Chapter VI

DEMOCRACY IN POWER; OR, JEFFERSON’S ADMINISTRATION.

1801–1809.

Few Removals by Mr. Jefferson from the Ungilt, Official Chairs.—Mr.
Smith gets into the Navy.—Who started long Messages to Congress; and
the Difficulty of finding an End to them.—War with Tripoli; and the
Complexion with which the Bey ended it.—Decatur and his Mediterranean
Travels.—Ohio in 1802.—The early Danger it ran of being all cut up
into City Lots.—How the Exodus of its Population was the Genesis of
its Growth.—Of Westering Caravans.—Bonaparte sells Louisiana, and what
a Sell it was.—How we were saved an extra Volume of Supreme Court
Decisions.—The Murder of Alexander Hamilton.—A Ghost-Story about Aaron
Burr.—The public Estimate of his Character unchanged by Biographical
varnishing.—A South Carolina Conceit.—The Play of Lear in
Tripoli.—Peculiar Mussulman Habits; the Author of Don
Quixote.—Michigan escapes the Cuppings of Eastern States.—Her
lymphatic Temperament.—Lake Michigan as a Breakwater against
Chicago.—Burr tried for Treason, “not proven” guilty, and
surrendered—to himself.—Of Bonaparte and other Usurpers.—The Oldest
dislike the Youngest.—History of the Attempts of George III. and
Bonaparte to blockade without Ships.—Once a Bull always a Bull.—Search
of American Ships for Seamen.—The Unwisdom of Half-Apologies.—The
American Embargo and its Popularity with Unmarried Girls.

The advent of the first Democratic brave to the dispensing patronage and to the right of taking official scalps, was not followed by a general emptying of official chairs and the massacre of official enemies. The thirty-five ballotings in the House of Representatives between Mr. Jefferson and Aaron Burr made men anxious, not hungry and thirsty. The fair-minded Madison was appointed to the State Department; Albert Gallatin, the golden-mouthed, to the Treasury; and Robert, not John Smith, to the Navy. Few changes were made in the ungilt places; although the innocent public of that day were not a little excited, at the bare suspicion that a few dozen Federalists were removed for their political opinions. The guilt of differing politically from the administration was not considered by the President so flagrant as to be adequately punished only by exile from office.

Upon Mr. Jefferson must, however, be laid the crime of beginning the practice of sending to Congress messages in writing,—a beginning which, like the messages themselves, seems to have no end. Since the flood human life is far too short for these Presidential essays, even without the accompanying documents.

A war with that dusky corsair, the Bey of Tripoli, clouded the very commencement of the new administration, breaking finally, after lasting three years, into a heavy shower, February 9, 1804, from the cannonading guns of young Decatur’s ship, the “Intrepid”,—a shower followed by blue-skied peace. Commodore Preble, who with his fleet had been dealing with Morocco, assisted in tanning, by some of Bellona’s bleaching-powders, the sable-peltried Tripolitan. The result was that the Bey turned to another complexion in his treatment of Christian captives.

In 1802 Ohio doffed the pantalets and appeared around the Union board as a full-grown State. Some of her settlements had grown so fast, and so threatened to absorb the land into building-lots, that it was feared for a time that the surface would be insufficient for farming purposes. The exodus of population farther westward, however, relieved the anxieties of its genesis, and marked the first chapter of its growth. The bivouac that had encamped on her grandly rolling rivers began soon to join the westering caravan which pitched their tents across the Mississippi against the sunsettings. A Hoosier who borrows money at two per cent a month to buy land with may be trusted to pay it back in a short time. Two to nothing that he will add from his generosity a bonus with the return of the loan.

Bonaparte, now Consul for life, and in sore need of money, sold to us, for $15,000,000, that tract of country stretching undefinedly towards the Pacific, and called Louisiana. Some of the wits of that day raised the question whether the purchase lawfully included alligators of such length that they stretched over the boundary lines. Neither this great question, nor the secondary one of the right of our government to buy foreign territory, was mooted in the Supreme Court, and thus we were spared an extra volume of majority essays and longer dissenting opinions. The foreign pill was too sugar-coated to cause any wry faces. It was a very big sell—for France.

In July, 1804, Aaron Burr, Vice-President, murdered Alexander Hamilton at Hoboken. Some biographers have attempted, since the death of the future exile and fugitive from justice, to lighten the heavy burden which he carried for thirty-three years afterwards, but in vain. The public rarely reverses its first verdict. They can seldom be made to believe that its first look at the piece was on the wrong side, and no new napping or glossing will convince it that the other is the right side.

The Presidency took such a fancy to Mr. Jefferson that, at his re-election, in 1804, he received 162 out of 176 votes cast; C. C. Pinckney, Esquire, of South Carolina getting the other 14. South Carolina then had the pleasant little conceit of voting for herself,—a harmless pastime that kept up her peculiar idea of resistance to Federal subjugation, and made a variety for the tellers in counting the contents of the electoral urn.

During 1805 Mr. Eaton, the American consul at Tunis, made an agreeable arrangement with Hamet Caramelli, the legitimate but exiled Bashaw of Tripoli, for his restoration to his seat, badly filled by his brother; and to carry out the plan, he started from Alexandria, in Egypt, in company with the sable Hamet, seventy American seamen and four hundred and thirty Arabs. After traversing a thousand miles of desert sands, he fought two severe battles, took Derne, the capital city of the chief province of Tripoli, and would have deposed the cruel reigning Bashaw, and opened the prison doors shut on hundreds of innocent Christian captives,—Eaton’s principal object in the romantic expedition,—but for a hasty, jealous, and disreputable treaty got up between Tobias Lear, Consul-General of the United States, and the Bey, whereby we agreed to pay the crowned bandit $60,000 in silver, instead of in leaden pieces, for the ransom of our sailors enmeshed, like flies, in the old spider’s web.

