INQUIRY

INTO

THE ORIGIN AND COURSE

OF

POLITICAL PARTIES

IN THE

UNITED STATES.

BY THE LATE EX-PRESIDENT

MARTIN VAN BUREN.

Nam quis nescit primam esse historiæ legem ne quid falsi dicere audeat? deinde, ne quid veri non audeat? Ne qua suspicio gratiæ sit in scribendo? Ne qua simultatis? Cicero. De Orat. Lib. II.

EDITED BY HIS SONS.
NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON.
1867.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by
Smith T. Van Buren,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of
New York.
RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY
H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.

INTRODUCTION.

The following pages originally formed part of a much larger work, from the general course and design of which they constituted a digression. It seems therefore proper to preface them by a few words of explanation, relating chiefly to the work from which they are now separated.

Mr. Van Buren, eighth President of the United States, on the expiration of his term of office, in the year 1841, retired to a country residence near Kinderhook, (the place of his birth,) in the State of New York, which he had then recently purchased, and to which he gave the name of Lindenwald. Here, with infrequent and brief interruptions, he continued to reside for some twenty years, or until his death, which occurred in July, 1862. Although numbering nearly sixty years of age,—two-thirds of which had been years of almost incessant activity and excitement, professional, political, and social,—at the period of his withdrawal to the tranquil scenes and occupations of rural life, he embraced the latter with an ardor and a relish that surprised not a little the friends who had known him only as prominent in, and apparently engrossed by, the public service, but which were happy results of early predilections, an even and cheerful temper, fitting him for and constantly inclining him to the enjoyment of domestic intercourse, a hearty love of Nature, and a sound constitution of mind and body. After twelve years of the period of his retirement had passed, happily and contentedly, he began to apply a portion of his "large leisure" to a written review of his previous life, and to recording his recollections of his contemporaries and of his times. To this work, as he intimates in its opening paragraphs, he was mainly induced by the solicitations of life-long friends, who, (it may be here added,) knowing the importance and interest of the scenes and incidents of his extended public career, and the extraordinary influence he had exerted upon public men and questions of his time, and perceiving the tenaciousness of his memory and the charm of his conversation unimpaired by the lapse of seventy years, confidently anticipated a work of much interest in such a record as they urged upon him to make.

But although Mr. Van Buren so far complied with these suggestions as to set about writing his memoirs, he was not inclined to pursue the employment as a task, or to devote more of his time to it than could be easily spared from other occupations in which he was interested, and in order to keep himself from every temptation to exceed this limitation, he resolved, at the start, that no part of what he might write should be published in his lifetime. The work which he had commenced, was thus exposed to frequent interruption, even by unimportant accidents, and at length was altogether arrested by the serious illness of a member of his family, and by the failure of his own health, which rapidly supervened. It resulted that the recorded memoirs of his life and times closed abruptly when he had brought them down to the date of 1833-34, and that he never revised for publication what he had written. There is evidence that he contemplated such a revision when he should reach a convenient stage of his progress, but from the circumstances under which he wrote (which have been alluded to) as well as from his comparatively small interest in the mere graces of composition, the labor limæ was continually postponed, and the "flighty purpose" was never o'ertaken. When, after his death, the subject of the disposition of these memoirs was presented to his sons, to whom his papers had been intrusted, they were embarrassed by questions as to the manner and form in which it was their duty to give them the publicity intended by their author. Should they, notwithstanding unaffected distrust of their qualifications, and a deep sense of special unfitness arising from natural partiality, undertake to continue the history of their father's life from the point at which his own account had ceased, to supply, as far as they could, the gaps in the previous narrative which had been left by him for further examination or after-construction, and to give to the work the extensive revision which, in the state in which it came to their hands, it seemed to require? Or should they publish the unfinished and unrevised memoirs, as they were left, as a fragment and a contribution, so far as they might go, to the history of the country? Would one or the other of these be such a history of the life of a statesman who had filled a large space in the observation of his countrymen, and who had exerted a controlling influence in the Government during interesting and critical periods, as would answer a natural and just public expectation, or satisfy the many warm friends who survived him? While occupied with the consideration of these questions, they received a note from Charles H. Hunt, Esq., informing them that he felt strongly inclined to write a Biography of Mr. Van Buren, and requesting the use for that purpose of any materials within their power to furnish. An additional paragraph of Mr. Hunt's note, referring to the rumor of writings left by Mr. Van Buren, showed that he had been entirely misinformed as to the nature and extent of those writings; he, in effect, supposing them to consist solely of disquisitions on various political questions.

The communication of Mr. Hunt not only superseded the necessity of deciding between the alternative propositions mentioned, but afforded them in all respects great satisfaction. His ripe and graceful scholarship, sound judgment, and pure taste were widely known, and especially to all who, like themselves, enjoyed familiar acquaintance with him. He had, moreover, recently advanced by a single step to the first rank among American biographers—a position readily accorded by recognized authority in the republic of letters, at home and abroad, to the author of the "Life of Edward Livingston." To such hands they could not hesitate to commit the work proposed, so far as they were able to control it, feeling assured that, while Mr. Hunt would bring to its performance the disinterestedness and impartiality indispensable to give it value as a history, and which are with difficulty maintained in family memorials, his inclination to undertake it was evidence of a general sympathy with, or at least respect for, Mr. Van Buren's character and public career sufficient to authorize the relinquishment to him of the materials in their possession. Accordingly the fragmentary memoirs, with all the correspondence and other manuscripts applicable to his purpose, and within their reach, were committed to Mr. Hunt, by Mr. Van Buren's representatives, with entire satisfaction and confidence that they will be used with fidelity and skill in the construction of the work he has undertaken,—a confidence that will be shared by Mr. Van Buren's surviving friends and by the public.

The main body of manuscripts left by Mr. Van Buren having been thus applied, some question remained in regard to that portion now published. Begun as an episode, the subject grew on the author's hands (as he explains in a note) to such proportions as to seem to stand more properly as a distinct production, and although, like the principal work, incomplete, it had been nevertheless carried forward to the point, chronologically speaking, that had been proposed, and that was in fact its natural termination. For this reason, and because it had no such connection with the memoirs as required that they should be printed together, it has been thought best to publish it without further delay in the form in which it was left by the writer. The subject is of peculiar interest at this time when our country, having suffered the rude shock and disorder of civil war, and our free and popular institutions having sustained with admirable firmness and substantial triumph a more fearful trial than any to which they had before been subjected, the sacred and momentous duty is devolved on patriots and good citizens throughout our borders to reconstruct whatever valuable parts have been thrown down, to restore what may have been injured or defaced in our political system and in the principles on which it rests; and the occasion seems auspicious for recalling the attention of our people to the study of the lives and doctrines—the grounds and motives of action—of the great men by whom the foundations of their government were laid.

The work of editing this volume has been inconsiderable, the sum of it having been to correct a few manifest inadvertencies, to divide it into chapters, with indexical heads, to furnish the whole with a title, and to add one or two foot-notes that appeared to be proper. Otherwise the aim has been to preserve the form and substance of the original. The citation from Cicero on the title-page was found on Mr. Van Buren's table, in his library, extracted in his own handwriting; whether only as a terse declaration of the law by the spirit of which his pen was guided, or as a possible motto for his complete work, is not known. The letter from Mr. Jefferson, forming an Appendix, was intended by Mr. Van Buren to be printed with whatever of his own might reach publication, and is spoken of in the present volume as "accompanying this work." It is now printed for the first time from the original manuscript letter, and a few errors in the edition published (probably from the draft) by the Library Committees of Congress are corrected.

The portrait fronting this book is engraved from Brady's imperial photograph, by Ritchie, and must be pronounced a very favorable specimen of his art. It represents Mr. Van Buren in the seventy-fifth year of his age.

Edgehill, Fishkill-on-Hudson, N. Y.,
February, 1867.

POLITICAL PARTIES

IN THE

UNITED STATES.

CHAPTER I.

Gratifying Period in our History embraced by Administrations of Jefferson and Madison—The Caucus System and its Abandonment—The System useful to the Republican or Democratic Party, but not so to the Federalists—Questions proposed—Difficulties of the Subject—Two great Parties, under changing Names, have always divided the Country—Few and imperfect Attempts heretofore made to trace the Origin and Principles of those Parties—This the first Attempt with that object on the Republican or Democratic Side—The Sources of Differences in Opinion and Feeling which gave rise to our Political Divisions, and punctum temporis of their Rise—Principles established by the English Revolution of 1688—Application of those Principles to the Colonies—Grounds of the American Revolution—Abstract Opinions regain their Influence after the Settlement of the practical Questions involved in the Revolution—Diverse Character and Feelings of Emigrants to the different Colonies—Effect of that Diversity on Principles of Government and Administration in the New Governments—Repugnance of the People to any Revival of the System overthrown by the Revolution—Popular Reluctance to create an Executive Branch of the Government—Confederacy of the United Colonies of New England in 1643—Dr. Franklin's Plan of Union in 1755—The Sentiments of the Colonists those of the Whigs of the Revolution—Exceptions—Discordant Materials, in certain Respects, of which the Revolutionary Brotherhood was composed—Effects of that Discordance upon the subsequent Organization of Political Parties—The Confederation, and Parties for and against it—Perversion of Party Names—Conflicts and Questions in Controversy between Federalists and Anti-Federalists—The Constitutional Convention of 1787—Different Plans proposed before it—Motives and Views of the Authors of those Plans—The Views which determined Congress and the People to acquiesce in the Results of the Convention—Adoption of the Constitution and Extinction of the Anti-Federal Party as such.

There has been no period in our history, since the establishment of our Independence, to which the sincere friend of free institutions can turn with more unalloyed satisfaction, than to that embraced by the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, moved as they were by a common impulse. Mr. Jefferson commenced the discharge of his official duties by an act which, though one of form, involved matter of the highest moment. I allude to the decision and facility with which, in his intercourse with the other branches of the Government, he suppressed the observance of empty ceremonies which had been borrowed from foreign courts by officers who took an interest in such matters, and were reluctantly tolerated by Washington, who was himself above them. Instead of proceeding in state to the capitol to deliver a speech to the legislature, according to the custom of monarchs, he performed his constitutional duty by means of a message in writing, sent to each House by the hands of his private secretary, and they performed theirs by a reference of its contents to appropriate committees. The Executive procession, instead of marking the intercourse between the different branches of the Government, was reserved for the Inauguration, when the President appeared before the people themselves, and in their presence took the oath of office.

A step so appropriate and so much in harmony with our institutions, was naturally followed by efforts for the abolition of offices and official establishments not necessary to the public service, the reduction of the public expenses, and the repeal of odious internal taxes. To these he added the influence of his individual example to keep the organization and action of the Federal Government upon that simple and economical footing which is consistent with the Republican system. In this branch of his official conduct he established precedents of great value, from some of which his successors have not ventured to depart.

With the single exception of his approval of the Bank of the United States, the administration of Mr. Madison was one of great merit, and was made especially illustrious by conducting the country through a war imperishably honorable for its military achievements and the consequent elevation of our national character.

Jefferson and Madison were brought forward by caucus nominations; they, throughout, recognized and adhered to the political party that elected them; and they left it united and powerful, when, at the close of public life, they carried into their retirement, and always enjoyed, the respect, esteem, and confidence of all their countrymen.

Mr. Monroe's administration did not introduce any very disturbing public questions. The protective policy was, toward its close, generally acquiesced in at the North and West, and no part of the South as yet even contemplated the resistance which was subsequently attempted. The agitation in regard to internal improvements was yet for the most part speculative and too far in advance of any contemplated action to stir the public mind. The Bank of the United States was having its own way without question on the part of the Government, and with but little if any suspicion on the part of the people. No very embarrassing questions had arisen in our foreign relations; yet the first year of Mr. Monroe's second term had scarcely passed away before the political atmosphere became inflamed to an unprecedented extent. The Republican party, so long in the ascendant, and apparently so omnipotent, was literally shattered into fragments, and we had no fewer than five Republican Presidential candidates in the field.

In the place of two great parties arrayed against each other in a fair and open contest for the establishment of principles in the administration of Government which they respectively believed most conducive to the public interest, the country was overrun with personal factions. These having few higher motives for the selection of their candidates or stronger incentives to action than individual preferences or antipathies, moved the bitter waters of political agitation to their lowest depths.

The occurrence of scenes discreditable to all had for a long time been prevented by a steady adherence on the part of the Republican party to the caucus system; and if Mr. Monroe's views and feelings upon the subject had been the same as were those of Jefferson and Madison, the results to which I have alluded, and which were soon sincerely deprecated, might have been prevented by the same means. There was no difference in the political condition of the country between 1816—when Mr. Monroe received a caucus nomination, on a close vote between Mr. Crawford and himself, and was elected—and 1824, when the caucus system was appealed to by the supporters of Mr. Crawford, which called for its abandonment. The Federal party were on both occasions incapable of successfully resisting a candidate in whose favor the Republicans were united, and they were on each sufficiently strong to control the election when the support of their opponents was divided amongst several. Mr. Monroe and a majority of his cabinet were unfortunately influenced by different views, and pursued a course well designed to weaken the influence of the caucus system, and to cause its abandonment. Mr. Crawford was the only candidate who, it was believed, could be benefited by adhering to it, and the friends of all the others sustained the policy of the administration. Those of Jackson, Adams, Clay, and Calhoun, united in an address to the people condemning the practice of caucus nominations, and announcing their determination to disregard them. Already weakened through the adverse influence of the administration, the agency which had so long preserved the unity of the Republican party did not retain sufficient strength to resist the combined assault that was made upon it, and was overthrown. Mr. Crawford and his friends adhered to it to the last, and fell with it.

It is a striking fact in our political history that the sagacious leaders of the Federal party, as well under that name as under others by which it has at different times been known, have always been desirous to bring every usage or plan designed to secure party unity into disrepute with the people, and in proportion to their success in that has been their success in the elections. When they have found such usage too strong to be overthrown for the time being, they have adopted it themselves, but only to return to their denunciations of it after every defeat. It would, on first impression, seem that a practice which is good for one political party must be good for another; but when the matter is more closely looked into, it will be discovered that the policy of the Federal leaders referred to, like most of the acts of those far-seeing men, rested upon substantial foundations. It originated, beyond doubt, in the conviction, on the part of the early Federalists, that a political organization in support of the particular principles which they advocated, and to which they intended to adhere, did not stand as much in need of extraneous means to secure harmony in its ranks as did that of their opponents.

The results of general elections for more than half a century have served to confirm this opinion. With the exception of a single instance, susceptible of easy explanation, the Republican, now Democratic party, whenever it has been wise enough to employ the caucus or convention system, and to use in good faith the influence it is capable of imparting to the popular cause, has been successful, and it has been defeated whenever that system has been laid aside or employed unfairly. With the Federal party and its successors the results have been widely different; with or without the caucus system they have generally found no difficulty in uniting whenever union promised success.

Why is it that a system or practice open to both parties, occasionally used by both, and apparently equally useful to both, is in fact so much less necessary to one than to the other? If this consequence springs from a corresponding difference in the principles for the defense and spread of which they have respectively been formed, what are those principles, whence are they derived, and what is their history?

These are grave questions, which have often presented themselves to the minds of our public men, and to answer which satisfactorily is neither an easy nor a short task.

Histories of struggles for power between individual men or families, long involved in obscurity, are becoming more frequent than they were, and far more satisfactory. Aided by a comparatively free access to public and private papers,—a privilege formerly sturdily refused, but which the liberal spirit of the age has now made common,—the literary men of most countries, with improved capacities to weigh conflicting statements as well as to narrate the results of their researches with simplicity and perspicuity, are probing the most hidden recesses of the past, and describing with reliable accuracy transactions of great interest, the causes and particular circumstances of which have been hitherto little or not at all understood. But to define the origin and trace the history of national parties is an undertaking of extraordinary difficulty; one from which, in view of the embarrassments that surround it in the case of our own political divisions, I have more than once retired in despair, and on which I now enter with only slight hopes of success. Yet it is due as well to the memories of the past as to actual interests, that a subject which has exerted so great an influence and which may be made so instructive, should be made plain, if that be practicable, to the understandings of the present and succeeding generations; and if my imperfect effort shall have a tendency to turn stronger minds and abler pens in that direction it will not have been made in vain.

The two great parties of this country, with occasional changes in their names only, have, for the principal part of a century, occupied antagonistic positions upon all important political questions. They have maintained an unbroken succession, and have, throughout, been composed respectively of men agreeing in their party passions and preferences, and entertaining, with rare exceptions, similar general views on the subjects of government and its administration. Sons have generally followed in the footsteps of their fathers, and families originally differing have in regular succession received, maintained, and transmitted this opposition. Neither the influences of marriage connections, nor of sectarian prejudices, nor any of the strong motives which often determine the ordinary actions of men, have, with limited exceptions, been sufficient to override the bias of party organization and sympathy, devotion to which has, on both sides, as a rule, been a master-passion of their members.

The names of these parties, like those of their predecessors in older countries, have from time to time been changed, from suggestions of policy or from accidental causes. Men of similar and substantially unchanged views and principles have, at different periods of English history, been distinguished as Cavaliers or Roundheads, as Jacobites or Puritans and Presbyterians, as Whigs or Tories. Here, with corresponding consistency in principle, the same men have at different periods been known as Federalists, Federal Republicans, and Whigs, or as Anti-Federalists, Republicans, and Democrats. But no changes of name have indicated—certainly not until very recently, and the depth and duration of the exception remain to be seen—a change or material modification of the true character and principles of the parties themselves. The difference between the old Republican and the Anti-Federal parties, arising out of the questions in regard to the new Constitution, was by far the greatest variation that has occurred.

Several hasty and but slightly considered attempts have been made to define the origin, and to mark the progress, of our national parties. But, with a single exception,—namely, that made by ex-President John Quincy Adams, in his Jubilee Discourse before the New York Historical Society, on the 30th of April, 1839, being the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Inauguration of George Washington as President of the United States,—they have not professed, so far as they have fallen under my notice, to do more than glance at the subject.

To say that this discourse of one hundred and twenty pages was written with Mr. Adams's accustomed ability, would be a commendation short of its merits. It was more. The political condition of the country, and the near approach of the memorable struggle of 1840, superadded to the stirring considerations connected with the occasion, seem to have persuaded that distinguished man that he was called upon to make an extraordinary effort. A severe philippic against his and his father's political enemies, this discourse, judged in the sense in which such performances are naturally estimated by contemporaries imbued with similar feelings, could not fail to be regarded as an eloquent and able production; but I deceive myself if it can be deemed by a single ingenuous mind either a dispassionate or an impartial review of the origin and course of parties in the United States. Such minds will be more likely to receive a paper, written so long after the transactions of which it speaks, with feelings of regret at the strong evidence it affords that the rage of party spirit, upon the assumed extinguishment of which its author had, years before, exultingly congratulated the people from the Presidential chair, was yet so active in his own breast. I say this more in sorrow than in anger. Other portions of this work[1] will, I am sure, exonerate me from the suspicion of cherishing the slightest sentiment of unkindness toward the memory of John Quincy Adams. When my personal acquaintance with him was but slight, and when our political relations were unfavorable to the cultivation of friendly feelings, my dispositions toward him were to an unusual extent free from the prejudices commonly engendered by party differences. In the later periods of our acquaintance, continuing to the end of his life, I regarded him with entire personal respect and kindness; and notwithstanding the occasional fierceness of our political collisions, I have never heard of any unfriendly expression by him in respect to myself personally.

It is not a little remarkable, though in harmony with other striking features in the relations of our parties, that no serious attempt has ever been made to trace their origin except by members of the same political school with Mr. Adams. If I am right in this, mine will at least have the weight, whatever that may be, due to the narration of one who, from the beginning to the end of an extended political career, has been an invariable and ardent member of the opposite school.

The author of the life of Hamilton confidently pronounces what occurred on the appointment of Washington as Commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary army, to be the true source of the party divisions that have so long and so extensively prevailed in this country. President John Quincy Adams, in his Inaugural Address, attributes them to the conflicting prejudices and preferences of the people for and against Great Britain and France at the commencement of the present government, and the discontinuance of them to the effects produced by the excesses of the French Revolution. Matthew L. Davis,—a man of much note and cleverness, who commenced his career an active member of the old Republican party, became the especial champion of Colonel Burr, and, soon seceding from the party to which he was at first attached, spent the remainder of his life in opposition to it,—in his life of Aaron Burr, attributes the origin of our two great political parties to the proceedings of the Federal Constitutional Convention and of the State Conventions which passed upon the question of ratification.

These various versions of the matter I shall hereafter notice, contenting myself, for the present, with the remark that party divisions which have extended to every corner of a country as large as our own, and have endured so long, could not spring from slight or even limited causes. No differences in the views of men on isolated questions temporary in their nature, could, it seems to me, have produced such results. Questions of such a character are either finally settled, with more or less satisfaction, or in time lose their interest, notwithstanding momentary excitement, and the temporary organizations springing from them give place in turn to others equally short-lived.

But when men are brought under one government who differ radically in opinion as to its proper form, as to the uses for which governments should be established, as to the spirit in which they should be administered, as to the best way in which the happiness of those who are subject to them can be promoted, no less than in regard to the capacity of the people for self-government, we may well look for party divisions and political organizations of a deeper foundation and a more enduring existence.

Ours arose at the close of the Revolution, and the leading parties to them were the Whigs, through whose instrumentality, under favor of Providence, our Independence had been established. They and the Tories constituted our entire population, and the latter had at first, for obvious reasons, but little to do in the formation of parties, save to throw themselves in a body into the ranks of one of them. It became at once evident that great differences of opinion existed among the Whigs in respect to the character of the government that should be substituted for that which had been overthrown, and also in respect to the spirit and principles which should control the administration of that which might be established. These spread through the country with great rapidity, and were respectively maintained with a zeal and determination which proved that they were not produced by the feelings or impulses of the moment. To ascertain the origin of those differences, and to trace their effects, we can adopt no safer course than to look to the antecedents of the actors in the stirring political scenes that followed the close of the war, to the characters and opinions of their ancestors, from whom they had naturally imbibed their first ideas of government either directly or traditionally, and to the incidents of the memorable struggle from which the country had just emerged.

The great principle first formally avowed by Rousseau, "that the right to exercise sovereignty belongs inalienably to the people," sprung up spontaneously in the hearts of the colonists, and silently influenced all their acts from the beginning. The condition of the country in which they settled,—a wilderness occupied besides themselves only by savage tribes,—to which many of them were driven by the fiercest persecutions ever known to the civilized world, and the stern self-reliance and independent spirit which most of them had acquired in contests with iron fortune that preceded their exile, combined to induce the cultivation and to secure the permanent growth of such a sentiment. Not being, however, for several generations, in a suitable condition, and from counteracting inducements not even disposed to dispute the pretensions of the Crown to their allegiance, they were content to look principally to its patents and other concessions for the measure of their rights. But their views were greatly changed, and their advance on the road to freedom materially accelerated, by the English Revolution of 1688. The final overthrow of James II., from whose tyrannical acts, as well in the character of Duke of York as in that of King, they had severely suffered, was not the greatest advantage the colonists derived from that Revolution. The principles upon which that most important of European movements was founded, and the doctrines it consecrated, paved the way to a result which, though not upon their tongues, or perhaps to any great extent the subject of their meditations as immediately practicable, was, doubtless, from that time, within their contemplation.

