V. Looking only to fundamentals, no two classes in the CHAPTER community might seem more naturally antagonistic than the small, self-working agricultural proprietors of the 1792. Northern States, and the possessors of large plantations cultivated by slaves. There were, however, some accidental circumstances which brought these two classes into close sympathy, giving rise to relations which produced a remarkable effect on the politics of the United States, through the traditionary influence of party names and associations, prolonged, in some degree, even to the present time. The expenses and efforts of the Revolutionary war had left not only the states and the confederacy, but individuals also, greatly burdened with debt. Almost all the small land-holders had been obliged to struggle at once against tax-gatherers, state and national, and their own creditors. It was this state of things which in Rhode Island, where these embarrassed land-holders had obtained control of the government, had produced the paper money tender laws, and in Massachusetts, where they had failed to do so, the insurrection, headed by Shays. But this pecuniary embarrassment was not confined to the small land-holders. It extended in almost equal degree to the greater part of the Southern planters, who, besides their more recent debts, found hanging over their heads, in consequence of the powers given to the general government to enforce the treaty with Great Britain, that large mass of ante-Revolutionary claims on the part of English merchants already more than once referred to. To meet this general state of indebtedness, paper money had been freely issued in Georgia and the Carolinas, and stop and tender laws enacted. In Virginia, this precaution against creditors was carried still further, being made to assume a permanent form by a repeal, toward the end of the V. CHAPTER present year, of the old law common hitherto to Virginia and all the other states, by which lands were liable to be 1792, seized on execution. For that seizure was substituted the aristocratic English writ of eligit, the creditor being reduced to a choice between a process against the person or movable goods of his debtor, or against the rents and profits of one half his lands, possession of that half to be delivered to him, by appraisement, for a period nominally sufficient to pay the debt. But from the over-estimate always made in such cases, this law became nearly equiv alent, in practice, to an exemption of lands from execution. It was on this common ground of pecuniary distress that so many, both of the aristocratic planters and of the democratic farmers, had united against the Federal Constitution, which they justly regarded as the work of the creditor party, intended and likely to lead to a strict enforcement of contracts, both public and private. A common reluctance to pay, a common dread of taxation, a common envy of the more fortunate moneyed class, whose position had been so palpably improved by the funding of the public debt-though little more so, in reality, than the position of every body else-made both farmers and planters join in those clamors against the funding system, into which Jefferson and his co-operators, not content with a mere re-echo of them, sought to infuse a new bitterness by dark charges of corruption and alarming insinuations of anti-Republican designs. Added to this was another feeling, which served to bind this sympathy still closer, and to give to it a more permanent character-a common feeling of hatred toward Great Britain, more intense in these two classes than in any others, and soon roused into vigorous action as well by domestic events as by the progress of the V. French Revolution, and the war between France and CHAPTER England growing out of it. Pending the Revolutionary struggle, every art had been used to inflame the public 1792. mind against Great Britain, and accordingly as men were more or less vindictive, or more or less under the operation of aggravating or soothing causes, this temporary inflammation had produced results more or less chronic. As a general rule, the educated and reflecting are the first to rise above the excitements of passion, whether particular or national. The lawyers, chief leaders of the conservative party, by the very nature of their studies, soon softened toward the country whence flowed the jurisprudence of the common law. The great religious sects were drawn by powerful sympathies toward their counterparts in Great Britain. Pecuniary interest and the intercourse of trade soon effaced from the minds of the merchants almost all traces of the recent struggle. But the agricultural masses of the North continued to hate with the fixed intensity natural to a rural population, which does not easily change, and to this feeling by far the larger portion of the Southern people, of all classes, very heartily responded. The war, during its latter years, had been almost exclusively confined to the South, and had been carried on there in a very revengeful and ferocious spirit. Virginia had been repeatedly ravaged; Georgia and the Carolinas had been made to suffer under the effects, not only of invasion from abroad, but of Indian and civil war. In the bitter hatred which these ravages had left in many breasts, Jefferson himself very warmly participated. One of the invasions had taken place while he was governor, and the public calamities occasioned by it had not only driven him to resign his office, but had even threatened to subject him to the mortification of an impeachment; he CHAPTER had a very narrow escape from personal capture; one of V. his plantations had been ravaged, and a large number of 1792. slaves carried off. Thus, by his own personal experience, was Jefferson strongly impelled to sympathize with a Jefferson, indeed, saw in himself-such are the delu sions to which ardent temperaments are liable-and he labored to persuade Washington to see in him the head of a republican party struggling against the corrupt machinations of Hamilton and others, who were seeking to impose a monarchical Constitution on the country. The simple fact of the matter seems to have been, as, indeed, is apparent from several parts of his own letter, quoted above, that he was merely the head of a party, chiefly Southern, exceedingly angry at not having been able to dictate the management of federal affairs, hostile to the funding system, and resolved to make some alterations in it. The reasons which he held out to Washington for consenting to a re-election were, in brief, the danger of a desperate assault on the government by the Northern Federalists, should they fail to obtain a majority in the new Congress, and the still greater danger, if they did obtain such a majority, of a secession from the Union on the part of the Southern States. But as the V. question at this moment seemed to lie between the con- CHAPTER tinuance of Washington in office and the successorship of some Northern federal man, either Adams or Jay, 1792. Jefferson might also have strong private as well as public reasons for the advice which he gave. Though Hamilton does not seem to have looked upon matters in quite so alarming a light, he was not less urgent with Washington still to maintain his place at the helm. "It is clear, says every one with whom I have conversed," so he wrote shortly after Washington's de- July 30. parture for Mount Vernon on a second visit, "that the affairs of the national government are not yet firmly es tablished; that its enemies, generally speaking, are as inveterate as ever; that their enmity has been sharpened by its success, and by all the resentments which flow from disappointed predictions and mortified vanity; that a general and strenuous effort is making in every state to place the administration of it in the hands of its enemies, as if they were its safest guardians; that the period of the next House of Representatives is likely to prove the crisis of its permanent character; that if you continue in office, nothing materially mischievous is to be apprehended; if you quit, much is to be dreaded; that the same motives which induced you to accept originally ought to decide you to continue till matters have assumed a more determinate aspect; that, indeed, it would have been better, as regards your own character, that you had never consented to come forward, than now to leave the business unfinished, and in danger of being undone; that, in the event of storms arising, there would be an imputation either of want of foresight or want of firmness; and, in fine, that on public and personal accounts, on patriotic and prudential considerations, the clear path to be pursued by you will be again to obey the voice of |