HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.*
IF any period of American history was epoch-making, it was that included in Jefferson's two Administrations. Partly owing to external, partly to domestic events, the American nation was during that period called upon to choose the form of internal polity which she should adopt, and the position which she should assume as regards the rest of the world. Jefferson conquered power as the leader of those who wished to regard the United States, not as a single community, but as a con- federacy of allied States. He and his friends were antagonistic to all notion of creating a powerful nation of the kind desired by Hamilton and the Federalists. The idea of a strong State, able to hold its own against all comers, was utterly abhorrent to Jefferson. His passion, as ho was never tired of proclaiming, was peace. What he desired was a continent covered by democratic communities, and bound loosely together by a Federal Union. He was, in fact, an idealist Jacobin. Impregnated with the ideas, though not with the bloody and passionate spirit of the Jacobins, he believed that it would be possible to found an ideal polity in. the New World, where every one should be free and equal, except the Negroes, where war should be an impossibility, and where government should be reduced to a minimum. Jefferson, however, like so many idealists before him, found facts stronger than theories, "the necessities of the moment" than an a priori line of policy. Notwithstanding his sincere desire to weaken the Federal power, he was forced to strengthen it very greatly. In spite of his passion for peace, he was obliged to be perpetually threatening hostilities and preparing for war. He yearned to reduce the Judiciary to impotence, yet his Administration left the Supreme Court stronger than before. He dreamed of laying up the whole of the United States Navy in a single dry-dock, and ended by building a flotilla of new gunboats. Nothing could have been more oppoied to all his theories than the endowment of the Union Government with a huge territory in which its agents wielded despotic powers. Yet by annexing Louisiana Jefferson gave the Union for the first time the full attributes of absolute sovereignty. Even his attempt to banish aristocratic formality from the White House had results exactly opposite to those he desired. His "Canons of Etiquette" were sincerely in- * History of the United States of America during the First and Second Admbria- tratione of Thomas jefferson. By Henry Adams. 4 vole. London: Patnam's Sous. New York : Charles Seribtter's Bow. 1891.
tended to introduce free social intercourse at the Execu- tive mansion,—an intercourse untrammelled by rules of precedence. Their effect was to cause the bitterest heart- burnings, and to produce a new hierarchy of the drawing- room more offensive and more arrogant than the old. In spite, however, of Jefferson's defects—and they were many—his accession to the Presidency must be counted as a matter of congratulation to the whole English race. There have always existed among men of English kin two parties, though they have borne very different names at different epochs,—the party of the big, and the party of the little patriotism ; the party which considers the interests of the nation as a whole, and the party whose ideal is particu- larist. Cromwell, for example, was one of the greatest leaders of the patriotic party. The King owed what strength he had to the particularism of the North, of Wales, of Scot- land, and of Ireland. The names of Lincoln and Jefferson Davies, again, recall the latest episode but one of the ever- recurring conflict. Thomas Jefferson's accession to power did good in showing that even when the particularist spirit is given full play, the compelling destiny of the race cannot be controlled. The man who was called to the helm in order to run the ship on the rocks, was forced by a will stronger than his own to strengthen her for future storms. If Jefferson's opponents had beaten him, it might have been possible to say that the attempt to move, not in the direction of drawing closer the bonds of the community, but of separa- tion, had never been tried on a large scale. As it is, two hemispheres may learn from the life of Jefferson that the destiny of the English race is centripetal, not centrifugal. But very few years may elapse before the lesson shall be of priceless importance to the Englishmen of Australia, The manner in which Mr. Adams has told the story of Jefferson's Administrations is worthy of high praise. His style is clear, forcible, and suggestive. American writers on the graver themes of history and polities seldom fall into the slipshod manner too common in England. Their fault, if it is a fault, is a too great stateliness of style. Mr. Adams has preserved himself from this temptation. He is dignified, but never pompous, and throughout his work shows a strong per- ception of what is of human interest in the events he chronicles.