That Revolution, which shattered, "past all surgery," the blasphemous and absurd dogma of the divine right of kings; which replaced the slavish doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance with the principle that the authority of the monarch was no other than a trust founded on an assumed agreement between him and his subjects that the power conferred upon him should be used for their advantage, for the faithful execution of which he was individually responsible, and for a breach of which resistance to his authority, as a last resort, was a constitutional remedy; which for the supremacy of the Crown substituted the supremacy of Parliament; which made the King as well as his subjects responsible to its authority, and which abrogated the right of the Crown to govern the colonies in virtue of its prerogative, and vested that power in Parliament, placed the colonists upon a footing widely different from that they had theretofore occupied.

The general principle that they were, by the laws and statutes of England, entitled to the political rights that appertained to British subjects, could not be denied, but commercial rivalry and political jealousies acting upon their excited feelings, soon generated questions of the gravest import, both as to the extent of the power of Parliament to legislate for them, and as to the participation in representation essential to authorize the exercise of that power.

The subjects of taxation and the regulation of trade by Parliamentary authority, excited the greatest interest on both sides of the Atlantic. In respect to the latter, the question was not a little embarrassed by an alleged acquiescence on the part of the colonists, and the consequent force of precedents. This circumstance, in connection with the consideration that, if the right to regulate the trade of the colonies was denied to the mother country, the allegiance conceded to be due would be paid to a barren sceptre, was calculated to deprive the cause of the colonists of the favorable opinion of those just men in England whose countenance and support were of so much service to them in the sequel. Duly appreciating the obstacles to success which there was reason to apprehend from this source, with the prudence and good sense that belonged to their character, and without waiving any of their rights, they placed their cause principally upon a ground that lay at the foundation of the Revolution, and was thoroughly immovable, viz., that by the fundamental laws of property no taxes could be levied upon the people but by their own consent or that of their authorized agents, and that by consequence the connection was indissoluble between taxation and representation.

In the justice and constitutionality of this position they were openly sustained by Lord Chatham, Lord Camden, Burke, Fox, and others,—men who were in their day and have since been regarded as leading minds of England. With but little of public sentiment against them beyond what was influenced by the inveterate hatred and the insane obstinacy of the King, wielding at will the majority of a notoriously corrupt Parliament and the brute force of the kingdom, the colonists appealed to the God of Battles in defense of a sacred principle of freedom, and in resistance to tyrannical acts of the most odious and oppressive character, and they were victorious. It is now, and will be in all time, a source of satisfaction to the people of these States, that the decision of the sword is not their only nor their highest title to the liberty they enjoy. The colonists were right in the contest. Of this no serious doubt is now entertained in any honest and well-informed quarter. The idea of virtual representation, and the attempt to justify one wrong by the practice of another, namely, the taxing other British subjects without giving them an adequate representation in Parliament,—the only replies that were made to the claim of constitutional rights,—are now well understood, and, it gives me pleasure to say, generally disavowed in England. Lord Derby, the manly and highly gifted leader of what is left of the old Tory party, not long since, in a speech delivered in the presence of an American minister, unreservedly admitted that we were right in the Revolutionary contest; and, if that question were now submitted to the free judgment of the people of England, such would be found to be the public sense of that great nation.

The only way in which the right in respect to taxation set up by the English Parliament could have been sustained consistently with the English Constitution, would have been by a joint government, securing to the colonies the representation in that body to which they were entitled as British subjects,—a plan to which both the mother country and the colonies were equally decided in their dislike, but for very different reasons. If a similar question were presented at this day it would, according to the present state of public opinion in both countries, be at once settled by an alliance of peace and friendship, substituting fraternal relations for those of parent and children.

Well would it have been for the interests of both and of humanity if the matter had been thus adjusted.

The immediate question upon which the Revolution turned was, of course, forever extinguished by its results. But it has been far otherwise with the opinions, doubtless of various shades and equally sincere, in regard to the nature of government, the uses to which it could be properly applied, and the manner and spirit of its application, with which the colonists entered into the contest, and with the feelings engendered by those opinions and developed by the war. Upon these points the characters and successive conditions of the early emigrants exerted a great influence. Those to Virginia were first in point of time, and certainly not inferior to any in the elements of character adapted to the difficulties they were destined to encounter. History, doubtless authentic, records that the first emigration to that State was a measure of the patriotic party in England, and sprung from a desire to make an offering to liberty in the wilderness which the stringency of power had prevented them from making at home. The accomplishment of that design, whatever may have been the aid subsequently derived from its authors, has been eminently successful. Whether as colonists, as citizens of a free State, or as a part of our great Confederacy, the emigrants to Virginia, their successors and descendants, have done all that men could do to realize the anticipations and designs of the founders of that ancient colony.

Fully equal to them in devotion to liberty, with the additional merit of having made greater sacrifices in its defense, stood the Puritans, whose descendants are said to constitute at this time one fifth (I believe it is) of the people of the United States. It would be superfluous to describe either the persecutions to which they were subjected by arbitrary power or their fidelity to their principles. Their story is known, and their early character understood, throughout the civilized world.

The Huguenots entered largely into the early settlement of several of the colonies, and their descendants now constitute numerous portions of several of our States. Indeed, the very first European colony established in this country was composed of Huguenots, who were exterminated by the Spaniards,—an event which, indirectly, contributed greatly to the emigration to Virginia under Sir Walter Raleigh. Fugitives from the most cruel as well as the most obstinate persecutions, hunted like wild beasts on account of their devotion to religious freedom and the right of opinion, they fled to our shores, detesting irresponsible power of every description, and ready to do their utmost to prevent its re-incorporation in our virgin system.

The States General and the Dutch West India Company, although the former were perhaps not more favorable to popular sovereignty, in our sense of these words, than the Stuarts, and the latter altogether mercenary, yet introduced into this country, in the colonization of New Netherlands, emigrants especially adapted, by character and disposition, to the scenes through which they were destined to pass. This happy result was attributable to the peculiar conjuncture of affairs at home when the establishment of that colony was undertaken. It was during the continuance of the truce in their War of Independence—the first that was granted to them by Philip II., after that barbarous contest had already lasted forty years—that the attention of the United Provinces was directed to this country. The revolting cruelties which Philip had caused to be inflicted upon the Dutch, through the instrumentality of Alva, are as notorious to the world as are those to which the Huguenots were subjected by Charles IX. and Louis XIV.; and the spirit of resistance to arbitrary power, whether ecclesiastical or political, was branded as by fire upon the hearts of both.

To colonists of these descriptions were from time to time added numerous other Protestants, who had fled to Holland, as well after the massacre of St. Bartholomew as from other and kindred demonstrations of political and priestly despotism in various parts of Europe, with an infusion of descendants of the disciples of the Bohemian martyr, John Huss, who, from the stake to which he had been doomed for his resistance to papal tyranny, conjured his followers not to put their trust in princes.

The mass of the early colonists having been sufferers at home, as well from social and political inequalities as from the heavy hand of power applied to themselves, having left behind them much that they dreaded and nothing that they approved in the management of public affairs, were exposed to no influences that could disincline them to the establishment of just and equal governments in the land of their adoption. Nothing could therefore be more natural than that they and their immediate descendants, made familiar with the wrongs and outrages practiced on their fathers by absolute tyrants, should have been jealous of their liberties, and disposed to be rigid in their restrictions upon the grant and exercise of delegated authority. From this disposition sprang the principles to which they always adhered in the administration of public affairs, and in the defense of which they appear to have been always ready to make any necessary sacrifice. These, on the part of by far the largest portions of the original colonists and their descendants, were an insurmountable opposition to hereditary political power in any shape and under any circumstances; a suspicious watchfulness of all official authority, proportioned to their knowledge of its liability to be abused; a consequent indisposition to concede more than was indispensable to good government; the establishment of a certain, and, as they called it, a swift responsibility for the exercise of that which was granted; an habitual distrust, exhibited on various occasions in their history, of every offer of special privileges by government, and an unwillingness to confer the power to grant them,—the former springing from suspicion that they were designed to impair their independence, and the latter from conviction, fully justified by experience, that such a power will always end in favoritism; and an early and strong appreciation of the value of union among themselves and between the colonies, originating in the necessity for their protection against the savages, and kept alive by perpetual machinations from the mother country to weaken and restrict their freedom.

These and kindred feelings and principles were, as I have said, natural to men whose antecedents, as well as those of their ancestors, had been such as I have described; and they remained throughout the prevailing features of colonial politics. They were not only the views of men prominent in their respective communities, but the matured convictions of the masses in respect to the line of policy necessary to their welfare, and therefore the more likely to be perpetuated, for it has been well and truly said, that "it is the masses alone that live." These opinions might occasionally and for a season lie dormant, or be made to yield to power, but neither corruption nor force could eradicate them. With occasional but brief intermissions, they controlled the action of the colonial legislatures; were embraced by a majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; directed the course of the Revolutionary Congress as well as that of the Government of the Confederation subsequent to the recognition of our Independence, and were in truth always the real sentiments of a majority of the people.

It will be hereafter seen when they were for a season rendered powerless, and when and how their control over the action of the government was restored.

The materials for tracing the action of the public mind, and the proceedings of public bodies during the early periods of our history, are, in comparison with those applicable to modern times, quite imperfect. But aided by the facts which the historians of our day, with great industry and in most cases with equal fidelity, have drawn from oblivion, and still more by the recent very general publication of the papers of eminent deceased statesmen, the work has become less difficult.

The fidelity of the Puritans to their well-known principles in respect to hereditary power, was soon exposed to a severe trial. During the residence of Sir Henry Vane in the Colony of Massachusetts, several English peers, induced by a desire to remove to that colony and to make it their place of permanent residence, offered to do so if changes could be effected in its government, by which the General Court should be divided into two bodies, and their hereditary right to seats in the upper branch allowed to them. Strong as was the wish of the colonists for the acquisition of those distinguished men, they yet declined a compliance with their wishes. All that they could be induced to allow was a life-tenure, and they actually made some appointments of that character; but of this they soon repented, and attached to the offices held by that tenure a condition which made the concession nugatory by making it valueless. It is perhaps not assuming too much to suppose that the regret they experienced at this momentary forgetfulness of their principles—a regret exhibited in various ways—had no small influence in inducing them to limit the terms of offices in the New England States to very short periods, as is still the custom there.

Similar conduct and feeling were disclosed by the colonists on every occasion that presented itself for their display, but the necessity for their exhibition was in a great measure superseded by the Declaration of Independence and the war that succeeded, during the continuance of which sentiments favorable to hereditary power were regarded by the country as crimes to be punished.

Our Independence was scarcely established when a circumstance occurred which exhibited in a very striking manner the fixed aversion of the great body of the people to hereditary distinctions.

The officers of the army, desirous of perpetuating the memory of the relations of respect and friendship which had grown up among them during the trying and momentous scenes through which they had passed, established, in May, 1783, the "Society of the Cincinnati," and made the honor of membership hereditary. It has not appeared that General Washington was consulted upon the subject in the first instance, but conscious of the purity of his own motives, and confiding fully in those of his military associates, he allowed his name to be placed at the head of the list of members and consented to be its president.

The principle of hereditary distinctions could not well have been placed before the people in a less exceptionable form, and yet there were but few occurrences during the war by which the public mind was so deeply excited as that by which the officers intended to grace the closing scenes of their meritorious career. The measure was assailed in all the forms in which an offended public opinion usually finds vent. In addition to able and eloquent attacks from American pens, the movement was severely criticised in a pamphlet published in France and written by Mirabeau, entitled, "Thoughts on the Order of Cincinnatus."

General Washington informed himself of the extent to which the subject was agitating the public mind, and, justly alarmed at the consequences it might produce, determined to do all in his power to arrest its progress. He wrote to Mr. Jefferson in April, 1784, asking his opinion and the probable views of Congress (of which Mr. Jefferson was a member) upon the subject, and his advice in respect to the most eligible measures to be adopted by the society at their next meeting, which was to be held in the ensuing month of May. This letter does not appear in the published writings of Washington, but an extract from it is given by Mr. Sparks, from which and from Jefferson's reply its contents as stated are gathered. Mr. Jefferson's answer, containing an unreserved communication of his opinions in the matter, may be found in Vol. I. of his Correspondence. He stated at length the objections that were made to the society, the unfriendliness of Congress to it, and added, in conclusion, that if, rather than decide themselves upon the best course to be pursued, the members should, at their approaching meeting, refer the question to Congress, such a reference would "infallibly produce a recommendation of total discontinuance."

General Washington attended the meeting in May, and proposed several changes in the constitution, and among them, in his own words, taken by Mr. Sparks from memoranda in his own handwriting, "to discontinue the hereditary part in all its connections, absolutely, without any substitution which can be construed into concealment or a change of ground only, for this would, in my opinion, increase rather than allay suspicion." This amendment, and others having a similar bearing, were adopted.

In Mr. Jefferson's letter to myself, accompanying this volume,[2] to which, as it was prepared with great care, and avowedly designed "to throw light on history and to recall that into the path of truth," I shall have frequent occasion to refer, will be found a highly interesting account of what took place between himself and General Washington, on his way to the meeting in Philadelphia, and on his return, in May, 1784.

Some of the State societies rejected these modifications in toto, and others only agreed to them partially. The agitation of the subject was thus continued for several years, and as late as 1787 no State had yet so far yielded its prejudices as to grant the charter for which the constitution of the society made it the duty of the State meetings to apply. Whatever opinion may at this day be formed in regard to the sufficiency of the reasons for the alarm which this transaction produced, it cannot be doubted that the proceedings in regard to it afford strong proof that there was, down to the spring of 1787, a settled aversion in the minds of a majority of the people to any measure or course of measures which were indicative of the slightest desire to return in any degree to the system which they had overthrown; and that as early as 1783 strong suspicion existed that such desires were concealed in the minds of many who had previously stood faithfully by the country in all its perils.

The intense hostility of the colonists and their successors to monarchical institutions, and the recollection of the cruelties inflicted upon them and upon their predecessors under the authority of kings, had produced a determined repugnance on their part to the concentration of power in the hands of single magistrates. Their minds had become thoroughly impressed with a conviction that the disposition to abuse power by those who were intrusted with it was not only inherent and invariable, but incurable, and that it was therefore unwise to grant more than was actually indispensable to the management of public affairs. At no period anterior to the adoption of the present Constitution, could a majority be obtained in Congress for the creation of an executive branch of the Government, or an impression be made upon the public mind favorable to such a measure. The inconveniences experienced from a want of it during a protracted war, and which were again encountered in the public service after the recognition of our independence, were not sufficient to overcome this repugnance. The tenacity with which they adhered to an equal representation and influence for the colonies before, and for the States after, the Declaration of Independence, in the confederacies and governments they formed, sprang from like considerations. They could not be brought to believe that a State, to which was allowed a greater power than was reserved to its confederates, could be restrained from the ultimate exercise of her superior power to depress her smaller confederates and to elevate herself.

Proofs of the existence and force of these opinions are spread through every portion of our early history.

In 1643 the New England Colonies, with the exception of those "who ran a different course" from the Puritans, entered into a Confederacy. Its avowed design was the better advancement of their general interests, but its real object was to provide greater security against the savages by whom they were menaced. It was called the "United Colonies of New England." The plan was for a season defeated, because Massachusetts claimed more power than she was willing to concede to the other colonies; but it was finally established upon principles of perfect equality, no more power or influence being conceded to Massachusetts, by far the largest, than to New Haven, the smallest colony. The management of affairs was intrusted to commissioners, of which each colony had two, but no executive power was conferred upon them. They might deliberate and recommend, but the colonies alone could carry their recommendations into effect. This Confederacy endured for nearly half a century, and worked well.

In 1755 a convention of delegates from the colonies was held at Albany, under the stimulus of French encroachments, and a plan of union, drawn up by Dr. Franklin, was agreed upon and submitted to the colonies for their approval. The plan, as was to be expected from the character of its author, distributed the powers of the government between the people and the prerogatives of the Crown, much more favorably to the popular side than it would seem the latter might, in the then condition of things, have reasonably hoped for. Still the attachments of the colonists to their local governments, and, above all, their distrust and dread of a central government, which was provided for, were sufficient to deprive the plan of their favor, and to cause its ultimate abandonment.

The privilege of "Government within themselves," as "their undoubted right in the sight of God and man," and "to be governed by rulers of their own choosing and laws of their own making," were from the beginning objects of absorbing solicitude with the colonists and their Revolutionary successors.

The principles and sentiments I have attempted to define, which had sprung up at the earliest period in the colonies, and had grown with their growth and strengthened with their strength, and in explanation of which I have referred to a few of the many illustrations with which their history abounds, were doubtless those also of a great majority of the Whigs of the Revolution, in whose breasts was not wanting the feeling which rarely fails to be seen in those political divisions that lead to civil war,—a thorough antagonism to the general opinions, as well as to the particular policy of the power or party opposed; but it is equally true that those were far from being the principles or feelings of all by whose efforts the Revolution was achieved. A numerous portion of the Whigs of the Revolution, many of them greatly distinguished for their talents, high characters, and great public services, neither concurred in the principles nor sympathized with the feelings I have described, but were in a great measure driven by other considerations to take active parts in the struggle. The number thus influenced was, fortunately for the result of the contest, increased by specific tyrannical acts, which a prudent government would have avoided, but which were forced on the ministry and Parliament of the mother country by the obstinacy and bigotry of the king. Within a year after his accession to the throne he wound up a series of unnecessary interferences with the administration of justice in the colonies, by changing the tenure of office, which had till that period prevailed in relation to the colonial judges, from that of good behavior to that of the will and pleasure of the Crown. By thus using his prerogative to create a distinction in different parts of the realm degrading to the colonies, he left the colonial lawyers no other course consistent with self-respect, to say nothing of patriotism, than to unite with those engaged in other pursuits in an effort to overthrow a government capable of such practices. While subjecting the legal profession to such humiliating proofs of the royal displeasure, his government commenced its assaults upon that portion of his subjects engaged in commerce. His indignation against those who scouted the doctrine of the British Constitution, "that the king can do no wrong," was intense and unappeasable in proportion to their presumed intelligence. It was in this spirit that he appears to have selected judges, professional men, and merchants, as special objects of his wrath, and having exerted his power against the first two classes, he turned his attention toward the latter.

The Navigation Acts, as they stood at the period of his accession, had been framed in the illiberal and selfish spirit which characterized the legislation of the age. But though they had proved injurious to the trade of the colonies, and humiliating to the colonial merchants, in consequence of the extent to which they made their interests subservient to those of the mother country, yet their prejudicial effects had in neither respect been fully developed, in consequence of the remissness which had prevailed in their execution. This had in a great degree been occasioned by illicit contrivances between the colonists engaged in trade and navigation and the officers of government stationed in the colonies. A vigorous execution of the existing laws not only was determined upon, but new acts were passed imposing additional restrictions, and superadding cumulative penalties upon those who disregarded them. To enforce this vindictive policy the Government resorted to a measure at once the most arbitrary and odious of any that had ever been known to the public service,—that of "Writs of Assistance,"—and converted the army and navy into a police establishment to aid in the detection and punishment of the colonial offenders.

By thus giving vent to his persecuting spirit—a spirit always blind to its own interests—this infatuated Prince drove into the front rank of the Revolution two classes of the colonists who were, from the nature of their pursuits, least likely to embark in popular outbreaks, and most inclined to favor a strong government,—classes which are usually caressed by more sagacious rulers, and which had been so here before the reign of George III. All orders of the colonists, save a few favorites, were by these and similar means united, as a band of brothers, in a movement such as the world had never before, and has never since seen, for the overthrow of a government by which they were so sorely oppressed.

This union was in other respects composed of very discordant materials. It consisted, on the one hand, of men and the descendants of men on whose hearts the fires of persecution had burned a hatred of royalty too deep to be erased and too zealous to be trifled with; of men who were at the same time too conversant with human nature to allow themselves to believe that the love of power and the proneness to its abuse were confined to its hereditary possessors, and who were therefore anxious to restrict grants of authority to their public functionaries to the lowest point consistent with good government, and to subject what they did grant to the most stringent responsibilities. They continued, also, to cherish the same preference for their local organizations, and to entertain the same distrust of an overshadowing central government, for which the great body of the people had long been distinguished. They were men whose highest ambition and desire for themselves and the country was that it should have a plain, simple, and cheap government for the management of the affairs of the Confederacy, republican in its construction and democratic in its spirit,—a government that should, as far as practicable, be deprived of the power of creating artificial distinctions in society, and of corrupting and thus subverting the independence of the people by the possession of a redundant patronage. Such a government had long been the subject of their meditations, and they braved the hazards and encountered the hardships of the Revolutionary contest for the opportunity of establishing it.

The Revolutionary brotherhood by which the recognition of our Independence was enforced, contained, on the other hand, men respectable in numbers, and distinguished by talent, public service, and high social position, who dissented from many (I may say from most) of these views, and who regarded them as Utopian in themselves, or as too contracted for the exigencies of the public service.

This difference in the opinions of men who had been engaged in such a contest was all but unavoidable, and was never absent from any political struggle of sufficient importance to be compared with it. It results, besides those which have been indicated as peculiar to our own condition and history, from simple but potent causes of universal operation, such as diversities in social condition, in education, in the influence and tendencies of previous pursuits, and in individual character and temperament, producing diversities of views on such occasions.

Although an aversion to royalty and opposition to hereditary government in any form, were sentiments that pervaded the masses and exercised a controlling influence in the Revolution, there were not a few, of the character I have described, who, though they doubtless did not at the moment design the reintegration of those institutions after the overthrow of the actual Government, could yet contemplate, without great revulsion of feeling, their ultimate establishment in this country. Prompt to resist tyranny in any shape, and stung by the oppressions practiced upon the colonies by the British Government, they hesitated not to peril their lives for its subversion here, whilst theoretically they not only tolerated its form and constitution, but regarded them as the best that could be devised to promote the welfare and to secure the happiness of mankind. Of the existence of this opinion on the part of many sincere friends and able advocates of the Revolutionary cause, in every stage of the contest and for years after its close, we have indubitable evidence. I will notice a few cases of this description, on account of the influence exerted on the formation of political parties by the knowledge of the existence of such opinions, and by the suspicions, perhaps unjust, and in some respects certainly so, as to the extent to which those who held them were willing to carry them out. In so doing, it is by no means my design to cast reproach upon the memories of the great men who entertained them, and who stood by their country in her severest extremity, and established the highest claims to her gratitude and favor.

No ingenuous mind can doubt that a large majority of the Whigs were opposed to the substitution of a government similar either in form or spirit to that from which they had emancipated themselves. Our Revolutionary creed was, "That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

Under such a creed all were entitled as of right to a perfect freedom of choice in regard to the character of the new government. Neither for the formation of their opinions, however erroneous these may have been, nor for the maintenance of them by lawful means, did any subject themselves to just reproach, or to other forfeiture than perhaps a loss of the confidence of those who thought differently.

James Otis, Stephen Hopkins, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton, may be selected from many others as representatives of the principles of that class to which I have referred as dissenting from the popular or preponderating ideas of the time.

I select them the more readily from a desire to avoid mistakes, as they were possessed of temperaments too sanguine and too fearless to be deterred from advancing openly opinions they honestly entertained, by their unpopularity.

There were certainly not many individuals, if there was one, who did more to set the ball of the Revolution in motion than James Otis; and if his career had not been cut short by the hand of violence he would have taken high rank among the great and good men who survived the struggle. His speech against the issuing of the Writs of Assistance had an effect corresponding to those of Patrick Henry. Yet this highly gifted man, whose patriotic spirit was sufficiently aroused by the oppressions of the mother country, while yet in their incipiency, to induce him to peril his life in acts of resistance, was an enthusiastic admirer of the principles of the English system, and honestly believed, as he said, "that the British Constitution came nearest the idea of perfection of any that had been reduced to practice."

