American Experiment (19 page)

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 human 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 dispensed 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.

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.”

Jefferson was still in Paris during those early events; he even helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man. He was optimistic. “I have so much confidence in the good sense of man,” he wrote a friend, “that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force; and I will agree to be stoned as a false prophet if all does not end well in this
country.…Here is but the first chapter of the history of European liberty.” He was not uncritical; he sent home acute observations on France’s halting progress toward self-government.

John Adams had a more measured reaction. He hoped that the French Revolution, he wrote a friend, would favor “liberty, equity, and humanity.…” But he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling,” he wrote another friend, Dr. Price. “I know that Encyclopedists and Economists, Diderot and D’Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau have contributed to this great event more than Sidney, Locke, or Hoadley, perhaps more than the American Revolution; and I own to you I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.…” Adams could not disguise his bias in favor of the English. Nor could Hamilton: friendship with Britain was at the heart of the Secretary’s foreign policy, not least because of his admiration for English legal and economic practices.

“We think in English,”
Hamilton said. But the cause of France, Republicans said, was the cause of
man.

Soon, however, the cause of man seemed to falter in France. The rise of the Jacobins, the execution of the king and queen, the endless devouring of new cadres of leaders, the horrifying rounds of the tumbril, produced a revulsion among some Americans. “When will these savages be satiated with blood?” John Adams demanded. Jefferson deplored the fate of the Terror’s victims, but there were higher stakes—the “liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest.” Others cared not a whit about the guillotining of the king and queen—they even celebrated it. At a Philadelphia banquet the head of a pig, representing Louis XVI, was passed around while the feasters, decked out in caps of liberty, mangled it with their knives. At a tavern between Chester and Wilmington the innkeeper exhibited a sign showing a decapitated female, her dripping head lying by the side of the trunk, until the public forced him to withdraw this grim effigy of the late queen.

Thus the Terror drove a wedge between Americans, and France’s war on Britain and Spain drove the wedge in deeper. The impact of the war stretched to the West Indies, to the Mississippi, to Canada, to the southwest frontier, to the posts on the northwest border still occupied by the British—areas of cardinal importance to the Americans. As American interests were touched and American attitudes enflamed, fierce disputes over foreign policy became linked with domestic disputes.

With dismay Washington observed the rising feeling. He had, above all, wanted to preside over a united government that could transcend “local prejudices, or attachments,” and “party animosities.” Before the end of his first term he was noting the “internal dissensions” that were “harrowing
and tearing our vitals.” To Hamilton and Jefferson he sent separate pleas for mutual forbearance and compromise. All he got for his pains was a complaint from his Secretary of State that Hamilton was intruding into foreign policy, a charge that his rival’s policies were directly opposite to his own, and an indication of intent to resign; and from his Secretary of the Treasury, a response that it was he—Hamilton—who was the “deeply injured party,” a charge that Jefferson’s “machinations” were subverting the government, and an offer that
both
he and Jefferson resign.