A School History of the United States by John Bach McMaster

totally dissolved.

Prompt action in so serious a matter was not to be expected, and Congress put it off till July 1. Meanwhile Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston were appointed to write a declaration of independence and have it ready in case it was wanted. As Jefferson happened to be the chairman of the committee, the duty of writing the declaration was given to him. July 2, Congress passed Lee’s resolution, and what had been the United Colonies became free and independent states.

[Illustration: Campaigns of 1775-1776]

[Illustration: %The Pennsylvania Statehouse, or Independence Hall[1]]

[Footnote 1: From the _Columbian Magazine_ of July, 1787. The tower faces the “Statehouse yard.” The posts are along Chestnut Street. For the history of the building, read F. M. Etting’s _Independence Hall._]

%138. Independence declared.%–Independence having thus been decreed, the next step was to announce the fact to the world. As Jefferson says in the opening of his declaration, “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another … a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” It was this “decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” therefore, which now led Congress, on July 4, 1776, to adopt the Declaration of Independence, and to send copies to the states. Pennsylvania got her copy first, and at noon on July 8 it was read to a vast crowd of citizens in the Statehouse yard.[1] When the reading was finished, the people went off to pull down the royal arms in the court room, while the great bell in the tower, the bell which had been cast twenty-four years before with the prophetic words upon its side, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” rang out a joyful peal, for then were announced to the world the new political truths, “that all men are created equal,” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” and “that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

[Footnote 1: The declaration was read from a wooden platform put up there in 1769 to enable David Rittenhouse to observe a transit of Venus.]

[Illustration: The royal arms]

%139. The Retreat up the Hudson.%–A few days later the Declaration was read to the army at New York. The wisdom of Washington in going to New York was soon manifest, for in July General Howe, with a British army of 25,000 men, encamped on Staten Island. In August he crossed to Long Island, and was making ready to besiege the army on Brooklyn Heights, when, one dark and foggy night, Washington, leaving his camp fires burning, crossed with his army to New York.

Howe followed, drove him foot by foot up the Hudson from New York to White Plains; carried Fort Washington, on the New York shore, by storm (November 16, 1776); and sent a force across the Hudson under cover of darkness and storm to capture Fort Lee. But the British were detected in the very nick of time, and the Americans, leaving their fires burning and their tents standing, fled towards Newark, N. J.

%140. The Retreat across the Jerseys.%–Washington, meanwhile, had gone from White Plains to Hackensack in New Jersey, leaving 7000 men under Charles Lee in New York state at North Castle. These men he now ordered Lee to bring over to Hackensack, but the jealous and mutinous Lee refused to obey. This forced Washington to begin his famous retreat across the Jerseys, going first to Newark, then to New Brunswick, then to Trenton, and then over the Delaware into Pennsylvania, with the British under Cornwallis in hot pursuit.

[Illustration]

%141. The Surprise at Trenton.%–Lee crossed the Hudson and went to Morristown, where a just punishment for his disobedience speedily overtook him. One night while he was at an inn outside of his lines, some British dragoons made him a prisoner of war. The capture of Lee left Sullivan in command, and by him the troops were hurried off to join Washington. Thus reenforced, Washington turned on the enemy, and on Christmas night in a blinding snowstorm he recrossed the Delaware, marched nine miles to Trenton, surprised a force of Hessians, took 1000 prisoners, and went back to Pennsylvania.

The effect of this victory was tremendous. At first the people could not believe it, and, to convince them, the Hessians had to be marched through the streets of Philadelphia, and one of their flags was sent to Baltimore (whither Congress had fled from Philadelphia), and hung up in the hall of Congress. When the people were convinced of the truth of the report, their joy was unbounded; militia was hurried forward, the Jerseymen gathered at Morristown, money was raised; the New England troops, whose time of service was out, were persuaded to stay six weeks longer, and, December 30, 1776, Washington again entered Trenton.

Meantime Cornwallis, who had heard of the capture of the Hessians, came thundering down from New Brunswick with 8000 men and hemmed in the Americans between his army and the Delaware. But on the night of January 2, 1777, Washington slipped away, passed around Cornwallis, hurried to Princeton, and there, on the morning of January 3, put to rout three regiments of British regulars. Cornwallis, who was not aware that the Americans had left his front till he heard the firing in his rear, fell back to New Brunswick, while Washington marched unmolested to Morristown, where he spent the rest of the winter.

%142. The Capture of Philadelphia.%–Late in May, 1777, Washington entered New York state. But Howe paid little attention to this movement, for he had fully determined to attack and capture Philadelphia, and on July 23 set sail from New York. As the fleet moved southward, its progress was marked by signal fires along the Jersey coast, and the news of its position was carried inland by messengers. At the end of a week the fleet was off the entrance of Delaware Bay. But Lord Howe fearing to sail up the river, the fleet went to sea and was lost to sight. Washington, who had hurried southward to Philadelphia, was now at a loss what to do, and was just about to go back to New York when he heard that the British were coming up Chesapeake Bay, and at once marched to Wilmington, Del.

[Illustration]

It was the 25th of August that Howe landed his men and began moving toward Washington, who, lest the British should push by him, fell back from Wilmington, to a place called Chadds Ford on the Brandywine, where, on September 11, 1777, a battle was fought.[1] The Americans were defeated and retreated in good order to Chester, and the next day Washington entered Philadelphia. But public opinion demanded that another battle should be fought before the city was given up, and after a few days he recrossed the Schuylkill, and again faced the enemy. A violent storm ruined the ammunition of both armies and prevented a battle, and the Americans retreated across the Schuylkill at a point farther up the stream.

[Footnote: 1 Among the wounded in this battle was a brilliant young Frenchman, the Marquis de Lafayette, who, early in 1777, came to America and offered his services to Congress as a volunteer without pay.]

Congress, which had returned to Philadelphia from Baltimore, now fled to Lancaster and later to York, Pa., and (September 26, 1777) Howe entered Philadelphia in triumph. October 4, Washington attacked him at Germantown, but was repulsed, and went into winter quarters at Valley Forge.

[Illustration]

%143. New York invaded.%–Though Washington had been defeated in the battles around Philadelphia, and had been forced to give that city to the British, his campaign made it possible for the Americans to win another glorious victory in the north. At the beginning of 1777 the British had planned to conquer New York and so cut the Eastern States off from the Middle States. To accomplish this, a great army under John Burgoyne was to come up to Albany by way of Lake Champlain. Another, under Colonel St. Leger, was to go up the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario to Oswego and come down to Mohawk valley to Albany; while the third army, under Howe, was to go up the Hudson from New York and meet Burgoyne at Albany. True to this plan, Burgoyne came up Lake Champlain, took Ticonderoga (July 5), and, driving General Schuyler before him, reached Fort Edward late in July. There he heard that the Americans had collected some supplies at Bennington, a little village in the southwestern corner of Vermont, whither he sent 1000 men. But Colonel John Stark met and utterly destroyed them on August 16. Meanwhile St. Leger, as planned, had landed at Oswego, and on August 3 laid siege to Fort Stanwix, which then stood on the site of the present city of Rome, N.Y. On the 6th the garrison sallied forth, attacked a part of St. Leger’s camp, and carried off five British flags. These they hoisted upside down on their ramparts, and high above them raised a new flag which Congress had adopted in June, and which was then for the first time flung to the breeze.

[Illustration: Flag of the East India Company]

%144. Our National Flag.%–It was our national flag, the stars and stripes, and was made of a piece of a blue jacket, some strips of a white shirt, and some scraps of old red flannel.[1]

[Footnote 1: The flags used by the continental troops between 1775 and 1777 were of at least a dozen different patterns. A colored plate showing most of them is given in Treble’s _Our Flag_, p. 142. In 1776, in January, Washington used one at Cambridge which seems to have been suggested by the ensign of the East India Company. That of this company was a combination of thirteen horizontal red and white stripes (seven red and six white) and the red cross of St. George. That of Washington was the same, with the British Union Jack substituted for the cross of St. George. After the Declaration of Independence, the British Jack was out of place on our flag; and in June, 1777, Congress adopted a union of thirteen white stars in a circle, on a blue ground, in place of the British Union. After Vermont and Kentucky were admitted, in 1791 and 1792, the stars and stripes were each increased to fifteen. In 1818, the original number of stripes was restored, and since that time each new state, when admitted, is represented by a star and not by a stripe.]

[Illustration: Flag of the United Colonies]

[Illustration: British Union Jack]

%145. Capture of Burgoyne.%–When Schuyler heard of the siege of Fort Stanwix, he sent Benedict Arnold to relieve it, and St. Leger fled to Oswego. Then was the time for the expedition from New York to have hurried to Burgoyne’s aid. But Howe and his army were then at sea. No help was given to Burgoyne, who, after suffering defeats at Bemis Heights (September 19) and at Stillwater (October 7), retreated to Saratoga, where (October 17, 1777) he surrendered his army of 6000 men to General Horatio Gates, whom Congress, to its shame, had just put in the place of Schuyler. Gates deserves no credit for the capture. Arnold and Daniel Morgan deserve it, and deserve much; for, judged by its results, Saratoga was one of the great battles of the world. The results of the surrender were four fold:

1. It saved New York state.
2. It destroyed the plan for the war. 3. It induced the King to offer us peace with representation in Parliament, or anything else we wanted except independence. 4. It secured for us the aid of France.

[Illustration: %Flag of the United States, 1777%]

%146. Valley Forge.%–The winter at Valley Forge marks the darkest period of the war. It was a season of discouragement, when mean spirits grew bold. Some officers of the army formed a plot, called from one of them the “Conway cabal,” to displace Washington and put Gates in command. The country people, tempted by British gold, sent their provisions into Philadelphia and not to Valley Forge. There the suffering of the half-clad, half-fed, ill-housed patriots surpasses description.

But the darkest hour is just before the dawn. Then it was that an able Prussian soldier, Baron Steuben, joined the army, turned the camp into a school, drilled the soldiers, and made the army better than ever. Then it was that France acknowledged our independence, and joined us in the war.

%147. France acknowledges our Independence.%–In October, 1776, Congress sent Benjamin Franklin to Paris to try to persuade the French King to help us in the war. Till Burgoyne surrendered and Great Britain offered peace, Franklin found all his efforts vain.[1] But now, when it seemed likely that the states might again be brought under the British crown, the French King promptly acknowledged us to be an independent nation, made a treaty of alliance and a treaty of commerce (February 6, 1778), and soon had a fleet on its way to help us.