The patriotic Hopkins, one of the Rhode Island Representatives in the General Congress, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote—and that colony authoritatively published its concurrence in the declaration—that "The glorious Constitution of Great Britain is the best that ever existed among men."

Gouverneur Morris's unyielding hostility to democratic principles, and his preference for aristocratic and monarchical institutions, were often exhibited and unreservedly avowed, as well on the floor of the Federal Convention as elsewhere, and have become familiar among his countrymen as household words. There were not many, if indeed there was a single one of his contemporaries, who went beyond him in hostility to the State governments. "State attachments and State importance," said he in the Federal Convention, "have been the bane of this country! We cannot annihilate them, but we may, perhaps, take out the teeth of the serpents." Such as were his principles at the commencement of his career they remained to the close of his life.

But the opinions of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, from their larger agency in the politics of the country, in the administration of its government, and in the actual formation of parties, are of still greater importance. A full exposition of these, beyond the single point upon which there existed the greatest jealousy at the period at which we have now arrived,—that of their preference for the English system,—will be best postponed until we come to consider the times and occasions which were presented for an ampler display of them. I will, therefore, only refer at this place to the contents of a statement prepared and signed by Thomas Jefferson, in February, 1818, and designed to explain a portion of his writings. In this he says, among other things: "But Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption. In proof of this I will relate an anecdote for the truth of which I attest the God who made me. Before the President set out upon his Southern tour, in April, 1791, he addressed a letter of the 4th of that month, from Mount Vernon, to the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War, desiring that if any serious and important cases should arise during his absence they would consult and act on them, and he requested that the Vice-President should also be consulted. This was the only occasion on which that officer was ever requested to take part in a Cabinet question. Some occasion for consultation arising, I invited those gentlemen (and the Attorney-General, as well as I remember) to dine with me, in order to confer on the subject. After the cloth was removed, and our question argued and dismissed, conversation began on other matters, and by some circumstance was led to the British Constitution, on which Mr. Adams observed,—'Purge that Constitution of its corruption and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become the most perfect Constitution ever devised by the wit of man.' Hamilton paused and said,—'Purge it of its corruptions and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become an impracticable government: as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect which ever existed.'"

The solemn responsibility under which this statement was made, the high character of its author, the time when it was recorded,—after one of the principal parties had passed from earth, and the two remaining were on the brink of the grave; when the passions excited by personal and political rivalry had died away, and friendly relations had been restored between the survivors,—would of themselves be sufficient to establish its accuracy, even if its description of the opinions of Adams and Hamilton had not been, as it will be seen that they were, abundantly confirmed as well by the speeches and writings of the parties themselves as by the recorded declarations of associates and friends who possessed the best opportunities to become acquainted with their real sentiments.

The natural presumption is—and there are many facts to prove its correctness—that opinions with which these most prominent leaders were so deeply imbued, had, to a very considerable extent at least, been diffused throughout the ranks of their followers.

The effects of this discordance on so many and such vital points in the political doctrines and feelings of those by whom the Revolution had been achieved, were postponed by the existence of the war; but when that restraint was removed by the recognition of our Independence they broke forth unavoidably, and were soon developed in the formation of political parties.

The Congress of the Confederation, and—from the dependence of the Federal Government upon the coöperation of the States for the performance of its most important duties—the State legislatures, as well as the public press, became the theatres for the display of these conflicting opinions.

The so-called Government of the Confederation was little else than an alliance between the States—a federal league and compact, the terms of which were set forth in the Articles of Confederation. Besides a control over questions of Peace and War, its powers and duties were chiefly advisory, and dependent for their execution upon the coöperation of the States. A federal system so defective was justly held responsible for a large share of the public and private embarrassments that existed at, or arose after, the termination of the Revolutionary contest. It was also, as was natural, charged in some degree with those which were, in truth, unavoidable consequences of a seven years' war, and which would have existed under any system. It is not surprising, therefore, that a party bent upon its overthrow should have arisen as soon as the public mind was by the course of events brought to a proper state to consider the subject. Of this party Alexander Hamilton became the leader, and its immediate objects were, of course, very soon frankly developed. These were in the first instance to divest the State governments of certain powers, and to confer them upon Congress, the possession of which by the Federal head they deemed indispensable to the exigencies of the public service, with the intention of following up this step by an attempt to abrogate the Articles of Confederation, and to substitute for that system an independent and effective Federal Government, composed of executive, legislative, and judicial departments. In respect to the powers to be given to the new Government, and to its construction otherwise, there doubtless existed some differences of opinion among the members of this party; but all agreed that it should be what in the language of the day was called a "strong government." There may not have been entire harmony among them in regard to the expediency and practicability of attempting it, but I do not think there is reasonable ground to doubt that most of them desired a virtual consolidation of the two systems—Federal and State. A few were, from an early period, suspected by those who differed from them, and who became their opponents, of desiring to return to the English system, and this suspicion, doubtless, contributed to make the latter more impracticable than they might otherwise have been.

The political feelings which lay nearest to the hearts of the great body of the people, as well during our colonial condition as in the States after the declaration and establishment of Independence, and of the strength of which I have referred to such striking and oft-repeated illustrations, were those of veneration and affection for their local governments as safeguards of their liberties and adequate to most of their wants; endeared to them as their refuge from the persecutions of arbitrary power, and hallowed by the perils and triumphs of the Revolution. Allied to these feelings, and nearly co-extensive with them in point of duration, was a distrust, at both periods, on the part of the masses, of what they called an overshadowing general government.

When to these sources of opposition to the views of the party which had arrayed itself against the government of the Confederation is added the natural and deeply seated hostility of those who dissented from its views in respect to hereditary government in any form, and the suspicion of a reserved preference for such, or at least for kindred institutions, we cannot be at a loss in accounting for the origin of the first two great parties which sprang up and divided the country so soon after the establishment of our Independence.

But the names by which these parties were distinguished are, it must be admitted, not so intelligible. The name of Anti-Federalists was strangely enough given by their opponents to those who advocated the continuance of the Union upon the principles which prevailed in its establishment, and according to which it was regarded as a Federal League or Alliance of Free States, upon equal terms, founded upon a compact (the Articles of Confederation) by which its conditions were regulated,—to be represented by a general Congress, authorized to consider and decide all questions appertaining to the interests of the alliance and committed to its charge, without power either to act upon the people directly or to apply force to the States, or otherwise to compel a compliance with its decrees, and without any guarantee for their execution other than the good faith of the parties to the compact. On the other hand the name of Federalists was assumed, and, what is still more extraordinary, retained by those who desired to reduce the State governments, by the conjunction of which the Federal Union had been formed, to the condition of corporations to be intrusted with the performance of those offices only for the discharge of which a new general government might think them the appropriate functionaries; to convert the States, not perhaps in name, but practically and substantially, into one consolidated body politic, and to establish over it a government which should, at the least, be rendered independent and effective by the possession of ample powers to devise, adopt, and execute such measures as it might deem best adapted to common defense and general welfare.

That this was a signal perversion of the true relation between party names and party objects can scarcely be denied. Yet we who have, in later days, witnessed the caprices in respect to party names to which the public mind has been occasionally subjected, and the facility with which one party has, through its superior address or its greater activity, succeeded in attaching to its adversary an unsuitable and unwelcome name, have not as much reason to be surprised at that perversion as had the men of that day who were subjected to it.

The motive which operated in thus denying to men whose principles were federal the name which indicated them, and in giving it to their opponents, must be looked for in the fact that federal principles were at that time favored by the mass of the people. This was well understood at the time, and was made still more apparent by the circumstance that those who really adhered to them, though compelled by the superior address of their adversaries to act under the name of Anti-Federalists, maintained their ascendancy in the government of the Confederation to its close.

Those who require further proof of the truth of this position beyond what results from a mere statement of the principles contended for by the respective parties, will find it fully sustained by definitions of Gouverneur Morris and James Madison. (2 Madison Papers, pp. 747-8, and 893.) Mr. Morris explained the distinction between a federal and a national supreme government,—the former being a mere compact resting on the good faith of the parties, the latter having a complete and compulsive operation. Mr. Madison, in the debate on the propositions of Mr. Patterson, which constituted the plan of the Anti-Federalists, and which were rejected by a vote of seven States to three,—one (Maryland) divided,—said: "Much stress has been laid by some gentlemen on the want of power in the Convention to propose any other than a federal plan.... Neither of the characteristics of a federal plan would support this objection. One characteristic was that in a federal government the power was exercised, not on the people individually, but on the people collectively, on the States. The other characteristic was that a federal government derived its appointments, not immediately from the people, but from the States which they respectively composed."

It cannot be difficult to decide which of these parties was, in truth, federal, and which anti-federal, according to these authentic definitions of a federal government.[3]

Between these parties, thenceforth distinguished by the misnomers of Federalists and Anti-Federalists, there was, from the close of the war to the establishment of the present government, an uninterrupted succession of partisan conflicts, in which the whole country participated. They grew, for the most part, out of propositions to take from the State governments the rights of regulating commerce and of levying and collecting impost duties, and for the call of a Convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. The first two of these propositions were introduced by the Federalists, and for six years vigorously supported by their party, with Hamilton at its head; and, although advocated by Madison whilst he was in Congress, such was the strength of the Anti-Federal party in that body and in the States that they were not able to carry either. Advances were occasionally made in respect to imposts, but these were so restricted as to the officers by whom the duties should be collected, whether State or Federal, and in regard to the application of the money when collected, that the movers of the principal measure considered its value so much impaired that they declined to push it further under the existing circumstances.

A distrust of the motives of the Federal leaders, and an apprehension that they designed to employ the powers asked for in the establishment of a strong and absorbing general government, capable of becoming, and which the Anti-Federalists feared would, in the progress of time, become, disposed to practice a tyranny upon the people, as oppressive as that from which the Revolution had relieved them, with the suspicion already referred to, that many would not be willing to stop at that point, were doubtless the true causes of these otherwise unaccountable failures. The accounts which have been brought down to us of the proceedings of public bodies, and of appeals to the people, through different channels, abundantly sustain this assumption. These, in a work like this, can only be glanced at.

The grounds taken by the opponents of these measures, and which, backed by popular suspicions, made them so powerful, were that the views of the Federalists were rather political than financial,—that they were at least as solicitous to gratify their well-understood passion for power, through the adoption of these propositions, as they were to maintain public credit. Beyond all doubt the belief that the government which the Federalists wished to create would, whatever it might be called, provide for the greatest practical extent of irresponsible power, led the Anti-Federalists not unfrequently to oppose measures which they would otherwise have supported.

General Hamilton's speech, most able as it was, went far to strengthen these impressions. The debate commenced on the 28th, and was continued to the 30th January, 1783, and was throughout one of great power. It resulted in the adoption, with slight amendments, of a proposition, submitted and vigorously supported by Mr. Madison, "That it is the opinion of Congress that the establishment of permanent and adequate funds to operate generally throughout the United States, is indispensably necessary for doing complete justice to the creditors of the United States, for restoring public credit, and for providing for the future exigencies of the war." Although this proposition finally passed without a dissenting vote, yet when an attempt was made to carry it into effect by an impost—the only way in which it was attempted—the measure was defeated, as has been before remarked, by restrictions in regard to the officers by whom it should be collected, and to the application of the money. In the course of his speech General Hamilton signified, as an additional reason why the impost ought to be collected by officers under the appointment of Congress, "that as the energy of the Federal Government was evidently short of the degree necessary for pervading and uniting the States, it was expedient to introduce the influence of officers deriving their emoluments from, and consequently interested in supporting the power of Congress."

Upon this Mr. Madison, in a note, observes: "This remark was imprudent and injudicious to the cause which it was meant to serve. This influence was the very source of jealousy which rendered the States averse to a revenue under the collection as well as appropriation of Congress. All the members of Congress who concurred in any degree with the States in this jealousy, smiled at the disclosure. Mr. Bland, and still more Mr. Lee, who were of this number, took notice in private conversation that Mr. Hamilton had let out the secret."[4]

It is scarcely possible, at this distant day, to appreciate the terror of irresponsible and arbitrary power which had been impressed upon the minds of men who had themselves suffered from its excesses, or had witnessed the cruelties it had inflicted on others, or whose fathers had been victims of its crimes. Even Mr. Jefferson, who differed from the Anti-Federalists in respect to these questions, as I shall hereafter have occasion to show, though he sympathized with them in their general feelings, in a letter to Mr. Madison in December, 1787, from Paris, upon the subject of the Constitution, did not hesitate to say, "I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive."[5]

Similar feelings were exhibited by Massachusetts in 1785. That leading State in the confederacy was, during the whole of this period, strongly imbued with the feelings of the misnamed Anti-Federal party. This was in no small degree owing to the talents, zeal, and activity displayed in their behalf by Samuel Adams and John Hancock, two of the three persons (John Adams having been the third), who were excepted by the British Government from the offer of pardon to its rebellious subjects. Hancock was a leading merchant and a zealous Revolutionary patriot, who had the honor of placing his name first to the Declaration of Independence, and the higher honor of sustaining the contest which it provoked to its close with inflexible firmness and at unusual risks, growing out of his large interests in commerce. Samuel Adams was equal to any man of his day in intelligence, integrity, and patriotism. He was among the very first who embraced the Revolution in the sense which it finally assumed,—that of entire separation from the British Crown,—and he supported the principles upon which it was founded, as well during the conflict as for the residue of his long life, with great ability and unsurpassed devotion. Whilst many of his associates, not less sincere than himself in resistance to the despotic acts of the mother country, could yet express their admiration of the English system and were consequently inclined to limit their efforts to a redress of temporary grievances, he at the earliest period avowed his hostility to kingly government, and rallied around himself the advocates for an entire separation, most of whom became with him early and prominent members of the Anti-Federal party.

The legislature of Massachusetts, momentarily diverted from the Anti-Federal track by influences which will be noticed in another place, adopted a resolution urging Congress to recommend a convention of the States "to revise the Confederation, and to report how far it may be necessary in their opinion to alter and enlarge the same, in order to secure and perpetuate the primary objects of the Union." Governor Bowdoin, who had recommended the measure to the legislature in his message, addressed a letter to Congress including the resolution, and sent it to the delegates of the State to be presented by them. The delegates suspended its delivery, and assigned their reasons for doing so in a letter dated September 3, 1785, addressed to the Governor, with a request that it should be laid before the legislature. From this letter, which is ably written and occupies throughout Anti-Federal ground, I make the following extracts:—"The great object of the Revolution was the establishment of good government, and each of the States, in forming their own as well as the Federal Constitution, have adopted republican principles. Notwithstanding this, plans have been artfully laid and vigorously pursued, which, had they been successful, we think would have inevitably changed our republican governments into baleful aristocracies. These plans are frustrated, but the same spirit remains in their abettors; and the institution of Cincinnati, honorable and beneficent as the views may have been of the officers who composed it, we fear, if not totally abolished, will have the same tendency.... 'More power in Congress,' has been the cry from all quarters, but especially of those whose views, not being confined to a government that will best promote the happiness of the people, are extended to one that will afford lucrative employments, civil and military. Such a government is an aristocracy, which would require a standing army and a numerous train of pensioners and placemen to prop and support its exalted administration. To recommend one's self to such an administration would be to secure an establishment for life, and at the same time to provide for his posterity. These are pleasing prospects which republican governments do not afford, and it is not to be wondered at that many persons of elevated views and idle habits in these States are desirous of the change. We are for increasing the power of Congress as far as it will promote the happiness of the people; but at the same time, are clearly of opinion that every measure should be avoided which would strengthen the hands of the enemies to free government, and that an administration of the present Confederation, with all its inconveniences, is preferable to the risk of general dissensions and animosities, which may approach to anarchy and prepare the way to a ruinous system of government."

This letter of the delegates was laid before the legislature at their next session, and produced a vote annulling the resolution recommending a convention. The letter was signed by Elbridge Gerry, Samuel Holton, and Rufus King. Mr. King, in the course of the following year, married Miss Alsop, the only child of John Alsop, a wealthy merchant of New York, and after having represented his native State with credit in the Federal Convention of 1787, moved to that city; was appointed one of the first senators in Congress from the State of New York (General Schuyler being the other); was the friend and associate of Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and Jay, and became, and continued for many years, a prominent member of the Federal party.

Every step that was taken toward a convention was regarded with distrust,—a distrust founded on a prevalent apprehension that the talented and, as was believed, ambitious men who would get the control of it, would in some way defeat those republican principles for the right to establish which the country had made such great sacrifices.

The Commercial Convention, representing five States, which originated in Virginia and met at Annapolis, and by which the movement that resulted in the present Constitution was commenced, permitted Hamilton to draw up their Address to the other States, which was also to be laid before Congress; but insisted on giving a shape to their proposition which would confine the Federal Convention within narrow bounds. They did this in deference to the well understood sentiment of the country, and as the only course, in their opinion, by which a convention could be obtained; and accordingly they proposed "That a convention should be called to meet at Philadelphia in May next, to devise such further provisions as should appear to them necessary to render the Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union, and to report such an act for that purpose to the United States in Congress assembled, as when agreed to by them, and afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State, will effectually provide for the same."[6]

The final action of Congress upon the subject, a majority of which entertained similar views, consisted of a resolution, introduced by the delegates from Massachusetts, declaring it to be the opinion of Congress that a convention should be held at the time and place named by the Commissioners who met at Annapolis, "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation, and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall, when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the States, render the Federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union."[7]

But for the sanction thus given to the measure by Congress no convention would have been held—at least none at that time. Washington, as appears from his Correspondence, would not have deemed a convention legal without it, and would not have attended;[8] and his example, added to the hesitation of most of the States, and the decided opposition of some of them, would have been sufficient to put a stop to the project.

It was under such circumstances that the Convention assembled. Its proceedings have become so familiar to the public mind, from the full publications that have been made of them, and the extent to which they have been reviewed, as to render it unnecessary to go very far into their details. The Anti-Federal plan was introduced by Mr. Patterson, of New Jersey, more in obedience to the ascertained wishes of his constituents, than in conformity with his particular views. It proposed an amendment of the Articles of Confederation for the construction of executive and judicial departments in the federal government; to make its laws and treaties the supreme law of the land; to increase the powers of Congress in several important particulars, among which were the right to levy and collect taxes and imposts, to regulate foreign commerce and commerce between the States, and to give to the federal government power to enforce its requisitions upon the States when it should become necessary,—and to leave the government in other respects as it stood.

The plan which Hamilton desired the Convention to propose to the people and the States, of which he left a copy with Mr. Madison as a permanent memorial of his opinions,—now published with Mr. Madison's "Papers," and in the "Life of Hamilton" by his son, and agreeing with each other in all respects,—consisted, in its most remarkable features, of the following provisions, viz:—

First: The President should hold his office during good behavior, removable only on conviction upon impeachment for some crime or misdemeanor; and he should have an absolute negative upon all bills, resolutions, and acts of Congress about to be passed into a law.

Secondly: The Senators should hold their offices by the same tenure, and should have the exclusive power of declaring war.

Thirdly: The General Government should have the right to appoint the future Governors of the States, who might hold their offices during good behavior, and who should have the power to negative all laws about to be passed by the respective State legislatures, subject to such regulations as Congress might prescribe, and also to appoint all the militia officers if Congress should so direct; and,

Fourthly: Congress should "have power to pass all laws which they shall judge necessary to the common defense and general welfare of the Union."

The first of these plans, which professed to represent the views of the Anti-Federalists, was rejected by the Convention, after full discussion, as has been already mentioned, by a vote of seven States to three, one being divided. Hamilton's scheme was not brought to a vote, nor, except by himself, made the subject of particular discussion. This course was obviously induced, in no small degree, by motives of respect for the feelings of its author. Every body praised his candor and independence, but the popular opinions in respect to its provisions were too well understood to allow of any vote, other than his own, being given in its favor, whatever private sympathy it may have enlisted.

Fortunately for the country at this, perhaps the most decisive period in its history, a majority of the Convention, composed of every shade of opinion, became thoroughly satisfied that a crisis had arrived which demanded a liberal sacrifice of extreme views. They were convinced that whilst, on the one hand, no system would stand the slightest chance to be acceptable to any thing like a majority either of the States or people, which was designed, or obnoxious to the suspicion of being designed, to degrade the State governments, or even to impair their capacities for the successful management of those portions of public affairs which, under a proper distribution of the powers of government, would be left under their control, or which was in the smallest degree calculated to do violence to the well-known feelings of the people upon the subjects of hereditary or irresponsible power; so, on the other, there was no room for two opinions in respect to the ruinous consequences that would, in the then condition of the country, inevitably result from the failure of a convention, brought together with so much difficulty, to remedy the manifest defects of the existing government by suitable and effectual additions and improvements, and to make a Constitution which would prove satisfactory both to the States and people. Kept together by this overruling conviction, they entered upon the construction of the present Constitution. The State governments had been until that period, in point of fact, the ruling power. The federal head, from the want of power to act directly upon the people, or, in a compulsory manner, upon the State authorities, was dependent on them for the execution of its most important decisions. Though much depressed by the adverse current of events, it was yet in the State governments that the pride of power stood relatively at the highest point. Any attempt, under such circumstances, to humiliate the State authorities, would inflame the passions of their supporters; but they might be, perhaps, to a sufficient extent conciliated, and the Convention prudently adopted this course. Irritating subjects were, with that view, as far as possible, avoided. Propositions to give to the new government a direct negative upon the legislation of the States, and to empower it to appoint their governors and militia officers, which had produced so much ill blood, were effectually discountenanced. The sovereignty of the States, to which State pride was so keenly alive, was not interfered with in respect to the powers of government which were left in their hands. An impartial and wise division of powers was made between them and the government proposed to be established. To remove apprehensions which had been long entertained, and which had sunk deep in the minds of many, the State authorities as such were allowed a liberal participation in the first formation, and their coöperation was made necessary to the subsequent continuance of the new government. The manner of choosing the electors of President and Vice-President was, with the same general view, left to the regulation of the State legislatures exclusively; and when a failure to choose by the electors should occur—a result then believed likely to happen frequently—the President was to be chosen by the House of Representatives of the United States, and, in the performance of that important duty, each State had reserved to it the right to appear and act in its federal character—that of a perfect equality with her sister States—whatever might be the difference in their respective population, territory, or wealth. The choice of the Senate of the United States was also left exclusively to the State legislatures. The result of all these arrangements was, that the Federal Constitution was so constructed as to put it in the power of a bare majority of the States to bring the government proposed by it to a peaceable end, without exposing their citizens to the necessity of resorting to force, by simply withholding the appointment of electors, or the choice of their Senators, or both.

No provisions could have been devised better calculated to remove apprehension and allay jealousy in respect to the new government. They hit the nail on the head. Although they might not avert the opposition of excited partisans, they answered the expectations of moderate men,—of that large class whose paramount object was the relief of the country as well as their own private affairs from the embarrassments under which they were suffering, and which were, as usual on such occasions, attributed altogether to the defects of the existing system. The question could with great propriety be put to Anti-Federal opponents (and doubtless was put),—Are you afraid to trust a numerical majority of the States? If not, they can at short intervals put an end to the new government if it proves to be as bad as you apprehend.

