The friends of the administration maintained, that a treaty was a contract between two nations, which, under the constitution, the President, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, had a right to make; and that it was made when, by and with such advice and consent, it had received his final act. Its obligations then became complete on the United States; and to refuse to comply with its stipulations, was to break the treaty, and to violate the faith of the nation.
The opposition contended, that the power to make treaties, if applicable to every object, conflicted with powers which were vested exclusively in congress. That either the treaty making power must be limited in its operation, so as not to touch objects committed by the constitution to congress, or the assent and co-operation of the house of representatives must be required to give validity to any compact, so far as it might comprehend those objects. A treaty, therefore, which required an appropriation of money, or any act of congress to carry it into effect, had not acquired its obligatory force until the house of representatives had exercised its powers in the case. They were at full liberty to make, or to withhold, such appropriation, or other law, without incurring the imputation of violating any existing obligation, or of breaking the faith of the nation.
The debate on this question was animated, vehement, and argumentative; all the party passions were enlisted in it; and it was protracted until the 24th of March, when the resolution was carried in the affirmative by sixty-two to thirty-seven voices. The next day, the committee appointed to present it to the chief magistrate reported his answer, which was, "that he would take the resolution into consideration."
The situation in which this vote placed the President was peculiarly delicate. In an elective government, the difficulty of resisting the popular branch of the legislature is at all times great, but is particularly so when the passions of the public have been strongly and generally excited. The popularity of a demand for information, the large majority by which that demand was supported, the additional force which a refusal to comply with it would give to suspicions already insinuated, that circumstances had occurred in the negotiation which the administration dared not expose, and that the President was separating himself from the representatives of the people, furnished motives, not lightly to be over-ruled, for yielding to the request which had been made.
George Washington
From the profile portrait by James Sharples
Sharples painted two pictures of Washington—this portrait showing him in the costume of a country gentleman, distinguished as being the only profile of the First President ever painted, and a full face presentation of him in military dress, reproduced in Volume IV of this work.
Sharples, an English painter by birth, was recommended by the great George Romney as being equipped to produce a work "worthy of the greatest of Americans." His success is attested by the praise of Washington's adopted son, who declared the Sharples portraits to be "the truest likenesses ever made," and by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw the pictures later in England and wrote: "I would willingly have crossed the Atlantic, if only to look on these portraits."
Courtesy Herbert L. Pratt