[Footnote 1: For an account of Franklin in France, see McMaster’s _With the Fathers_, pp. 253-270.]

%148. The British leave Philadelphia.%–Hearing of the approach of the French fleet, Sir Henry Clinton, who in May had succeeded Howe in command, left Philadelphia and hurried to the defense of New York. Washington followed, and, coming up with the rear guard of the enemy at Monmouth in New Jersey, fought a battle (June 28, 1778), and would have gained a great victory had not the traitor, Charles Lee, been in command.[2] Without any reason he suddenly ordered a retreat, which was fortunately prevented from becoming a rout by Washington, who came on the field in time to stop it.

[Footnote 2: After remaining a prisoner in the hands of the British from December, 1776, to April, 1778, Lee had been exchanged for a British officer.]

After the battle the British hurried on to New York, where Washington partially surrounded them by stretching out his army from Morristown in New Jersey to West Point on the Hudson.

%149. Stony Point.%–In hope of drawing Washington away from New York, Clinton in 1779 sent a marauding party to plunder and ravage the farms and towns of Connecticut. But Washington soon brought it back by dispatching Anthony Wayne to capture Stony Point, which he did (July, 1779) by one of the most brilliant assaults in military history.

%150. Indian Raids.%–That nothing might be wanting to make the suffering of the patriots as severe as possible, the Indians were let loose. Led by a Tory[1] named Butler, a band of whites and Indians of the Seneca tribe of the Six Nations[2] marched from Fort Niagara to Wyoming Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania, and there perpetrated one of the most awful massacres in history. Another party, led by a son of Butler, repeated the horrors of Wyoming in Cherry Valley, N.Y.

[Footnote 1: Not all the colonists desired independence. Those who remained loyal to the King were called Tories.]

[Footnote 2: By this time the Five Nations had admitted the Tuscaroras to their confederacy and had thus become the Six Nations.]

%151. George Rogers Clark%.–Meantime the British commander at Detroit tried hard to stir up the Indians of the West to attack the whole frontier at the same moment. Hearing of this, George Rogers Clark of Virginia marched into the enemy’s country, and in two fine campaigns in 1778-1779 beat the British, and conquered the country from the Ohio to the Great Lakes and from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi.

%152. Sullivan’s Expedition%.–In 1779 it seemed so important to punish the Indians for the Wyoming and Cherry Valley massacres that General Sullivan with an army invaded the territory of the Six Nations, in central New York, burned some forty Indian villages, and utterly destroyed the Indian power in that state.

%153. The South invaded%.–For a year and more there had been a lull in military operations on the part of the British. But they now began an attack in a new quarter. Having failed to conquer New England in 1775-1776, having failed to conquer the Middle States in 1776-1777, they sent an expedition against the South in December, 1778. Success attended it. Savannah was captured, Georgia was conquered, and the royal governor reinstated. Later, in 1779, General Lincoln, with a French fleet to help him, attempted to recapture Savannah, but was driven off with dreadful loss of life.

These successes in Georgia so greatly encouraged the British that in the spring of 1780 Clinton led an expedition against South Carolina, and (May 12) easily captured Charleston, with Lincoln and his army. By dint of great exertions another army was quickly raised in North Carolina, and the command given to Gates by Congress. He was utterly unfit for it, and (August 16, 1780) was defeated and his army almost destroyed at Camden by Lord Cornwallis. Never in the whole course of the war had the American army suffered such a crushing defeat. All military resistance in South Carolina was at an end, save such as was offered by gallant bands of patriots led by Marion, Sumter, and Pickens.

%154. The Treason of Arnold.%–The outlook was now dark enough; but it was made darker still by the treachery of Benedict Arnold. No officer in the Revolutionary army was more trusted. His splendid march through the wilderness to Quebec, his bravery in the attack on that city, the skill and courage he displayed at Saratoga, had marked him out as a man full of promise. But he lacked that moral courage without which great abilities count for nothing. In 1778 he was put in command of Philadelphia, and while there so abused his office that he was sentenced to be reprimanded by Washington. This aroused a thirst for revenge, and led him to form a scheme to give up the Hudson River to the enemy. With this end in view, he asked Washington in July, 1780, for the command of West Point, the great stronghold on the Hudson, obtained it, and at once made arrangements to surrender it to Clinton. The British agent in the negotiation was Major John Andre, who one day in September met Arnold near Stony Point. But most happily, as he was going back to New York, three Americans[1] stopped him near Tarrytown, searched him, and in his stockings found some papers in the handwriting of Arnold. News of the arrest of Andre reached Arnold in time to enable him to escape to the British; he served with them till the end of the war, and then sought a refuge in England. Andre was tried as a spy, found guilty, and hanged.

[Footnote 1: The names of these men were Paulding, Williams, and Van Wart.]

%155. Victory at Kings Mountain.%–After the defeat of Gates at Camden, the British overran South Carolina, and in the course of their marauding a band of 1100 Tories marched to Kings Mountain, on the border line between the two Carolinas. There the hardy mountaineers attacked them (Oct. 7, 1780) and killed, wounded, or captured the entire band.

[Map: %CAMPAIGNS IN THE SOUTH 1778-1781%]

%156. Victory at the Cowpens%.–Meantime a third army was raised for use in the South and placed under the command of Nathanael Greene, than whom there was no abler general in the American army. With Greene was Daniel Morgan, who had distinguished himself at Saratoga, and by him a British force under Tarleton was attacked January 17, 1781, at a place called the Cowpens, and not only defeated, but almost destroyed.

Enraged at these reverses, Cornwallis took the field and hurried to attack Greene, who, too weak to fight him, began a masterly retreat of 200 miles across Carolina to Guilford Courthouse, where he turned about and fought. He was defeated, but Cornwallis was unable to go further, and retreated to Wilmington, N.C., with Greene in hot pursuit. Leaving the enemy at Wilmington, Greene went back to South Carolina, and by September, 1781, had driven the British into Charleston and Savannah.

Cornwallis, as soon as Greene left him, hurried to Petersburg, Va. A British force during the winter and spring had been plundering and ravaging in Virginia, under the traitor Arnold. Cornwallis took command of this, sent Arnold to New York, and had begun a campaign against Lafayette, when orders reached him to seize and fortify some Virginian seaport.

%157. Surrender of Cornwallis.%–Thus instructed, Cornwallis selected Yorktown, and began to fortify it strongly. This was early in August, 1781. On the 14th Washington heard with delight that a French fleet was on its way to the Chesapeake, and at once decided to hurry to Virginia, and surround Cornwallis by land while the French cut him off by sea. Preparations were made with such secrecy and haste that Washington had reached Philadelphia while Clinton supposed he was about to attack New York. Clinton then sent Arnold on a raid into Connecticut to burn New London, in the hope of forcing Washington to return. But Washington kept straight on, hemmed Cornwallis in by land and sea, and October 19, 1781, forced the British general to surrender.

%158. The War on the Sea.%–The first step towards the foundation of an American navy was taken on October 13, 1775. Congress, hearing that two British ships laden with powder and guns were on their way from England to Quebec, ordered two swift sailing vessels to be fitted out for the purpose of capturing them. Two months later Congress ordered thirteen cruisers to be built, and named the officers to command them.

Meantime some merchant ships were purchased and collected at Philadelphia, from which city, one morning in January, 1776, a fleet of eight vessels set sail. As they were about to weigh anchor, John Paul Jones, a lieutenant on the flagship, flung to the breeze a yellow silk flag on which were a pine tree and a coiled rattlesnake, with this motto: “Don’t tread on me.” This was the first flag ever hoisted on an American man-of-war.

Ice in the Delaware kept the fleet in the river till the middle of February, when it went to sea, sailed southward to New Providence in the Bahamas, captured the town, brought off the governor, some powder and cannon, and after taking several prizes got safely back to New London.

Soon after the squadron had left the Delaware, the _Lexington_, Captain John Barry in command, while cruising off the Virginia coast, fell in with the _Edward_, a British vessel, and after a spirited action captured her. This was the first prize brought in by a commissioned officer of the American navy.[1]

[Footnote 1: John Barry was a native of Ireland; he came to America at thirteen, entered the merchant marine, and at twenty-five was captain of a ship. At the opening of the war Barry offered his services to Congress, and in February, 1776, was put in command of the _Lexington_. After his victory he was transferred to the twenty-eight-gun frigate _Effingham_, and in 1777 (while blockaded in the Delaware) with twenty-seven men in four boats captured and destroyed a ten-gun schooner and four transports. When the British captured Philadelphia, Barry took the _Effingham_ up the river; but she was burned by the enemy. In 1778, in command of the thirty-two-gun frigate _Raleigh_, he sailed from Boston, fell in with two British frigates, and after a fight was forced to run ashore in Penobscot Bay. Barry and his crew escaped, and in 1781 carried Laurens to France in the frigate _Alliance_. On the way out he took a privateer, and while cruising on the way home captured the _Atalanta_ and the _Trepassey_ after a hard fight. As Barry brought in the first capture by a commissioned officer of the United States navy, so he fought the last action of the war in 1782; but the enemy escaped. When the navy was reorganized in 1794, Barry was made senior captain, with the title of Commodore. In 1798 he commanded the frigate _United States_ in the war with France. He died in 1803.]

In March, 1776, Congress began to issue letters of marque, or licenses to citizens to engage in war against the enemy; and then the sea fairly swarmed with privateers.

In 1777 the American flag was seen for the first time in European waters, when a little squadron of three ships set sail from Nantes in France, and after cruising on the Bay of Biscay went twice around Ireland and came back to France with fifteen prizes. As France had not then acknowledged our independence, they were ordered to depart. Two did so; but one of them, the _Lexington_, was captured by the British, and the other, the _Reprisal_, was wrecked at sea.

%159. Paul Jones.%–Meanwhile our commissioners in France, Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, fitted out a cruiser called the _Surprise_. She sailed from Dunkirk on May 1, 1777, and the next week was back with a British packet as a prize. For this violation of French neutrality she was seized. But another ship, the _Revenge_, was quickly secured, which scoured the British waters, and actually entered two British ports before she sailed for America. The exploits of these and a score of other ships are cast into the shade, however, by the fights of John Paul Jones, the great naval hero of the Revolution. He sailed from Portsmouth, N.H., November 1, 1777, refitted his ship in the harbor of Brest, and in 1778 began one of the most memorable cruises in our naval history. In the short space of twenty-eight days he sailed into the Irish Channel, destroyed four vessels, set fire to the shipping in the port of Whitehaven, fought and captured the British armed schooner _Drake_, sailed around Ireland with his prize, and reached France in safety.

