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CHAPTER To Adams's unwilling and ungraceful retirement and troublous unrest, John Jay, his compatriot and fellow1801. laborer in so many trying scenes for a quarter of a cen tury, exhibited a striking contrast. Having refused to become again chief justice, and declining to be longer a candidate for the governorship of New York, considering his debt to the public discharged, though ten years younger than Adams, he simultaneously withdrew into a voluntary retirement, protracted through a still longer period, and presenting, in its peacefulness, and the universal respect which it attracted, a contrast to Adams's as strong as that between the ex-chief justice's mild but steady firmness, apparently forgetful of self, and the irritable vehemence and ever-active egotism, such marked traits in the ex-president's character.

Contemporaries, especially if engaged in the heat of political struggles, are almost always led to ascribe to trivial, temporary, and personal accidents a large part of those effects which are properly due to causes more remote, general, permanent, and inevitable. While the Essex Junto imputed to Adams the downfall of Federal ascendency, he bitterly retorted by imputing to their intrigues to defeat him, not that defeat only, but the ruin of the party also.

It was not, however, the unfortunate divisions among themselves—and, though mere party politicians then and since may have thought so-it was not the Alien and Sedition Laws, the surrender of the pretended Jonathan Robbins, the additional army, the large naval expenditures, the eight per cent. loan, and the direct tax, the collection of which was going on during the presidential canvass on the one hand, nor, on the other, the renewal of negotiations with France, that really lost to the Federalists the administration of the government. Those

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neasures might, and no doubt did, contribute to deter- CHAPTER mine the precise moment of that event; but, under any circumstances, it could not have been long deferred.

From the first moment that party lines had been dis. tinctly drawn, the opposition had possessed a numerical majority, against which nothing but the superior energy, intelligence, and practical skill of the Federalists, backed by the great and venerable name and towering influence of Washington, had enabled them to maintain for eight years past an arduous and doubtful struggle. The Federal party, with Washington and Hamilton at its head, represented the experience, the prudence, the practical wisdom, the discipline, the, conservative reason and instincts of the country. The opposition, headed by Jefferson, expressed its hopes, wishes, theories, many of them enthusiastic and impracticable, more especially its passions, its sympathies and antipathies, its impatience of restraint. The Federalists had their strength in those narrow districts where a concentrated population had produced and contributed to maintain that complexity of institutions and that reverence for social order, which, in proportion as men are brought into contiguity, become more absolutely necessaries of existence. The ultra democratical ideas of the opposition prevailed in all that more extensive region in which the dispersion of popu lation, and the despotic authority vested in individuals over families of slaves, kept society in a state of immaturity, and made legal restraints the more irksome in proportion as their necessity was the less felt. Massachusetts and Connecticut stood at the head of the one party, supported, though not always without some wayering, by the rest of New England. The other party was led by Virginia, by whose finger all the states south and west of the Potomac might be considered to be

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CHAPTER guided. The only exception was South Carolina, in the tide-water district of which state a certain number of the wealthier and more intelligent planters, led by a few men of talents and probity who had received their education in England, were inclined to support the Federal policy, so ably upheld in Congress by Smith, Harper, Pinckney and Rutledge. But even in South Carolina .he mass of the voting population felt and thought otherwise; nor could the influence of a few individuals long resist a numerical preponderancy so decided. As for the states of Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and ex cept for a brief moment, North Carolina, they followed without doubt or hesitation in the wake of Virginia; and the rapidly-increasing backwoods settlements of all these states constantly added new strength to the opposition. Of the five states intervening between Virginia and New England, little Delaware alone adhered with unflinching firmness to the Federal side. Maryland and New Jersey, though wavering and undecided, inclined also the same. way. The decision between Federalism and the socalled Republican party, depended on the two great and growing states of Pennsylvania and New York; and from the very fact that they were growing, that both of them had an extensive backwoods frontier, and that both were constantly receiving accessions of political enthusi asts from Europe, they both inclined more and more to the Republican side.

Scarcely a session of Congress had passed that some new expense had not been authorized and some new tax imposed. A just regard to the welfare of the country had obliged Washington and the Federalists to throw themselves into the gap against the national hatred of England kindled in the Revolutionary war and aggravated since by new aggressions and insolence, in the very

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spirit, it would seem, of those ministers by whom the CHAPTER Revolution had been provoked. On the other hand, they had been obliged to oppose that ardent zeal for France 1801. which gratitude for French assistance and enthusiasm for liberty combined to inspire. During the last six years of Washington's administration, there had always been in the House a majority against him; while the vice-president's casting vote in the Senate had often been needed to secure a majority even there. On Washington's retirement, Jefferson had been kept out of the suc cessorship only by two chance votes, given for Adams as well as for him, in the decidedly anti-Federal states of Virginia and North Carolina. It so happened, indeed, during Adams's administration, that all the doubtful states were represented by senators of the Federal party, thus giving to the Federalists, for the first time, the certain control in that body. Adams's spirited resistance to the insults of France, by kindling a flash of patriotic Federalism in the Southern States, which glimmered, however, only to expire again, secured, also, the first and last House of Representatives in which the Federalists had a decided majority. But upon Pennsylvania and New York, even patriotism itself, invoked to stand up against French insolence, produced little or no effect, while the indefatigable and unscrupulous ambition of M'Kean in the one state, and of Burr in the other, seconded as Burr was by the influence of the Clintons and the wealth of the Livingstons, precipitated that inevitable triumph of the opposition which nothing could very long have delayed. The Federal party, never strong, expired at last by reason of that exhaustion, the natural result, by the laws of reaction, of extraordinary efforts to arouse and prepare the country to resist the aggres3ons of France. The party for a moment rose majestic,

CHAPTER as if with new strength, trampling under foot those who XV. hesitated to vindicate their country's honor and inde1801. pendence. But this very effort exhausted and destroyed

it. It was in vain that Adams sought to avert the effect by renewing, at the earliest possible moment consistent with the honor of the country, pacific relations with France. The force of the party had been expended in the desperate effort to repel French insolence, and there was not now vitality enough left effectually to resist the opponents, who rose dexterously out of the dust in which they had been trodden, and, as if refreshed by the humiliation, re-entered the contest with new vigor.

But though the Federal party thus fell never to rise again, it left behind it permanent monuments. The whole machinery of the Federal government, as it now operates, must be considered as their work. With every individual part of that machinery, as those parts were successively brought into operation, the opposition, first, as anti-Federalists, then as Republicans, and then as Democrats-for so the more ultra began now to call themselves-had found most critical and pertinacious fault. We shall soon see how, themselves in power, notwithstanding all their former criticisms, they at once adopted, without essential change, the greater part of this very machinery, and how they were ultimately driven again to restore, with hardly an exception, all those portions of it with which, in conformity to their own theories, they had at first attempted to dispense testimony as irrefragable as it was reluctant, that how ever the so-called Republican leaders might excel the Federalists in the arts of popularity, the best thing they could do, in the constructive part of politics, was humbly to copy the models they had once calumniated.