Having already, in a spirit of devotion to duty and a hazardous disregard of responsibility which was made necessary by the occasion, set aside the instructions of Congress by making a new Constitution, the Convention pursued a similar course to the end. Instead of reporting the result of their labors to Congress for its approval and submission to the States for their unanimous sanction, according to the Articles of Confederation, as was proposed at Annapolis and provided by Congress in the act of sanction to the holding of the Convention, that body sent the instrument it had framed to Congress, not for its approval, but to be by it submitted to the States and people in the first instance, under a provision, prescribed by the Convention, that if it was ratified by nine of the thirteen States it should be binding upon all,—an heroic though perhaps a lawless act.

The dangerous condition of the country, and the general opinion that some decided step was necessary to its safety, added to the imposing character of the instrument itself, which, though not satisfactory to Congress, was yet far less objectionable than had been anticipated, and a general expectation that important amendments rendering it still more acceptable to the people would follow its ratification, deterred the national legislature from refusing to comply with the request of the Convention, notwithstanding its flagrant disregard of congressional authority. The same considerations should have induced the Anti-Federal party to acquiesce in the ratification of the Constitution. They should have looked upon the marked effect of that instrument upon Congress as a prophetic warning of the danger to which they would expose themselves as a party by opposing it. But they did not see their duty, or, perhaps, their interests, in that light; honest in their intentions and obstinate in their opinions, they opposed the ratification, were defeated, and, as a party, finally overthrown.

The Anti-Federal party represented very fairly the ideas and feelings that prevailed with the masses during the Revolution. These, as we have described, having been deeply rooted by the persecutions suffered by Puritan, Huguenot, Hussite, and Dutch ancestors, and, however crude and unsystematized at first, having been gradually stimulated into maturity and shape by the persevering injustice of the mother country, became political opinions of the most tenacious and enduring character. At the moment of which we are speaking, alarm in respect to the character of the General Government about to be established, with increased attachments to those of the States, were predominant feelings in the Anti-Federal mind, and closed it against a dispassionate consideration of the Constitution submitted to their choice. The local governments were entitled to all the regard which had been cherished for them by the Anti-Federalists and by their political predecessors under the colonial system; neither were the dangers which threatened them overrated. Hamilton could not tolerate the idea that they should be continued otherwise than as corporations, with very limited powers. Morris, in his usual rough and strong way, was for "drawing their teeth," as I have already quoted him; and even the temperate Madison was in favor of giving the General Government a direct negative upon all their laws,—a proposition which, though not so humiliating as Hamilton's, or so harshly expressed as that of Morris, would have been far more fatal to their future usefulness. Standing now on the vantage-ground of experience, no sensible man can fail to see that the State governments would have perished under the treatment thus proposed for them, nor can any such man doubt the immense advantage they have been and still are to our system. A short reflection upon what has been accomplished through their agency, and upon what our condition would probably have been if they had been blotted out of the system, as was virtually desired in most influential quarters, must satisfy candid and intelligent minds of the fatal unsoundness of the policy proposed. The States would under it have been governed as her numerous colonies were governed by Rome, and a comparison of our present condition with what it must have been under the satraps of a consolidated federal government, will cause every patriotic heart to rejoice at our escape from the latter. For that escape we are largely indebted to the old Anti-Federal party. They stood out longest and strongest in behalf of the State governments, after the establishment of our Independence; and although they failed in other respects, they made impressions upon the public mind which have never been effaced, and for which we owe them a debt of gratitude. Their motives, as is usual in political collisions, were misrepresented; they were spoken of as men of contracted views, of narrow prejudices; and their preference for the State governments was attributed to the preponderance they possessed in them, and to a consciousness that their greatness and power were derived from local prejudices and from their skill in fomenting them. Hence was inferred their hostility to an efficient federal government, whose extensive affairs they were incapable of managing, and in which, consequently, it was alleged that they would not retain the influence they possessed at home.

Although I unite fully in condemning the course pursued by the Anti-Federalists in respect as well to the Constitution as to their refusal to grant an adequate revenue to the federal head, and the right to regulate commerce, I regard those imputations which ascribed to them a readiness to sacrifice the great interests of the country to merely factious purposes, as the ebullitions of party spleen produced by party jealousies, as unjust and unfounded as was the charge brought forward by the old Republican party against Alexander Hamilton of a design to plunge the country into war with France to subserve the wishes and interests of England. I do not think there were ten in every hundred of that party who did not believe that imputation well founded, and most of them went to their graves without having yielded that conviction. I came upon the political stage when this matter was only viewed in the retrospect, and am free to say that I even believed that, if there was any thing true in the party criminations of the preceding era, this was so. Judge, then, of my surprise, on discovering from his papers, as well as from those of some of his contemporaries recently published, that there was probably no man in the country more sincerely anxious to prevent a war with France; that he applied his great mind incessantly to that object; that he was willing, indeed desirous, to send either Mr. Jefferson or Mr. Madison as one of the commissioners to negotiate with France, a proposition in respect to which he could not obtain the concurrence of either Mr. Adams or his cabinet, the latter of whom were sufficiently prompt to adopt his advice save when it conflicted with their party prejudices; and that so far from acting on that occasion at the instigation or to promote the policy of Great Britain, although entertaining strong—in my opinion too strong—preferences for England as between her and France, he was, in respect to every thing that affected the interests of his own country, purely and strictly American. Of this no man, whose mind is not debauched by prejudice, can entertain a doubt on reading the papers referred to.

The imputations upon the motives of the Anti-Federalists were of the same general stamp and origin. It was too soon for those who were yet fresh from the self-sacrificing and patriotic struggle on the field of the Revolution, where they had nobly done their duty, to fall under the influence of such petty motives as were attributed to them. Like their opponents, they might and did peril much of their own standing to further political views of great magnitude which they honestly, if erroneously, believed would promote the welfare of their country; but base incentives and merely factious calculations are not predicable of the times or of the men.

We should be slow to attribute narrow views to a political party to whose principal leaders, more than to any other portion of the Whigs, we owe the great change in the character of our Revolutionary struggle by which the assertion of Independence was substituted for the demand of a redress of grievances.

If the Anti-Federal party had been accused of cherishing morbid and impracticable ideas on the subject of a general government, the charge would have come nearer the truth. Many of them had so vivid a recollection of cruelties practiced upon their fathers, and had themselves seen and felt so much of the tyranny of the mother country, as to destroy all hope on their part that political power could be vested in remote hands, without the certainty of its being abused. Although they may have been right in respect to the monarchical preferences of many who were the most zealous for a convention, still they overrated the danger that such views would be encouraged by that body, and in their apprehensions of subsequent efforts to establish monarchical institutions here, they did not sufficiently appreciate an existing security against the accomplishment of such an object, the character and adequacy of which shall be hereafter noticed. We have every reason to believe that they regarded the project of a general convention as involving, if successful, the fate of republican principles in this country; and under the influence of feelings of so sombre a character, their course, as a party, was, it must be admitted, substantially adverse to any change, content rather to bear the ills they had than to encounter others of which they knew not the precise extent, but which they dreaded more. In this they fell behind the progress of events.

If our Revolutionary contest had terminated in a compromise with the mother country, as was for a long time expected, the existing system, with the amendments which would then have been generally favored, might have sufficed. It might have answered all the purposes contemplated by that which Franklin took so much pains to establish in 1755. But when our country had taken her position among the nations of the earth as a sovereign and independent power, she acquired rights and incurred obligations which could not be properly cared for by any agency short of a well-constructed and efficient general government, and the existing organization was neither. By an efficient government I do not mean one capable of absorbing or neutralizing the State authorities, or not fully responsible for the faithful exercise of the powers conferred upon it, or possessing more power than was necessary for the discharge of all the duties assigned to it, but one amply furnished with the ability to discharge them by its own means. To this end it was necessary that it should have competent and well organized executive, legislative, and judicial departments, and at least the power requisite to raise its necessary revenues from the people directly. To all this the Anti-Federal party was opposed, and therein it was wrong. The risk of having exceptionable principles incorporated into the Constitution was one that had to be encountered at some time, and there were cogent reasons for meeting it then. The condition of the country, in regard to its credit and other interests, presented an argument of great urgency for the necessity of a competent government. But above all other considerations stood the fact that the Convention had proposed for the approval of the people and the States a constitution which, when interpreted according to its plain and obvious meaning, conferred on the government proposed by it powers fully adequate to the public service, but none from which danger could be apprehended to any interest. That this was so is no longer an open question. Time and experience have demonstrated the error of the Anti-Federalists, who, under the influence of strong prejudices, although doubtless honestly, thought differently. No one will now question the devotion of the people, for whose benefit it was framed, and who are the best judges in the matter, to the existing system. With full power to alter or abolish it, they have lived under it for the greater part of a century, without making or desiring to make any essential alterations in its structure. By the exercise of those powers only which were plainly given by the Constitution to the government established by its authority and expressed on its face, in regard to which there has been no dispute, and which were at the times of its adoption well understood by those who made and those who adopted it, our country has prospered and grown to its present greatness. I say by those powers only, because the spurious interpolations which have from time to time been attempted have in no instance been productive of good.

The Convention was held with closed doors, and the result of its labors was not known to the public before it was communicated to Congress, nor the particulars of its proceedings, the votes, resolutions, and speeches, till many years afterwards. The public mind, and especially the Anti-Federal portion of it, was impressed by those circumstances, operating upon long entertained suspicions, with the most unfavorable anticipations in respect to the character of the instrument that had been agreed upon. All found it so different from what it was feared by many that it would be, and so many received it according to its real merits, that it carried a large preponderance of the public sentiment, drawn from both parties, to the conclusion that it ought not to be, and could not with safety be rejected. The reflection of this sentiment was distinctly seen in the action of Congress. It had given its assent to the holding of a Convention, without which that body would not have met; but it had, as we have seen, restricted its action in two most important points: 1st, that the Convention should limit its action to a revision of the Articles of Confederation and to suggestions for their improvement; and, 2d, that its doings should be reported to Congress, to be submitted to the States, under those Articles which required the assent of every State to any alteration. The Convention disregarded both; it sent to Congress a new constitution, regulated its submission to the States, and decided that the assent of nine of the thirteen should make it binding upon all. Congress, with its resolutions and limitations thus set at nought, and without even a protest, did what was asked of it. Yet the leaders of the Anti-Federal party in the States determined upon opposition. The course and character of that opposition indicate that those who embarked in it were conscious of their approaching defeat.

In the three largest and most strongly Anti-Federal States, in which the power of that party, when cordially united, was irresistible, the Constitution was ratified. It was adopted by the required number of States, and the fate of the Anti-Federal party, as such, was forever sealed by the result of the contest in which it had unwisely engaged.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This refers to the Memoirs of the writer, to which the present essay was intended to be an episode. See [Introduction] to this volume. Eds.

[2] See [Appendix].

[3] This contradiction between names and principles was obvious even to intelligent foreigners. The French minister Fauchet, in his famous despatch to his government (the publication of which worked the downfall of Edmund Randolph, Washington's Secretary of State) alluding to political parties in America, speaks of the whimsical contrast between their names, Federal and Anti-Federal, and their real opinions;—the former aiming with all their power to annihilate federalism, while the latter were striving to preserve it.

[4] 1 Madison Papers, 291.

[5] 2 Jefferson's Correspondence, 276.

[6] See Address; 2 Madison, 698. Not more than one, if one, of the five States was fully in favor of a Convention.

[7] Journals of that Congress, Vol. IV. p. 724.

[8] Sparks's Washington, Vol. IX.; Notes, pp. 237-9.

CHAPTER II.

The Federal Party in Power under the New Constitution—Agency of Individuals in the Formation and Ratification of the latter—Prospects of the Opening Administration of the Government—Unwise Course of the Federal Party—President Washington—His Peculiar Relations with the People and with Parties—His first Cabinet—Character of the Differences between Jefferson and Hamilton—The latter sustained—Hamilton's Position, Power, and Influence upon the subsequent Course of Parties—His Monarchical Views—Various Authorities in Relation to the latter—Fidelity of Washington to the Republican Form of Government—Importance of correctly Understanding the Extent of Hamilton's Influence during the Administrations of Washington and John Adams—Personal and Official Relations between Washington and Members of his Cabinet—Evidences of the Spread of Monarchical Views among Officers and Public Men in Washington's Time—His Steadfast Adherence to the last to the Republican Form—His Permanent Hold upon the Affections of the People, even while they repudiated certain Leading Principles of his Administration.

The period in our political history to which our inquiry has conducted us, was one of the greatest interest. The successful effort that had been made to compel Great Britain to acknowledge our Independence; the government of the Confederation, and the causes that led to its abandonment; the grave step taken in a better direction by the formation and ratification of the new Constitution, with the hopes and fears excited by the last great movement, were well calculated to impress profoundly the minds of those who had been actors in such important scenes. The success of the Federal party in the first election held under the new Constitution was complete. For the first time since its organization, that party possessed the unrestricted control of the national legislature. If any thing could have been thought wanting to insure its permanent success, that was believed to be secured by the consent of General Washington to be the first President of the new government about to be organized under a constitution, to the paternity of which they had established so fair a claim. Neither the formation nor the ratification of that instrument were altogether the work of avowed members of that party; but as between the two parties they had clearly the best title to be regarded as its authors. The merits of individuals in that great work were various. Alexander Hamilton, the able and undisputed leader of the Federal party, from its origin to his death, did comparatively nothing either toward its formation or adoption by the Federal Convention. His most useful services were rendered in the New York State Convention, by which it was ratified, and in his contributions to the numbers of "The Federalist." These were formally declared as the measure of his services in that regard, in reply to a direct inquiry long after Hamilton's death, by his best informed and always devoted friend, Gouverneur Morris, as will be seen hereafter. It was, beyond all doubt, from Madison that the Constitution derived its greatest aid in respect as well to its construction as to its passage through the Convention, and its ratification by the States.

The character and political career of James Madison were sui generis—as much so as though far different from those of John Randolph. Possessed of intellectual powers inferior to none, and taking an unsurpassed interest in the course of public affairs, he seemed invariably to bring to the discussion of public questions a thoroughly unprejudiced mind. Whilst in the speeches of his contemporaries we seldom fail to perceive that the argument submitted was framed to support a foregone conclusion,—to recommend a measure for which the speaker cherished a personal preference,—it is rare indeed, if ever, that any such indications are to be found in those of Mr. Madison. Whilst the former present themselves as advocates, the latter appears in the attitude of an umpire between rival opinions, who has made it his business to search for the truth, and is determined to abide the result of his investigations, uninfluenced in the formation of his decision by preferences or prejudices of any description. The most acute observer in reviewing the writings, speeches, and votes of Mr. Madison during the exciting periods of which we are speaking, when governments as well as individuals were to an unusual extent in a state of transition, would find it difficult to place his finger upon any of them in respect to which the justice of this description would not be manifest.

Mr. John Quincy Adams, in his Jubilee Address, heretofore alluded to, describes Mr. Madison and General Hamilton as being, at this period, "spurred to the rowels by ambition."[9] Both of these gentlemen were, doubtless, ambitious of the fame which is acquired by serving one's country honestly and efficiently, and we have no sufficient reason for assuming that Mr. Adams meant more than that. It is, nevertheless, but justice to those truly great men to add that so far as high-reaching ambition is indicated by abjuring unpopular opinions and assuming those which are believed to be otherwise; by professing attachment to principles not really cherished for their own sake, or by personal intrigues of any description to acquire or increase popular favor, I sincerely believe that there were no two men of their day less liable to the imputation. Mr. Madison's course at the period of which we are speaking and during his antecedent public life, was, to a remarkable extent, divested of a partisan character. He supported, ably and perseveringly, many, if not most of the propositions for the adoption of which the Federal party was particularly solicitous, whilst representing one of the most decided Anti-Federal States in the Confederacy, without losing the confidence of his constituents, or even hazarding its loss. He was, throughout, in favor of giving to the federal head an independent right to levy and collect its necessary revenue and to regulate commerce, and was from the beginning in favor of a convention to revise the Constitution. In that body he was one of the majority in favor of the course I have described, and which resulted in the present Constitution. His successful and brilliant efforts in favor of the new system of government placed him at the head of its friends; but there was no time when Mr. Madison can, with truth and fairness, be said to have belonged to the Federal party; he all the time represented a State which took the lead in opposition to that school, his political affinities and associations were in general adverse to that organization, and, as I have said, he never forfeited the good opinion of his State. She seems always to have confided in his sincerity and in the integrity of his motives, and to have been willing to allow him to follow the dictates of his own judgment in regard to particular measures.

The most auspicious prospects beamed upon the opening administration of the new government, and it is fair to presume that the anticipations thus inspired would have been triumphantly realized if those who had been selected to conduct it, and their successors for the ensuing twelve years, had accepted the Constitution in the sense in which it was known to have been understood by those who framed it, and by the people when they adopted it. A course thus right in itself, and thus acquiescent in the popular will by men, some of whom had been long suspected by many of their Revolutionary associates of not holding that will in very high respect, would not have failed to conciliate large portions of the Anti-Federal party. Their dread of the exercise of unauthorized power by a general government, of which the responsibility was, in their estimation, too remote to be safely trusted, and their apprehensions for the safety of State institutions, always an object of their greatest solicitude, might have been allayed, if not substantially subdued. These valuable objects accomplished, the great improvements in the condition as well of public as of individual affairs, unavoidably flowing from the reasonably harmonious action of a government which the Federal party had done so much to establish, and the crowning fact that these gratifying results were brought about in the name, and with the active coöperation of Washington, the object of universal respect and affection, would have secured to that party through the long lapse of time that has since intervened, at least as large a share in the control of the government as has been possessed by a party which became its successful rival, but which can scarcely be said to have then existed.

But the Federal party rashly turned its back upon the only course by which these advantages might have been secured, and in doing so, showed itself regardless of considerations which would not have escaped the attention of more discreet, if not wiser bodies. Its influential and leading men forgot that the administration did not, in point of fact, represent the political opinions in respect to the proper uses and spirit of governments in general of a majority of the people; that their party had acquired power solely by its wise course in regard to a single, though doubtless most important measure; and that even in respect to that large portions of the people felt, as expressed by John Quincy Adams, "that the Constitution itself had been extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant nation." The Federal party took its course also in momentary forgetfulness of the characters of those whose opinions it was about to violate, whose feelings were to be offended, and whose resentments it must incur. It overlooked what it had the fullest reason to know, that those whom it was about to drive into opposition were men, and the descendants of men, who had from the beginning, and at all times, and under all circumstances, been enthusiasts in devotion to liberty, and stern and uncompromising in demanding stringent restrictions upon delegated authority,—as inflexible in their opinions, and as incapable of being driven from their support by the hand of power, or seduced by corruption, as human nature could be made in the schools of fiery trial in which they had been trained. The Federalists in power, or rather he who, through the great confidence of his chief, wielded that power, did nothing, if we except the personal efforts of Washington in favor of conciliation, absolutely nothing to soothe the feelings of their defeated opponents, or to allay their apprehensions, but much to exacerbate the former and to confirm the latter.

The justice of these allegations is fully proved by the acts of the public men of that day. From the official position of the first President, and the part he consequently took in the management of public affairs, a faithful survey of these cannot be made without embracing him in the review. This is treading upon privileged ground. No American, no good man, can approach it without feeling that it is such, or without being embarrassed by the apprehension that, however pure his intention, he may undesignedly outrage the sentiments of admiration and reverence by which it is naturally and properly intrenched. General Washington retired gracefully from his military command, with more true glory than ever fell to the lot of man. There have, doubtless, at times, appeared military leaders of more professional genius and science, but never one better adapted to the high duties to which he was called; never one of whom it could with more truth be said, to use a modern and comprehensive expression, that he was "the right man in the right place." Certainly without his seeking it, and doubtless against his wishes, he was transferred to the civil service of his country by his election to the office of President under the new Constitution. The administration, of which he thus became the constitutional head, adopted certain measures, proposed others, and set up claims to power under that instrument, of which many of his countrymen and personal friends could not approve, and which they felt themselves obliged to oppose; these, in the progress of time and events, became organized as a political party by which those objectionable measures and claims of power were perseveringly resisted, but without any diminution of respect for his character, position, and feelings. They overthrew the administration of his successor, which claimed to act upon his principles, succeeded to the control of the Federal Government, and have kept it ever since, with rare and limited exceptions, attributable to special causes.

There is, notwithstanding, in this great country, no hamlet, town, city, or place in which American citizens congregate, where the name of Washington is ever pronounced without the profoundest reverence, or in which there does not prevail an undying sense of gratitude for his public services. The history of the world will be searched in vain for a tribute of love and gratitude at all comparable to that which the people of the United States have rendered to him who was the commander of their armies in the war of the Revolution, and their first republican chief magistrate—a tribute, in paying which the only contest between political parties is as to which shall manifest the most zeal, and which shall attain the highest success.

Was ever before so great and so gratifying reward bestowed, including in its wide extent the noble, exalted, and well-won title of Pater Patriæ! This, the highest honor that man can receive on earth, was not, as of old, a title given to an adored chief by victorious soldiers who, however renowned for their valor, were always open to the influence of personal and temporary feelings; nor was it obtained through the instrumentality of a venal senate; neither did it originate in state-craft or priest-craft, which have in every age paid homage to the great men of the world for selfish and sinister purposes. The high honors paid to Washington proceeded from no such sources, nor were they exposed to the suspicions from which such bestowments are rarely free. They sprang from the disinterested and deliberate judgment of an intelligent, virtuous, and free people, who felt that he had, in his military capacity alone, done incomparably more than any other man for the establishment of their Independence, and that in all his civil service he had been actuated by the same upright motives which had governed his whole previous career, and that in that sphere also, as in every act of his life, he had placed the performance of public duties and the advancement of public interests before all other earthly considerations. Although many of them had differed from him in respect to some measures which had received his sanction, they were not on that account the less satisfied that he had, in the exercise of a rightful discretion, been influenced only by an earnest desire to promote the welfare of his country. So regarding his whole career, they with one accord gave him the highest place on the roll of fame and the first in their hearts.

This spontaneous and ample recognition of a debt of imperishable gratitude to a public benefactor, whose modesty was equal to his unsurpassed merit, was the act of a people often misrepresented, and as often misunderstood, but who have never been found wanting, in the end, in what was due to faithful public servants, to themselves, or to their political institutions.

We are, perhaps, yet too near the period of these great transactions to pronounce safely upon the general justice of their dealings with the contemporaries of Washington. But when time shall have relieved the subject more thoroughly from the adverse influences of family connections and partisan feelings, I have not a doubt that some American historian, loving his country and admiring the character of his countrymen, will take pleasure in holding up to the world a picture of the distribution of popular confidence and popular favors in their case also, which may safely be compared with that drawn from the history of any people.

Unbelievers may gainsay, and disappointed aspirants may rail at these deductions, but they nevertheless do no more than justice to the character of our people, before whom every public question and the acts and opinions of every public man, be he whom he may, may be freely canvassed. All that can be asked of him who seeks to vindicate and perpetuate the truth of history, is that he shall deal justly and candidly with his subject. From a scrutiny so conducted, no citizen will ask or expect that any public transaction, or the course of any public man shall be exempted.