For a year he was forced to be idle. But at last, in 1779, he was given command of a squadron of five vessels, and in August sailed from France. Passing along the west coast of Ireland, the fleet went around the north end of Scotland and down the east coast, capturing and destroying vessel after vessel on the way. On the night of September 23, 1779, Jones (in his ship, named _Bonhomme Richard_ in honor of Franklin’s famous _Poor Richard’s Almanac_) fell in with the _Serapis_, a British frigate. The two ships grappled, and, lashed side by side in the moonlight, fought one of the most desperate battles in naval annals. At the end of three hours the _Serapis_ surrendered, but the _Bonhomme Richard_ was a wreck, and next morning, giving a sudden roll, she filled and plunged bow first to the bottom of the North Sea. Jones sailed away in the _Serapis_.

[Illustration: Benjamin Franklin]

In the Revolution the British lost 102 vessels of war, while the Americans lost 24–most of their navy.

%160. Revolutionary Heroes.%–It is not possible to mention all the revolutionary heroes entitled to our grateful remembrance. We should, however, remember Lafayette, Steuben, Pulaski, and DeKalb, foreigners who fought for us; Samuel Adams and James Otis of Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry of Virginia, who spoke for freedom; Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution; Putnam who fought and Warren who died at Bunker Hill; Mercer who fell at Princeton; Nathan Hale, the martyr spy; Herkimer, Knox, Moultrie, and that long list of noble patriots whose names have already been mentioned.

%161. The Treaty of Peace.%–The story is told that when Lord North, the Prime Minister of England, heard of the surrender of Yorktown, he threw up his hands and said, “It is all over.” He was right; it was all over, and on September 3, 1783, a treaty of peace (negotiated by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay) was signed at Paris.

Meantime the British, in accordance with a preliminary treaty of peace signed in November, 1782, were slowly leaving the country, till on November 25, 1783, the last of them sailed from New York.[1] Washington now resigned his commission, and in December went home to Mt. Vernon.

[Footnote 1: They did not leave Staten Island in New York Bay till a week later. For an account of the evacuation of New York see McMaster’s _With the Fathers_, pp. 271-280.]

%162. Bounds of the United States.%–By the treaty of 1783 the boundary of the United States was declared to be about what is the present northern boundary from the mouth of the St. Croix River in Maine to the Lake of the Woods, and then due west to the Mississippi (which was, of course, an impossible line, for that river does not rise in Canada); then down the Mississippi to 31 deg. north latitude; then eastward along that parallel of latitude to the Apalachicola River, and then by what is the present north boundary of Florida to the Atlantic.

But these bounds were not secured without a diplomatic struggle. As soon as France joined us in 1778, she began to persuade Spain to follow her example. Very little persuasion was needed, for the opportunity to regain the two Floridas (which Spain had been forced to give to England in 1763) was too good to be lost. In June, 1779, therefore, Spain declared war on England, and sent the governor of Lower Louisiana into West Florida, where he captured Pensacola, Mobile, Baton Rouge, and Natchez. Made bold by this success, Spain, which cared nothing for the United States, next determined to conquer the region north of Florida and east of the Mississippi, the Indian country of the proclamation of 1763. (See map of The British Colonies in 1764.) The commandant at St. Louis[2] was, therefore, sent to seize the post at St. Joseph on Lake Michigan, built by La Salle in 1679. He succeeded, and taking possession of the country in the name of Spain, carried off the English flags as evidence of conquest. Now when the time came to make the treaty of peace, Spain insisted that she must have East and West Florida and the country west of the Alleghany Mountains, because she had conquered it. France partly supported Spain in this demand. The country north of the Ohio she proposed should be given to Great Britain, and the country south to Spain and the United States.

[Footnote 2: It will be remembered that Spain now held Louisiana, or the country west of the Mississippi. (See Chapter VIII.)]

[Illustration: RESULTS OF THE %WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE% BOUNDARY DEFINED BY TREATY 1783. AND TERRITORY HELD BY GREAT BRITAIN 1783-1796., AND SPAIN 1783-1795]

The American commissioners, seeing in all this a desire to bound the United States on the west by the Alleghany Mountains, made the treaty with Great Britain secretly, and secured the Mississippi as our western limit.

Spain at the same time secured the Floridas from Great Britain, and insisting that West Florida must have the old boundary given in 1764,[1] and not 31 deg. as provided in our treaty of peace, she seized and held the country by force of arms; and for twelve years the Spanish flag waved over Baton Rouge and Natchez.[2]

[Footnote 1: See Chapter X.]

[Footnote 2: Read Hinsdale’s _Old Northwest_, pp. 170-191; McMaster’s _With the Fathers_, pp. 280-292.]

The area of the territory thus acquired by the United States was 827,844 square miles, and the population not far from 3,250,000. Apparently an era of great prosperity and happiness was before the people. But unhappily the government they had established in time of war was quite unfit to unite them and bring them prosperity in time of peace.

[Illustration: Washington’s sword]

SUMMARY

1. In accordance with one of the Intolerable Acts, General Gage became governor of Massachusetts in 1774.

2. Seeing that the people were gathering stores and cannon, he attempted to destroy the stores, and so brought on the battles of Lexington and Concord, which opened the War for Independence.

3. The Congress of colonial delegates, which met in 1774 and adjourned to meet again in 1775, assembled soon after these battles, and assumed the conduct of the war, adopted the army around Boston, and made Washington commander in chief.

4. Washington reached Boston soon after the battle of Bunker Hill, which taught the British that the Americans would fight, and he besieged the British in Boston. In March, 1776, they left the city by water, and Washington moved his army to the neighborhood of New York.

5. There he was attacked by the British, and was driven up the Hudson River to White Plains. Thence he crossed into New Jersey, only to be driven across the state and into Pennsylvania.

6. On Christmas night, 1776, he recrossed the Delaware to Trenton, and the next morning won a victory over the Hessians. Then on January 3, 1777, he fought the battle of Princeton, and he spent the remainder of the winter at Morristown.

7. In July, 1777, Howe sailed from New York for Philadelphia, to which city Washington hurried by land. The Americans were defeated at the Brandy wine, and the city fell into the hands of Howe. Washington passed the winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge.

8. Meantime an attempt had been made to cut the states in two by getting possession of New York state from Lake Champlain to New York city, and an army under Burgoyne came down from Canada. He and his troops were captured at Saratoga.

9. In February, 1778, France made a treaty of alliance with us and sent over a fleet. Fearing this would attack New York, Clinton left Philadelphia with his army. Washington followed from Valley Forge, overtook the enemy at Monmouth, and fought a battle there. The British then went on to New York, while Washington stretched out his army from Morristown to West Point.

10. So matters remained till December, 1778, when the British attacked the Southern States. They conquered Georgia in the winter of 1778-1779.

11. In the spring of 1780 they attacked South Carolina and captured General Lincoln. Gates then took the field, was defeated, and succeeded by Greene, who after many vicissitudes drove the British forces in South Carolina and Georgia into Charleston and Savannah, during 1781.

12. Meantime a force sent against Greene under Cornwallis undertook to fortify Yorktown and hold it, and while so engaged was surrounded by Washington and the French fleet and forced to surrender.

THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE

CAMPAIGNS OF 1775-1776

_In New England_.

1775. Concord and Lexington.
Continental Army formed.
Washington, commander in chief.
Battle of Bunker Hill.

1775-1776. Siege of Boston.

1776. Evacuation of Boston.

_In Canada_.

1775. Arnold’s march to Quebec.
Montgomery’s march to Montreal.
Capture of Montreal.

1776. Defeat and death of Montgomery at Quebec. Americans return to Ticonderoga.

1776. Howe sails for New York.
Washington marches to New York.
The Declaration of Independence. Capture of New York.
Retreat across the Jerseys.
Surprise at Trenton.
1777. Battle of Princeton.
Washington at Morristown.
Burgoyne and St. Leger move down from Canada to capture New York state and cut the colonies in two. St. Leger defeated at Fort Stanwix.
Burgoyne captured at Saratoga.
Howe sails from New York to Chesapeake Bay and moves against Philadelphia.
Washington moves from New York to Philadelphia. Battles of Brandywine and Germantown. Philadelphia captured by the British. 1777-1778. Americans winter at Valley Forge. 1778. Alliance with France.
Fleet and army sent from France. Clinton leaves Philadelphia and hurries to New York. Washington follows him from Valley Forge. Battle of Monmouth.
Washington on the Hudson.

CAMPAIGNS CHIEFLY IN THE SOUTH, 1778-1781.

1778. The South invaded.
Savannah captured and Georgia overrun. 1779. Clinton ravages Connecticut to draw Washington away from the Hudson.
Wayne captures Stony Point.
Lincoln attacks Savannah.
1780. Clinton captures Charleston.
Campaign of Gates in South Carolina. Battles of Camden and Kings Mountain. Treason of Arnold.
1781. Greene in command in the South. Battle of the Cowpens.
March of Cornwallis from Charleston. Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
Cornwallis goes to Wilmington and Greene to South Carolina. Cornwallis goes to Yorktown.
Washington hurries from New York. Surrender of Cornwallis.
1782-1783. Peace negotiations at Paris. 1783. Evacuation of New York.

THE STRUGGLE FOR A GOVERNMENT

CHAPTER XII

UNDER THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION

%163. How the Colonies became States.%–When the Continental Congress met at Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, a letter was received from Massachusetts, where the people had penned up the governor in Boston and had taken the government into their own hands, asking what they should do. Congress replied that no obedience was due to the Massachusetts Regulating Act or to the governor, and advised the people to make a temporary government to last till the King should restore the old charter. Similar advice was given the same year to New Hampshire and South Carolina, for it was not then supposed that the quarrel with the mother country would end in separation. But by the spring of 1776 all the governors of the thirteen colonies had either fled or been thrown into prison. This put an end to colonial government, and Congress, seeing that reconciliation was impossible, (May 15, 1776) advised all the colonies to form governments for themselves (p. 132). Thereupon they adopted constitutions, and by doing so turned themselves from British colonies into sovereign and independent states.[1]

[Footnote 1: All but two made new constitutions; but Connecticut and Rhode Island used their old charters, the one till 1818, the other till 1842. Vermont also formed a constitution, but she was not admitted to the Congress (p. 243).]

