American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  THE DEADLY PATTERN

  George Washington seemed to be a relaxed and happy man at the ball given in his honor on the occasion of his sixty-second birthday, ten days before the second inaugural. With military bearing and punctilio, he marched in with Martha Washington at his side, to the airs of “The President’s March.” He liked the Philadelphia belles who were there, he liked the words “Long live the President” in Latin or French they had woven into their hair bandeaux, and he liked his old friends from Revolutionary days, among whom he moved easily, remembering old campaigns and humorous war stories. Political talk he brushed aside. Precisely at the moment of the ball’s end, he and the First Lady rose, the band struck up a reprise of “The President’s March,” and the couple paraded out, amid cheers.

  The President had good reason to feel content. He had wanted above all to nurture and symbolize a united nation, and he seemed to have done so, in appointing a balanced Cabinet, in his travels, and always in furbishing his carefully shaped image of benign authority. He had followed up his northeastern tour with a journey to the South in the spring of 1791, where as usual he had been showered with endless tributes but where he had also talked with farmers and woodsmen in the taverns along the way. He concluded: “Tranquility reigns among the people.”

  The man who took the oath of office ten days later, however, seemed a changed man, almost an angry man. He proceeded to the Senate alone in a coach, entered the chamber with minimal ceremony, gave an address of 136 words in which he said that if he knowingly violated the Constitution he should be impeached and upbraided, took the oath of office, and returned to his residence. The reason, rumor had it, was an attack in Freneau’s National Gazette on the birthday ball as a “monarchical farce” promoted by sinister types close to the President and opposed to freemen’s liberties. More likely, the attack reminded Washington of more basic divisions in the country—of the party and factional rivalries that had broken out even within his official family, the hostility to Hamilton’s excise tax out in the hinterland, the battles between the first Americans and the settlers that erupted fitfully along the long frontier to the west.

  Increasingly the West was exciting the interest of the public and posing problems for the government. Settlers were moving toward the Ohio and the Mississippi, with the help of the land speculators. About the time of Washington’s first inaugural certain citizens of Pennsylvania and New Jersey were receiving, on a confidential basis, an “invitation” that read:

  “Several Gentlemen who propose to make settlements in the Western Country mean to reconnoitre & survey the same the ensuing winter. All farmers, Tradesmen &c of good characters, who wish to unite in this scheme & to visit the Country under my direction, shall be provided with boats & provisions for the purpose, free of expence, on signing an agreement.…The boats which will be employed on this expedition are proposed to be from 40 to 60 feet long, to row with 20 oars each, & to carry a number of Swivels. Each man to provide himself with a good firelock or rifle, ammunition & one blanket or more if he pleases. Such as choose tents or other conveniences must provide them themselves. Every person who accompanies me on this undertaking shall be entitled to 320 acres of land, at 1/8 of a dollar per acre.… All persons who settle with me at New Madrid, & their posterity will have the free navigation of the Mississippi & a Market at New Orleans free from duties for all the produce from their lands, where they may receive payment in Mexican Dollars for their flour, tobacco &c.…”

  Buffalo and other game would be plentiful in the area, it was promised; settlers would be helped in clearing ground, building a house, and obtaining livestock; schoolmasters would be engaged and ministers encouraged to come. The new city would be built on a high bank of the Mississippi, near the mouth of the Ohio, in the “richest & most healthy part of the Western Country.”

  This kind of advertisement was helping swell a vast movement of population over the Appalachians and into the West. Amid intense state jealousies and fierce political combat, the original states had been adjusting to the pressures of western expansion. Before and after the Revolution, Virginians and Marylanders were moving as far as the forks of the Ohio, joining Pennsylvanians and others. New Englanders and New Yorkers were also moving west. After the Revolution the streams of settlers swelled to torrents.

  State lands were reorganized as people legislated with their feet. In 1783 Virginia had agreed to cede its lands north of the Ohio, provided it could reserve for itself a district to satisfy military grants made during the Revolution. Virginia had held back its land south of the Ohio, which would be organized as the state of Kentucky. In 1785 Massachusetts gave up its claim to a stretch of land crossing the (present) states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and the following year Connecticut ceded some of its western land, withholding a tract in northern Ohio—the Western Reserve—for the relief of Connecticut victims of destruction of property by the British. Other states too let go of their lands, which gave to the Confederation—and later to the United States—a huge public domain.

  Into this domain swarmed the settlers, crowding the roads year after year, especially during the months of spring to fall, moving singly, by families, or by groups. Usually it was a family, its belongings packed into one covered wagon, leading a horse or cow or mule. Others traveled by two-wheeled carts, still others on horseback or even on foot. With luck they could boat down rivers, but sometimes luck failed, as overloaded craft upset in rapids or “savages” shot arrows from the high banks. Preceding, accompanying, or following the migrants were other possible dangers—claim jumpers, squatters and fugitives from justice, merchants and other middlemen looking for quick profits in monopolistic situations, and land sellers and speculators not unwilling to lure poor farmers and mechanics west with grandiose promises of cheap land, rich harvests, and big money. On the face of it, the “invitation” to New Madrid looked like such a real estate scheme.