No man could have accepted office with fewer temptations to depart from the line of duty than offered themselves to President Washington. His claims to the admiration of his countrymen and of the world were complete; reasonable in all his desires and happy in his domestic relations, he was possessed of property beyond either his wants or his desires, and was without children to inherit his estate or to succeed to the glories already attached to his name. The advantages to be derived by a republican magistrate from the consciousness of occupying such a position and of its being also appreciated by his constituents, are very great. The confidence inspired by these considerations was also strengthened by the fact that in the high and responsible stations in which he had been placed he had never failed to increase the good-will and respect of those by whom he had been appointed. But these circumstances of encouragement did not blind his cautious mind to a proper sense of the difficulties incident to the new duties he had assumed and to his want of experience in regard to them. In addition to the command of all the military force in the country in a more plenary form than that in which he had before possessed it, he was now intrusted with the superintendence and direction of large portions of the domestic and of all the foreign concerns of a great people just taking their position in the family of nations. First on the list of his responsible duties stood that of organizing a government constructed upon new and to a great extent untried principles, at a moment when the tendency of the French Revolution had been sufficiently developed to threaten political convulsions more portentous and more difficult to be dealt with than any that the world had ever witnessed; and he was called to the performance of this delicate task amidst party dissensions at home of the most violent nature, which many people apprehended might extend to a revolution in the character of the government itself. Firm in all his purposes Washington did not shrink from the application of his well-balanced mind to a survey of the difficulties that stood in his way, in making which no exaggerated estimate of his own capacities prevented him from foreseeing the embarrassments that might arise, and to some extent must arise, from the difference in the nature of many of the duties he was now called upon to discharge from those with which his past public life had made him familiar; and I have always thought that, among the great transactions of his career, there was scarcely one in which were exhibited more strikingly the strength of his judgment and the nobleness of his disposition, than in the formation of his first Cabinet.

It is difficult for one not particularly conversant with such matters to realize the obstructions which not unfrequently present themselves in the work of forming a good cabinet. These are sometimes the consequence of an overestimate of his own qualifications on the part of the chief magistrate elect, and a resulting disinclination to bring into the government men whose prominence before the country and whose great accomplishments as statesmen may depress his own importance in the action of the administration. This feeling, when it exists in only a moderate degree, is certain to be encouraged by the flatteries of friends, or more often by selfish men for the purpose of promoting their designs upon the patronage at the disposal of the incumbent. Against the dangerous influences of these classes President Washington was effectually guarded by elements in his own character decidedly unpropitious to both. But he was not so free from embarrassments arising from another source. He was at the commencement of his government surrounded by his fellow-soldiers, the officers of the army of the Revolution,—veterans who had acquired high consideration by their meritorious services, and were endeared to him by their personal characters and their past and present sufferings. They were generally men whose judgments he could not but respect, and who, like their class in all countries, were not disposed to consider the aid of civilians in the administration of public affairs as imperatively necessary. The actual state of the country also, in regard to its party divisions and dissensions, was, as I have already said, perhaps the greatest source of perplexity and trouble.

Not discouraged by these difficulties, he proceeded to the formation of his cabinet in a spirit of patriotism and good sense, manifesting an anxious desire to allay, if he could not neutralize, the violence of party spirit, and to enlist in the administration of the new government and secure to the public service those of highest character and talents who belonged to, or were disposed to sympathize with, the party which had opposed the Constitution. With these noble views, he divided his cabinet equally between gentlemen of that school and members of the Federal party, and equally also between civilians and military men. For the two most responsible, as well as most difficult offices, to which were assigned duties least familiar to himself, he selected two gentlemen, who from their active patriotism and distinguished talents occupied high, if not the highest positions in the country, had already been placed at the head of the rival and conflicting opinions which divided it, and of whose personal uprightness and political independence he was well assured.

Down to the period which we have now reached, President Washington had, to a remarkable extent, kept himself aloof from partisan strife. This was partly owing to his great self-command and to his perception of the incompatibility of a participation in that field of action with the positions he occupied in the public service; and possibly, to some extent, to anticipations, not unnatural, that the future held in store for him a fame which would soar above parties. He had seen and known too much of men to allow himself to hope that the cabinet he had selected would be entirely free from disunion, or from those distractions likely to arise from the conflicting materials of which it was composed; but he did not at first appreciate fully the extent and bearing of the differences that existed between the opinions and public views of Jefferson and Hamilton. Hoping that these would be confined to particular points in the administration of affairs, he doubtless relied upon his personal influence to soothe the asperities they might produce, and at least to limit their adverse effect to the measures to which they might be from time to time applied. His confidence in this regard was well warranted by his past good fortune in removing obstacles that threatened injury to the country, by means of the general respect that was paid to his opinions and wishes by all classes of his countrymen. His success in allaying the spirit of insubordination that manifested itself among the officers of the army at Newburgh and for a season menaced seriously the character of the army and the peace of the country; in arresting a design which was supposed to be on foot in Congress, to make the sufferings and consequent indignation of the troops subservient to the promotion of the financial schemes of civilians; and in dispersing the storm which threatened to follow the establishment of the Cincinnati, with its hereditary honors, strikingly justified his confidence in the efficacy of any future efforts in the same direction.

More could not have been done, or in a better spirit, than Washington did to preserve harmony between the two leading members of his cabinet, and to secure their coöperation in the public service. No steps, consistent with a proper self-respect, as it now appears, were omitted on his part. If the differences in their views had been less radical these friendly efforts and applications must have succeeded, received as they were by both in the most becoming and grateful spirit.

But these commendable exertions were doomed to an unavoidable and final disappointment. The President might as well have attempted to combine the elements of fire and water as to secure a harmonious action in the administration of the Government between Jefferson and Hamilton. The antagonistic opinions of these great men upon the subjects of government and its proper administration were too profoundly planted in their breasts, and they were both too honest to depart from them without a corresponding change in their convictions, which there was no reason to anticipate, to admit of a hope for a different result.

Of the nature and extent of their differences of opinion it is my purpose to attempt some explanation in another place; but here I will only say, as I desire to say in advance, that I do not now believe, whatever my impression may have been, that they originated in any difference as to the objects at which they aimed, or that those objects, in either case, were other than the welfare and happiness of those for whom they were selected to act. They may have differed in opinion in respect to the condition, social and political, in which the mass of the people would be most likely to be prosperous and happy; they certainly did so, and that very widely, in regard to the public measures by which that prosperity and happiness would be promoted or diminished; and that diversity in their opinions arose mainly from their conflicting estimates of the capacity of the people for self-government. Upon that point they were opposed diametrically, and that opposition produced an unavoidable antagonism in their views of almost every public question.

In a conversation between these gentlemen in 1791, to which a more particular reference will be made hereafter, General Hamilton thus expressed himself:—"For that mind must be really depraved which would not prefer the equality of political rights, which is the foundation of pure republicanism, if it can be obtained consistently with order." This was, I do not in the least doubt, his real sentiment; but unhappily circumstances, to which we may hereafter recur, had impressed his mind with a conviction, which was never removed, that the great desideratum which he mentioned—the preservation of order—could not be secured where the control of public affairs was largely in the hands of the people. He very correctly regarded the security of the rights of persons and of property as an indispensable ingredient in good government; and distrusting the respect of the people, when acting in masses, for both, he was adverse to that equality of rights which he truly said was "the foundation of pure republicanism." These great objects he thought could in no other way be secured than by a strong government, in which there would be what he called a "stable will," independent of popular control. This he endeavored openly, and with a candor that belonged to his character, to obtain in the Convention, and failing there, he hoped to realize its advantages, in some degree, by strengthening what he described as the "organs" of the Government, through the action of a popular President and a good administration. The most important of the measures by which he designed to accomplish these objects Mr. Jefferson regarded as so many violations of the Constitution, and he looked upon the spirit in which they had their origin as evidence of disaffection to republican government, the differences in opinion between these master spirits of the cabinet, who engrossed a share of the attention of the people inferior only to that paid to the President, were therefore, not limited as Washington hoped they would be, to particular measures but presented contradictory and irreconcilable theories for the administration of the Government, which could not even be discussed in the cabinet without producing interminable distractions. As was to be expected from minds like their respective systems left no middle ground, and required the adoption of the one or the other as a rule of action for the Government. The unavoidable obligation to make a selection between them devolved therefore on Washington, and he discharged it, as he did all his duties, courteously and firmly. He gave the preference to Hamilton, and sustained him in the measures he proposed to carry out the policy he recommended.

Mr. Jefferson, sensible that the necessity of his retirement from the cabinet had thus become absolute, determined to take that step in a way as little annoying to the President and as little injurious to the public service as possible. To this end he gave early notice that he would resign at the expiration of the President's first term of office; and when that time arrived he retired. This left General Hamilton without any check from his associates in the administration, save what might proceed from the Attorney General, Edmund Randolph, who became Secretary of State on Jefferson's retirement, and of whom the latter said that his habit was to give his opinions to his friends and his votes to his opponents.

Thus, next to Washington, Alexander Hamilton became the most powerful man in the nation, abundantly able to give to party divisions their form and pressure, and in effect to shape the action of the Government according to his judgment by the authority with which he was invested, and which he exerted with less restraint than had ever before or has ever since been encountered by any minister in this country or in Europe.

To no quarter, therefore, could our attention be more profitably directed for instruction in the history and course of parties during his political career than to the opinions and acts of that remarkable man. The time has been, I am sensible, when, with vision distorted by partisan prejudices, which seldom allow both sides of any question to be seen, I could not have reviewed his course with the impartiality due to truth and justice; but I am happy to believe that those feelings have sufficiently lost their force to permit me, while dissenting more thoroughly than ever from his principles, to do justice to his motives, and to admit his sincerity and his desire to serve his country in the very acts which I unreservedly condemn. The most obnoxious of his opinions have here, thank God, become obsolete and exploded theories, not at all dangerous as examples, and mainly referred to as historical marks of our progress. Believing, as I think all liberal minds now do, that they were honestly formed, we can speak of them without reproach to their author, and censure them without being suspected of a design to cast obloquy on his memory. The history of our partisan warfare has presented, since his time, the anomalous feature of a persevering denial in his name, by some of his followers, of the political opinions which he not only did not affect to disclaim, but which he made it his business on all fitting occasions to publish and advocate, believing them to be right, and to the last moment of his life confidently expecting that they would become, at no distant day, the general sentiment of the country.

I have already referred to contemporaneous declarations, made in April, 1791, by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, at an informal meeting of General Washington's Cabinet, to which the Vice-President had been invited, in favor of monarchical institutions according to the English model. The terms in which those gentlemen expressed their admiration of, and preference for, the English system of government, though differing in particulars, were in no sense equivocal, nor can there be, at this day, the slightest doubt of their authenticity. On the 13th of August, in the same year, General Hamilton held another conversation with Mr. Jefferson, of which the latter leaves the following notes:—

"I own," said Hamilton, "it is my own opinion, though I do not publish it in Dan or Beersheba, that the present government is not that which will answer the ends of society by giving stability and protection to its rights, and that it will probably be found to be expedient to go into the British form. However, since we have undertaken the experiment, I am for giving it a fair course, whatever my expectations may be. The success, indeed, is so far greater than I had expected, and therefore success seems more possible than it had done heretofore, and there are still other and other stages of improvement which, if the present does not succeed, may be tried and ought to be tried before we give up the republican form altogether; for that mind must be really depraved which would not prefer the equality of political rights, which is the foundation of pure republicanism, if it can be obtained consistently with order. Therefore whoever by his writings disturbs the present order of things is really blamable, however pure his intentions may be, and he was sure Mr. Adams's were pure."

"This," Mr. Jefferson adds in his memorandum, "is the substance of a declaration made in much more lengthy terms, and which seemed to be more formal than usual for a private conversation between two, and as if intended to qualify some less guarded expressions which had been dropped on former occasions. Thomas Jefferson has committed it to writing the moment of Alexander Hamilton's leaving the room."

The measures described by Hamilton as the stages of improvement already adopted were doubtless the bank and funding system, and those still in reserve were such as are recommended in his report on manufactures, subsequently made.

In the Federal Convention which framed our present Constitution General Hamilton submitted a series of propositions to be adopted as a basis for the new government, which he supported in an elaborate and very able speech. The debates of the Convention were reported by Mr. Madison, who submitted the notes he had taken of his speech to General Hamilton, which the latter admitted to be correct, contenting himself with a few formal and verbal amendments. In the year 1810, before the proceedings of the Convention were ordered to be published, the Rev. Dr. Mason, intending to write the life of Hamilton, applied to Mr. Madison, then President of the United States, for a copy of that speech, which was furnished to him accompanied by the following note:—

"James Madison presents his respects to Dr. Mason with the promised copy of Mr. Hamilton's observations in the General Convention on the subject of a Federal Constitution, as noted at the time."
"Washington, January 12th, 1810."

Dr. Mason abandoned the idea of preparing the life, and a descendant of his, a few years since, placed in my hands two of the documents collected by his grandfather, one of which was the above note with a copy of the speech. The following are extracts from the latter:—

"This view of the subject almost led him to despair that a republican government could be established over a country of so great an extent. He was sensible at the same time that it would be unwise to propose one of any other form. In his private opinion he had no scruple in declaring, supported as he was in the opinion of so many of the wise and the good, that the British government was the best in the world; and he doubted very much whether any thing short of it would do in America."

Speaking of the executive, he said: "As to the executive it seemed to be admitted that no good one could be established on republican principles. Was not this giving up the merits of the question, for can there be a good government without a good executive? The English model was the only good one on this subject. The hereditary interest of the king was so interwoven with those of the nation, and his personal emolument so great, that he was placed above the danger of being corrupted from abroad," &c. Also, "their House of Lords is a most noble institution. Having nothing to hope for by a change and a sufficient interest by means of their property in being faithful to the national interest, they form a permanent barrier against any pernicious innovation, whether attempted on the part of the Crown or of the Commons."

On comparing these extracts with the speech, as published in the "Madison Papers," I find them to accord in all respects. In the life of Hamilton, by his son, the author indulges in harsh imputation upon the conduct of Mr. Madison, in this connection, in the justice of which I am deceived in the general sentiment of the country if he finds many to agree with him; and through a fatality which often attends similar demonstrations, he publishes in the same volume Hamilton's plan of government, the original draft of which Dr. Mason informed Mr. Madison was yet among the General's papers, and which is, word for word, the same as the copy published in the "Madison Papers;" and also Hamilton's own notes for his great speech in the Convention, which indicate the character of the speech upon the point in question as fully as notes ever prefigured a speech, and both of which confirm all that Mr. Madison has said in regard to it.

The following are extracts from the notes:—

"Here I shall give my sentiments of the best form of government—not as a thing attainable by us, but as a model which we ought to approach as near as possible." "British Constitution best form." "There ought to be a principle in the government capable of resisting the popular current." "No periodical duration will come up to this." "The principle chiefly intended to be established is this, that there must be a permanent will." "A democratic assembly is to be checked by a democratic senate, and both these by a democratic chief magistrate: the end will not be answered; the means will not be equal to the object." "The monarch must have proportional strength. He ought to be hereditary, and to have so much power that it will not be his interest to risk much to acquire more." "The advantage of a monarch is this, he is above corruption,—he must always intend in respect to foreign nations the true interests and glory of the people." "Republics liable to foreign corruption and intrigue. Holland—Athens." "Effect of the British government." "A vigorous execution of the laws, and a vigorous defense of the people will result." "Better chance for a good government." "It is said a republican government will not admit of a vigorous execution." "It is therefore bad; for the goodness of a government consists in a vigorous execution."

It thus appears that the opinions avowed to Mr. Jefferson on different occasions, one of which seems to have been sought for the purpose, were no more than repetitions of those he had avowed on the floor of the Convention, and of which he knew that Mr. Madison possessed an authentic record that would some day see the light; indeed, if such had not been the fact he would have just as frankly repeated them, for they were the settled convictions of his mind during his life—as fresh when they were announced to Mr. Jefferson as when promulgated in the Convention. Nor had he any motives for concealment of his views, if concealment had been, as it was not, characteristic of the man, for he was equally convinced that the government which had been established would prove a failure, and that the wisdom of his plans and the propriety of adopting them would thus become apparent to all.

We have here the words of General Hamilton himself—in his declarations deliberately made and attested in the most solemn and responsible form by Thomas Jefferson, and in his speech as reported by James Madison, under still more specific responsibility, confirmed by his own notes for that speech now published by his son and biographer—all going to the same end, viz: to show that he was in principle a monarchist, and that he preferred a monarchical to a republican form of government.

But Jefferson and Madison were politically his opponents. Let us now see what his oldest and best friend says upon this point. Gouverneur Morris, his coadjutor in the Convention and in politics through life, and his eulogist at the grave, gave in 1811 an unreserved exposé of Hamilton's opinions on this very question, in a letter to Robert Walsh, then editor of the "National Gazette," written, doubtless, in answer to inquiries. The reader should procure this letter, and will find in it much matter of interest. I omit, among other things, what it says in respect to Hamilton's purity, and his frank and honorable character and bearing in political matters, having said as much myself, and with no less sincerity.

"General Hamilton," says Morris, "had little share in forming the Constitution. He disliked it, believing all republican government to be radically defective. He admired, nevertheless, the British Constitution, which I consider an aristocracy in fact though a monarchy in name.... General Hamilton hated republican government because he confounded it with democratical government, and he detested the latter because he believed it must end in despotism, and be, in the mean time, destructive to public morality.... But although General Hamilton knew these things from the study of history, and perceived them by the intuition of genius, he never failed on every occasion to advocate the excellence of, and avow his attachment to monarchical government."

In another part of the letter, "one marked trait in the General's character was the pertinacious adherence to opinions he had once formed."[10]

In a previous letter, written shortly after Hamilton's death, (December, 1804,) to Governor Aaron Ogden, Morris says: "Our poor friend Hamilton bestrode his hobby to the great annoyance of his friends and not without injury to himself. More a theoretic than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system may be good in itself and bad in relation to particular circumstances. He well knew that his favorite form was inadmissible unless as the result of civil war; and I suspect that his belief in what he called an approaching crisis[11] arose from a conviction that the kind of government most suitable, in his, opinion, to this extensive country, could be established in no other way."

Hamilton not only cherished his preference for monarchical institutions to the very close of his life, but we have good reason to believe that the expectation that some crisis in the affairs of the country, encouraged by the weakness of our political system, would yet arise and would lead to their introduction, was equally abiding. His letters and writings will be found to contain many intimations to that effect. I will notice two instances. His letter to Timothy Pickering in 1803, is the only attempt that I have ever seen, coming from himself, to explain his course in the Convention. There may have been others, but I would be surprised indeed by the production of any thing from his pen denying his preference for the monarchical form of government, although such was the standing charge of his political opponents. None such, I feel very confident, ever existed. That letter concludes with the following very significant remark:—

"I sincerely hope that it may not hereafter be discovered that, through want of sufficient attention to the last idea," (that of giving adequate energy to the Government,) "the experiment of Republican Government, even in this country, has not been as complete, as satisfactory, and as decisive as could be wished."

The explanation of "his conduct, motives, and views" in accepting the challenge of Colonel Burr—probably the last paper containing any allusion to public affairs that he ever wrote—closes with expressions, italicized by myself, remarkably in harmony with the intimations of Gouverneur Morris to Aaron Ogden:—

"To those who, with me, abhorring the practice of dueling, may think that I ought on no account to add to the number of bad examples, I answer that my relative situation, as well in public as private, enforcing all the considerations which men of the world designate honor, imposed on me, as I thought, a peculiar necessity not to decline the call. The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity with prejudice in this particular."

Although not so pointed in expressing it, his disposition toward the State governments was scarcely more favorable than toward the plan of the general government. In his letter to Pickering, at a period when their usefulness and importance to the system were better appreciated, he says: "Though I would have enlarged the legislative power of the General Government, yet I never contemplated the abolition of the State governments, but, on the contrary, they were in some particulars a part,—constituent parts,—of my plan." But let us see what part it was that he would have them perform. He said in the Convention: "If they (the State governments) are extinguished, he was persuaded that great economy might be obtained by substituting a general government. He did not mean, however, to shock the public opinion by proposing such a measure. On the other hand, he saw no other necessity for declining it. They are not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue, or agriculture. Subordinate authorities, he was aware, would be necessary. There must be district tribunals, corporations for local purposes. But cui bono the vast and expensive apparatus now appertaining to the States?"

These were Hamilton's views in respect to the State governments, as expressed in the Convention, according to Mr. Madison's report. In this case it is also fortunate for the cause of truth that, from a paper written by Hamilton just as the General Convention adjourned, and published by his son, it appears very plainly that his views upon the subject cannot have been greatly misreported by Mr. Madison. In this paper he speculates upon the probable fate of the Constitution; after saying, in confirmation of my suggestion that he doubted the dispositions of the people in other respects than their intelligence and capacity, that the Constitution would have in its favor "the good will of men of property in the several States who wish a government of the Union able to protect them against domestic violence, and the depredations which the democratic spirit is apt to make on property," he adds: "If the Government be adopted, it is probable General Washington will be the President of the United States. This will insure a wise choice of men to administer the Government, and a good administration. A good administration will conciliate the confidence and affection of the people, and perhaps enable the Government to acquire more consistency than the proposed Constitution seems to promise for so great a country. It may then triumph over the State governments and reduce them to entire subordination, dividing the larger States into smaller districts. The organs of the General Government may also acquire additional strength." The italics in the above extracts are all my own except as to the word organs. He would not "shock the public opinion" by proposing to extinguish the State governments, but there was no other reason for omitting to do so. It would be well if it were done, but it was not wise to shock the public mind upon a point in respect to which it was known to be sensitive. But he would reduce them to entire subordination, triumph over and consequently humiliate them. It would be a poor compliment to Hamilton's knowledge of men and of the effect of public measures, to assume that he did not know that such would be the surest as well as the safest way to extinguish them in the end.

In a letter to Gouverneur Morris, so late as in 1802, a little more than two years before his death, and which will be found in "The Works of Hamilton," edited by his son, (Vol. VI. p. 529,) he thus unbosoms himself to his friend: "Mine is an odd destiny. Perhaps no man in the United States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself; and contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know from the very beginning, I am still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric. Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for my reward. What can I do better than withdraw from the scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me."

There would seem to be no force in evidence, however appropriate its source or credible its character, if that we have produced is not conclusive in regard to the opinions of General Hamilton upon certain points. It proves, first, that he regarded monarchical institutions, according to the English model, as being the most perfect government that ever existed; secondly, that he would have preferred the establishment of such a government here, and was only prevented from advocating it by a conviction that it was made impracticable by the adverse public opinion of the time; thirdly, that he thought it was our duty, nevertheless, to approach that model with our Government as nearly as the prejudices of the people would permit, and that he introduced into the Convention a plan by which that object might be reached; fourthly, that he regarded the present Federal Constitution, which, as lately as two years before his death, in a free communication to his trusted friend, he called "a frail and worthless fabric," as inadequate to the purposes of a good government; that he had accepted it at the time as a temporary bond of union, but believed from the beginning that it would prove a failure and fall into contempt; that he believed that this result would open the way to popular tumults forcing intervention, and to convulsions through the evils of which the people would, at no distant day, become convinced of their error, and consent to institutions substantially similar to those he favored; and, fifthly, that his preference for monarchical institutions was a fixed and cherished sentiment; that although at times encouraged by his success in measures he had no right to hope for under the Constitution as he knew that instrument was intended to be, he yet invariably returned to his first opinion adverse to the sufficiency of the Constitution, and descended to the grave not only without a change in his opinions, but with increased convictions of their perfect soundness.