[Illustration]

[Illustration: THE UNITED STATES WHEN PEACE WAS DECLARED in 1783 SHOWING THE STATE CLAIMS]

%164. Articles of Confederation.%–While the colonies were thus gradually turning themselves into the states, the Continental Congress was trying to bind them into a union by means of a sort of general constitution called “Articles of Confederation.” By order of Congress, Articles had been prepared and presented by a committee in July, 1776, but it was not till November 17, 1777, that they were sent out to the states for adoption. Now it must be remembered that six states, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, claimed that their “from sea to sea” charters gave them lands between the mountains and the Mississippi River, and that one, New York, had bought the Indian title to land in the Ohio valley. It must also be remembered that the other six states did not have “from sea to sea” charters, and so had no claims to western lands. As three of them, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, held that the claims of their sister states were invalid, they now refused to adopt the Articles unless the land so claimed was given to Congress to be used to pay for the cost of the Revolution. For this action they gave four reasons:

1. The Mississippi valley had been discovered, explored, settled, and owned by France.

2. England had never owned any land there till France ceded the country in 1763.

3. When at last England had got it, in 1763, the King drew the “proclamation line,” turned the Mississippi valley into the Indian country, and so cut off any claim of the colonies in consequence of English ownership.

4. The western lands were therefore the property of the King, and now that the states were in arms against him, his lands ought to be seized by Congress and used for the benefit of all the states.

For three years the land-claiming states refused to be convinced by these arguments. But at length, finding that Maryland was determined not to adopt the Articles till her demands were complied with, they began to yield. In February, 1780, New York ceded her claims to Congress, and in January, 1781, Virginia gave up her claim to the country north of the Ohio River. Maryland had now carried her point, and on March 1, 1781, her delegates signed the Articles of Confederation. As all the other states had ratified the Articles, this act on the part of Maryland made them law, and March 2, 1781, Congress met for the first time under a form of government the states were pledged to obey.

%165. Government under the Articles of Confederation.%–The form of government that went into effect on that day was bad from beginning to end. There was no one officer to carry out the laws, no court or judge to settle disputed points of law, and only a very feeble legislature. Congress consisted of one house, presided over by a president elected each year by the members from among their own number. The delegates to Congress could not be more than seven, nor less than two from each state, were elected yearly, could not serve for more than three years out of six, and might be recalled at any time by the states that sent them. Once assembled on the floor of Congress, the delegates became members of a secret body. The doors were shut; no spectators were allowed to hear what was said; no reports of the debates were taken down; but under a strict injunction to secrecy the members went on deliberating day after day. All voting was done by states, each casting but one vote, no matter how many delegates it had. The affirmative votes of nine states were necessary to pass any important act, or, as it was called, “ordinance.”

To this body the Articles gave but few powers. Congress could declare war, make peace, issue money, keep up an army and a navy, contract debts, enter into treaties of commerce, and settle disputes between states. But it could not enforce a treaty or a law when made, nor lay any tax for any purpose.

%166. Origin of the Public Domain%.–In 1784 Massachusetts ceded her strip of land in the west, following the example set by New York (1780), and Virginia (1781).

As three states claiming western territory had thus by 1784 given their land to Congress, that body came into possession of the greater part of the vast domain stretching from the Lakes to the Ohio and from the Mississippi to Pennsylvania.[1] Now this public domain, as it was called, was given on certain conditions:

1. That it should be cut up into states.

2. That these states should be admitted into the Union (when they had a certain population) on the same footing as the thirteen original states.

3. That the land should be sold and the money used to pay the debts of the United States.

[Footnote 1: The strip owned by Connecticut had been offered to Congress in October, 1789, but not accepted. It still belonged to Connecticut in 1785. In 1786 it was again ceded, with certain reservations, and accepted.]

Congress, therefore, as soon as it had received the deeds to the tracts ceded, trusting that the other land-owning states would cede their western territory in time, passed a law (in 1785) to prepare the land for sale by surveying it and marking it out into sections, townships, and ranges, and fixed the price per acre.

%167. Virginia and Connecticut Reserves.%–When Virginia made her cession in 1781, she expressly reserved two tracts of land north of the Ohio. One, called the Military Lands, lay between the Scioto and Miami rivers, and was held to pay bounties promised to the Virginia Revolutionary soldiers. The other (in the present state of Indiana) was given to General George Rogers Clark and his soldiers. A third piece was reserved by Connecticut when she ceded her strip in 1786. This, called the Western Reserve of Connecticut, stretched along the shore of Lake Erie (map, p. 175). In 1800 Connecticut gave up her jurisdiction, or right of government, over this reserve in return for the confirmation of land titles she had granted.

[Illustration: TERRITORY OF THE %UNITED STATES% NORTHWEST OF THE OHIO RIVER %1787%]

%168. Ordinance of 1787; Origin of the Territories.%–Hardly had Congress provided for the sale of the land, when a number of Revolutionary soldiers formed the Ohio Land Company, and sent an agent to New York, where Congress was in session, and offered to buy 5,000,000 acres on the Ohio River: 1,500,000 acres were for themselves, and 3,500,000 for another company called the Scioto Company. The land was gladly sold, and as the purchasers were really going to send out settlers, it became necessary to establish some kind of government for them. On the 13th of July, 1787, therefore, Congress passed another very famous law, called the Ordinance of 1787, which ordered:

1. That the whole region from the Lakes to the Ohio, and from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi, should be called “The Territory of the United States northwest of the river Ohio.”

2. That it should be cut up into not less than three nor more than five states, each of which might be admitted into the Union when it had 60,000 free inhabitants.

3. That within it there was to be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except in punishment for crime.

4. That until such time as there were 5000 free male inhabitants twenty-one years old in the territory, it was to be governed by a governor and three judges. They could not make laws, but might adopt such as they pleased from among the laws in force in the states. After there were 5000 free male inhabitants in the territory the people were to elect a house of representatives, which in its turn was to elect ten men from whom Congress was to select five to form a council. The house and the council were then to elect a territorial delegate to sit in Congress with the right of debating, not of voting. The governor, the judges, and the secretary were to be elected by Congress. The council and house of representatives could make laws, but must send them to Congress for approval.

Thus were created two more American institutions, the territory and the state formed out of the public domain. The ordinance was but a few months old when South Carolina ceded (1787) her little strip of country west of the mountains (see map on p. 157) with the express condition that it _should_ be slave soil. In 1789 North Carolina ceded what is now Tennessee on the same condition. Congress accepted both and out of them made the “Territory southwest of the Ohio River.” In that slavery was allowed.[1]

[Footnote 1: The only remaining land-holding state, Georgia, ceded her claim in 1802 (p. 246).]

%169. Defects of the Articles of Confederation.%–While Congress at New York was framing the Ordinance of 1787, a convention of delegates from the states was framing the Constitution at Philadelphia. A very little experience under the Articles of Confederation showed them to have serious defects.

_No Taxing Power_.–In the first place, Congress could not lay a tax of any kind, and as it could not tax it could not get money with which to pay its expenses and the debt incurred during the Revolution. Each of the states was in duty bound to pay its share. But this duty was so disregarded that although Congress between 1782 and 1786 called on the states for $6,000,000, only $1,000.000 was paid.

_No Power to regulate Trade_.–In the second place, Congress had no power to regulate trade with foreign nations, or between the states. This proved a most serious evil. The people of the United States at that time had few manufactures, because in colonial days Parliament would not allow them. All the china, glass, hardware, cutlery, woolen goods, linen, muslin, and a thousand other things were imported from Great Britain. Before the war the Americans had paid for these goods with dried fish, lumber, whale oil, flour, tobacco, rice, and indigo, and with money made by trading in the West Indies. Now Great Britain forbade Americans to trade with her West Indies. Spain would not make a trade treaty with us, so we had no trade with her islands, and what was worse, Great Britain taxed everything that came to her from the United States unless it came in British ships. As a consequence, very little lumber, fish, rice, and other of our products went abroad to pay for the immense quantity of foreign-made goods that came to us. These goods therefore had to be paid for in money, which about 1785 began to be boxed up and shipped to London. When the people found that specie was being carried out of the country, they began to hoard it, so that by 1786 none was in circulation.

%170. Paper Money issued.%–This left the people without any money with which to pay wages, or buy food and clothing, and led at once to a demand that the states should print paper money and loan it to their citizens. Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina, and Georgia did so. But the money was no sooner issued than the merchants and others who had goods to sell refused to take it, whereupon in some of the states laws called “tender acts” were passed to compel people to use the paper. This merely put an end to business, for nobody would sell. In Massachusetts, when the legislature refused to issue paper money, many of the persons who owed debts assembled, and, during 1786-87, under the lead of Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary soldier, prevented the courts from trying suits for the recovery of money owed or loaned.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read McMaster’s _History of the People of the United States_, Vol. I., pp. 281-295, 304-329, 331-340; Fiske’s _Critical Period of American History_, pp. 168-186.]

%171. Congress proposes Amendments.%–Of the many defects in the Articles, the Continental Congress was fully aware, and it had many a time asked the states to make amendments. One proposed that Congress should have power for twenty-five years to lay a tax of five per cent on all goods imported, and use the money to pay the Continental debts. Another was to require each state to raise by special tax a sum sufficient to pay its yearly share of the current expenses of Congress. A third was to bestow on Congress for fifteen years the sole power to regulate trade and commerce. A fourth provided that in future the share each state was to bear of the current expenses should be in proportion to its population.

But the Articles of Confederation could not be amended unless all thirteen states consented, and, as all thirteen never did consent, none of these amendments were ever made.

%172. The States attempt to regulate Trade and fail.%–In the meantime the states attempted to regulate trade for themselves. New York laid double duties on English ships. Pennsylvania taxed a long list of foreign goods. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island passed acts imposing heavy duties on articles unless they came in American vessels. But these laws were not uniform, and as many states took no action, very little good was accomplished.[1]

[Footnote 1: McMaster’s _History of the People of the United States_, Vol. I., pp. 246-259, 266-280; Fiske’s _Critical Period of American History_, 134-137, 145-147.]

