Mr. Jay (and not Mr. Jefferson) as has been suggested to you, embarked as envoy extraordinary for England about the middle of May. If he succeed, well; if he does not, why, knowing the worst, we must take measures accordingly.[1]
[Footnote 1: Ford, XII, 436. Mount Vernon, June 25, 1794.]
Jay reached London early in June, 1794, and labored over the treaty with the British negotiators during the summer and autumn, started for home before Christmas, and put the finished document in Washington's hands in March. From the moment of his going enemies of all kinds talked bitterly against him. The result must be a foregone conclusion, since John Jay was regarded as the chief Anglo-maniac in America after Hamilton. They therefore condemned in advance any treaty he might agree to. But their criticism went deeper than mere hatred of him: it sprang from an inveterate hatred of England, which dated from before the Revolution. Since the Treaty of 1783 the English seemed to act deliberately with studied truculence, as if the Americans would not and could not retaliate. They were believed to be instigating the Indians to continuous underhand war. They had reached that dangerous stage of truculence, when they did not think it mattered whether they spoke with common diplomatic reticence. Lord Dorchester, the Governor-General of Canada, and to-day better known as Sir Guy Carleton, his name before they made him a peer, addressed a gathering of Indian chiefs at Quebec on the assumption that war would come in a few weeks. President Washington kept steady watch of every symptom, and he knew that it would not require a large spark to kindle a conflagration. "My objects are, to prevent a war," he wrote to Edmund Randolph, on April 15, 1794, "if justice can be obtained by fair and strong representations (to be made by a special envoy) of the injuries which this country has sustained from Great Britain in various ways, to put it into a complete state of military defence, and to provide eventually for such measures as seem to be now pending in Congress for execution, if negotiations in a reasonable time proves unsuccessful."[1]
[Footnote 1: Ford, XIII, 4-9.]
The year 1794 marked the sleepless anxiety of the Silent President. Day and night his thoughts were in London, with Jay. He said little; he had few letters from Jay—it then required from eight to ten weeks for the mail clippers to make a voyage across the Atlantic. Opposition to the general idea of such a treaty as the mass of Republicans and Anti-Federalists supposed Washington hoped to secure, grew week by week. The Silent Man heard the cavil and said nothing.
At last early in 1795 Jay returned. His Treaty caused an uproar. The hottest of his enemies found an easy explanation on the ground that he was a traitor. Stanch Federalists suffered all varieties of mortification. Washington himself entered into no discussion, but he ruminated over those which came to him. I am not sure that he invented the phrase "Either the Treaty, or war," which summed up the alternatives which confronted Jay; but he used it with convincing emphasis. When it came before the Senate, both sides had gathered every available supporter, and the vote showed only a majority of one in its favor. Still, it passed. But that did not satisfy its pertinacious enemies. Neither were they restrained by the President's proclamation. The Constitution assigned the duty of negotiating and ratifying treaties to the President and Senate; but to the perfervid Anti-Britishers the Constitution was no more than an old cobweb to be brushed away at pleasure. The Jay Treaty could not be put into effect without money for expenses; all bills involving money must pass the House of Representatives; therefore, the House would actually control the operation of the Treaty.
The House at this time was Republican by a marked majority. In March, 1796, the President laid the matter before the House. In a twinkling the floodgates of speechifying burst open; the debates touched every aspect of the question. James Madison, the wise supporter of Washington and Hamilton in earlier days and the fellow worker on "The Federalist," led the Democrats in their furious attacks. He was ably seconded by Albert Gallatin, the high-minded young Swiss doctrinaire from Geneva, a terrible man, in whose head principles became two-edged weapons with Calvinistic precision and mercilessness. The Democrats requested the President to let them see the correspondence in reference to the Treaty during its preparation. This he wisely declined to do. The Constitution did not recognize their right to make the demand, and he foresaw that, if granted by him then, it might be used as a harmful precedent.
For many weeks the controversy waxed hot in the House. Scores of speakers hammered at every argument, yet only one speech eclipsed all the rest, and remains now, after one hundred and thirty years, a paragon. There are historians who assert that this was the greatest speech delivered in Congress before Daniel Webster spoke there—an implication which might lead irreverent critics to whisper that too much reading may have dulled their discrimination. But fortunately not only the text of the speech remains; we have also ample evidence of the effect it produced on its hearers. Fisher Ames, a Representative from Massachusetts, uttered it. He was a young lawyer, feeble in health, but burning, after the manner of some consumptives, with intellectual and moral fire which strangely belied his slender thread of physical life. Ames pictured the horrors which would ensue if the Treaty were rejected. Quite naturally he assumed the part of a man on the verge of the grave, which increased the impressiveness of his words. He spoke for three hours. The members of the House listened with feverish attention; the crowds in the balconies could not smother their emotion. One witness reports that Vice-President John Adams sat in the gallery, the tears running down his cheeks, and that he said to the friend beside him, "My God, how great he is!"
When Ames began, no doubt the Anti-British groups which swelled the audience turned towards him an unsympathetic if not a scornful attention—they had already taken a poll of their members, from which it appeared that they could count on a majority of six to defeat the Treaty. As he proceeded, however, and they observed how deeply he was moving the audience, they may have had to keep up their courage by reflecting that speeches in Congress rarely change votes. They are intended to be read by the public outside, which is not under the spell of the orator or the crowd. But when Fisher Ames, after what must have seemed to them a whirlwind speech, closed with these solemn, restrained words, they must have doubted whether their victory was won:
Even the minutes I have spent in expostulating, have their value [he said] because they protract the crisis and the short period in which alone we may resolve to escape it. Yet I have, perhaps, as little personal interest in the event as any one here. There is, I believe, no member, who will not think his chance to be a witness of the consequences greater than mine. If, however, the vote should pass to reject—even I, slender and almost broken as my hold on life is, may outlive the government and Constitution of my country.[1]