It has been a question often mooted whether the idea of using the power with which he was or might be clothed to overthrow the actual government, and to introduce the system he so earnestly preferred, was ever seriously entertained by Hamilton. Such designs were freely charged upon him by many of the old Republicans, who, under the full influence of partisan prejudices, doubtless believed that he waited only for a fit opportunity to attempt them. His repeated and undisguised expressions of a preference for monarchical institutions, to friends and foes, when the people of the United States, whose officer he was, had established a government which they intended should be so widely different from such institutions, were well calculated to engender the suspicion. Plain men naturally imagined that a man like Hamilton would do much and incur high responsibilities for the accomplishment of an object so near his heart. Mr. Jefferson, who was not a man of a suspicious temperament, through the fiery and protracted contests of parties, at the head of which they respectively stood, was evidently at times alarmed by similar apprehensions. But toward the close of his life, when partisan asperities had been long since forgotten, in a letter to myself he virtually exonerated Hamilton from the charge in these expressions:—"For Hamilton frankly avowed that he considered the British Constitution, with all the corruptions of its administration, as the most perfect model of government that had ever been devised by the wit of man,—professing, however, at the same time, that the spirit of this country was so fundamentally republican that it would be visionary to think of introducing monarchy here, and that therefore it was the duty of its administrators to conduct it upon the principles their constituents had elected."[12]

Mr. Charles Francis Adams has placed before us, in his life of his grandfather, John Adams, a series of facts bearing upon this point with no ordinary significance. They are not brought forward in support of any such charge, but as raising a question for the consideration of his readers, whether it is not possible that in the pains he took to increase greatly the provisional forces authorized to meet our difficulties with France, and to convert the whole into a permanent military establishment; in the readiness with which he fell in with the scheme of Miranda, to conquer, through the joint operations of Great Britain and the United States, the Floridas, Louisiana, and the South American possessions of Spain, in case of a rupture between us and France; and in his prompt consent to take command of the troops to be so employed, General Hamilton was influenced by a desire to bring about the crisis to which he had always looked as one that would present a fit opportunity for the establishment here of the political institutions he preferred.

These are grave matters, and of a nature calculated to challenge a new and stricter examination of one of those critical periods which have often occurred in our history, and from which we have had so many providential deliverances. The subject is treated with becoming delicacy and great caution by the author, whose conclusion, of which we have only a hint, may possibly have been influenced by family traditions, tinctured unavoidably with strong personal prejudices but never wanting in intelligence. I will not undertake to speculate even as to what General Hamilton might have done or have left undone if he had found himself at the head of a large and permanent military force, and the country convulsed by those popular outbreaks, the expectation of which seems to have been never absent from his mind or from the minds of his disciples. He might have mounted his "hobby"—as Morris termed his passion for monarchical institutions—and have struck a blow in their behalf, acting in the spirit of other "strong minds" who, as Mr. C. F. Adams well and truly says, "seldom fail to associate with dreams of their own glory the modes of exercising power for the good of their fellow-men. Considering their happiness as mainly dependent upon a sense of security from domestic convulsions, his first aim would have been to gain that end at any rate, even if it should be done at some expense of their liberties." But looking at the subject with no other feeling than a sincere desire to arrive at a correct solution of the circumstances narrated by Mr. Adams, I cannot bring my mind to the conclusion referred to.

I can well conceive that Hamilton might have been led to avail himself of such a state of things for a coup de main of some decided character if its existence had been brought about by others, or had been the result of fortuitous circumstances—a contingency which his mind had doubtless often contemplated. But I do not think that he would have planned or contributed to bring about such a state of things involving to so grave an extent the public order and the peace of the country. Such a course would have been at variance with some of his most cherished principles and inconsistent with his personal character. The preservation of order, and a respect for the individual rights of persons and of property, appeared always to be the objects of his greatest solicitude. It was only because he did not think that these could be effectually secured under any other form of government that he preferred monarchical institutions, acknowledging at the same time that they were at war with the principles of natural justice, and only allowable upon that of their absolute necessity to secure society against the occasional waywardness of a majority of its members. It was mainly because of the very erroneous opinions he had formed of the dispositions in this respect of a majority of his adopted countrymen that he was induced to devote his splendid talents to hopeless efforts to sustain principles so irreconcilable with those for which he had periled his life in the war of the Revolution. I say erroneous, not only because I think them such, but because experience, the only unerring test, has so proved them. We are, at the moment when I write, a half century from the transactions which form the subject of our consideration, and I venture nothing in saying that there is no country in Europe in which order has, in the interim, been better preserved, or the rights of persons and property been more secure, than in the United States; none in which the power of government has been more stable or more adequate to the purposes of its institution.

But this is a wide field, for which I have neither space nor time. It becomes me to remember, whilst occupied not without pleasure with these retrospective investigations and meditations, that I have already passed by several cheerful years, the allotted threescore-and-ten,—that period of such solemn import which the undeserved favor of an always kind Providence has permitted me to pass, not only with life but with the means and the faculties to enjoy life,—and that if I hope to complete the work before me I must confine myself more to the highway of my subject, and leave its by-paths to the explorations of younger men.

I cannot, nevertheless, refrain from a brief reference to transactions which have more than once occurred in this country, have made a greater impression on my mind than they seem to have made on others, and which I think have a strong bearing upon the question of the American love of order and respect for property and its rights. Although it is not probable that the facts of these can ever be sufficiently understood abroad to be correctly appreciated, it is otherwise here, and they are well worthy of our profoundest meditations. I allude to scenes which have been presented at San Francisco, which were at the moment of such thrilling interest, but appear already to have sunk into oblivion amid the ceaseless bustle and never-halting progress of American life.

Look at that young but already large and flourishing city! Regard her as she stood at the commencement of the extraordinary steps that were taken for her relief! Think of the scenes through which she was made to pass, and the condition to which she has been restored! An active and artful portion of her population thoroughly steeped in corruption, vice, and crime; her municipal authorities, the direct offspring of that corruption, not only regardless of duty but fraternizing with criminals, deriding the complaints of the injured, and scoffing at their prayers for official interference; despair succeeding hope, and the opinion that protection is at an end, and that nature may soon reassert her empire at length ripening into conviction in the breasts of the good of all classes; the general meeting of the citizens, and the appointment of the Committee of Vigilance with unlimited powers and subject to responsibility to no other tribunal than to the congregated mass of the people from whom they derive their authority and their power; the regular military organization adopted by the Committee and forthwith called into the field of duty, sufficient in men, arms, and equipments to crush resistance to the authority of the Committee in the city, and to deter the exercise of any other authority at that remote distance that might have a right to claim cognizance of the crimes they seek to suppress; all legal rule superseded by that of the Committee of Vigilance and put down on the instant of its assertion; criminals who had been set at large by the former authorities re-arrested on charges of capital offences, tried before the Committee, informally but honestly and intelligently, found guilty and executed; the functionaries who had connived at those offences arraigned at the bar of the same tribunal and dealt with according to their deserts; crimes detected and felons dragged from their hiding-places to meet a just punishment; men to whom no specific offence could be traced, but who were notorious enemies of order and abettors of crime, banished not to return under penalty of death, and every effort made to resist or defeat the action of the Committee crushed by an all-sufficient military force. The power of the Committee continues in active and constant exercise for nearly three months, when the purification of the city from crime and from criminals being accomplished, the authority of the laws is restored, also the use of the ballot-box which had been desecrated; this restoration is by the order and in pursuance of the authority and power of the Committee which are voluntarily laid down with the approbation and consent of a community consisting of from 25,000 to 30,000 persons.

There is no good reason for saying that during the whole of that period and in the midst of such stirring scenes the power of the Committee was in a single instance exercised to divest any innocent man of his property, or to oppress him in any way, or to interfere with his legal rights further than to compel submission to the temporary supremacy of that body, or to punish the innocent, or to enable the guilty to escape, or to aggrandize the Committee, or to benefit its members, their friends, or its employées, or to do an act of intentional injustice to any human being. During the government of the Committee the business concerns of the city and the vocations of its citizens were carried on with at least as much regularity and success as ever. Since its resignation and the consequent dispersion of its power not a banished man has returned contrary to the terms of his expulsion, and no member of the Committee, nor any one who acted by and within its authority, has been called to account for his acts within the bounds either of the city or of the State to which it belongs.

Is it probable that there is any city in Europe of equal size in which its legally established authorities could have been suspended by the irregular action of its own people with similar results,—in which the substituted power could be exercised with equal wisdom and forbearance, and laid down with so few causes for individual complaint? My opportunities for observation, although considerable, have been less than those of some others, and I may be wrong in thinking as I do that such things could not be done by any other people in the world.

The remedy for the social and political crimes which called the Committee of Vigilance into existence was a fearful one, and must be so regarded by all thinking and virtuous minds, and it would seem paradoxical to set up such a crowning act of disorder—that of the subversion of all legal authority, for even the shortest period—as an exhibition of a love of order and respect for the rights of persons and of property on the part of the actors; but I cannot resist the belief that the transaction afforded the strongest proof of the existence of those great principles in their minds, and that a proper sense of them and a determination to maintain them will seldom be wanting on the part of those who can act as did the Committee of San Francisco and its supporters.

But I ask pardon for this digression, and return to my subject. Many considerations besides those suggested by Hamilton's invariable solicitude for the preservation of order and by his constant respect for the individual rights of persons and of property, press themselves upon my mind against the conclusion intimated by Mr. C. F. Adams, and against the probability that General Hamilton ever contemplated the creation of a state of things that would justify or facilitate the employment of force to establish institutions more congenial with his taste and judgment than those we possessed. But I forbear to urge them, partly because I have devoted as much time and space to the subject as I can afford, and also because I am well satisfied that his knowledge of the certain opposition of General Washington to any such scheme or design would have been sufficient to deter him from undertaking either during the lifetime of the General, even if his own disposition had pointed in that direction.

It was at no time the intention of President Washington to give his sanction to the opinions so generally, and as it now appears so justly, attributed to General Hamilton. Never was man more strongly pledged to the support of republican government, or more unchangeably determined to maintain the responsibilities he had incurred in that regard. Embracing with all his heart the Declaration of Independence, in which its principles were delineated with the pencil of truth, he did more than any other man to overthrow the government against which it was hurled, and to open the way for the establishment of a republic in its place. None knew better than he that such was the object of the Revolution, and his resolution was immovable that the sufferings and sacrifices which had been incurred in support of that object should not fail to accomplish it through any act of omission or commission on his part. Every important act in his eventful career shows that he regarded himself on that point as invested by his country with a sacred trust. When the bright prospect which he had largely contributed to open to his countrymen for the realization of their wishes in this respect was in danger of being obscured, if not forever blasted, by means similar to those which have so often prevented or subverted free government, by the violence of an exasperated soldiery, he threw himself into the breach, and saved at the same time by his heroic and patriotic effort their interests and the honor of his brothers-in-arms. When the minds of the earnest and jealous friends of liberty were frenzied by an ill-advised attempt in the same quarter to introduce hereditary distinctions amongst us, he was again found at the post of duty; and, though feelingly indulgent to his military companions, as well as satisfied of the perfect purity of their intentions, he nevertheless promptly and successfully employed the great influence he derived from their respect for his character and their confidence in his friendship to induce them to abandon their project.

In the full possession of such claims to the esteem, gratitude, and trust of his countrymen, superadded to those which were due for his military services, he closed the first great period of his splendid life by presiding over the Federal Convention, and by assenting to, and recommending to the favor of the people, a Constitution eminently republican in its form, and in the principles upon which it was founded. So far was he from encouraging the spread of opposite sentiments that there is, on the contrary, much reason to believe that it was by making his views of the subject known to those about him that the anti-republican tone which Jefferson found, on his arrival from France, so prevalent in social and political circles at the seat of government, was kept in check until public opinion became strong enough to extinguish it altogether. Speaking to this point, Mr. Jefferson says, "The truth is that the Federalists, pretending to be the exclusive friends of General Washington, have ever done what they could to sink his character by hanging theirs on it, and by representing as the enemy of Republicans, him who of all men is best entitled to the appellation of the father of that Republic which they were endeavoring to subvert, and the Republicans to maintain. They cannot deny, because the elections proclaimed the truth, that the great body of the nation approved the republican measures. General Washington was himself sincerely a friend to the republican principles of the Constitution. His faith perhaps in its duration might not have been as confident as mine; but he repeatedly declared to me that he was determined it should have a fair chance of success, and that he would lose the last drop of his blood in its support against any attempt which might be made to change it from its republican form. He made these declarations the oftener because he knew my suspicions that Hamilton had other views, and he wished to quiet my jealousies upon the subject."[13]

Independently of his principles, which were the main source, doubtless, of the personal solicitude he often manifested upon this point, General Washington was a man of too much sense and reflection not to know that the world would in all future time hold him responsible for the overthrow of the republican principle here, if its extinguishment occurred in his day, and he was too careful of his well-earned fame, and anticipated too correctly the elevation it was destined to reach in connection with the history of his country, not to do all in his power to guard it from detriment upon a point at once so delicate and so momentous. Hamilton was the first man to whom he would make his sentiments known, and I can find nothing in the positions which they occupied toward each other which would induce me to entertain the opinion that Hamilton would have ventured on an attempt to shake his patriotic resolutions on that point through the influence he was supposed to possess over the actions of Washington in other respects.

There is, I am quite sure, nothing more essential to a right appreciation of many of the most important incidents in our political history, than a correct understanding of the relations that existed between those distinguished men. It cannot fail to shed considerable light on much that occurred during the government of the Confederation, and is perhaps the only touchstone by which the measures of government and many other public transactions between 1789 and 1799—between the organization of the new government and the death of Washington—can be safely tested.

I will give my interpretation of the character of those relations, fully aware of the misrepresentations and misunderstandings to which they have been subjected, and from which no subject connected with partisan conflicts can, it appears, be entirely free, but conscious of a single desire to state things truly, and of an inability to do intentional injustice to either. It will be for others to judge of my success.

Mr. Charles F. Adams, in the work to which I have referred,[14] says, "Without much hold upon the judgment or affections of the people at large, he (Hamilton) had yet by the effect of his undisputed abilities and his masculine will gained great sway over the minds of the intelligent merchants along the Atlantic border. His previous doctrines, in unison with the feelings and interests of the most conservative class, had drawn to him their particular confidence, whilst his position in the first administration had facilitated the establishment by him of a chain of influence resting for its main support on his power over the mind of Washington himself, but carried equally through all the ramifications of the executive department. Thus it happened that even after he ceased to be personally present his opinions continued to shape the policy of Washington's second administration, and even that of his successor." This declaration extending so far would have been deemed quite credible at the period to which it relates, and, coming from the grandson of that "successor"—himself the undisguised enemy of Hamilton—was probably called forth by the recent publication of the private papers of the latter.

As far as Mr. Adams affirms that the policy of Washington's administration, and also, in many very important respects, that of his successor, were guided by the opinions of Hamilton, his declaration has my full concurrence. No candid and intelligent man can, I think, read the evidence which has recently appeared, in connection with facts previously known, without acknowledging the undeniable truth of these positions. But I do not by any means intend to concede the control of Hamilton over the mind of Washington which is implied by the terms employed by Mr. Adams without qualifications which limit and very materially change its character. The policy of both administrations was guided by the opinions of Hamilton, but those opinions received their influence through different channels, and were enforced in very different ways. Hamilton's opinions, when known as his, had very little weight with the successor of Washington, save, in many cases, to secure a bad reception for themselves; but that successor had little if any control over, or influence with, the members of his own cabinet, and not much with Congress or the Federal party, by whom the policy of his administration was shaped. With them Hamilton's opinions established the rule of action. In respect to the two latter, this arose mainly from the sway he was capable of exerting over them by the force of his great talents, and from a general concurrence in his views. In respect to the prominent members of Mr. Adams's cabinet his control arose from the power he had in part acquired over their minds whilst they were also members of General Washington's administration. Timothy Pickering, who, after the retirement of Mr. Jefferson and the brief term of Randolph, was Secretary of State under both Presidents, was a remarkable man, sincere and honest, I am willing to believe, in his political opinions, but savagely bitter in his feelings toward his opponents. It seemed pretty much a matter of course in him to hate those to whose political course he was opposed, and, as is usually the case with minds thus constituted, he was equally bigoted in his devotion to those with whom he agreed and acted.

General Hamilton was his beau ideal of a politician and statesman, and it would not have been an easy matter in him to have dissented from any opinion positively advanced by Hamilton, whatever his own first impressions on the subject might have been. Mr. McHenry, Secretary of War in both cabinets, was undoubtedly an honorable and well-disposed gentleman. He was, in the opinion of those who had the best opportunities for judging, including Washington and Hamilton, not entirely competent for the duties of his office, and that circumstance drove him the more to rely for support on Hamilton, for whom he cherished an early and ardent friendship. His personal devotion to Hamilton was such as to prevent Mr. Adams from longer overlooking his incompetency, as Washington had done, and precipitated his resignation. Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, the member of his cabinet most trusted by President Adams because the least suspected, was, notwithstanding, the one among his official advisers who went the greatest lengths to testify his entire allegiance to Hamilton, who had been the artificer of his political fortunes from the beginning and by whose influence he had been advanced to the high position he occupied. Throughout he advised with and was assisted by Hamilton in the performance of his official duties. Such was Hamilton's "power over his mind" that he was applied to successfully by the former for evidence of facts to be derived from the treasury archives to sustain an attack that Hamilton contemplated making upon the President—an attack that he did make, although he acknowledged to Wolcott that it would not be regarded as proper that he should have received the evidence at his hands, and that that fact ought not therefore to be known.

No one can read the correspondence between General Hamilton and Mr. Wolcott, as recently published with Hamilton's Works, without regretting that the parties to it should have been so forgetful of the proprieties due to the occasions to which it relates, or without a disposition to excuse the strong expression of Mr. Charles F. Adams, in speaking of his grandfather's cabinet, applied to Mr. Wolcott "as the most venomous serpent of them all."

Mr. Charles F. Adams places Hamilton's sway over the mind of Washington upon the same footing with that which he exerted over the executive department, composed principally of the members of his second cabinet of whom we have been speaking. From this view I entirely dissent. If Hamilton possessed any power over the mind of Washington, it was of a very different character from that which he exercised over those members. Washington was to an unusual extent free from the weakness of overrating his own powers; with just conceptions of his capacities for public service he was always ready to place them at the public disposal, but he was very far from pretending to qualifications which he did not possess. No one was more sensible than he that the science of civil government—the construction of constitutions and the administration of the civil affairs of the State—were not best learned in the camp, where so large a portion of his life had been spent. He therefore, as we have seen, selected two of the ablest statesmen in the country, particularly versed in those portions of the public business which he devolved upon them. They differed irreconcilably in respect to the policy of the administration, and in the performance of his duty he decided between their conflicting opinions in favor of those of Hamilton. Preferring the policy of the latter he adopted the measures he recommended to carry it out, which happened also to appertain principally to Hamilton's department, and sustained him in their execution. In doing so he but sustained the measures of his administration and views which were either originally his own or made such upon conviction. Participating in the general opinion in favor of Hamilton's remarkable talents, having full opportunities to judge of his character, and confiding in his integrity, he extended to him, it is true, but with the purest motives, the degree of countenance and trust which established his extraordinary power and influence. Of the consequences, as well to his administration as to the country, we will have much to say hereafter. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that there ever was a period at which, or a transaction between them in which, their relative positions, rights, and duties were either forgotten or disregarded. It was well understood that the degree of weight to be attached to Hamilton's advice would depend upon the unbiased opinion which Washington himself should form of its soundness, influenced as he naturally would be, and always was, by a conviction of Hamilton's undoubted integrity, and his superior capacity for the decision of the question under consideration. There certainly never was a time when the slightest indication of a desire or design on the part of Hamilton to sway the mind of Washington in his official acts through his personal influence, or by any considerations which did not point distinctly and exclusively to the public good, would not have been peremptorily and indignantly repelled. It is evident from the whole tenor of Washington's life that no man ever lived who was more tenacious of self-respect, or more absolute in his reservation of the right to judge for himself of what belonged to his individual independence and personal dignity, or more prompt to resist every attempt to encroach upon either. No one understood his temperament in that respect better than General Hamilton, or would have been less likely to bring himself in conflict with it. Many indications of this understanding and of its effects are to be found in the accounts of their personal intercourse. The correspondence between them in regard to the discreditable use that Washington thought was being made in Congress of the sufferings and dissatisfaction of the army, already referred to, will be found to throw much light upon the sense of both as to the nature of their personal relations.

In June, 1793, Hamilton announced to President Washington, that considerations relative both to the public interest and his own dignity had brought his mind to the conclusion to resign his office at the termination of the close of the next session of Congress, and one of the reasons he assigned for delaying his final retirement to that period was to give Congress an opportunity to complete the investigation that had been instituted in regard to his official conduct. In March thereafter Hamilton informed the President that the committee charged to inquire, among other things, "into the authority of the President respecting the making and disbursement of the loans under certain acts of Congress," were about to meet. He sent to him at the same time, a copy of a paper he had presented to the committee, containing his opinion in relation to the proper limits of a legislative inquiry, but said that he deemed it expedient to fix in advance, with the President, on the true state of facts, of which he proceeded to make a statement, and requested the President to sanction it. General Washington soon thereafter made a declaration, in the form of a letter to Hamilton, of his recollections and opinions in respect to the matter. The latter, in reply, protested vehemently against the sufficiency of the declaration for the protection of his honor, and in a letter of considerable length, written with his usual ability, undertook to show that the character of the President's declaration would enable, his (Hamilton's) enemies to say that "the reserve of the President is a proof that he does not think that Hamilton's representations are true, else his justice would have led him to rescue the officer concerned even from suspicion upon the point."

The subject of loans and their frequency produced much excitement in Congress, and not a few calls upon the President and the Secretary of the Treasury for information in regard to them. It does not appear from the published works of Hamilton, that any answer was made by General Washington to his letter, or any other explanation of the subject; and no one, I think, can read the correspondence without feeling that the interpretation I give to its abrupt termination is the correct one, viz.: that Washington intended by his silence to reprove the freedom of Hamilton's letter. The resignation of the latter was deferred, with the approbation of the President, till January, 1795, when it was accepted in a letter from General Washington, containing an approval of Hamilton's official conduct as full as words could make it.[15]

The construction I have placed upon the character of their personal relations is also sustained by a correspondence between them in May, 1798, after Hamilton's retirement from office, which will be found in the sixth volume of Hamilton's "Works," at p. 289. Hamilton's object appears to have been to impress the mind of Washington with a proper sense of the dangerous crisis which had arrived in the condition of public affairs. His letter contains the following extraordinary paragraph: "I am sincere in declaring my full conviction, as the result of a long course of observation, that the faction which has for years opposed the government are ready to remodel our Constitution under the influence or coercion of France, to form with her a perpetual alliance, offensive and defensive, and to give her a monopoly of our trade, by peculiar and exclusive privileges. This would be in substance, whatever it might be in name, to make this country a province of France. Neither do I doubt that her standard displayed in this country would be directly or indirectly seconded by them in pursuance of the project I have mentioned."

In such a state of things it was impossible, he said, not to look up to him, (Washington,) and to wish that his influence might, in some proper way, be brought into direct action, and he added: "Among the ideas that have passed through my mind for this purpose, I have asked myself whether it might not be expedient for you to make a circuit through Virginia and North Carolina under some pretense of health, &c. This would call forth addresses, public dinners, &c., which would give an opportunity of expressing sentiments in answers, toasts, &c., which would throw the weight of your character into the scale of the government, and revive enthusiasm for your person which might be turned into the right channel."