%173. A Trade Convention called to meet at Annapolis, 1786.%[2]–Under these conditions, the business of the whole country was at a standstill, and as Congress had no power to do anything to relieve the distress, the state of Virginia sent out a circular letter to her sister states. She asked them to appoint delegates to meet and “take into consideration the trade and commerce of the United States.” Four (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) responded, and their delegates, with those from Virginia, met at Annapolis in September, 1786.

[Footnote 2: The report of this Annapolis convention is printed in _Bulletin of Bureau of Rolls and Library of the Department of State_, No. 1, Appendix, pp. 1-5.]

CHAPTER XIII

MAKING THE CONSTITUTION

%174. Call for the Constitutional Convention.%–Finding that it could do nothing, because so few states were represented, and because the powers of the delegates were so limited, the convention recommended that all the states in the Union be asked by Congress to send delegates to a new convention, to meet at Philadelphia in May, 1787, “to take into consideration the situation of the United States,” and “to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the Constitution of the Federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”

%175. The Philadelphia Convention.%[1]–Early in 1787 Congress approved this movement, and during the summer of 1787 (May to September) delegates from twelve states (Rhode Island sent none), sitting in secret session at Philadelphia, made the Constitution of the United States.

[Footnote 1: All we know of the proceedings of this convention is derived from the journals of the convention, the notes taken down by James Madison, the notes of Yates of New York, and a speech by Luther Martin of Maryland. They may be found in Elliot’s _Debates_, Vol. IV.]

[Illustration: Independence Chamber[2]]

[Footnote 2: The room where the Constitution was framed.]

%176. The Virginia and New Jersey Plans%.–The story of that convention is too long and too complicated to be told in full.[1] But some of its proceedings must be noticed. While the delegates were assembling, a few men, under the lead of Madison, met and drew up the outline of a constitution, which was presented by the chairman of the Virginia delegation, and was called the “Virginia plan.” A little later, delegates from the small states met and drew up a second plan, which was the old Articles of Confederation with amendments. As the chairman of the New Jersey delegation offered this, it was called the “New Jersey plan.” Both were discussed; but the convention voted to accept the Virginia plan as the basis of the Constitution.

[Footnote 1: For short accounts, read “The Framers and the Framing of the Constitution” in the _Century Magazine_, September, 1887, or “Framing the Constitution,” in McMaster’s _With the Fathers_, pp. 106-149, or Thorpe’s _Story of the Constitution_, Chautauqua Course, 1891-92, pp. 111-148.]

%177. The Three Compromises.%–This plan called, among other things, for a national legislature of two branches: a Senate and a House of Representatives. The populous states insisted that the number of representatives sent by each state to Congress should be in proportion to her population. The small states insisted that each should send the same number of representatives. For a time neither party would yield; but at length the Connecticut delegates suggested that the states be given an equal vote and an equal representation in the Senate, and an unequal representation, based on population, in the House. The contending parties agreed, and so made the first compromise.

But the decision to have representation according to population at once raised the question, Shall slaves be counted as population? This divided the convention into slave states and free (see p. 186), and led to a second compromise, by which it was agreed that three fifths of all slaves should be counted as population, for the purpose of apportioning representation.

A third compromise sprang from the conflicting interests of the commercial and the planting states. The planting states wanted a provision forbidding Congress to pass navigation acts, except by a two-thirds vote, and forbidding any tax on exports; three states also wished to import slaves for use on their plantations. The free commercial states wanted Congress to pass navigation laws, and also wanted the slave trade stopped, because of the three-fifths rule. The result was an agreement that the importation of slaves should not be forbidden by Congress before 1808, and that Congress might pass navigation acts, and that exports should never be taxed.

%178. The Election of President.%–Another feature of the Virginia plan was the provision for a President whose business it should be to see that the acts of Congress were duly enforced or executed. But when the question arose, How shall he be chosen? all manner of suggestions were made. Some said by the governors of the states; some, by the United States Senate; some, by the state legislatures; some, by a body of electors chosen for that purpose. When at last it was decided to have a body of electors, the difficulty was to determine the manner of electing the electors. On this no agreement could be reached; so the convention ordered that the legislature of each state should have as many electors of the President as it had senators and representatives in Congress, and that these men should be appointed in such way as the legislatures of the states saw fit to prescribe.

%179. Sources of the Constitution.%–An examination of the Constitution shows that some of its features were new; that some were drawn from the experience of the states under the Confederation; and that others were borrowed from the various state constitutions. Among those taken from state constitutions are such names as President, Senate, House of Representatives, and such provisions as that for a census, for the veto, for the retirement of one third of the Senate every two years, that money bills shall originate in the House, for impeachment, and for what we call the annual message.[1]

[Footnote 1: On the sources of the Constitution, read “The First Century of the Constitution” in _New Princeton Review,_ September, 1887, pp. 175-190.]

The features based directly on experience under the Articles of Confederation are the provisions that the acts of Congress must be _uniform_ throughout the Union; that the President may call out the militia to repel invasion, to put down insurrection, and to maintain the laws of the Union; that Congress shall have _sole_ power to regulate _foreign trade_ and _trade between the states._ No state can now coin money or print paper money, or make anything but gold or silver legal tender. Congress now has power to lay taxes, duties, and excises. The Constitution divides the powers of government between the legislative department (Senate and House of Representatives); the executive department (the President, who sees that laws and treaties are obeyed); and the judicial department (Supreme Court and other United States courts, which interpret the Constitution, the acts of Congress, and the treaties).

The new features are the definition of treason and the limitation of its punishment; the guarantee to every state of a republican form of government; the swearing of state officials to support the Federal Constitution; and the provision for amendment.

Among other noteworthy features are the creation of a United States citizenship as distinct from a state citizenship, the limitation of the powers of the states; and the provision that the Constitution, the acts of Congress, and the treaties are “the supreme law of the land.”

%180. Constitution submitted to the People.%–The convention ended its work, and such members as were willing signed the Constitution on September 17, 1787. Washington, as president of the convention, then sent the Constitution to the Continental Congress sitting at New York and asked it to transmit copies to the states for ratification. This was done, and during the next few months the legislatures of most of the states called on the people to elect delegates to conventions which should accept or reject the Constitution.

%181. Ratification by the States.%–In many of these conventions great objection was made because the new plan of federal government was so unlike the Articles of Confederation, and certain changes were insisted on. The only states that accepted it just as it was framed were Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, and Maryland. Massachusetts, South Carolina, New Hampshire, New York, and Virginia ratified with amendments. (For dates, see p. 176.)

%182. “The New Roof.”%–The Constitution provided that when nine states had ratified, it should go into effect “between the states so ratifying.” While it was under discussion the Federalists, as the friends of the Constitution were named, had called it “the New Roof,” which was going to cover the states and protect them from political storms. They now represented it as completed and supported by eleven pillars or states. Two states, Rhode Island and North Carolina, had not ratified, and so were not under the New Roof, and were not members of the new Union. Eleven states having approved, nothing remained but to fix the particular day on which the electors of President should be chosen, and the time and place for the meeting of the new Congress. This the Continental Congress did in September, 1788, by ordering that the electors should be chosen on the first Wednesday in January, 1789, that they should meet and vote for President on the first Wednesday in February, and that the new Congress should meet at New York on the first Wednesday in March, which happened to be the fourth day of the month. Later, Congress by law fixed March 4 as the day on which the terms of the Presidents begin and end.[1]

[Footnote 1: The question is often asked, When did the Constitution go into force? Article VII. says, “The ratification of the conventions of nine states shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the states so ratifying the same.” New Hampshire, the ninth state, ratified June 21, 1788, and on that day, therefore, the constitution was “established” between the nine.]

%183. How Presidents were elected%.–It must not be supposed that our first presidents were elected just as presidents are now. In our time electors are everywhere chosen by popular vote. In 1788 there was no uniformity. In Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia the people had a complete, and in Massachusetts and New Hampshire a partial, choice. In Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Georgia the electors were appointed by the legislatures. In New York the two branches of the legislature quarreled, and no electors were chosen.

As the Constitution required that the electors should vote by ballot for two persons, such as had been appointed met at their state capitals on the first Wednesday in February, 1789, made lists of the persons voted for, and sent them signed and certified under seal to the president of the Senate. But when March 4, 1789, came, there was no Senate. Less than a majority of that body had arrived in New York, so no business could be done. When at length the Senate secured a majority, the House was still without one, and remained so till April. Then, in the presence of the House and Senate, the votes on the lists were counted, and it was found that every elector had given one of his votes for George Washington, who was thus elected President. No separate ballot was then required for Vice President. Each elector merely wrote on his ballot the names of two men. He who received the greatest number of votes, if, in the words of the Constitution, “such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed,” was elected President. He who received the next highest, even if less than a majority, was elected Vice President. In 1789 this man was John Adams of Massachusetts.

[Illustration: Federal Hall, New York[1]]

[Footnote 1: From an old print made in 1797.]

[Illustration: G Washington]

%184. The First Inauguration.%–As soon as Washington received the news of his election, he left Mount Vernon and started for New York. His journey was one continuous triumphal march. The population of every town through which he passed turned out to meet him. Men, women, and children stood for hours by the roadside waiting for him to go by. At New York his reception was most imposing, and there, on April 30, 1789, standing on the balcony in front of Federal Hall (p. 171), he took the oath of office in the presence of Congress and a great multitude of people that filled the streets, and crowded the windows, and sat on the roofs of the neighboring houses.[1]

[Footnote 1: Full accounts of the inauguration of Washington may be found in _Harper’s Magazine_, and also in the _Century Magazine_, for April, 1889.]

SUMMARY

1. When independence was about decided on, Congress appointed a committee to draft a general plan of federal government.

2. This plan, called Articles of Confederation, Maryland absolutely refused to ratify till the states claiming land west of the Alleghany Mountains ceded their claims to Congress.

3. New York and Virginia having ceded their claims, Maryland ratified in March, 1781.

4. These cessions were followed by others from Massachusetts and Connecticut; and from them all, Congress formed the public domain to be sold to pay the debt.

5. The sale of this land led to the land ordinance of 1785 and the ordinance of 1787, for the government of the domain and the new political organism called the territory.

