V.

able to the government; among whom, as if to draw off CHAPTER Hamilton's attention, he particularly named his neighbor George Mason, who had taken so decided a part in op- 1792. position to the Federal Constitution.. Hamilton's answer to these charges, not found among Washington's papers, is, perhaps, no longer extant. Much as we may regret the loss, it is still sufficiently easy, even without such assistance, to perceive in Jefferson's charges a great distortion of facts, large drafts upon an excited imagination, and unnecessary alarms at chimerical dangers.

As to the funding of the public debt, there seems too much reason to suspect that, while it was only the method and incidents that were professedly found fault with, it was, in fact, the substance of the thing that gave the real offense. What was more natural than that those who resisted so pertinaciously the payment of their own private debts—and there was scarcely an anti-Federal state in which laws for that purpose had not been enacted-should be inclined to look on the public creditors with equal disfavor? It is by no means easy to reconcile with any principles of candor or justice Jefferson's extreme eagerness to reap all the fruits of the discontent which the funding of the public debt had occasioned, and his efforts to stimulate that discontent, with that wish for the payment of the debt and anxiety to preserve the public faith which at the same time he professed to feel.

The idea that the burden of paying the public debt fell with disproportionate weight on the South, because the original creditors, or, as Jefferson expressed it, "the owners of the debt," were chiefly in that section, while the present holders of it were mostly at the North, can only be explained as one of those exaggerations into which the people of all sections naturally fall, and of which party politicians so generally avail themselves to stir up

V.

CHAPTER local discontents. So far as the Revolutionary debt grew out of certificates for military services, since New En1792. gland furnished more men than all the other states put together, her original share of that part of the debt must evidently have been in the same proportion. So far as the debt grew out of actual loans, the records of the loanoffices proved a great preponderance of Northern lenders. Most of the remainder of the debt originated in certificates for supplies furnished to the army; and that the great bulk of these supplies had been drawn from New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, was a matter beyond any dispute. That a considerable proportion of the certificates originally issued at the South had passed into Northern hands was undoubtedly true; but this was only a natural and inevitable result of the course of trade, and of the fact that the few capitalists of the country able to wait the leisure of the United States were chiefly to be found in the Northern section. So far as respected personal benefit to individuals, the North, no doubt, had a greater interest than the South in the funding of the public debt; but in the great national benefits of that measure, the re-establishment of credit, public and private, and the impulse thereby given to every branch of industry, all sections of the Union shared alike. But these were benefits which the Republican opposition had neither the sagacity to perceive, nor, had they perceived them, the candor to recognize.

The idea that the amount of the debt had been swelled by adding together the debtor and creditor side of accounts, had reference, it is probable-but what reference exactly it is not easy to tell-to the assumption. of the state debts, a measure of which, at this day, no one will dispute either the justice or the wisdom. The notion that the transfer of the debt to foreign holders

V.

would be an injury to the country, that the interest of CHAPTER the debt so transferred could only be paid by the exportation of coin, and that all capital invested in stocks was 1792. so much withdrawn from commerce and agriculture, evinced no very great knowledge of finance or political economy; nor was this horror of foreign creditors very compatible with the idea of paying off the debt in two thirds of the time by borrowing at two thirds of the interest, which only could have been done, if at all, by converting the domestic into a foreign debt.

These carping criticisms on the funding system-the established privilege of opposition-were indeed of very little consequence compared with the more serious charges urged by Jefferson, and of which he must be taken to be the responsible endorser, if not the original author, of the existence of "a corrupt squadron deciding the voice of the Legislature," and under the control of a monarchical party, who intended to avail themselves of the majority thus obtained to overthrow the existing republican system, and to establish in its place a monarchy after the British model. Who were the individuals compos ing this corrupt squadron? In what particular way had they been corrupted? To the like charges of corruption and corrupt influence, reiterated in Freneau's Gazette, it had been well replied by the Federal newspapers that, until the individuals intended were pointed out, until specific cases of corruption were stated, this accusation, hanging unfixed over the heads of some fifty members of Congress-that being the number, both houses included, of those who had sustained the funding system throughout-must be regarded as an impotent piece of malice, contemptible alike for its falsehood and its cowardice. To this reasonable challenge, repeated afterward on the floor of the House, no reply was ever

CHAPTER made; and this charge of corruption, affecting the honor V. of some of the most distinguished men whom the nation 1792. has ever produced, was left to rest on vague suggestions,

that several members of the first Congress were large holders of the public debt, and that two or three of them, among whom Sedgwick and Smith, of South Carolina, were afterward specified in private letters or by irresponsible pamphleteers, had gained money by buying up stocks in anticipation of the adoption of the funding system.

But it was not merely as to the funding system that corruption was charged to exist. The funding of the public debt was not an end, but a means. The same corrupt squadron by whom that measure had been carried, by means of that very measure had been purchased up generally to do the bidding of the Secretary of the Treasury-such was the charge-having sold themselves, in fact, as tools to a conspiracy for overturning the Federal Constitution, and setting up a monarchy in its place. Under this strange hallucination of a monarchical conspiracy for the destruction of the Constitution on the part of those by whom its adoption had been secured, from which the country was only saved by the republican zeal and virtue of himself and his anti-Federal friends and supporters, Jefferson labored to his dying day; and to impose a like delusion on posterity seems to have been one chief object of the carefully prepared collection of papers and letters which he left behind him for publication.

Of Jefferson's political bigotry we have already had occasion to speak. With a very acute intellect, he had in his constitution a strong tinge of fanaticism. His imagination so far predominated over his reason as to lead him to see things, not as they were, but as he hoped,

V.

wished, suspected they might be; and, as is very apt to be CHAPTER the case with men of a fanatical turn of mind, there was. nothing bad which he did not suspect of those who did 1792. not share in and subscribe to all his dogmas. Suspicions and facts he confounded together into one indistinguishable mass. The mere figments of his imagination or the circulating scandals of the day seemed to him more actually facts than the very facts passing before his eyes. This quality of mind was inconsistent with sound judgment, but it admirably qualified him for a party leader in excited times, bringing him into close sympathy with that great mass who feel keenly, guess wildly, reason little, and believe unhesitatingly.

What Washington thought of this pretended monarchical conspiracy, and of the general course pursued by the opposition, of which Jefferson began now to be the recognized head, sufficiently appears by a conversation which took place at Philadelphia shortly after Washing- July 10. ton's return from Mount Vernon, of which Jefferson has preserved a memorandum in his Ana. Not having reached Washington at Mount Vernon, Jefferson's letter had followed him back to Philadelphia. In an interview on the subject of it, Washington remarked, "that, with respect to the existing causes of uneasiness, he thought that there were suspicions against a particular party which had been carried a great deal too far. There might be desires, but he did not believe there were designs to change the form of government into a monarchy. There might be a few who wished it in the higher walks of life, particularly in the great cities, but the main body of the people in the Eastern States were as steady for Republicanism as in the Southern. Pieces lately published, and particularly in Freneau's paper, seemed to have in view the exciting opposition to the government, and