Although Washington himself had been highly excited, by the course of events, against those to whom Hamilton attributed such treasonable designs, he was yet enabled by his good sense and by his knowledge of his countrymen to see at a glance the reckless extravagance of Hamilton's imputations, and he was doubtless dissatisfied with the uses, little creditable, which it was proposed to make of himself. His answer was a truly imposing production. It narrowed Hamilton's description of the portions of his countrymen whose course he deemed objectionable, virtually disapproved his charges by giving his own views of the extent of the danger which was to be apprehended from those whose patriotism Hamilton so grossly impeached, and placed the objectionable character of the course recommended to him in a striking light by showing that, his health never having been better, he would be obliged to commence his journey with the propagation of a falsehood.

Those who wish to read these letters will do well to look for them in Hamilton's "Works," as I am sorry to say that in Mr. Sparks's "Writings of Washington" the above extract from Hamilton's letter, containing his suggestion of an electioneering tour in the South by Washington, is omitted, and the whole paragraph in Washington's reply, in which he rejects and virtually rebukes it, suppressed. Neither is that part of Hamilton's letter given in which he denounces "the powerful faction which has for years opposed the government" with fanatical violence, (for his description of them deserves no other name,) whilst what Washington says upon that point is set forth with considerable aggravation. The results of those omissions and suppressions are not only to conceal the fact that such a proposition was made to Washington, and the grounds upon which he declined to adopt it, but his remarks, condemnatory of a portion of his fellow-citizens, are left to stand as voluntary denunciations of his own instead of, as they in truth were, modifications of the charges to which Hamilton had called his attention.

I have thus selected a few transactions between these great men, occurring at long intervals and embracing the entire period of their intercourse, to show that the influence which it must be conceded Hamilton exercised over Washington's conduct in the civil service of his country was not of the character which is commonly understood and intended by the imputation of it in the case of high official personages, and which necessarily involves the sacrifice of personal independence and, at least in some degree, of self-respect on the part of the person influenced.

Anecdotes of distinguished men are always interesting, although their accuracy is not so reliable, of course, as that of statements substantiated by their own writings. I was told of one, several years since, which struck me as throwing light upon this subject of the personal relations between Washington and his immediate associates and friends. So thinking, and especially as General Hamilton was in one sense a party concerned, I have recently obtained reliable testimony of its authenticity. Judge Fine, the writer of the following note, is well known in New York, and not a little in other States; he has been a State Senator, a Representative in Congress, a State Judge, &c., &c., and is regarded as a gentleman of the utmost probity and of superior intelligence. Judge Burnet, with whom I have served in the United States Senate, was also well known as a gentleman in whose statements entire confidence might be placed, and was, withal, a Hamiltonian Federalist, and never, politically, any thing else; in whose eyes, I am very sure, any statement disparaging to the memory of either Washington or Hamilton would have appeared a grave offense against morality and truth.

FROM JOHN FINE.

Ogdensburg, N. Y., April 30, 1857.

Hon. M. Van Buren:

Dear Sir,—During the session of the Presbyterian General Assembly in Cincinnati—May, 1852—I dined twice at the hospitable mansion of Hon. Jacob Burnet, now deceased. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1770, and was the son of Dr. William Burnet, who was in the medical service of his country through the Revolution.

Judge Burnet was acquainted with our early distinguished statesmen, and his conversation was rich in the recollection of their manners and characters. He related an anecdote of Washington which he had from the lips of Alexander Hamilton.

When the Convention to form a Constitution was sitting in Philadelphia in 1787, of which General Washington was President, he had stated evenings to receive the calls of his friends. At an interview between Hamilton, the Morrises, and others, the former remarked that Washington was reserved and aristocratic even to his intimate friends, and allowed no one to be familiar with him. Gouverneur Morris said that was a mere fancy, and he could be as familiar with Washington as with any of his other friends. Hamilton replied, "If you will, at the next reception evening, gently slap him on the shoulder and say, 'My dear General, how happy I am to see you look so well!' a supper and wine shall be provided for you and a dozen of your friends."

The challenge was accepted. On the evening appointed a large number attended, and at an early hour Gouverneur Morris entered, bowed, shook hands, laid his left hand on Washington's shoulder, and said: "My dear General, I am very happy to see you look so well!" Washington withdrew his hand, stepped suddenly back, fixed his eye on Morris for several minutes with an angry frown, until the latter retreated abashed and sought refuge in the crowd. The company looked on in silence.

At the supper which was provided by Hamilton, Morris said: "I have won the bet but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce me to repeat it."

Yours truly,

JOHN FINE.

Better proof of the truth of this statement could not, at this day, be expected or desired, and assuming it to be substantially true, the transaction, in my estimation, illustrates the character of the personal relations that existed between Washington and the two distinguished men, Hamilton and Morris, who, in respect to the management of public affairs, enjoyed perhaps his fullest confidence.

It is without doubt true, that in his intercourse with public men Washington observed an extraordinary degree of dignified reserve, and there is every reason to believe that this invariable habit was natural to him, and in no degree assumed for effect. We indeed know nothing of his character if he was at all capable of practicing the low device of hiding mental deficiencies under a wise look and a mysterious manner, which is sometimes the resort of meaner minds; but some such foundation (or some degree of it) for his habit must have been presupposed by the very unusual proceeding of Morris and it is quite impossible to believe that a man was in danger of being unduly influenced by his personal friends who could thus, by the power of his eye and the solemnity of his countenance, abash and punish the presumption of a man of Morris's standing, confessedly the sauciest man in his society, without causing the slightest confusion or excitement in the surrounding company.

He had nothing to conceal; he never desired to pass for more than he was worth, and there have been few men who formed a juster estimate of their own qualifications and capacities. In respect to military affairs he was evidently self-reliant, but not more so than was justified by his large experience and by the success which had crowned his efforts; but neither in that nor in any other department was he above receiving advice. In the intricate and complex affairs of civil administration, and in grave questions of constitutional construction and of national law, he felt that his experience and study had been much less than those of some who were associated with him in the public service, and he did not hesitate to recognize the difference. The principal aid he could bring to the settlement of such questions consisted of a clear head, a sound judgment, and an honest heart. These he never failed to apply after such questions had been prepared for decision by the previous examination and discussions of those of his cabinet whose attention had been more directed to them than his own. To secure these prerequisites he had, as I have said before, availed himself of the highest talent which the country afforded, without reference to distinctions of party.

This was the way in which he dealt with the grave questions that arose during the early stages of his administration, touching the numerous and complicated difficulties between us and our old friend and ally France, the reception and treatment of her ministers, Genet and his successor Adet, our assumption of a neutral position between European belligerents, the claims of France under the treaty of alliance and guaranty, the powers of Congress under the Constitution in relation to a national bank, and other subjects. In respect to the first of these matters he went so far as to consult Hamilton by letter on the question of his own personal demeanor at a Presidential levee toward the French minister, by whose conduct he had been offended. Whatever may be our regret at finding the confidential note asking that advice preserved to so late a period and now recklessly published, we may yet be satisfied that the step itself only affords additional evidence of the prudence and manliness of Washington's character. Few men stood less in need of advice in respect to his treatment of those who had given him offense in a matter purely personal; but it was natural for him to assume that the usages of diplomacy had settled rules for the action of the heads of government in such cases, of which he was not informed and in respect to which he was not ashamed to ask advice and information from proper sources. The constancy with which he invoked the aid of his cabinet upon all questions of the general character to which I have alluded, the unreserved manner in which he submitted them to their consideration, the delicacy with which he withheld his opinions until theirs were pronounced, and the spirit in which these were received, whether agreeing with or differing from his own, were above all praise. The information we possess of the details of those interesting proceedings is principally derived from Mr. Jefferson, and in all that he has written or in all that we have understood him to have said upon the subject no word of complaint or allegation at variance with the description here given of them is to be found. The idea that Washington ever sought to advance his objects by indirect or exceptionable means, or that he was actuated in his public measures by any other motive than an honest desire to promote the good of his country, seems never to have presented itself to Mr. Jefferson's mind, however erroneous he considered some of those measures. I spent some days with him, as I have elsewhere described,[16] two years before his death, and in the course of our repeated conversations he dwelt long and particularly upon these early transactions. I attributed the circumstance at the time to a desire, consistent with his very genial disposition, to gratify my curiosity, which was strong and not concealed; and it did not occur to me that he might have had other views, until, after my return home, I received his long letter avowedly written for the purpose for which I now use it, "to throw light on history, and to recall that into the path of truth when he was no more, nor those whom it might offend." In all that he said—and he spoke with perfect freedom of men and things—there was nothing inconsistent with the inference I have here drawn from his writings, but much to confirm it. The President's decisions upon cabinet questions were generally in favor of Hamilton's views; but that circumstance, very much to his credit, was not permitted to influence Jefferson's estimate of motives, but was regarded as the natural result of Washington's general sympathy with Hamilton's political opinions, and his confidence in his ability and integrity,—a sympathy, however, that never even approached the subject of a change in the existing form of our Government. That was a question as to which we have the best reason to believe that Washington would have never taken counsel except from his God and his conscience. He more than once declared to Jefferson "that he was determined that the republican form of our Government should have a fair chance of success, and that he would, if necessary, spill the last drop of his blood in its defense,"—a resolution, and the likelihood of its being sustained, that no one understood better than Hamilton.

By these repeated declarations to Mr. Jefferson, Washington only renewed to a civilian, whose character and position made them the more significant and impressive, a pledge which he had given to the world at Newburgh in the presence of the companions of his glory, yet with arms in their hands—that his name should never be added to the list of those who, having done much to emancipate a people from thralldom, were the first to blast their hopes and sacrifice their dearest interests at the promptings of selfish and unhallowed passions. They only proved that the flattery of the world during the ten intervening years had not corrupted his heart nor endangered the observance of a pledge which had derived its value from the character of the man who gave it, and on whose continued fidelity to the principle it involved the future liberties and welfare of his country were in so large a degree dependent.

It has always been believed that if Washington had inclined a favorable ear to the suggestions of the Newburgh letters, and in due season had given his name and influence to the counter-revolution they were intended to promote, it might have been made successful, and the system which the Revolution had overthrown might have been in some modified form restored. The disparity between the means which were at his disposal when propositions looking to such a result were thrown before the army at Newburgh and those within his reach when the declarations to Mr. Jefferson were made was not as great as might be supposed. At the former period it is true that the army of the Revolution was yet in the field, mortified, irritated, and indeed highly inflamed by the assumed injustice and ingratitude of their country, and in all probability prepared to follow his lead in furtherance of any views he might disclose which did not exceed the proposed limits; and the government to be overthrown was feeble, distracted, destitute of the sinews of war, and with but a slight hold upon the confidence and affections of the people. But it must also be remembered that the fervor and spirit of the Revolution—that intense hatred of royalty and monarchical institutions in any shape—which had roused the country to the contest, had as yet in no sensible degree abated amongst the masses, neither had they surrendered those sanguine anticipations of the blessings and advantages of republican government by which their hearts had been fortified and their arms strengthened for the struggle. That any attempt to bring about a counter-revolution under such circumstances, however popular the name and character of him by whom it was sanctioned, or however imposing the means by which it was sustained, would meet with a formidable opposition from the great body of the people was certain; and it was not easy to estimate the nature and extent of the resistance that might spring from the sources to which I have referred to confront an army which had so lately been the object of their unalloyed admiration and affection.

In the lapse of time between that period and the one at which Mr. Jefferson received the assurances he describes great changes had taken place in respect to all these matters, but, as I have said, not so adverse as might on first impression be supposed to the practicability of an attempt such as Washington referred to. The army of the Revolution had indeed been dissolved, and, in regard to the elements of which it was principally composed, beyond recall; but its officers, who, next to Washington, were capable of giving a tone and direction to the spirit of the troops, were alive, several of them again under his command, not a few about his person, and all filled with unabated admiration and affection for their idolized chief. If the account given us by Mr. Jefferson of the feelings he found most prevalent in our principal cities and at the seat of government on his return from France and in his progress to Philadelphia, to take upon himself the office of Secretary of State, is to be relied upon,—and many important contemporaneous occurrences corroborate his statement,—sad changes had taken place in the public opinion and feeling, of absorbing interest in this connection. "The President," he says, "received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The courtesies of dinner-parties given me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican governments was evidently the favorite sentiment." In his description of what he heard and saw there can be no mistake; but it is more than probable that changes among the people at large, upon the point spoken of, had not occurred to any thing like the same extent as among those portions of society to which he more particularly refers. Still it is undeniably true that from the influence of examples set by men in high places, from the difficulties under which the late government had labored, and from other causes, there had been at that moment a falling off from the true faith respecting governments and the administration of them which could now be scarcely credited. Add to these favoring circumstances the fact that the man, without whose countenance or coöperation no reactionary attempt would have been thought of even by the rankest advocate for monarchical institutions, was at the head of the Government to be overthrown, and the unquestioned object of the national confidence and affection, and the scheme, with his coöperation, was not likely to be then regarded as so impracticable as it would now certainly be considered. If such a work were at this day thought of by any man or men, however elevated in position or loved by the people, they could reap no other harvest than contempt and derision; but the single fact that Washington, who always handled serious matters seriously, and who was not liable to be alarmed by "false fires," treated the subject as he did, is sufficient to mark the difference between the condition of the country and of the public mind then and now.

But happily for us he was the same man in 1793 that he was in 1783. The principle upon which he acted upon both occasions was maintained through life without spot or blemish. The world believed, and for the best reasons, that he had refused to become the master of a people, whose liberties he had, through the favor of God and the fortitude and bravery of his countrymen, been made instrumental to establish, because he deemed it a higher honor to be their servant. It compared his acts with those of the Cæsars, of Cromwell, and of Napoleon, and glorified his name above that of any other mortal man. Such has been his reward for his faithfulness to the most sacred of human trusts—a reward and a fidelity unparalleled! Services have been rendered in every age which entitled the actors in them to the gratitude of their country, and to the thanks of mankind, but lacking the distinguishing feature of Washington's, their traces have become fainter with the lapse of time, whilst the remembrance of his unequaled merits grows more distinct and strong with each revolving year.

That he committed grave errors in giving his sanction, probably with considerable reluctance, to some of the measures of his administration, is certain. I say this not merely on the strength of my own poor opinion, but because such is the unreserved and irreversible judgment of the country, to which, under a republican government, the acts of all public men are subjected. But the assent which he gave to these measures was never, even by those most opposed to them, attributed to him as a fault, but was regarded only as an honest error of opinion; and hence the extraordinary political phenomenon of a party having its origin in the adoption by him of those measures expelling from power his immediate successor, who claimed to act upon his principles, placing those principles by protracted and diligent efforts under the ban of public opinion, and keeping them and their supporters there, in the main, for more than half a century—and yet being not a whit behind those who approved them in its respect for his name and character, because its members, in the eloquent language of Mr. Jefferson, "would not suffer the temporary aberration to weigh against the immeasurable merits of his life; and although they tumbled his seducers from their places, they preserved his memory embalmed in their hearts with undiminished love and devotion, and there it forever will remain embalmed in entire oblivion of every temporary thing which might cloud the glories of his splendid life."

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Mr. Van Buren, in making the above quotation from the Jubilee Address, doubtless relied upon his memory. "Both spurred to the rowels by rival and antagonist ambition," are the words used by Mr. Adams; but they, in fact, refer distinctly to Jefferson and Hamilton, though Mr. Madison's name is incidentally coupled with that of the latter in the same sentence. Eds.

[10] Sparks's Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol. III. p. 260.

[11] The italics are mine.

[12] See [Appendix].

[13] See [Appendix].

[14] Life of John Adams. The italics are my own.

[15] Hamilton's Works, Vol. IV. pp. 436, 510, 516, 562; Vol. V. pp. 74, 78.

[16] See [Note] on page 9.

CHAPTER III.

The Fact that Hamilton shaped and guided the Administrations of Washington and John Adams at the Time generally believed, now clearly established—Occasions when his Influence did not prevail—His Views and Purposes on entering the Cabinet—Some of his early Measures not authorized by the Constitution—True Character of that Instrument—Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury—His extraordinary Ability—His exaggerated Ideas as to the Embarrassments of the Country—Unfounded Alarm at that Period on the Subjects of the Public Debt and Public Revenues—Device for surmounting Constitutional Obstacles to Hamilton's Plan—Source of the Doctrine of Implied Powers—Foundation of Hamilton's Policy under his Construction of the Constitution—His Measures and the Effects he anticipated from them—The Funding System—The Weakening of State Authority a leading Feature of Hamilton's Policy—Further Aims and other "Stages of Improvement"—Hamilton's Report on Manufactures; its Ability, Spirit, and Political Effects upon its Author and his Party—Hamilton's Desire to build up in this Country a "Money Power" similar to that of England—Such a Power antagonistic to the Democratic Spirit of our People—The Real Object of Hamilton in endeavoring to transplant the System here—His temporary Success, and the Influence thereof in forming a School that survived him—His Motives and the Convictions upon which they were Founded.

THAT the policy of every administration of the Federal Government for the first twelve years of its existence was shaped, and the action of the Federal party guided, by the opinions and advice of Hamilton, was the general impression of the opponents of that party, and of course known to the leading Federalists. I have in another place[17] referred to the fact that Mr. Jefferson, in all my conversations with him in 1824, when he spoke of the course pursued by the Federal party, invariably personified it by saying "Hamilton" did or insisted thus; and, on the other hand, "the Republicans" held or claimed so and so; and that upon my calling his attention to the peculiarity of his expression, he smiled and attributed his habit to the universal conviction of the Republicans that Hamilton directed every thing. But the evidence they possessed of the truth of that impression was slight indeed in comparison with that which is now before the country. They had only the opinions given in the cabinet upon the important public questions that arose during that period, with the decisions of the President upon them and other public documents relating to them, and the general conjectural impressions on the minds of politicians, which can seldom be traced to any specific authority, in respect to the influence which governs the action of parties. The additions now made by the publication of Hamilton's private papers alone, and more especially when they are read in connection with those of other distinguished public men, prove those impressions to have been well founded, and to an extent far beyond what was even imagined in those days. I had read these papers with care, and, I hope, weighed their contents with candor, before I gave my assent to the declaration of Mr. Charles F. Adams upon the subject, quoted on p. 96 above. Many of General Washington's letters to Hamilton are marked "private," and some "private and confidential." It is not for me to decide upon the propriety of their publication, however much I may regret that the friends of the latter should have deemed that course necessary in respect to many of them. I content myself with a general reference to those which have a bearing upon the point under consideration, without making extracts or adding remarks explanatory of their tendency and effect. The letters between Washington and Hamilton more particularly in point will be found in the fifth volume of Hamilton's "Works," p. 106, in answer to letter at p. 12; and in the sixth volume, at pp. 19, 34, 35, 36, 52, 63, 64, 73, 90, 143, 156, 179, 197; those between Hamilton and members of Washington's cabinet, in the sixth volume, at pp. 29, 41, 67, 129, 238.

The steps taken by General Hamilton to shape the policy and to prescribe the action of Mr. Adams's administration were designed to embrace its entire course, and were carried into effect with but little respect for the wishes or opinions of its constitutional head. Three weeks had not elapsed after Mr. Adams's inauguration before General Hamilton wrote a letter to Mr. Pickering, Secretary of State, in which he expressed "his extreme anxiety that an exactly proper course should be pursued in regard to France," and suggested for his consideration, under seven different heads, what he thought that course ought to be. The Secretary was not requested to submit these views to the President, nor was any desire indicated that he should do so, nor any notice taken of the President in the letter further than may be found in the closing paragraph,—"The executive, before Congress meet, ought to have a well-digested plan and coöperate in getting it adopted."

If there was a single instance in which Hamilton, in his numerous letters of advice to the Secretaries, requested them to submit his views to the consideration of the President, it has escaped my observation. He was several times spoken of, but generally as to what he ought to do and what he might or might not be induced to do. The letters and papers bearing upon the subject will be found in the sixth volume of Hamilton's "Works," at pp. 213, 215, 218, 246, 250, 251, 252, 269, 278, 292, 294, 381, 444, 447, 471, 477, 484.

During the whole period Hamilton was regarded as the leader of the Federal party by most of the prominent members of that party,—Mr. Adams and a few of his friends excepted,—by those who represented the country abroad, by members of Congress, &c., &c. He was considered the fountain head of partisan authority, was freely applied to for advice, and gave it when it was asked, and quite as freely when it was not. He from time to time furnished members of Congress with specifications of steps proper to be taken, in one of which will be found suggested the passage of the celebrated sedition law. A few instances of his interference in this form will be found in Volume V. Hamilton's "Works," pp. 79, 86, and in Volume VI. at pp. 92, 94, 381, 383, 390.

The most important, if not the only occasions on which the influence of Hamilton over the action of the Federal party was exerted without success, were those of the formation of the Federal Constitution, and the support of Aaron Burr, by that party, for President, and for Governor of New York in 1801 and 1804. The first can scarcely be regarded, however, as such an occasion, because it was one in which party distinctions were merged in a compromise to which he himself ultimately assented. The others belong to the number of those occasions which, from time to time, present themselves in the history of all political parties, when the lust of power overrides the advice of their ablest and best friends. A party which has been long out of power, or which, having long held it, is threatened with imminent danger of losing it, can rarely resist the temptation when it is presented of securing success by dividing its opponents. Such a temptation is almost always strong enough to silence other objections, and Hamilton, on those occasions, shared the fate of party leaders who place their individual influence in opposition to the excited passions and short-sighted schemes of their party.

It was my fortune to hear Hamilton's great speech against the support of Burr for the office of Governor of New York by the Federalists of the State. I happened to visit Albany on the day appointed for the meeting, in company with William P. Van Ness, who was a few months afterwards Burr's second in his duel with Hamilton; and we lodged, as we were in the habit of doing, at Lewis's Tavern, the place where the meeting was to be held. Our room adjoined and communicated with the larger one in which the meeting took place; and after its organization, Mr. Van Ness threw open the door between the rooms, giving us a full view of the assemblage and exposing our presence to them. I mention these circumstances, which I recollect well, because it is my impression that it was very unusual at that day for politicians of one party to attend the meetings of the other. Mr. Van Ness and myself differed irreconcilably in respect to the support of Colonel Burr, but we were both members of the Republican party. The meeting consisted of about one hundred very respectable looking men, generally well advanced in life, and I remember many gray heads among them. Such was a gathering of the Federalists, in a city in which they had complete control, called together to hear the leader of their party, decidedly the most eloquent man of his day, a little more than fifty years ago. Quantum mutatus! My seat was so near to Hamilton that I could hear distinctly every word he said, and three impressions of the scene are still strong in my memory—his imposing manner and stirring eloquence, the obvious disinclination of the larger portion of his audience to be governed by his advice, notwithstanding the unbounded respect and love they bore him, and the marked indignation which often sparkled on the countenance of Van Ness whilst he was speaking.

Preferring monarchical institutions because he conscientiously believed that republican government could not be maintained "consistently with order," but satisfied that public opinion would not then admit of their establishment in this country, and indisposed for the reasons I have assigned to advocate the use of force for that purpose, yet expecting a crisis to arrive by which the opinions of the people would be changed, or the use of force be rendered justifiable, Hamilton entered the cabinet of President Washington determined to recommend a line of policy and the adoption of measures, which, whilst they would give the Government sufficient power to sustain itself against the democratic spirit of the country,—always the object of his dread,—would not be out of place when a resort to the English model, the object of his life-long choice, should have become necessary. If, in the execution of this policy, he had confined himself to the powers intended to be conferred upon the Federal Government by the Constitution, however much his conduct might have been censured on account of the anti-republican spirit it evinced, it would nevertheless have presented a very different aspect to posterity. But this was unhappily far from his intention. No one knew better than Hamilton that power to adopt some of the most important of the measures included in the chart he had devised for the action of the Federal Government was not designed to be granted to it either by those who framed, or by those who had adopted the Constitution, and that if there had been any reason to suspect that that instrument conferred such powers there would not have been the slightest chance for its ratification.

