able to it; but that it is better to ratify it in the manner the Senate have advised, (and with the reservation already mentioned,) than to suffer matters to remain as they are-unsettled."

In answer to this the Secretary writes: "I had communicated fully your determination with respect to the ratification. I have no doubt that the order for seizing provision-vessels exists. Nothing was occurred to prevent the speaking of that determination."

On the 29th July the President writes: "I also return, under cover of this letter, the draft of the memorial, and the rough draft of a ratification. These are very important papers, and, with the instructions which follow, will require great attention and consideration, and are the primary cause of my returning to Philadelphia." On the 31st he writes: "The memorial seems well designed to answer the end proposed."

While the memorial was in the hands of the President at Mount Vernon, it became the subject of conversation with the Heads of Departments. Wolcott and Pickering were both opposed to any delay in concluding the business. Wolcott observed that it would give the French Government an opportunity of professing to make very extensive overtures to the United States, and thus embarrass the treaty with Great Britain.

Pickering, on hearing the memorial, exclaimed, "This, as the sailors say, is throwing the whole up in the wind."

The President returned to Philadelphia on the 11th of August. The same evening, in presence of Pickering and Bradford, the Secretary of State observed, "that the sooner the memorial was revised by the gentlemen jointly, who were prepared with their opinions, the better." The President replied, "that he supposed every thing of this sort had been settled. The Secretary said that it was not so, as Colonel Pickering was for an immediate ratification. To this Pickering responded: "I told Mr. Randolph that I thought the postponement of ratification was a ruinous step."

On the morning of the 13th of August, the letters which had been written to foreign ministers in his absence, were laid before the President. The one addressed to Mr. Monroe was in these words: -"The treaty is not yet ratified by the President; nor will it be ratified, I believe, until it returns from England-if then. The late British order for seizing provisions, is a weighty obstacle to a ratifi

cation. I do not suppose that such an attempt to starve France will be countenanced." Other letters were written of the same tenor, and laid before the President. He made no objection to the strong expressions contained in them.

There can be no question from the evidence, that up to the 13th of August, 1795, and for a month previous, the President had deliberately made up his mind not to sign the treaty so long as the provision order was in existence. What caused the great change between that time and the 18th; for on that day he gave to the treaty an unconditional ratification? Marshall, in his Life of Washington, intimates, that the great clamor raised against the treaty in the commercial towns, was the cause of this change in the mind of the President. He thought that by signing the treaty at once he would put an end to all hope of influencing the executive will by agitation. This solution is not consistent with the character of the man. one despised mere popular clamor more more the opinion of his fellow-citizens. but eminently judicious, he sought for counsel in all quarters, and profited more by advice than any other man that ever held a public station.

No

than he did; no one valued With a mind not suggestive

He considered that the occasion called for wise and temperate measures. In his letter of the 31st of July, to the Secretary of State, he says: "In time, when passion shall have yielded to sober reason, the current may possibly turn; but in the mean while, this Government, in relation to France and England, may be compared to a ship between the rocks Scylla and Charybdis. If the treaty is ratified, the partisans of the French (or rather of war and confusion) will excite them to hostile measures, or at least to unfriendly sentiments if it is not, there is no foreseeing all the consequences which may follow, as it respects Great Britain. It is not to be inferred from hence, that I am, or shall be disposed to quit the ground I have taken, unless circumstances more imperious than have yet come to my knowledge, should compel it; for there is but one straight course in these things, and that is, to seek truth and pursue it steadily." He then instructs the Secretary to be attentive to all the resolutions that might come in, and to all the newspaper publications, that he might have all the objections against the treaty which had any weight in them, embodied in the memorial addressed to the British

king, or in the instructions to the American Minister at London. It cannot be presumed, therefore, that the excitement in the country against the treaty, was the cause, or at least the principal cause of the sudden change in the determination of the President. We must look to some other source for a solution of this difficulty.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE FAUCHET LETTER.

On the 31st day of October, 1794, about the time of the wh. sky insurrection, and Jay's negotiation in London, the French Minister forwarded a dispatch to his government, entitled "Private Correspondence of the Minister on Politics, No. 10."

