been accustomed to consider within legitimate political methods. The Republican leaders made every trial as public as possible, and gained votes constantly, so that the Federalists began to be shy of the very powers which they had sought. Every new election was a storm-signal for the Federalist party; and the danger was increased by schism in their own ranks.
125. Hamilton was now a private citizen of New York; but he had the confidence of his party more largely than its nominal Federalist Schism. head, the president, and he maintained close and confidential relations with the cabinet which Adams had taken unchanged from Washington. The Hamilton faction saw no way of preserving and consolidating the newly acquired powers of the Federal government but by keeping up and increasing the war feeling against France; Adams had the instinctive leaning of an American president towards peace. Amid cries of wrath and despair from his party he accepted the first overtures of the new Napoleonic government, sent envoys to negotiate a peace, and ordered them to depart for France when they delayed too long. Then, discovering flat treachery in his cabinet, he dismissed it and blurted out a public expression of his feeling that Hamilton and his adherents were “a British faction.” Hamilton retorted with a circular letter to his party friends, denouncing the president; the Republicans intercepted it and gave it a wider circulation than its author had intended; and the Hamilton faction tried so to arrange the Election of 1800. electoral vote that C. C. Pinckney should be chosen president in 1800 and Adams should be shelved into the vice-presidency. The result depended on the electoral vote of New York; and Aaron Burr, who had introduced the drill and machinery of a modern American political party there, had made the state Republican and secured a majority for the Republican candidates. These (Jefferson and Burr) received the same number of electoral votes (73),[1] and the House of Representatives (controlled by the Federalists) was thus called upon to decide which should be president. There was an effort by the Federalists to disappoint the Republicans by making Burr president; but Jefferson obtained that office, Burr becoming vice-president for four years. This disputed election, however, led to the adoption in 1804 of the 12th amendment to the Constitution, which prescribed that each elector should vote separately for president and vice-president, and thus prevent another tie vote of this kind; this amendment, moreover, made very improbable the choice in the future of a president and a vice-president from opposing parties.
126. The “Revolution of 1800” decided the future development of the United States. The new dominant party entered “Revolution of 1800.” upon its career weighted with the theory of state sovereignty; and a civil war was necessary before this dogma, put to use again in the service of slavery, could be banished from the American system. But the democratic development never was checked. From that time the interpretation of the Federal Constitution has generally favoured individual rights at the expense of governmental power. As the Republicans obtained control of the states they altered the state constitutions so as to cut out all the arrangements that favoured property or class interests, and reduced political power to the dead level of manhood suffrage. In most of the states outside of New England this process was completed before 1815; but New England tenacity was proof against the advancing revolution until about 1820. For twenty years after its downfall of 1800 the Federalist party maintained its hopeless struggle, and then it faded away into nothing, leaving as its permanent memorial the excellent organization of the Federal government, which its successful rival hardly changed. Its two successors—the Whig and the second Republican party—have also been broad-constructionist parties, but they have admitted democracy as well; the Whig party adopted popular methods at least, and the Republican went further in the direction of individual rights, securing the emancipation of enslaved labour.
127. The disputed election of 1800 was decided in the new capital city of Washington, to which the government had just been The New Capital. removed after having been for ten years at Philadelphia. Its streets and parks existed only on paper. The Capitol had been begun; the Executive Mansion was unfinished, and its audience room was used by Mrs Adams as a drying room for clothes; and the congressmen could hardly find lodgings. The inconveniences were only an exaggeration of the condition of other American cities. Their sanitary conditions were bad, and yellow fever and cholera from time to time reduced several of them almost to depopulation. More than once, during this decade, the fever visited Philadelphia and New York, drove out most of the people, and left grass growing in the streets. The communication between the cities was still wretched. The traveller was subject to every danger or annoyance that bad roads, bad carriages, bad horses, bad inns and bad police protection could combine to inflict upon him. But the war with natural obstacles had fairly begun, though it had little prospect of success until steam was brought into use as the ally of man.
128. About this time the term “the West” appears. It meant then the western part of New York, the new territory The West. north of the Ohio, and Kentucky and Tennessee. In settling land boundaries New York had transferred (1786) to Massachusetts, whose claims crossed her territory, the right to (but not jurisdiction over) a large tract of land in central New York, and to another large tract in the Erie basin. The sale of this land had carried population considerably west of the Hudson. After other expeditions against the Ohio Indians had been defeated, one under General Anthony Wayne had compelled them in 1794-95 to give up all the territory now in the state of Ohio. Settlement received a new impetus. Between 1790 and 1800 the population of Ohio had risen from almost nothing to 45,000, that of Tennessee from 36,000 to 106,000, and that of Kentucky from 74,000 to 221,000—the last-named state now exceeding six of the “old thirteen” in population. The difficulties of the western emigrant, however, were still enormous. He obtained land of his own, fertile land and plenty of it, but little else. The produce of the soil had to be consumed at home, or near it; ready money was scarce and distant products scarcer; and comforts, except the very rudest substitutes of home manufacture, were unobtainable. The new life bore most hardly upon women; and, if the record of woman's share in the work of American colonization could be fully made up, the price paid for the final success would seem enormous.
129. The number of post offices rose during these ten years from 75 to 903, the miles of post routes from 1900 to 21,000, Post Office. and the revenue from $38,000 to $231,000. These figures seem small in comparison with the 61,158 post offices, 430,738 m. of post routes (besides 943,087 m. of rural delivery routes), and a postal revenue of $191,478,663 in 1908, but the comparison with the figures of 1790 shows a development in which the new Constitution, with its increased security, must have been a factor.
130. The power of Congress to regulate patents was already bearing fruit. Until 1789 this power was in the hands of the Patents. states, and the privileges of the inventor were restricted to the territory of the patenting state. Now he had a vast and growing territory within which all the profits of the invention were his own. Twenty patents were issued in 1793, and 23,471 one hundred years afterwards; but one of the inventions of 1793 was Eli Whitney's cotton gin.
131. When the Constitution was adopted it was not known that the cultivation of cotton could be made profitable in the Cotton. Southern states. The “roller gin” could clean only 6 ℔ a day by slave labour. In 1784 eight bags of cotton, landed in Liverpool from an American ship, were seized on the ground that so much cotton could not be the produce of the United States. Eli Whitney (q.v.) invented the saw-gin, by which the cotton was dragged through parallel wires with openings too narrow to allow the seeds to pass; and one slave could now clean 1000 ℔ a day. The exports of cotton leaped from 189,000 ℔ in
- ↑ Adams received 65, Pinckney 64 and John Jay 1.
