with may be trusted to pay it back in a short time. Two to nothing that he will add from his generosity a bonus with the return of the loan.
Bonaparte, now Consul for life, and in sore need of money, sold to us, for $15,000,000, that tract of country stretching undefinedly towards the Pacific, and called Louisiana. Some of the wits of that day raised the question whether the purchase lawfully included alligators of such length that they stretched over the boundary lines. Neither this great question, nor the secondary one of the right of our government to buy foreign territory, was mooted in the Supreme Court, and thus we were spared an extra volume of majority essays and longer dissenting opinions. The foreign pill was too sugar-coated to cause any wry faces. It was a very big sell—for France.