This letter on its way was captured by a British cruiser, placed in the hands of Lord Grenville, and by him forwarded to the Minister here (Mr. Hammond), with instructions to use it for the benefit of his Majesty's service. When the letter came to Hammond, he made known the contents to Mr. Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, but did not intimate a desire that it might be communicated to the President. Wolcott himself suggested it, and asked that it might be placed in his hands for that purpose. Hammond at first declined, but finally consented, on condition that a certified copy should be left in his hands. Wolcott received the letter the 28th day of July, 1795, while the President was at Mount Vernon. He immediately showed it to Mr. Pickering. It was their opinion that its contents were of so delicate and important a nature that they ought to be imparted to the President without delay, and with the utmost secrecy. Any open attempt to effect this end, they thought might excite the suspicion of Mr. Randolph. The first hint of the matter was communicated to the President in a letter from Mr. Pickering in the following words: "July 31st-On the subject of the treaty, I confess I feel extreme solicitude, and, for a special reason, which can be communicated to you only in person. I entreat, therefore, that you will return with all convenient speed to the seat of government.

In the

mean time, for the reason above referred to, I pray you to decide on no important political measure in whatever form it may be presented to you. Mr. Wolcott and I (Mr. Bradford concurring) waited on Mr. Randolph, and urged his writing to request your return. He wrote in our presence." Just the day before, Randolph had written to the President-"As soon as I had the honor of receiving your letter of the 24th instant, I conferred with the Secretaries of the Treasury and of War upon the necessity or expediency of your return hither at this time. We all concurred that neither the one nor the other existed, and that the circumstance would confer upon the things which had been and are still carried on, an importance which it would not be convenient to give them." After receiving the above mysterious letter from Pickering, which perhaps arrived the same day with Randolph's, the President hastened to the seat of government. He arrived on the 11th of August, and the contents of Fauchet's intercepted letter were made known to him the same day.

In this private correspondence, after stating that the dispatches of himself and colleagues had been confined to a naked recital of facts, the Minister thus proceeds: "I have reserved myself to give you, as far as I am able, a key to the facts detailed in our reports.

The previous confessions of Mr. Randolph alone throw a satisfactory light upon every thing that comes to pass. * I shall, then, endeavor to give you a clue to all the measures, of which the common dispatches give you an account; and to discover the true causes of the explosion, which it is obstinately resolved to repress with great means (the whisky insurrection), although the state of things has no longer any thing alarming." * * * He then undertakes to give a history of the primitive division of parties-Federalists and AntiFederalists. Speaks of the whimsical contrast between the name and the real opinion of the parties the former aiming with all their power to annihilate Federalism, while the latter were striving to preserve it. These divisions, he proceeds to say, originated in the system of finances, which had its birth in the cradle of the constitution. It created a financiering class, who threaten to become the aristocratical order of the State. He then continues, in the fifth paragraph, in these words: "It is useless to stop longer to prove that the monarchical system was interwoven with those novelties of finance, and that the friends of the latter favored the attempts which

were made, in order to bring the constitution to the former by insensible gradations. The writings of influential men of this party prove it (alluding to Mr. Adams's Discourses on Davila); their real opinions, too, avow it, and the journals of the Senate are the depository of the first attempts."

He speaks of the sympathy of this party with the regenerating movements of France, while running in monarchical paths; and after an account of the rapid increase and consolidation of the AntiFederal party, under the name of patriots and republicans, he thus proceeds:—“In every quarter are arraigned the imbecility of the Government towards Great Britain, the defenceless state of the country against possible invasions, the coldness towards the French Republic the system of finance is attacked, which threatens eternizing the debt, under pretext of making it the guarantee of public happiness; the complication of that system which withholds from general inspection all its operations-the alarming power of the influence it procures to a man whose principles are regarded as dangerous-the preponderance which that man acquires from day to day in public measures, and, in a word, the immoral and impolitic modes of taxation which he at first presents as expedients, and afterwards raises to permanency."

He then speaks of the excise law-the navigation of the Mississippi, and the system for the sale of public lands, as being the principal sources of discontent to the Western people, and the cause of their rebellion. "At last," says he, "the local explosion i effected. * * * The Government which had foreseen it, reproduced, under various forms, the demand of a disposable force which might put it in a state of respectable defence. Defeated in this measure, who can aver that it may not have hastened the local eruption, in order to make an advantageous diversion, and to lay the more general storm which it saw gathering? Am I not authorized in forming this conjecture from the conversation which the Secretary of State had with me and Le Blanc, above, an account of which you have in my dispatch, No. 3? But how may we expect that this new plan will be executed?-By exasperating and severe measures, authorized by a law which was not solicited till the close of the session. This law gave to the one already existing for collecting the excise, a coercive force which hitherto it had not possessed, and a demand of which