6. The defects of the Articles made revision necessary, and produced such distress that two conventions were called to consider the state of the country. That at Annapolis attempted nothing. That at Philadelphia framed the Constitution of the United States.

7. The Constitution was then passed to the Continental Congress, which sent it to the legislatures of the states to be by them referred to conventions elected by the people for acceptance or rejection.

8. Eleven having ratified, Congress in 1788 fixed a day in 1789 (which happened to be March 4), when the First Congress under the Constitution was to assemble.

9. The date of the first presidential election was also fixed, and George Washington was made our first President.

/1776. New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode The Colonies adopt | Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Constitutions and –| Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North become States. | Carolina, South Carolina. |1777. New York, Georgia.
\1780. Massachusetts.

The President. /Manner of electing. \Inauguration of Washington.

The Congress. /Organization of the First \under the Constitution.

/The Supreme Court
The Judiciary. –|The Circuit Court \The District Court

/Secretary of State
The Secretaries. –|Secretary of Treasury |Secretary of War
|The Attorney-general.
\Origin of the “Cabinet.”

CHAPTER XIV

OUR COUNTRY IN 1790

%185. The States.%–What sort of a country, and what sort of people, was Washington thus chosen to rule over? When, he was elected, the Union was composed of eleven states, for neither Rhode Island nor North Carolina had accepted the Constitution.[1] Vermont had never been a member of the Union, because the Continental Congress would not recognize her as a state.

[Footnote 1: The states ratified the Constitution on the dates given below: 1. Delaware Dec. 7, 1787
2. Pennsylvania Dec. 12, 1787
3. New Jersey Dec. 18, 1787
4. Georgia Jan. 2, 1788
5. Connecticut Jan. 9, 1788
6. Massachusetts Feb. 7, 1788
7. Maryland April 28, 1788
8. South Carolina May 23, 1788
9. New Hampshire June 21, 1788
10. Virginia June 26, 1788
11. New York July 26, 1788
12. North Carolina Nov. 21, 1789
13. Rhode Island May 29, 1790]

[Illustration: The %UNITED STATES% March 4, 1789]

%186. Only a Part inhabited.%–Three fourths of our country was then uninhabited by white men, and almost all the people lived near the seaboard. Had a line been drawn along what was then the frontier, it would (as the map on p. 177 shows) have run along the shore of Maine, across New Hampshire and Vermont to Lake Champlain, then south to the Mohawk valley, then down the Hudson River, and southwestward across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then south along the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Altamaha River in Georgia, and by it to the sea. How many people lived here was never known till 1790. The Constitution of the United States requires that the people shall be counted once in each ten years, in order that it may be determined how many representatives each state shall have in the House of Representatives; and for this purpose Congress ordered the first census to be taken in 1790. It then appeared that, excluding Indians, there were living in the eleven United States 3,380,000 human beings, or less than half the number of people who now live in the single state of New York.

%187. How the People were scattered.%–More were in the Southern than in the Eastern States. Virginia, then the most populous, contained one fifth. Pennsylvania had a ninth, while in the five states of Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia were almost one half of the English-speaking people of the United States. These were the planting states, and, populous as they were, they had but two cities–Baltimore and Charleston. Savannah, Wilmington, Alexandria, Norfolk, and Richmond were small towns. Not one had 8000 people in it. Indeed, the inhabitants of the six largest cities of the country (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and Salem) taken together were but 131,000.

[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF THE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES FIRST CENSUS, 1790/]

[Illustration: Boston in 1790[1]]

[Footnote 1: From the _Massachusetts Magazine_, November, 1790.]

%188. The Cities.%–And how different these cities were from those of our day! What a strange world Washington would find himself in if he could come back and walk along the streets of the great city which now stands on the banks of the Potomac and bears his name! He never in his life saw a flagstone sidewalk, nor an asphalted street, nor a pane of glass six feet square. He never heard a factory whistle; he never saw a building ten stories high, nor an elevator, nor a gas jet, nor an electric light; he never saw a hot-air furnace, nor entered a room warmed by steam.

In the windows of shop after shop would be scores of articles familiar enough to us, but so unknown to him that he could not even name them. He never saw a sewing machine, nor a revolver, nor a rubber coat, nor a rubber shoe, nor a steel pen, nor a piece of blotting paper, nor an envelope, nor a postage stamp, nor a typewriter. He never struck a match, nor sent a telegram, nor spoke through a telephone, nor touched an electric bell. He never saw a railroad, though he had seen a rude form of steamboat. He never saw a horse car, nor an omnibus, nor a trolley car, nor a ferryboat. Fancy him boarding a street car to take a ride. He would probably pay his fare with a “nickel.” But the “nickel” is a coin he never saw. Fancy him trying to understand the advertisements that would meet his eye as he took his seat! Fancy him staring from the window at a fence bright with theatrical posters, or at a man rushing by on a bicycle!

[Illustration: Philadelphia in 1800 (Arch Street)]

%189. Newspapers and Magazines.%–A boy enters the car with half a dozen daily newspapers all printed in the same city. In Washington’s day there were but four daily papers in the United States! On the news counter of a hotel, one sees twenty illustrated papers, and fifty monthly magazines. In his day there was no illustrated paper, no scientific periodical, no trade journal, and no such illustrated magazines as _Harper’s, Scribner’s_, the _Century, St. Nicholas_. All the printing done in the country was done on presses worked by hand. To-day the Hoe octuple press can print 96,000 eight-page newspapers an hour. To print this number on the hand press shown in the picture would have taken so long that when the last newspaper was printed the first would have been three months old!

[Illustration: A Franklin press]

[Illustration: A fire bucket [1]]

[Footnote 1: Original in the Pennsylvania Historical Society.]

%190. The Fire Service.%–the ambulance, the steam fire engine, the hose cart, the hook and ladder company, the police patrol, the police officer on the street corner, the letter carrier gathering the mail, the district messenger boy, the express company, the delivery wagon of the stores, have all come in since Washington died. In his day the law required every householder in the city to be a fireman. His name might not appear on the rolls of any of the fire companies, he might not help to drag through the streets the lumbering tank which served as a fire engine, but he must have in his hall, or beneath the stairs, or hanging up behind his shop door, at least one leathern bucket inscribed with his name, and a huge bag of canvas or of duck. Then, if he were aroused at the dead of night by the cry of fire and the clanging of every church bell in the town, he seized this bucket and his bag, and, while his wife put a lighted candle in the window to illuminate the street, set off for the fire. The smoke or the flame was his guide, for the custom of indicating the place by a number of strokes on a bell had not yet come in. When at last he arrived at the scene he found there no idle spectators. Every one was busy. Some hurried into the building and filled their sacks with such movable goods as came nearest to hand. Some joined the line that stretched away to the water, and helped to pass the full buckets to those who stood by the fire. Others took posts in a second line, down which the empty buckets were hastened to the pump. The house would often be half consumed when the shouting made known that the engine had come. It was merely a pump mounted over a tank. Into the tank the water from the buckets was poured, and it was pumped thence by the efforts of a dozen men.

[Illustration: Fire engine of 1800[1]]

[Footnote 1: From an old cut]

%191. The Post Office.%–Washington sees a great wagon or a white trolley car marked United States Mail, and on inquiry is told that the money now spent by the government each year for the support of the post offices would have more than paid the national debt when he was President. He hears with amazement that there are now 75,000 post offices, and recalls that in 1790 there were but seventy-five. He picks up from the sidewalk a piece of paper with a little pink something on the corner. He is told that the portrait on it is his own, that it is a postage stamp, that it costs two cents, and will carry a letter to San Francisco, a city he never heard of, and, if the person to whom it is addressed cannot be found, will bring the letter back to the sender, a distance of over 5000 miles. In his day a letter was a single sheet of paper, no matter how large or small, and the postage on it was determined not by weight, but by distance, and might be anything from six to twenty-five cents.

At that time postage must always be prepaid, and as the post office must support itself, letters were not sent from the country towns till enough postage had been deposited at the post office to pay the expense of sending them. Newspapers and books could not be sent by mail.

%192. The Franchise.%–Taking the country through, the condition of the people was by no means so happy as ours. They had government of the people, but it was not by the people nor for the people. Everywhere the right to vote and to hold office was greatly restricted. The voter must have an estate worth a certain sum, or a specified number of acres, or an annual income of so many dollars. But the right to vote did not carry with it the right to hold office. More property was required for office holding than for voting, and there were besides certain religious restrictions. In New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the governor, the members of the legislature, and the chief officers of state must be Protestants. In Massachusetts and Maryland they must be Christians. All these restrictions were long since swept away.

%193. Cruel Punishments.%–The humane spirit of our times was largely wanting. The debtor was cast into prison. The pauper might be sold to the highest bidder. The criminal was dragged out into open day and flogged or branded. From ten to nineteen crimes were punishable with death. No such thing as a lunatic asylum, or a deaf and dumb asylum, or a penitentiary existed. The prisons were dreadful places. Men came out of them worse than they went in.

%194. The Condition of the Laborer; of the well to do.%–Men worked harder and for less money then than now. A regular working day was from sunrise to sunset, with an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. Sometimes the laborer was fed and lodged by the employer, in which case he was paid four dollars a month in winter and six in summer. Two shillings (30 cents) a day for unskilled labor was thought high wages.

[Illustration: %Washington’s flute and Miss Custis’s harpsichord at Mount Vernon%]

Even the houses of the well to do were much less comfortable places than are such abodes in our day. There were no furnaces, no gas, no bathrooms, no plumbing. Wood was the universal fuel. Coal from Virginia and Rhode Island was little used. All cooking was done in “Dutch ovens,” or in “out ovens,” or in the enormous fireplaces to be found in every household. Wood fuel made sooty chimneys, and sooty chimneys took fire. In every city, therefore, were men known as “sweeps,” whose business it was to clean chimneys.

[Illustration: %Earthenware stove–Moravian%]

[Illustration: %Dutch oven%[1]]

[Footnote 1: The bread, or meat, to be baked was put into the pot, and hot coals were heaped all around the sides and on the lid, which had a rim to keep the coals on it.]

[Illustration: a foot stove]

Washington was a farmer, yet he never in his life beheld a tomato, nor a cauliflower, nor an eggplant, nor a horserake, nor a drill, nor a reaper and binder, nor a threshing machine, nor a barbed wire fence.