  But James Madison put a far more ominous gloss on the document when he sent a copy of it to George Washington late in March 1789. “It is the most authentic & precise evidence of the Spanish project that has come to my knowledge.” The Spanish project! For decades Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Englishmen had contended for control of the lower Mississippi. For years Americans on the southwest frontier had chafed under Spanish control of the lower Mississippi and had resented the Northeasterner who seemed to care so little about settlers’ rights in the Southwest. Patrick Henry, trying to mobilize Kentuckians against the 1787 Constitution, charged that the new federal government would surrender navigation of the Mississippi to Spain in exchange for concessions that would mean little to the frontiersmen. James Wilkinson, a Revolutionary War general, actually accepted Spanish gold in return for information and other services to the Spanish. By the end of the 1780s the Southwest was a conspiracy theorist’s heaven, alive with intrigue, suspicion of the new federal government, and plots for secession. Land speculators were believed to be aiding and abetting the conspiracies.

  The question of the Southwest was one more flammable issue in the politics of the 1790s, and one more stimulus to party rivalry, with Republicans generally more sympathetic to southwestern fears and hopes than were Federalists based in the Northeast. The Southwest intensified rather than transcended political conflict. And the Southwest—indeed the whole frontier from Florida through the Southwest and up through the Northwest to the Canadian border in the Northeast—involved another “foreign power” who aroused among some Americans the deepest anxieties and hatreds of all—the American Indian.

  For years the main device for dealing with this “foreign power” had been the treaty, as in the case of the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws in the South in the mid-1780s. “The principle was adopted of considering the Indians as foreign and independent powers, and also as proprietors of lands,” John Quincy Adams wrote later. “As independent powers, we negotiated with them by treaties; as proprietors, we purchased of them all the land which we could prevail on them to sell; as brethren of the hu
man race, rude and ignorant, we endeavored to bring them to the knowledge of religion and of letters.”

  This sentiment was typical of the ambivalent policy of Americans toward Indians—paying for the Indians’ land as they ousted them, uplifting them as they uprooted them. Washington and other Federalist leaders rejected the policy many frontiersmen called for—all-out conquest of the Indians. They chose policies of negotiation, a show of liberality, guarantees of protection from encroaching whites, trade, and education. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by Congress in one of its final and most important actions under the Confederation, stated that the “utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent….” and “laws founded in justice and humanity shall, from time to time, be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.…”

  Noble words—and genuinely meant by many of those who uttered or legislated them—but the frontiersmen and settlers hardly heard and rarely heeded these words; their actions were based on practical needs for more land, on fear and suspicion of the “redskin,” on the latest scalping incident, no matter who provoked it. Inevitably, the fierce combat that followed led to bigger battles.

  It was the same old deadly pattern of white advance, Indian defense, white retaliation. In 1790 Kentucky militiamen and federal regulars burned deserted Indian villages near the Maumee River in Ohio; later a combined force of Chippewas, Miamis, Shawnees, Ottawas, and other tribes, under the leadership of Chief Little Turtle, slaughtered six hundred men commanded by General Arthur St. Clair. Vengeance was delayed when Washington invited fifty chiefs of the Six Iroquois Nations, old allies of the British but also friendly to the Americans, to journey to Philadelphia for a parley. The whites wished to awe the Indians with their wealth and numbers, satisfy some of the minor Indian grievances, and persuade them to go as emissaries to Little Turtle. After a month of being wined and dined in the best Philadelphia style, the guests were flattered but not deceived. Their chief, Red Jacket, suggested that since the red men were being manipulated by both Britain and the United States, only an agreement between the two powers would bring order to the frontier. But he did promise to try to soothe his western brethren.

  That task fell to Captain Hendrick Aupaumut, a Mohican chief who had served under Washington at the Battle of White Plains. To the Delawares, one of Little Turtle’s allies, Aupaumut pictured Washington’s policy of friendship. Since the Americans now had their own liberty, “now they endeavor to lift us up…from the ground, that we may stand up and walk ourselves.” The British, on the other hand, would just cover them “with blanket and shirt every fall,” so that they would remain “on the ground and could not see great way.”

  Little Turtle’s followers, however, already felt uplifted enough by their victories, and what they could see close at hand was not liberty but more encroachment. They would not yield. Then came the vengeance: Three years after St. Clair’s disaster, General Anthony Wayne decimated Ottawas, Shawnees, and other Indians at the Battle of the Fallen Timbers. Next year a thousand red men from thirteen tribes gathered at Fort Greenville, Ohio, and ceded over 25,000 square miles of eastern and southern Ohio for $25,000 in goods and a $9,500 annuity.

  Whether standing fast and dying, retreating west, or remaining to barter and be educated in white ways, Indians might well wonder how they were making out on the other side of the American experiment. They may have read a hint of the future on the medal that General Washington had conferred on Red Jacket: it depicted the general in martial array presenting a peace pipe to an Indian chief while, in the background, a white man broke the land with a plow.

  News of Wayne’s victory came to President Washington not in Philadelphia but twenty-five miles to the northwest, where he was conducting his own war, not against red men but against whites. With him was Alexander Hamilton, who more than any other man was the cause of the trouble.

