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The order of Cincinnati will be placed in the command of it.”
Republican fear of the prospect of hereditary power and the Federalist anxiety about the strength of slaveholders.
The treaty, which President Washington received on Saturday, March 7, 1795, appeared to concede too much to London, essentially codifying the economic ties between the two nations that Hamilton had been nurturing for years.84
As Jefferson read the treaty, he saw that Hamilton had successfully managed to legislate through Jay’s diplomacy. “A bolder party-stroke was never struck,” Jefferson told Madison.93 “For it certainly is an attempt of a party, which finds they have lost their majority in one branch of the legislature, to make a law by the aid of the other branch and the executive, under color of a treaty, which shall bind up the hands of the adverse branch from ever restraining the commerce of their patron-nation.
The treaty was nevertheless narrowly ratified. Washington believed, as did a bare two-thirds majority of the Senate, that the pact was preferable to going to war.
The price of this diplomatic and political victory, however, was high, for the approval of the Jay Treaty by the Federalists gave the nascent Republicans a palpable and energizing sense of purpose.
6. Office-hunters, willing to give up principles for places. A numerous and noisy tribe.
bestir
Vice President Adams and New Hampshire senator John Langdon in which Adams allegedly said that “no government could long exist, or that no people could be happy, without an hereditary first magistrate, and an hereditary senate, or a senate for life.”9 Campaign literature read: “Thomas Jefferson is a firm REPUBLICAN—John Adams is an avowed MONARCHIST.
Whispers of possible secession to form a confederacy of northern states appeared in The Connecticut Courant in November and December 1796—whispers that hinted at a larger source of tension.
When Jefferson went on to win the presidency four years later, his Federalist critics would disparage him as the “Negro President” because of his dependence on the three-fifths clause.
Madison replied with a six-point case against it.35 The key ones: Since things were currently cordial between the two men, “it deserves to be considered whether the idea of bettering it is not outweighed by the possibility of changing it for the worse.
“Considering the probability that Mr. A.’s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter … there may be real embarrassments from giving written possession to him of the degree of compliment and confidence which your personal delicacy and friendship have suggested.
“The second office of this government is honorable and easy,” Jefferson said.52 “The first is but a splendid misery.
Shays’s rebellion
Compare and contrast Shay's Rebellion against today's tea party.
Still, the monarchists (in this account) had been—and were—counting on the failure of the new government.3 Monarchy would then step into the breach.
three French officials—known as X, Y, and Z
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ_Affair
The sedition bill criminalized free speech, forbidding anyone to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame … or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.”16
Of Irish descent, Lyon was attacked by Federalists as “a seditious foreigner” who “may endanger us more than a thousand Frenchmen in the field.
Jefferson was distraught. “I know not which mortifies me most, that I should fear to write what I think or my country bear such a state of things,
Lyon himself found strength and vindication in the conviction. He reported to jail, sought reelection to the House from prison, and won.
A correspondent reported that Hamilton had led a louder cheer and toast to George III than to John Adams at a dinner of the St. Andrews Club of New York.
Hyperbole was the order of the day. For Republicans, Adams was an aspiring monarch. Americans, one Republican wrote, “will never permit the chief magistrate of the union to become a King instead of a president.”12 For Federalists, Jefferson was a dangerous infidel. The Gazette of the United States told voters to choose GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT or impiously declare for “JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD.”13
Jefferson harbored a real hope in the good sense of the people. His belief in democracy was not a pose, but a conviction: Educate the public, he believed, and by and large a majority would find its way to the right place.
Hamilton, however, believed there was little to lose. “If we must have an enemy at the head of the Government,” Hamilton said, “let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.
Judiciary Act of 1801
The most significant decision Adams made in these months was to name John Marshall, his secretary of state, as chief justice of the United States, giving a Jefferson foe lifetime tenure as head of one of the three branches of the federal government.
“Mr. Jefferson is a man of too much virtue and good sense to attempt any material change in a system which was adopted by our late beloved Washington, and has been since steadily pursued by Mr. Adams, and which has preserved our country in peace and prosperity for 12 years, during which period almost the whole civilized world has been deluged in blood,” William Fitzhugh, a Virginia Federalist who had been close to George Washington, wrote in January 1801.
An evangelical minister, William Scales, took a more optimistic view: “Many declare you an atheist,” Scales wrote to Jefferson, “but be it so, I much rather a liberal atheist should govern the people, than a bigoted saint, who knows not God.”71
Marshall shared the old Federalist fear that Jefferson would “excite the resentment and hate of the people against England” but “without designing to proceed to actual hostilities.
though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect,
Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him?
“The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists: With the latter I am not disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.
“More confidence is placed in me than my qualifications merit, and I dread the disappointment of my friends.
He liked quiet but could not stand silence.
when we reflect how difficult it is to move or inflect the great machine of society, how impossible to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right, we see the wisdom of Solon’s remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear, and that will be chiefly to reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it, and improve some little on old routines.
According to Virginia’s William Branch Giles, “The ejected party is now almost universally considered as having been employed in conjunction with G.B. in a scheme for the total destruction of the liberties of the people.
“Luckily for me I have been in Turkey, and am quite at home in this primeval simplicity of manners.
He wanted to make sure they concurred in something else, too: that the naval forces were authorized—by executive, not legislative, authority—to “search for and destroy the enemy’s vessels wherever they can find them.
General Washington and Mr. Adams opened every session of Congress with a speech. Mr. Jefferson delivers no speech, but makes his communication by a written message.
The world did feel more Jeffersonian than Hamiltonian in the closing days of 1801.
“It is not the last stone in the Bastille, nor is it of any great consequence as an article of worth; but as a free-will offering, we hope it will be received,” said the citizens of Cheshire.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.
Benjamin Rush had helped inform Jefferson’s views on church and state in 1800.
present juncture, he would say to the clergy who are now so active in settling the political affairs of the world: ‘Cease from your political labors your kingdom is not of this world.
Christianity disdains to receive support from human governments.
Judiciary Act of 1801,
“There is certainly a most serious schism between the Chief and his heir apparent; a schism absolutely incurable, because founded in the breasts of both is the rivalship of an insatiable and unprincipled ambition,
“To the union of all honest men.