[Illustration: Kitchen in Washington’s headquarters in Morristown, N.J.[1]]

[Footnote 1: This shows a fine specimen of the old-fashioned fireplace. Notice the andirons, the bellows, the lamp, the spinning wheel, the old Dutch clock, and the kettles hanging on the crane over the logs.]

[Illustration: A plow used in 1776]

His land was plowed with a wooden plow partly shod with iron. His seed was sown by hand; his hay was cut with scythes; his grain was reaped with sickles, and threshed on the barn floor with flails in the hands of his slaves.

%195. Negro Slavery.%–No living person under thirty years of age has ever seen a negro slave in our country. When Washington was President there were 700,000 slaves. When the Revolution opened, slavery was permitted by law in every colony. But the feeling against it in the North had always been strong, and when the war ended, the people began the work of abolition. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire the constitutions of the states declared that “all men are born free and equal,” and that “all men are born equally free,” and this was understood to abolish slavery. In Pennsylvania, slavery was abolished in 1780. In Rhode Island and Connecticut gradual abolition laws were passed which provided that all children born of slave parents after a certain day should be free at a certain age, and that their children should never be slaves. The Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. But in 1790 New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and all the states south of these were slave states. (See map on the next page.)

Though slaves were men and women and children, they had no civil rights whatever. They could be bought and sold, leased, seized for a debt, bequeathed by will, given away. If they made anything, or found anything, or earned anything, it belonged not to them, but to their owners. They were property just as oxen or horses were in the North. It was unlawful to teach them to read or write. They were not allowed to give evidence against a white man, nor to travel in bands of more than seven unless a white man was with them, nor to quit the plantation without leave.

If a planter provided coarse food, coarse clothes, and a rude shelter for his slaves, if he did not work them more than fifteen hours out of twenty-four in summer, nor more than fourteen in winter, and if he gave them every Sunday to themselves, he did quite as much for their comfort as the law required he should.

[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE AREA OF %SLAVE AND FREE SOIL IN 1790%]

If the slave committed any offense, if he stole anything, or refused to work, or ran away, it was lawful to load him with irons, to confine him for any length of time in a cell, and to beat him and whip him till the blood ran in streams from the wounds, and he grew too weak to stand. Old advertisements are still extant in which runaway blacks are described by the scars left upon their bodies by the lash. When such lashings were not prescribed by the court, they were commonly given under the eye of the overseer, or inflicted by the owner himself.

%196. Six Days from Boston to New York.%–Our country was small when Washington was President. The people lived on the seaboard. The towns and cities were not actually very far apart; but the means of travel were so poor, the time consumed in going even fifty miles was so great, that the country was practically immense in extent. Now we step into a beautifully fitted car, heated by steam, lighted by electricity, richly carpeted, and provided with most comfortable seats and beds, and are whirled across the continent from Philadelphia to San Francisco in less time than it took Washington to go from New York to Boston.

[Illustration: Old mill at West Falmouth, Mass.[1]]

[Footnote 1: In many parts of the country where there was no water power, as Cape Cod, Long Island, Nantucket, etc., flour was ground at windmills. The windmill shown in the picture was built in 1787, and is still in use.]

If you had lived in 1791 and started, say, from Boston, to go to Philadelphia to see the President and the great city where independence had been declared, you would very likely have begun by making your will, and bidding good-by to your friends. You would then have gone down to the office of the proprietor of the stagecoach, and secured a seat to New York. As the coach left but twice a week, you would have waited till the day came and would then have presented yourself, at three o’clock in the morning, at the tavern whence the coach started.

The stagecoach was little better than a huge covered box mounted on springs. It had neither glass windows, nor door, nor steps, nor closed sides. The roof was upheld by ten posts which rose from the body of the vehicle, and the body was commonly breast high. From the top were hung curtains of leather, to be rolled up when the day was fine, and let down and buttoned when it was rainy and cold. Within were four seats. Without was the baggage. Fourteen pounds of luggage were allowed to be carried free by each passenger. But if your portmanteau or your brass-nail-studded hair trunk weighed more, you would have paid for it at the rate per mile that you paid for yourself. Under no circumstances, however, would you be permitted to take on the journey more than 150 pounds. When the baggage had all been weighed and strapped on the coach, when the horses had been attached, and the waybill, containing the names of the passengers, made out, the passengers would clamber to their seats through the front of the stage and sit down with their faces toward the driver’s seat.

One pair of horses usually dragged the coach eighteen miles, when a fresh pair would be attached, and if all went well, you would be put down about ten at night at some wayside inn or tavern after a journey of forty miles. Cramped and weary, you would eat a frugal supper and hurry off to bed with a notice from the landlord to be ready to start at three the next morning. Then, no matter if it rained or snowed, you would be forced to make ready by the dim light of a horn lantern, unknown now, for another ride of eighteen hours.

If no mishaps occurred, if the coach was not upset by the ruts, if storm or flood did not delay you at Springfield, where the road met the Connecticut, or at Stratford, where it met the Housatonic, each of which had to be crossed on clumsy flatboats, the stage would roll into New York at the end of the sixth day.

%197. Two Days from New York to Philadelphia.%–And here a serious delay was almost certain to occur, for even in the best of weather it was no easy matter to cross the Hudson to New Jersey. When the wind was high and the water rough, or the river full of ice, the boldest did not dare to risk a crossing. Once over the river, you would again go on by coach, and at the end of two more days would reach Philadelphia. In our time one can travel in eight hours the entire distance between Boston and Philadelphia, a distance which Washington could not have traversed in less than eight days.

[Illustration: Stagecoach and inn[1]]

[Footnote 1: From a print of 1798.]

%198. The Roads and the Inns.%–The newspapers and the travelers of those days complained bitterly of the roads and the inns. On the best roads the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the passengers were often forced to get out and help the driver pull the wheels out of the mud. Breakdowns and upsets were of everyday occurrence. Yet bad as the roads were, the travel was so considerable that very often the inns and taverns even in the large cities could not lodge all who applied unless they slept five or six in a room.

%199. A Steamboat on the Delaware.%–Rude as this means of travel seems to us, the men of 1790 were quite satisfied with it, and absolutely refused to make use of a better one. Had you been in Philadelphia during the summer of 1790 and taken up a copy of _The Pennsylvania Packet_, you could not have failed to notice this advertisement of the first successful steamboat in the world:

%The Steam-Boat

Is now ready to take Passengers, and is intended to set off from Arch Street Ferry in Philadelphia every _Monday, Wednesday_ and _Friday_, for _Burlington, Bristol, Bordentown_ and _Trenton_, to return on _Tuesdays, Thursdays_ and _Saturdays_–Price for Passengers, 2/6 to Burlington and Bristol, 3/9 to Bordentown, 5/. to Trenton. June 14. tu.th ftf.%

This boat was the invention of John Fitch, and from June to September ran up and down the Delaware; but so few people went on it that he could not pay expenses, and the boat was withdrawn.

%200. To the Great West.%–From Philadelphia went out one of the great highways to what was then the far West, but to what we now know as the valley of the Ohio. The traveler who to-day makes the journey from Philadelphia to Pittsburg is whisked on a railroad car through an endless succession of cities and villages and rich farms, and by great factories and mills and iron works, which in the days of Washington had no existence. He makes the journey easily between sunrise and sunset. In 1790 he could not have made it in twelve days.

%201. Towns beyond the Alleghany Mountains.%–Though the country between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi had been closed to settlement from 1763 to 1776 by the King’s proclamation, it was by no means without population in 1790. At Detroit and Kaskaskia and Vincennes were old French settlements, made long before France was driven out of Louisiana. But there were others of later date. The hardy frontiersman of 1763 cared no more for the King’s proclamation than he did for the bark of the wolf at his cabin door. The ink with which the document was written had not dried before emigrants from Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania were hurrying into the valley of the Monongahela.

In 1769 William Bean crossed the mountains from North Carolina, and, building a cabin on the banks of Watauga Creek, began the settlement of Tennessee. James Robertson and a host of others followed in 1770, and soon the valleys of the Clinch and the Holston were dotted with cabins. In 1769 Daniel Boone, one of the grandest figures in frontier history, began his exploits in what is now Kentucky, and before 1777 Boonesboro, Harrodsburg, and Lexington were founded.

[Illustration: %Model of Fitch’s steamboat%[l]]

[Footnote 1: Now in the National Museum, Washington.]

%202. State of Franklin.%–Before the Revolution closed, emigrants under James Robertson and John Donelson planted Nashville and half a dozen other settlements on the Cumberland, in middle Tennessee. After the Revolution ended, so many settlers were in eastern Tennessee that they tried to make a new state. North Carolina, following the example of her Northern sisters, ceded to Congress her claim to what is now Tennessee in 1784. But the people on the Watauga no sooner heard, of it than under the lead of John Sevier they organized the state of Franklin, whereupon North Carolina repealed the act of cession and absorbed the new state by making the Franklin officials her officials for the district of Tennessee. In 1789 she again ceded the district, and in May of that year Tennessee became part of the public domain.

%203. Squatters in Ohio.%–The cession to Congress of the land north of the Ohio led to an emigration from Virginia and Kentucky to what is now the state of Ohio. As this territory was to be sold to pay the national debt, Congress was forced to order the squatters away, and when they refused to go, sent troops to burn their cabins, destroy their crops, and drive them across the Ohio. The lawful settlement of the territory began after the Ohio and Scioto companies bought their lands in 1787, and John C. Symmes purchased his in 1788.

%204. Pittsburg in 1790.%–At Pittsburg, then the greatest town in the United States west of the Alleghany Mountains, were some 200 houses, mostly of logs, and 2000 people, a newspaper, and a few rude manufactories. The life of the town was its river trade. Pittsburg was the place where emigrants “fitted out” for the West. A settler intending to go down the Ohio valley with his family and his goods would lay in a stock of powder and ball, buy flour and ham enough to last him for a month, and secure two rude structures which passed under the name of boats.

[Illustration: %The first millstones and salt kettle in Ohio%]

%205. A Trip down the Ohio in 1790.%–In the long keel boat he would put his wife, his children, and such travelers as had been waiting at Pittsburg for a chance to go down the river. In the flatboat would be his cattle or his stores. Two dangers beset the voyager on the Ohio. His boat might become entangled in the branches of the trees that overhung the river, or be fired into by the Indians who lurked in the woods. The cabin of the keel boat, therefore, was low, that it might glide under the trees, and the roof and sides were made as nearly bullet-proof as possible. The whole craft was steered by a huge oar mounted on a pivot at the stern.[1]

[Footnote 1: See the boats in the pictures on next page.]