Nothing could be better, for instance, than his account of the intricate diplomatic negotiations which ended in the cession of Louisiana. In Mr. Adams's narrative, the parts respectively played by the Prince of Peace, by Talleyrand, by Napoleon, by Livingstone, and by Munroe, are described with great force and skill. Still more interesting, however, are the opening chapters of Mr. Adams's book, -which describe society as it existed in America at about the year 1800. The eighteenth century lingered long in America, and while London had got free from the period of velvet, powder, knee-breeches, and
snuff-boxes, these emblems of the earlier epoch were still to be found dominant in Anierica. And even more striking than the chapters which describe the physical and economic conditions of the United States, or set forth their intellectual configura- tion, is that which deals with the ideals of the New World. The genius loci which changed the poor, ignorant, submissive peasant of Europe into the typical arrogant, hard-headed American, is described and analysed in a manner which deserves special notice. After quoting a passage from Wordsworth which describes the supposed disappointment of an emigrant in the conditions of life in the New World, Mr. Adams continues :— • " Some misunderstanding must always take place when the observer is at cross-purposes with the society ho describes. Wordsworth might have convinced himself by a moment's thought that no country could act on the imagination as America acted upon the instincts of the ignorant and poor, without some quality that deserved better treatment than poignant scorn ; but perhaps this was only one among innumerable cases in which the uncon- scious poet breathed an atmosphere which the self-conscious poet could not penetrate. With equal reason ho might have taken the opposite view,—that the hard, practical, money-getting American democrat, who had neither generosity nor honour nor imagination, and who inhabited cold shades where fancy sickened and where genius died, was in truth living in a world of dream, and acting a drama more instinct with poetry than all the avatars of the East, walking in gardens of emerald and rubies, in ambition already ruling the world and guiding Nature with a kinder and wiser hand than had over yet been felt in human history. From this point his critics never approached him.---they stopped at a stone's throw ; and at the moment when they declared that the man's mind had no illusions, they added that he was a knave or a lunatic. Even on his practical and sordid side, the American might easily
have been represented as a victim to illusion. If the Englishman had lived as the American speculator did,—in the future,—the hyperbole of enthusiasm would have seemed less monstrous. Look at my wealth 1 ' cried the American to his foreign visitor. ' See these solid mountains of salt and iron, of lead, copper, silver, and gold ! See these magnificent cities scattered broadcast to the Pacific ! See my cornfields rustling and waving in the summer breeze from ocean to ocean, so far that the sun itself is not high enough to mark where the distant mountains bound my golden seas ! Look at this continent of mine, fairest of created worlds, as she lies turning up to the sun's never-failing caress her broad and exuberant breasts, overflowing with milk for her hundred million children ! Soo how she glows with youth, health, and love ' Perhaps it was not altogether unnatural that the foreigner,. on being asked to see what needed centuries to produce, should have looked about him with bewilderment and indignation. Gold ! cities I cornfields ! continents ! Nothing of the sort ! I see nothing but tremendous wastes, where sickly men and women are dying of home-sickness or are scalped by savages ! mountain-ranges a thousand miles long, with no means of getting to them, and nothing in them when you get there ! swamps and forests choked with their own rotten ruins ! nor hope of better for a thousand years ! Your story is a fraud, and you are a liar and swindler !' Met in this spirit, the American, half perplexed and half defiant, retaliated by calling his antagonist a fool, and by mimicking his heavy tricks of manner. For himself he eared little, but his dream was his whole existence. The men who denounced him admitted that they left him in his forest swamp quaking with fever, but clinging in the delirium of death to the delusions of his dazzled brain. No class of men could be required to support their convictions with a steadier faith, or pay more devotedly with their persons for the mistakes of their judgment."
It is impossible for Englishmen, and, we believe, also for Americans, to read the history of Jefferson's Administrations without a sense of profound regret. For a few years at the beginning of this century and the end of the last, there seemed more than a hope that England and her daughter would become reconciled and bound together by an alliance of kinship, interest, and inclination,—an alliance stronger than that which
usually exists between foreign nations. Unfortunately, how- ever, owing in no small measure to the blindness and folly of our Government, the good feeling was turned into hatred, and the War of 1812—a war infinitely more to be regretted than the War of Independence—took place. How bright was the prospect of a lasting alliance which was thus destroyed, cannot be better shown than by the following quotation from a letter written to Lord Grenville by Mr. Liston, the British Minister at Washington, in the year 1800:-
" The advantages to be ultimately reaped from a perseverance in the line of conduct which Great Britain has adopted for the last four years appear to my mind to be infallible and of infinite magnitude ; the profitable consequences of a state of hostility, small and uncertain. I have been pleasing my imagination with looking forward to the distant spectacle of all the northern con- tinent of America covered with friendly though not subject States, consuming our manufactures, speaking our language, proud of their parent State, attached to her prosperity. W ar must bring- with it extensive damage to our navigation, the probable loss of Canada, and the world behind it, the propagation of enmity and prejudices which it may be impossible to eradicate. The system of the American government does not strike me, with the near- view I have of it, as being in so perilous a situation as is imagined in Europe. I am willing to avoid political prophecies, but I con- fess I think it will get on well enough if the country remains in peace ; and if they go to war, the fabric may acquire strength.. God forbid that it should be to our detriment, and to the triumph of our enemies ! "
Would that Mr. Liston could have converted to his views the blundering, selfish, and purblind oligarchy that then dominated England !
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