the crew making the trip home on foot or on horseback. John Fitch and others were already experimenting on what was soon to be the steamboat; but the statesman of 1789, looking at the task of keeping under one government a country of such distances, with such difficulties of communication, may be pardoned for having felt anxiety as to the future. To almost all thinking men of the time the Constitution was an experiment, and the unity of the new nation a subject for very serious doubt.
106. The comparative isolation of the people everywhere, the lack of books, the poverty of the schools and newspapers, were Literature. all influences which worked strongly against any pronounced literary development. Poems, essays and paintings were feeble imitations of European models; history was annalistic, if anything; and the drama hardly existed. In two points the Americans were strong, and had done good work. Such men as Jonathan Edwards had excelled in various departments of theology, and American preaching had reached a high degree of quality and influence; and, in the line of politics, the American state papers rank among the very best of their kind. Having a very clear perception of their political purposes, and having been restricted in study and reading to the great masters of pure and vigorous English, and particularly to the English translators of the Bible, the American leaders came to their work with an English style which could hardly have been improved. The writings of Franklin, Washington, the Adamses, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Jay and others show the secret of their strength in every page. Much the same reasons, with the influences of democracy, brought oratory, as represented by Patrick Henry, Fisher Ames, John Randolph and others, to a point not very far below the mark afterwards reached by Daniel Webster. The effect of these facts on the subsequent development of the country is not often estimated at its full value. All through an immigration of every language and dialect under heaven the English language has been protected in its supremacy by the necessity of going back to the “fathers of the republic” for the first, and often the complete, statement of principles in every great political struggle, social problem or lawsuit.
107. The cession of the “North-West Territory” by Virginia and New York had been followed up by similar cessions by Limits of Settlement. Massachusetts (1785), Connecticut (1786) and South Carolina (1787). North Carolina did not cede Tennessee until early in 1790, nor Georgia her western claims until 1802. Settlement in all these regions was still very sparse. The centres of Western settlement, in Tennessee and Kentucky, had become more firmly established, and a new one, in Ohio, had just been begun. The whole western limits of settlement of the old thirteen states had moved much nearer their present boundaries; and the acquisition of the Western title, with the liberal policy of organization and government which had been begun, was to have its first clear effects during the first decade of the new government. Almost the only obstacle to its earlier success had been the doubts as to the attitude which the Spanish authorities, at New Orleans and Madrid, would take towards the The Mississippi River. new settlements. They had already asserted a claim that the Mississippi was an exclusively Spanish stream from its mouth up to the Yazoo, and that no American boat should be allowed to sail on this part of it. To the Western settler the Alleghanies and bad roads were enough to cut him off from any other way to a market than down the Mississippi; and it was not easy to restrain him from a forcible defiance of the Spanish claim. The Northern states were willing to allow the Spanish claim for a period of years in return for a commercial treaty; the Southern states and the Western settlers protested angrily; and once more the spectre of dissolution appeared, not to be laid again until the new government had made a treaty with Spain in 1795 (see Pinckney, Thomas), securing common navigation of the Mississippi.
108. Contemporary authorities agree that a marked change Social Conditions. had come over the people since 1775, and few of them seem to think the change one for the better. Many attribute it to the looseness of manners and morals introduced by the French and British soldiers; others to the general effects of war; a few, Tories all, to the demoralizing effects of rebellion. The successful establishment of nationality would be enough to explain most of it; and if we remember that the new nation had secured its title to a vast western territory, of unknown but rich capacities, which it was now moving to reduce to possession by emigration, it would seem far more strange if the social conditions had not been somewhat disturbed.
G.—The Development of Democracy, 1789-1801.
109. All the tendencies of political institutions in the United States had certainly been towards democracy; but it cannot be Democracy in the United States. said that the leading men were hearty or unanimous in their agreement with this tendency. Not a few of them were pronounced republicans even before 1775, but the mass of them had no great objections to a monarchical form of government until the war-spirit had converted them. The Declaration of Independence had been directed rather against the king than against a king. Even after popular sovereignty had pronounced against a king, class spirit was for some time a fair substitute for aristocracy. As often happens, democracy at least thought of a Caesar when it apprehended class control. Certain discontented officers of the Continental Army proposed to Washington that he become king, but he promptly and indignantly put the offer by. The suggestion of a return to monarchy in some form, as a possible road out of the confusion of the Confederation, occurs in the correspondence of some of the leading men; and while the Convention of 1787 was holding its secret sessions a rumour went out that it had decided to offer a crown to an English prince.
110. The state constitutions were democratic, except for property or other restrictions on the right of suffrage, or provisions carefully designed to keep the control of at least one house of the state legislature “in the hands of property.” The Federal Constitution was so drawn that it would have lent itself kindly either to class control or to democracy. The electoral system of choosing the president and vice-president was altogether anti-democratic, though democracy has conquered it: not an elector, since 1796, has disobeyed the purely moral claim of his party to control his choice. Since the Senate was to be chosen by the state legislatures, “property,” if it could retain its influence in those bodies, could control at least one house of Congress. The question whether the Constitution was to have a democratic or an anti-democratic interpretation was to be settled in the next twelve years.
111. The states were a strong factor in the final settlement, from the fact that the Constitution had left to them the control of the Influence of Immigration. elective franchise: they were to make its conditions what each of them saw fit. Religious tests for the right of suffrage had been quite common in the colonies; property tests were almost universal. The former disappeared shortly after the War of Independence; the latter survived in some of the states far into the constitutional period. But the desire to attract immigration was always a strong impelling force to induce states, especially frontier states, to make the acquisition of full citizenship and political rights as easy and rapid as possible. This force was not so strong at first as it was after the great stream of immigration began about 1848, but it was enough to tend constantly to the development of democracy. In later times, when state laws allow the immigrant to vote even before the period assigned by Federal laws allows him to become a naturalized citizen, there have been demands for the modification of the ultra state democracy; but no such danger was apprehended in the first decade.
112. The Anti-Federalists had been a political party, but a party with but one principle. The absolute failure of that Organization of the New Government. principle deprived the party of all cohesion; and the Federalists controlled the first two Congresses almost entirely. Their pronounced ability was shown in their organizing measures, which still govern the American system very largely. The departments of state, of the treasury, of war, of justice, and of the post-office were rapidly and successfully organized; acts were passed for the regulation of seamen, commerce, tonnage duties, lighthouses, intercourse with the Indians, Territories, and the militia; a national capital was selected; a national bank was chartered; the national debt was funded, and the state debts were assumed as