  As part of the Secretary’s plan to fund the national debt, Congress had in 1790 imposed a small excise tax on the production of liquor, as well as on such other genteel indulgences as snuff and sugar loaf. From the start, anti-Federalist congressmen had denounced the whiskey excise as “odious, unequal, unpopular, and oppressive” and predicted that it would “convulse the Government.” Even though Washington had moved to ease Hamilton’s tax, Pennsylvania farmers west of the Alleghenies were not to be mollified. They had long been “intoxicated with liberty,” a French traveler had noted, and their definition of liberty was freedom from the tax collector. This particular levy they loathed. With the Mississippi closed off to western trade, the farmers made more profits from shipping wheat and rye over the mountains in liquid form rather than bulk. The excise had to be paid in cash, which was so scarce in the western counties that jugs of home brew were used for currency. Worst of all, since the tax was levied at the still head, farmers had to pay tax on what they saved for their own refreshment. In practice, the home brewers were masterly at foiling the tax men, whether state or federal, but it was the principle of the thing. They defied the federals.

  For George Washington, it was the principle of the thing too. Defiance in the West brought back unhappy memories of the revolt of Shays’s men hardly seven years before. Why had the federal government been established, if not to put down defiance of law and order? The President suspected further that local “Democratic” societies, composed of admirers of the French Revolution and foes of Freemasonry, Alexander Hamilton, and the Society of the Cincinnati, were inspiring resistance. In fact, events were not marching to a plan but awaiting the inevitable incident, and this came in the form of an eruption of gunfire, and two deaths, at the home of a local excise collector. Disorder spread as mobs destroyed excise offices.

  Federalists in Philadelphia greeted the disturbances with fear and rage, demanding that the “white Indians” be put to the sword. Seeing an opportunity to discredit and destroy Democratic societies, Hamilton called for immediate military action. The President concurred; if “the laws are to be so trampled upon with impunity,” he said, “and a minority, a small one too, is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government.” He called up the militia of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey and was vastly relieved when thirteen thousand men responded to the order to put down their fellow citizens. The President himself took to the field—and with him rode the original excise man himself, target of the hatred of rebel and republican alike, Secretary Hamilton. Washington had proceeded as far as Trappe when the good news arrived from General Wayne.

  This great show of force was mounted on the assumption of a real threat from the whiskey rebels. Certainly there was much talk—and occasional examples—of tarring and feathering local tax collectors, smashing the stills of those who paid the excise, and burning the barns of particularly obnoxious officials. But the Whiskey Rebellion was never a true rebellion. It was oratory, mass meetings, and whiskey itself that largely kept the rebels going. While there was talk that rebel leader David Bradford, the popular prosecuting attorney of Washington County, might lead the Monongahela counties to independence, the rebels were scattered, their leadership divided. Moderates counseled moderation, and some property holders joined the revolt mainly to deflect it from any further violence. The strength and the involvement of the Democratic societies as a whole proved to have been much overrated.

  For there was no civil war in Pennsylvania, no fighting to speak of. Like the Shaysites of old, Bradford and other leaders fled, leaving the rest of the population meekly to submit to a new loyalty oath. Some rebels were arrested, two were convicted of treason—and Washington pardoned them both. A triumphant President wrote to a friend that the Europeans would now see that “republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination: on the contrary, that under no form of government, will laws be better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually disp
ensed to mankind.” Order was necessary to liberty.

  Washington was as angry as he was relieved. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Burgess Ball, he fulminated at the Democratic societies—could “any thing be more absurd, more arrogant, or more pernicious” than these “self-created bodies” telling a representative government what to do? In his next annual address to Congress he denounced the role of “certain self-created societies” for actions smacking almost of sedition. Republicans were indignant; they had largely followed a hands-off attitude toward the rebellion, though Jefferson had derided the campaign against it as “an armament against people at their ploughs.” When Jefferson had been a member of the Cabinet, he had warned Washington that an attack on the Democratic societies would make the President appear as “the head of a party instead of the head of the nation.” Now Madison saw Washington’s speech to Congress as putting him “ostensibly at the head of the other party.”

  That was the last thing General Washington wanted. And if ever there was a case for the presidency as a symbol of unity and nonpartisanship, it was in the mid-1790s, as the European powers squared off and drew the New World into war.

  DIVISIONS ABROAD AND AT HOME

  In September 1792 the French revolutionaries proclaimed the French Republic. Four months later they executed their king. Ten days after that they declared war on Great Britain, Spain, and Holland. The news of these events fell like hammer blows on American opinion. Since 1789 the sons and daughters of the American Revolution had been watching the French revolutionaries with ardent hope and sympathy. Lafayette had even sent Washington the key to the Bastille. To old soldiers in taverns and hostelries, it seemed sublime that the people who had aided the American Revolution should embark on their own, and indeed they took credit for exporting the idea across the Atlantic. “Liberty,” proclaimed the Boston Gazette, “will have another feather in her cap.” Speakers broke into song and verse as they rapturized the revolutionary upsurge in Paris and the start of “freedom’s glorious reign.”