The Convention that framed the Constitution was well aware that the portion of its labors which related to the extent of the powers to be given to the new government was that upon which the public mind was most sensitive. It was not ignorant how far the apprehensions of the people upon that point had, through the entire period of our colonial history, prevented the establishment of any general government, and even the institution of one since the Declaration of Independence that was adequate to the necessities of the country. It knew that the powers given to Congress, particularly, would be the part of the Constitution to which the attention of the friends of the State governments would be directed, and upon which their opposition would be most likely to arise. Understanding these things, the Convention, with that good sense and prudence by which its entire course was so greatly distinguished, bestowed upon that branch of its business the utmost care and circumspection. Instead of describing the power given to Congress in general terms, as was done by Hamilton, in the plan submitted by him for its adoption,—viz.: "To pass all laws which they shall judge necessary to the common defense and general welfare of the Union,"—by which much would of necessity be left to the discretion of those who were to execute the power, the Convention specified the powers it intended to grant under seventeen heads, and described them in the simplest and plainest language, so that none should be at a loss to understand their import. So well was this design executed that no room for doubt or cavil remained to those who had no other desire than to arrive at the meaning of the framers of the Constitution.

Here the Convention might have stopped, for no implication could have been more unavoidable than that Congress should have the right to promulgate the rules they adopted by the enactment of laws. But as if aware of the uses which the able men from whom it apprehended opposition might make of the fact that a necessity of a resort to implication had been left by the instrument, it granted that power also in express terms. The principal part of that clause was moreover designed to constitute Congress the law-maker for the other great departments of the government, and to exclude the idea that they should also have the power of legislation.

Having thus, as it thought, guarded the work of its hands from misrepresentation or misinterpretation upon what it justly considered the most delicate and, if disregarded, the most vulnerable point, and having framed a Constitution with which all friends to republican principles ought to be satisfied, the Convention appealed with confidence to the ratifying conventions, and in doing so it did no more than justice to those bodies,—the instrument, thus guarded, was ultimately ratified by the votes of all the States.

If Hamilton, either in the articles of the "Federalist," to which he largely contributed, or on the floor of the Convention of Ratification, of which he was a member, had only countenanced that construction of the Constitution which he set up for it as Secretary of the Treasury, or if in any other way a suspicion had been produced that it was intended to give that instrument such a construction after its ratification, its rejection would have been inevitable. No one who has studied the state of the public mind at that period can for a moment doubt that this would have been the result. Such was the true character of the Constitution which the people of the United States intended to establish, and thought they had established, and such were the circumstances under which it was ratified.

Hamilton was placed by Washington virtually at the head of his administration; for, although the Secretary of State has, since that period, been regarded in that light, no such impression had then obtained, and in the government of Great Britain, to which attention had been most directed, it was otherwise. The Treasury Department wielded infinitely the most influence, and the superior confidence of the President in the incumbent decided the point of priority, at least for the time being. Perhaps the only question in respect to Hamilton upon which there has never been any diversity of sentiment was in regard to his talents. That they were of the highest order was the opinion of all who knew him. Jefferson scarcely ever spoke of him in his letters to Madison without admonishing him of the extraordinary powers of his mind, and in one of them he says,—"Hamilton is really a Colossus to the Anti-Republican party; without numbers he is a host in himself. In truth when he comes forward there is nobody but yourself (Madison) that can meet him." When I was Minister of the United States in England I saw much of Prince Talleyrand, then French Ambassador at the same Court, and enjoyed relations of marked kindness with him. In my informal visits to him we had long and frequent conversations, in which Hamilton, his acquaintance with him in this country, and incidents in their intercourse, were his favorite themes. He always spoke with great admiration of his talents, and during the last evening that I spent with him he said that he regarded Hamilton as the ablest man he became acquainted with in America,—he was not sure that he might not add without injustice, or that he had known in Europe.[18] With such advantages, greater at that time certainly than the public service of any country afforded to any other man, it is difficult to conceive of a more commanding position than that which he occupied. With a mind that dwelt habitually upon great ideas, the political career of such a man could not fail to produce important results for good or for evil. It must not, however, be forgotten, for it is a truth which exerted a powerful influence on his whole course, that he was at the same time, as his friend Morris described him, "more a theoretic than a practical man." It was natural that a mind so easily excited and an imagination so vivid as Hamilton's seem always to have been, should have formed exaggerated ideas as well of the extent and character of the embarrassments under which the country was laboring, as of the causes from which they sprang. These were undoubtedly very serious, very difficult to be dealt with; and it is equally true that they had been greatly aggravated by, if they were not, as he was very willing to consider them, mainly attributable to the defects of the former federal system. But there was some misapprehension, and no small degree of exaggeration upon these points. We are indeed an imaginative people, and the transfer of our fathers to a new country and climate doubtless accounts for the great difference in this respect between ours and the cool, deliberate, and unimpressible temperaments and character retained by those in Europe who have the same descent. It was not to have been expected that a country so young as our own, and as unprepared, could have passed through a seven years' war with a powerful nation without involving itself in grave embarrassments; but when the extent of those embarrassments, the difficulties of dealing with them, and the then resources of the country are now regarded, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the grounds for the alarm then so prevalent upon the subjects of the public credit and the public revenues were greatly overrated.

Our whole foreign debt amounted to but twelve millions of dollars, payable by installments, the last of which did not become due until seven years thereafter. The domestic debt amounted to forty-two millions, for the payment of which the Government was under no obligation to make immediate provision, amounting in all to fifty-four millions, and the annual expenses of the Government were estimated at less than six hundred thousand dollars. This was the full extent of federal responsibilities. Hamilton assumed some fifteen millions of the State debts, but that was an act entirely voluntary, neither asked nor desired by the States, unconstitutional and inexpedient, and caused as much unpopularity to his administration of the department as, perhaps more than, any act by which it was distinguished.

To meet these responsibilities the new Constitution had placed in the hands of the Federal Government the power of collecting a revenue from imposts and taxes, to borrow money on the credit of the United States to any amount which the public service might be deemed to require, and to regulate commerce, both foreign and domestic,—a power from the exercise of which great improvements in the trade of the country were justly anticipated. In aid of these resources we possessed a population of some three and a half millions, as active and enterprising as any on the face of the earth, just emerging from the discouragements of a defective government, and bounding with hope into all the varieties of business and labor, for which a fertile soil and a salubrious climate afforded the most ample facilities. The comparison may be, and doubtless by many will be, regarded as inappropriate; but with the views—simple but practical—which experience has taught me, I cannot but think that if one were instituted between the liabilities of the United States in 1790 and those of the State of New York in 1842,—between the means at the disposal of each, and the extent to which the credit of each had been depressed,—it would be found that speedier and more substantial relief, and under less eligible circumstances, was obtained for the latter by the simple and direct efforts of those unpretending financiers, Michael Hoffman and Azariah C. Flagg, than was accomplished for the United States by the manifold schemes that were resorted to at the period of which we are speaking. Certain I am that if a similar comparison were made between the difficulties which the Treasury Department of the Federal Government had to contend with in 1790, and those which it encountered in 1837, combined with the powerful and active hostility of the United States Bank, the former would lose much of the apparent importance with which tradition, the influence of a great name, and the rhetorical applauses of modern political orators, of the Federal school, have invested them.[19]

The condition of things at the period we are considering was such as to promise the greatest advantages from the simplest, though persevering and well-considered, employment of the means then for the first time placed at the disposal of the General Government.

If it had fortunately so happened that General Washington had placed Hamilton at the head of the State Department, in which the theories which he appears to have studied from his earliest manhood—he having, though anonymously, at the age of twenty-three, sent to Robert Morris, then a member of Congress, the first plan for a bank of the United States, accompanied by an elaborate examination into monetary and financial affairs generally, and those of the United States in particular—would not have been called into action, and if he had appointed Madison to be Secretary of the Treasury, the fate of his administration and the effects of its measures in respect to parties would have been very different. The practical character of Madison's talents and disposition had been exemplified in the whole of his previous career, and was conspicuous in his course on the subject of revenue. On the second day after the votes for President and Vice-President under the new Constitution had been canvassed, and twenty days before the inauguration of President Washington, he commenced operations in the new House of Representatives, of which he was a member, to enable the new government to avail itself of the advantages secured to it by the Constitution in regard to revenue.

To this end he introduced a bill to impose impost and tonnage duties by which he believed all the objects of a national revenue could be secured without being oppressive to the country, and pursued his object day in and day out, until his bill became a law. A prompt application of the means thus acquired to the regular payment of the interest on the public debt, with a resort to others authorized in express terms by the Constitution if the impost had not proved adequate to all the objects of a national revenue, as he believed it would, and a discreet use of the power to borrow exerted in the ordinary way, accompanied by proper efforts to keep public expenditures at the lowest point consistent with an efficient public service, would in all probability have been the sum of the measures which Mr. Madison would have deemed necessary to place the public credit at the highest desirable point and to discharge all the existing obligations of the Government. They constitute all the means employed by the department now, and for several years past have proved abundantly sufficient to meet infinitely higher responsibilities, and there is in truth no conclusive reason to be found in the history of the period referred to why they would not have performed the same offices then.

But these simple and usually efficacious measures did not come up to Hamilton's standard. They fell short of what he thought necessary to the actual wants of the public service, and still more so in regard to what he deemed due to the efficiency, stability, and dignity of the Government. To secure all of these objects he desired to build up a financial system which would approach to an equality with the English model after which he designed to construct it; and he believed that it was in that way only that the public necessities could be amply provided for, the public credit placed at the point which he wished it to occupy, and the respectability of the Government be properly consulted. But this plan required the adoption of measures which, it is not too much to say, he knew that neither those who framed nor those who adopted the Constitution intended to authorize. This difficulty, which to ordinary minds would have appeared insurmountable, was overcome by a device either of his own creation or, as I have for many years believed, the suggestion of another.

The subject of internal improvements by the Federal Government, in regard as well to the power of the latter over the subject as to the expediency of its exercise, was repeatedly and very fully discussed in Congress, whilst Mr. Rufus King and myself represented the State of New York in the Senate of the United States. Upon the question of power we concurred in opinion, he adhering to that of Hamilton—the construction of such works being one of the very few powers which the latter did not claim for the Federal Government. Notwithstanding this agreement the subject was often canvassed between us in respect to the arguments advanced, from time to time, in Congress, by others. On one of those occasions, he told me that on Gouverneur Morris's visit to the city of New York, soon after his return from the Federal Convention, he was congratulated by his friends on the circumstance that the Convention had succeeded in agreeing upon a Constitution which would realize the great object for which it had been convened, and that Morris promptly and, as Mr. King seemed to have understood it, significantly replied—"That will depend upon the construction that is given to it!" Mr. King did not state any inference he had drawn from the remark and seemed to me indisposed to prolong the conversation upon that point, and, knowing his habitual reserve in speaking of his old associates, I yielded to what I believed to be his wish not to be questioned, although I was at the moment strongly impressed by the observation. I referred to it afterwards in a speech I made in the Senate upon the powers of the Government, which was extensively published. At a subsequent period this ready answer of Morris would not have attracted notice; but spoken before even a single officer had been elected to carry the Constitution into effect, and of course before any question as to its construction had arisen, it was to my mind, and, as I believe, to the mind of Mr. King, evidence of a foregone conclusion to claim under that instrument powers not anticipated by the great body of those who framed it, or by those who had given it vitality by their approval. The facts that this reply had been so long remembered by Mr. King, a prominent and sagacious member of the Convention, and repeated under the circumstances I have detailed, were calculated to create such an impression. It gave, at least to my view, a decided direction in respect to the source from whence the doctrine of implied powers originated. I had found it difficult, with the opinions I had formed of Hamilton's character and dispositions, to reconcile the first suggestion of such a policy with them. I could believe that, in accordance with the principles which he avowed, he might be not unwilling to carry it into effect when it was suggested to him; but that, after advancing his opinions in a manner so frank and fearless, notwithstanding their well understood unpopularity, he should be found mousing over the words of the Constitution for equivocal expressions, containing a meaning intelligible only to the initiated, and by such methods preparing to spring a trap upon the people, was, it appeared to me, utterly foreign to his nature and habits. Neither was I disposed to believe that he would, at the very moment of signing, have denounced the Constitution as inadequate to the purposes of good government if he had then regarded it as possessing the very extensive powers he afterwards assisted in claiming for it, nor would he have subsequently declared it to be "a frail and worthless fabric." His complaint upon the latter occasion would have been against the construction that had been given to it, and not against the Constitution itself.

Morris, whose ability no one will question, was a constant attendant upon the Convention, took an active part in its proceedings throughout, was on most of its committees and the working-man of the last,—the duties of which were "to revise the style of, and arrange the articles which had been agreed to by the House,"—and the second and last draft of the Constitution was reported by him. But it is now comparatively unimportant with whom the latitudinarian construction of the Constitution, which has caused so much strife and contention and so little advantage to any person, party, or interest, originated. Hamilton, at least, adopted it as the corner-stone of his constitutional views, and, by his genius and the weight of his official influence, gave it a temporary success.

For reasons which will appear in the sequel, I will confine myself to a simple statement of the questions that were raised in respect to the construction of the Constitution, and a few illustrations of their character. That instrument, as has already been stated, contained a specific enumeration of the powers given to Congress, and the reasons have been also described for this particularity. The measures to which they referred were known by appropriate and distinct names, and applied to definite and well understood objects, and they have been ever since known and understood as they were then. This enumeration of the powers of Congress was followed, as we have seen, by a grant of authority to that body to "make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers."

Under this winding-up clause of the Constitutional enumeration of the powers of Congress, the true sense and object of which was so easy to be understood, Hamilton claimed for that body the power of authorizing by law measures of a substantive character, described by well understood names, altogether different from those employed in the enumeration, such as the incorporation of banks, &c., &c., if Congress should declare itself of the opinion that the execution of the enumerated powers would be materially aided by any such measures, reserving to Congress the right of deciding whether the proposed measure would be sufficiently useful to create the "propriety and necessity" required by the Constitution, and placing in its breast alone the final decision of every such question.

The objects of the Constitution, as set forth in its preamble, were "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The first of the powers of Congress, contained in the enumeration of them in the Constitution, is in the following words:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, and imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"—and then follow all the other powers, to borrow money, &c.

The terms "common defense and general welfare," used in this enumeration, were taken from the Articles of Confederation, where they stood thus: "All charges of war, and all other expenses that shall be incurred for the common defense and general welfare, and allowed by the United States, in Congress assembled, shall be defrayed out of a common treasury, which shall be supplied by the several States in proportion," &c. Under those Articles they were never understood as a substantive grant of power to the Continental Congress, or as authorizing that body to ask from the States moneys, and to expend them for any purposes other than those which the Articles afterwards specified. By the new Constitution the manner of getting the money was happily changed from State requisitions to taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to be expended, however, when so obtained, for the common defense and general welfare, as before, and the Constitution then, like the Articles of Confederation, says upon what objects it is to be expended. The Convention which framed and those which ratified the instrument, of course, understood the terms as used in the same sense. But after the Constitution was ratified, without an intimation of such a construction having been whispered before, it was contended by many that the manner in which the terms common defense and general welfare were used in it authorized Congress to adopt any measure which that body might deem calculated to subserve the common defense and general welfare of the country, whilst others, less reckless, limited the power they claimed for Congress to the application of money to any such measures. Among the former, as to the clause in the preamble, Hamilton placed himself, insisting that, under the grant of powers to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying its given powers into execution, Congress had the power to adopt every measure of government not expressly denied to it or exclusively granted to the States, which it should deem useful in the execution of its enumerated powers, however variant in its name, object, and general understanding; and under the clause quoted from the preamble an unlimited power of taxation, and an equally unlimited authority to expend the money so raised upon objects which it might think would promote the common defense and general welfare. He thus claimed for Congress substantially all legislative power, save such as was expressly prohibited to it, given exclusively to the States, or denied to both, falling but little if any thing short of the power he assigned to the national legislature in his propositions submitted to the Convention, which that body would not even consider, viz.: "to pass all laws which they shall judge necessary to the common defense and general welfare of the Union."

When the advocates of these doctrines were asked to remember the state of public opinion at the time when the Constitution was framed; the jealousy which then existed and had for so many years existed, of the power of the General Government; the fact that the apprehensions which had been entertained had so long prevented the calling of a Convention; the extreme improbability that the Convention, under such circumstances, could have intended to give to Congress the power to pass any law it might be pleased to regard as useful in the execution of an enumerated power, whatever might be its bearing upon the State governments; to add to the power to make peace and war and to raise armies and equip fleets; to make the power to raise money unlimited by authorizing its expenditure upon any measure Congress might assume to be conducive to the common defense and general welfare, and the absurdity of the supposition that the grant of such far-reaching and absorbing powers would have been conferred in so obscure a way, and that the Constitution would have passed the scrutiny of so many State Conventions without its ever having been intimated in any way that there lay concealed in its general terms grants of power which, if but suspected, would have set the country in a blaze, and would have produced instant refusals to ratify on the part of most of the States,—when such considerations were opposed to those bold pretensions, the only reply was, the Constitution must be construed by its letter, and we cannot look behind it or beside it for the means of doing so truly.

To the answer that extraneous matter has always been allowed by all laws, state and national, to be used in the interpretation of the highest acts of sovereignty, such as the construction of treaties between sovereign powers, of patents issued under the great seal, of acts of Parliament, of Congress, and of State legislatures, and in respect to the latter class the old law, the mischief and the proposed remedy to be taken into consideration in searching for the meaning of such acts, in the construction of wills, deeds, &c., &c., the only rejoinder was that a Constitution was an exception to those rules; in short that a Constitution was the sole exception to the application of the maxim which has grown out of the observation and experience of mankind,—qui hæret in literâ hæret in cortice.

The nearness of the time when the Constitution was framed to the period of which we are speaking gave to this construction its most repulsive aspect. The members of the Federal Convention were yet on the stage of action, and many of them participators in the measures that were brought forward on the strength of it. The remonstrances of those who dissented on the ground of their own knowledge that the Convention did not contemplate such a construction were disregarded, not because they did not represent the truth but because the objection was inadmissible upon principle. This was emphatically the case in respect to the establishment of a national bank, the pioneer of constitutional infractions, the "wooden horse" from whose sides the most violent assaults have been made upon the Constitution. It was a fact well remembered by the members, and subsequently confirmed by the publication of the journal of the Convention, that a motion was made to give to Congress power to grant acts of incorporation, as facilities to public improvements. This fact was brought to the notice of President Washington by Mr. Jefferson, in his opinion upon the bank question: "It is known," said he, "that the very power now proposed as a means was rejected as an end by the Convention which formed the Constitution; a proposition was made to them to authorize Congress to open canals, and an amendatory one to empower them to incorporate, but the whole was rejected, and one of the reasons of rejection urged in the debate was that then they would have power to erect a bank, which would render the great cities, where there were prejudices or jealousies upon this subject, adverse to the reception of the Constitution."

This communication was made directly to General Washington, who had been President of the Convention, and made to defeat a measure of Hamilton's, who never failed to turn every proposition of his opponents against themselves when it was in his power to do so. It remained unnoticed, and its truth was therefore virtually admitted. Upon the very first question, then, which arose under the Constitution upon Hamilton's construction, and that one first also in importance, the well-known intentions of the Convention were directly and intentionally overruled.

President Washington gave no reasons for his decision in favor of the Bank Bill. I will hereafter state the principle upon which I think it fair to presume that he acted. Hamilton was influenced by views which governed his conduct in every constitutional question that arose in his day. He did not, because he could not with any show of propriety, deny that the Constitution ought in strictness to be construed according to the intentions of those who made it; but believing, doubtless sincerely, from the beginning, that, so construed, it was insufficient for the purposes of good government and must prove a failure, he designedly gave it construction, in cases where he deemed that course necessary to the public interest, in opposition to what he knew to have been the intentions of the Convention. The objection that this was setting at naught the declared will of the people had but little weight with him. He believed that a majority of the Convention would have been content to incorporate the powers he now claimed in the Constitution if they had not been deterred by the fear that it would not be ratified, and for the opinion of a majority of the people he made proverbial his want of respect. He held them incapable of judging in such questions. He was as anxious as any man to promote their happiness and welfare, but he thought it a political necessity that this could only be done in despite of themselves; no man could possibly be less prone than he was to the employment of sinister means in private life, and yet he held them excusable in dealing with the people; he thought nothing effectual and salutary could be done with them without appeals to their special interests, without exciting their passions and turning them to the side of the Government. This was the vicious feature of his political creed, and proofs of its existence could be multiplied almost without end; but, as the subject will unavoidably and often present itself, I will content myself here with an extract from a letter written by him to his friend Morris, after the great public transactions in which he had been engaged were principally ended. The last letter to Morris, from which I have quoted, spoke of the past; this looks to the future, and shows the lengths to which he was yet, as he had always been, willing to go. The letter is dated April 6, 1802, in which, after complimenting Morris upon his efforts "in resisting the follies of an infatuated administration," he thus points his friend to the work before them:—

"But, my dear sir, we must not content ourselves with a temporary effort to oppose the approach of evil. We must derive instruction from the experience before us, and learning to form a just estimate of things to which we have been attached, there must be a systematic and persevering endeavor to establish the fortune of a great empire on foundations much firmer than have yet been devised. What will signify a vibration of power if it cannot be used with confidence or energy, and must be again quickly restored to hands which will prostrate much faster than we shall be able to rear under so frail a system? Nothing will be done until the structure of our national edifice shall be such as naturally to control eccentric passions and views, and to keep in check demagogues and knaves in the disguise of patriots."[20]

This speaks for itself, and certainly nothing could be more superfluous than an attempt to elucidate its import and extent. It deserves to be remembered that this was in the thirteenth year of the Constitution, now described as a "frail system," and which, in a previous letter to Morris, was called a "frail and worthless fabric." Hamilton enforced his construction, but upon that point we will say no more until we arrive at a period when it was exposed to a scrutiny by which it was forever exploded. Looking to the construction of the Constitution which I have described for his authority to adopt the measures he deemed necessary to establish his policy, he advanced in his work with his accustomed industry and perseverance. The outlines of that policy were substantially portrayed in his speeches in the Federal Convention, in his letter to General Washington from New York during the session of that body, and in a paper written by him after its adjournment, and now published by his son,—all of which have already been referred to. It was founded on a conviction, doubtless sincere and at all events not liable to change, that great danger to the federal system was to be apprehended from the hostility of the State governments, and on a consequent desire to reduce their power and importance; on an immovable distrust of the capacities and dispositions of the masses; and on an unshaken belief that the success of the new government could only be secured by assimilating its action to that of the English system as nearly as that could be done without too gross, and therefore dangerous, violation of the well understood and most cherished sentiments of the people.

The power wielded by the English ministry, in Parliament and in the country, springs from influences derived from various sources, mainly from the funding system, from the Bank of England, from connection with the East India Company, and from ability to confer government favors on individuals and classes in the shape of offices and dignities in church and state, of titles, pensions, bounties, franchises, and other special privileges of great value. Its power in these respects is derived from the crown in virtue of its prerogatives, aided by acts of Parliament where these are required by the Constitution.