[Illustration: Map of Ohio]

%206. Towns along the Ohio.%–As the emigrant in such an ark floated down the river, he would come first to Wheeling, a town of fifty log cabins, and then to Marietta, a town planted in Ohio in 1788 by settlers sent by the Ohio Company. Below Marietta were Belpre and Gallipolis, a settlement made by Frenchmen brought there by the Scioto Company. Yet farther down, on the Kentucky side, were Limestone (now Maysville) and Newport, opposite which some settlers were founding the city of Cincinnati. Once past Cincinnati, all was unbroken wilderness till one reached Louisville in Kentucky, beyond which few emigrants had yet ventured to go.

[Illustration: %Cincinnati in 1802 (Fort Washington)%]

%207. Cotton Planting.%–The South, in 1790, was on the eve of a great industrial revolution. The products of the states south of Virginia had been tar, pitch, resin, lumber, rice, and indigo. But in the years following the peace the indigo plants had been destroyed year after year by an insect. As the plant was not a native of our country, but was brought from the West Indies, it became necessary either to import more seed plants, or to raise some other staple. Many chose the latter course, and about 1787 began to grow cotton.

[Illustration: %Farmers’ Castle (Belpre) in 1791%]

%208. Whitney and the Cotton Gin.%–The experiment succeeded, but a serious difficulty arose. The cotton plant has pods which when ripe split open and show a white woolly substance attached to seeds. Before the cotton could be used, these seeds must be picked out, and as the labor of cleaning was very great, only a small quantity could be sent to market. It happened, however, that a young man from Massachusetts, named Eli Whitney, was then living in Georgia, and he, seeing the need of a machine to clean cotton, invented the cotton gin.[1] Till then, a negro slave could not clean two pounds of cotton in a day. With the gin the same slave in the same time could remove the seeds from a hundred pounds. This solved the difficulty, and gave to the United States another staple even greater in value than tobacco. In 1792 one hundred and ninety-two thousand pounds of cotton were exported to Europe; in 1795, after the gin was invented, six million pounds were sent out of the country. In 1894 no less than 4275 million pounds were raised and either consumed or exported. Of all the marvelous inventions of our countrymen, this produced the very greatest consequences. It made cotton planting profitable; it brought immense wealth to the people of the South every year; it covered New England with cotton mills; and by making slave labor profitable it did more than anything else to fasten slavery on the United States for seventy years, and finally to bring on the Civil War, the most terrible struggle of modern times.

[Footnote 1: The word “gin” is a contraction of “engine.”]

[Illustration: %The cotton gin% _A_. Whitney’s original gin. _B_. A later form.]

SUMMARY

1. When Washington was inaugurated, the United States consisted of eleven states, with a population of about 3,380,000.

2. These people lived not far from the Atlantic coast. Few cities existed; not one had 50,000 inhabitants. Even the largest was without many conveniences which we consider necessaries.

3. Travel was slow and difficult, and though a steamboat had been invented and used, it was too far ahead of the times to succeed.

4. West of the Alleghany Mountains a few settlements had been made between 1763 and 1783. But it was after 1783, when streams of emigrants poured over the mountains, that settlement really began.

6. In the South cotton was just beginning to be cultivated; there all labor was done by slaves. In the North slavery was dying out, and in five of the states had been abolished.

State of the Country in 1790

– _On the Seaboard._
The population. {Number.
{Distribution.
{Movement west.
The cities {Size.
{Absence of many conveniences known to us. {Newspapers and magazines.
Communication between states. {Bad roads. Slow travel. {The post offices.
{The stagecoaches. The inns. {The early steamboat.

– _In the Ohio Valley._ {Population. Squatters. {Pittsburg in 1790.
{A trip down the Ohio. {Towns in the valley.

– _In the South._ {Slavery.
{Cotton planting.
{Whitney and the cotton gin.

CHAPTER XV

THE RISE OF PARTIES

%209. Organizing the New Government.%–he President having been inaugurated, and the new government fairly established, it became the duty of Congress to enact such laws as were needed immediately. The first act passed by Congress in 1789 was therefore a tariff act laying duties on goods, wares, and merchandise imported into the United States. Customhouses were then established and customs districts marked out, and ports of entry and ports of delivery designated; provision was made for the support of lighthouses and beacons; the Ordinance of 1787 for the government of the territories was slightly changed and reenacted; the departments of State, War, and Treasury were established; and a call was made on the Secretary of the Treasury to report a plan for payment of the old Continental debt.

%210. The United States Courts.%–The Constitution declares that the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court and such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. Acting under this power, Congress made provision for a Supreme Court, consisting of a Chief Justice and five Associate Justices, and marked out the United States into circuits and districts. The circuits were three in number. In the first were the Eastern States; in the second, the Middle States; and in the third, the Southern States. To each were assigned two Justices of the Supreme Court, whose business it was to go to some city in each state in the circuit, and there, with the district judge of that state, hold a circuit court. The district courts were thirteen in number, one being established in each state.[1] Washington appointed John Jay the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

[Footnote 1: For later changes, see Andrews’s _Manual of the Constitution,_ p. 183.]

%211. The Secretaries.%–During the management of affairs by the Continental Congress three great executive departments had gradually grown up and been placed in charge of three men, called the “Superintendent of Finance,” the “Secretary of the United States for the Department of Foreign Affairs,” and the “Secretary of War.” These the Constitution recognized in the expression “principal officer in each of the executive departments.” Congress by law now continued the departments and placed them in charge of a Secretary of the Treasury, a Secretary of State, and a Secretary of War. Washington filled the offices promptly, making Alexander Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Jefferson Secretary of State, and General Henry Knox Secretary of War.

%212. The “Cabinet.”%–It has long been the custom for the President to gather his secretaries about him on certain days in each week for the purpose of discussing public measures. To these gatherings has been given the name “Cabinet meetings,” while the secretaries have come to be called “Cabinet officers.” The Constitution, however, never intended to give the President a body of advisers. Indeed, a proposition to provide him with a council was voted down in the constitutional convention. But Washington at once began to consult the Chief Justice, the Vice President, his three secretaries, and the Attorney-general on matters of importance. At first he asked their opinions individually and in writing, but toward the end of his first term he convened a general meeting of the heads of departments, and by so doing set a custom out of which, in time, the “Cabinet” has grown.

%213. The Origin of the National Debt.%–As soon as Hamilton was made Secretary of the Treasury, it became his duty, in accordance with an order from Congress, to prepare a plan for the payment of the debts contracted by the Continental Congress. When that body was unexpectedly called on, in May, 1775, to conduct the war, it had nothing with which to pay expenses, and was forced to use all sorts of means to raise money.

[Illustrations: Continental money]

%214. Paper Money.%–The first resort was the issue, during 1775 and 1776, of six batches of Continental “bills of credit,” amounting in all to $36,000,000. These “bills” were rudely engraved bits of paper, stating on their face that “This bill entitles the bearer to receive —- Spanish milled dollars, or the value thereof in gold or silver.” They were issued in sums of various denominations, from one sixth of a dollar up, and were to be redeemed by the states. The amount assigned each state for redemption was in proportion to the supposed number of its inhabitants.

%215. Loan-office Certificates.%–In 1776 Congress tried another means. It opened a loan office in each state and called on patriotic people to come forward and loan it money, receiving in return pieces of paper called “loan-office certificates.” Interest was to be paid on these; but after a while Congress, having no money with which to pay interest, was forced to resort to another form of paper, called “interest indents.”

%216. The Congress Lottery.%–The loan office having failed to bring in as much money as was needed, Congress, toward the close of 1776, was driven to seek some other way, and resorted to a lottery. A certain number of tickets were sold, after which a drawing took place, and all who drew prizes were given certificates payable at the end of five years.

%217. More Bills of Credit.%–But the sale of tickets went off so slowly that Congress had to go back to the issue of bills of credit. In 1777, therefore, the printing press was again put to work, and issues were made in rapid succession, till more than $200,000,000 in Continental paper were in circulation.

%218. The “New Tenor”.%–Then the Continental bills ceased to circulate, and in March, 1780, Congress called in the old money and offered to exchange it for a new issue, giving one dollar of the new paper money, or “new tenor,” for forty dollars of the old. But the attempt to restore credit by such means was a failure, and by the end of the year 1781 all paper money ceased to circulate.

%219. Certificates.%–Long before this time officials had been forced to pay debts contracted in the name of Congress with other kinds of paper, called certificates, and known as treasury, commissary, quartermaster, marine, and hospital certificates, according to the department issuing them. To these must be added the “final settlements,” or certificates given to the soldiers at the end of the war in payment of their services.

%220. Foreign Debt.%–Besides the debt thus contracted at home, Congress had borrowed a great sum in Europe.

%221. The National Debt in 1790.%–Thus the debt contracted by the Continental Congress consisted of two parts. 1. The foreign debt, due to France, Holland, and Spain, and amounting, Hamilton found, to $11,700,000. 2. The domestic or home debt, of $42,000,000. But the states had also fallen into debt because of their exertions in the war. Just how great the state debts were could not be determined, but they were estimated to be $21,500,000.

%222. Assumption and Funding.%–For the redemption of this debt Hamilton prepared two measures,–the funding, or, as we should say, the bonding, of the foreign and Continental debt, and the assuming and funding of the state debts. This was done, and Congress ordered stock bearing interest to be issued in exchange for the old debts, and so established our national debt, which in 1790 amounted to $75,000,000.

%223. The National Capital.%–Funding the state debts was strongly opposed by many congressmen, and was not carried till a bargain was made by which it was agreed that if enough members from Virginia and Pennsylvania would support the measure to secure its passage through the House of Representatives, the national government should be removed from New York to Philadelphia for ten years, and after that to a city to be built on the Potomac. This was faithfully carried out, and in the summer of 1790 the government offices were removed to Philadelphia, where they remained till the summer of 1800, when they were removed to Washington in the District of Columbia.

%224. The Bank of the United States.%–The troublesome questions of funding and assumption thus disposed of, Congress called on Hamilton for a report on the further support of public credit, and when it met in the

A School History of the United States by John Bach McMaster (page 3)