The nation never liked that play of Lear. They always thought of this its principal act, with the Earl of Kent:—

“There is division,
Although as yet the face of it be covered
With mutual cunning ’twixt Albany and Cornwall.”

Had these successive and armed protests by America against the Barbary habit of enslaving white Christian captives, taken in war, been properly seconded by the European powers, the dusk Mussulman of Northern Africa would have been then converted from the old Roman practices to which they willingly succeeded,—practices which the author of Don Quixote, himself an Algerine captive for five years, had punctured with his sharp quill over two centuries before, and which Lord Exmouth, with a British fleet, so riddled with shotted logic, in 1816, as to silence forever.

While the play of Lear was so badly acted on the shores of the Mediterranean, Michigan, toddling up from between the lake coasts that bordered her double peninsula, left her ancient name of Wayne County and the protecting hand of Indiana, and assumed an independent territorial _status_. Her lymphatic temperament enabled her to suck up through her many aquatic ducts an arterial circulation which helped her to stand pretty successfully the dry-cuppings of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. In straits often she has worked her way with moderate success through her Superior Lakes and water-courses to the open paths of seaboard trade. The pictured rocks of her great northern lake illustrate in lithography, rarely copied, some traits which she shares with no others. Fortunately for her future independence, the intervention of Lake Michigan prevents her territory from being laid out in city lots by Chicago.

The American Cain, restless and uneasy, haunted by the pale ghost of Hoboken, set on foot in 1806 an expedition designed either to slice off a piece of American territory west of the Alleghanies, and to give it as a _morceau_ to Aaron the First, to be crowned at New Orleans, his future capital; or to rid Mexico of a part of her troublesome northern possessions and to establish over it the dynasty of the Burrs. Tried at Richmond, Virginia, in 1807, before Chief Justice Marshall, he had the honor of being enclosed in the superb amber vase of Wirt’s rhetoric for immortal preservation, but the misfortune to be dismissed on insufficient proof to the chained companionship of the dreaded ghost.

Bonaparte, tired of his consulate for life, and anointed Emperor December 2, 1804, by a priest whom he called from Rome to Paris for that purpose, known as Pope Pius VII., had raised against himself and his family pretensions the more ancient usurpers of Europe, whose equally bold seizure of the right to govern people, and to take their money whereon to live in ease, was veiled and historically disguised by a few score years of unrighteous possession. Of course the ancient usurpers despised and made faces at the newest. Armies composed of thousands of common people—farmers, mechanics, and poor laborers—padded in bright-colored clothes out of moneys borrowed on their credit and to be repaid by their children, were hurled by these usurpers at each other at Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena; and after the smoke of the shocks rolled off, it was found that all the crowned graspers were badly shaken up and shattered, and had limped away exceedingly hurt in pride and limb, excepting England only, which, mistress of the water by the victory of Nelson at Trafalgar, in 1805, thrust her hated trident into the face of the master of the land. The sea-tossings of the combatants became profitable to our neutral commerce, which picked up out of the ports of each the articles needed by the other, and laid them down on the rival wharves. England had become too much of a trader and shopkeeper to see such results with complacency, even if, as a belligerent, she could not participate in the dividends. And so, in May, 1806, she attempted to inaugurate against France—in addition to actual hostilities—a paper blockade, by declaring, in a well-sealed and highly respectable looking document, about two thirds of the Continent of Europe, including the French territory and its dependencies, in a state of blockade. Without a blockading squadron to deliver this document and to enforce the blockade, this declaration was an empty bravado, and a fraud on the rights of neutrals. This dog-in-the-manger device to stop the trade it could not supply provoked the newest usurper to a like policy. Napoleon, equally blinded by his resentments, and equally unconscientious in his handling of international law, issued from Berlin a counter document, also well sealed and incapable of delivery, declaring the British Isles in a state of blockade. Without ships—those marine constables—to serve papers and bring offenders within maritime jurisdiction, these orders and decrees became mischievous threats, making lawful trade piracy, and subjecting neutral merchant vessels to arrest, detention, search, and condemnation. England now put forth another pretension. As by the feudal law it was held that “once a subject always a subject,” of course a fortunate Bull remained a Bull, even when seeking work or protection on an American vessel. American ships were thus required to stop on the high seas and be searched for truant English stock. Such a bull England might make of herself; but she was so angry as not to see that neutrals would not become such silly calves as to be driven off by these big-looking shouts.

The question was sharply stated by the Leopard, a British man-of-war, to the Chesapeake, an American frigate, on board of which it was claimed were four British seamen. The refusal to permit the ship’s hold to be looked into not pleasing the Leopard, she fell unexpectedly upon the little frigate and tore the supposed bulls with horny claws out of the grasp of the American. The sight offended all America, especially as it turned out that three of the four seamen were American citizens.

President Jefferson expressed the national resentment in a proclamation interdicting all British ships entering our ports. Great Britain made another bull by half apologizing and delivering up two of the four seamen. The lesson of the stamp duties had not illuminated the density of George III. He had not learned that half-apologies are confessions of wrong, but no atonement.

Further experiments were mutually made by the two enraged fighters on neutral rights and international decencies. In November Great Britain forbade any one trading with France; and France, equally enterprising, ordered the stoppage of all trade with England. Our government replied to these illegal proceedings by an embargo on all vessels in our ports, foreign and domestic. From December, 1807, until March, 1809, marine beaux were abundant, and young ladies joyous. When the embargo was raised the hopes of the latter sank. They became more desponding still when the government forbade all commercial correspondence with France and England.