THOMAS JEFFERSON
THOMAS JEFFERSON.
The “People’s” President, 1800.
In 1800 Adams was a candidate for re-election, and fully expected to be successful. But the Democratic-Republican party, as the opposition was now called, defeated him, and elected to the Presidency its great leader, Thomas Jefferson.
At a glance, it will be seen that the Republican of 1800 was the father of the Democratic party, the canonized Thomas Jefferson. The people, even thus early in the history of our nation, had begun to give evidence of that discontent at the aristocratic tendencies that even “The Father of his Country,” George Washington, and his successor, John Adams, displayed.
It would be considered almost sacrilege were we to republish here the many attacks that were made upon George Washington, when President of the United States, on account of the odor of aristocracy with which he had become so strongly impregnated before the Revolution, and which clung to him like the scent of the roses to the shattered vase. While there can be no doubt,of course, in the minds of us all, that Washington was pre-eminently a patriot, with a firm and steadfast faith in the doctrine of the rights of the people; still, he belonged to a section, to a State, that had been settled by Cavaliers who believed that they were somewhat better by birth than the Pilgrims of New England. And, having been born and educated in that atmosphere, it is small wonder that his character should have been somewhat attainted by his surroundings.
Upon Washington’s elevation to the Presidential chair he surrounded the executive mansion with more of the air of ceremony and evidences of “caste” than were pleasant to the mass of the people. He was attacked, during his first and second terms, by pamphleteers, who, in most scurrilous articles, wrote of him as one designing to perpetuate aristocracy and “caste” in our country. The debt of gratitude which the new Republic and the people thereof owed Washington was too great for any effect to be produced similar to the revolution in 1892. However, an impression was made; reluctantly, John Adams, Washington’s Vice-President, was elected as second President of the Union. This reluctance became apparent by his failure to be re-elected four years later.
A Minister from the United States to England always seems to become a suspicious object inthe minds of the people of America. No man ever added to his popularity by being sent as Minister to the Court of St. James. John Adams, who was our first Minister, was but the beginning of a long list of unfortunates. In fact, the American people will heartily endorse the opinion of that great statesman, James G. Blaine, which is being so vigorously advocated by the New YorkHerald, that foreign Ministers are expensive and useless appendages of this Republic. The election of John Adams was occasioned more by the reflected glory of Washington and the gratitude of the people, which, like the rays of the declining sun, became diminished as it sunk behind the horizon of time. In Thomas Jefferson, the people, even thus early in the history of our nation, sawtheirfriend. His simplicity of life, purity of character, and honesty of purpose, surrounded his name with the same halo, in the sight of the people, as that with which the names of Jackson, Lincoln and Cleveland have since been made luminous. Though Jefferson was called a Republican, still, to the people, he was a Democrat in the sense that democracy means equality.
Never was there a statesman more thoroughly imbued with the principles of popular liberty than Jefferson. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God”—Oliver Cromwell’s saying—was the mottoengraved on his seal. He had taken a leading part in the colonies’ struggle for freedom. He was a member of the Continental Congress, Governor of Virginia during the war, and—a yet greater title to immortality—author of the Declaration of Independence. After the war he had been sent as American Minister to France, where he sympathized warmly with the revolution against Bourbon tyranny.
Jefferson’s election to the Presidency was universally regarded as a great popular triumph. He was hailed everywhere as “the Man of the People,” and the day that saw him inaugurated was celebrated with such rejoicings as had not been witnessed since the news of peace came, in 1783. No business, no labor was done on the 4th of March, 1801. It was a day of powder and parades, of church services, of bell-ringing, of speeches, and illuminations. The country’s satisfaction seemed unanimous.
“The exit of aristocracy” was a toast drunk at one great banquet that evening; and when it had been duly honored, the band appropriately struck up the “Rogue’s March.”
The inauguration itself was a simple affair enough. It has, indeed, been asserted that Jefferson rode up Capitol Hill without a single attendant, tied his horse to a picket fence, and walked aloneinto the Senate chamber to take the oath of office. Professor McMaster offers evidence to prove this story inaccurate. Jefferson was not surrounded, on his induction into the Presidency, by such throngs as attended the inaugurations of Washington and Adams in New York and Philadelphia. But he went to the Capitol in the midst of a gathering of citizens, with the accompaniment of drums, flags, cannon, and a troop of militia. His dress was, as usual, that of a plain citizen, without any distinctive badge of office. On taking the oath of office he said, in a brief speech to the Senate: “I know that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong—that this government is not strong enough. I believe this, on the contrary, to be the strongest government on earth.”
Jefferson’s administration—so economical, business-like, and democratic as to have made “Jeffersonian simplicity” a proverb—met with such approval that when he was re-elected in 1804 only fourteen votes were recorded against him. Only in one State—Massachusetts—was there any excitement in the campaign.
The supremacy of the Democratic-Republican party lasted practically unchallenged until John Quincy Adams was elected, under peculiar circumstances, in 1824. There were in that year threeleading candidates for the Presidency—Adams, Clay, and Jackson. As neither of them commanded a majority of the Electoral College, the question was referred to the House of Representatives, which selected Adams as being, in a measure, a compromise candidate.
John Quincy Adams was at that time acting with the Democratic party, but he was, as James Parton points out in his “Life of Jackson,” “a Federalist by birth, by disposition, by early association, by confirmed habit.” And it soon became clear that Federalism, long supposed to be dead, was “living, rampant, and sitting in the seat of power.” Federalists were appointed to office—notably Rufus King, the most conspicuous survivor of the original Federalists—who was sent as minister to England. Adams was for stretching the Constitution, as the old Federalists were. In his first message to Congress he advocated government roads and canals, a government university and observatory, government exploring expeditions, and the like.
His personality and manners revived the aristocratic traditions of his father. In the state he maintained at Washington he was said to go beyond the first President Adams. He refurnished the White House on a grand scale, and shocked the frugal taste of the day by placing abilliard table in it. The East Room, in which his excellent mother had hung clothes to dry, was now a luxuriously fitted apartment.
“John II.” was the name that John Randolph of Roanoke bestowed upon the son and heir of the “Duke of Braintree.” Randolph had hated the Adams family since an incident that occurred on the day of Washington’s inauguration, which he recalled long afterwards in one of his speeches. “I remember,” he said, “the manner in which my brother was spurned by the coachman of the Vice-President—John Adams—for coming too near the vice-regal carriage.”
Even Mr. Blaine, who in his “Twenty Years of Congress” shows himself a kindly critic of the Federalist ideas and Federalist leaders, admits the “general unpopularity attached to the name of Adams.”
During John Quincy Adams’ administration the mutterings of a coming political upheaval began to be heard. It began to be said that the Presidency was growing too much like an hereditary monarchy. It was becoming too settled a practice for each incumbent, after eight years in office, to make his Secretary of State his political heir. It gave the President what was almost equivalent to the power of appointing his successor. John Quincy Adams, it was said, counted confidently on the usual doubleterm, and upon seeing his friend Clay, to whom he had given the chief post in his Cabinet, elected to succeed him.
“The issue is fairly made out: Shall the government or the people rule?” asked Andrew Jackson, and on that issue he appealed to the country in his memorable electoral campaign against Adams, in 1828. That was the bitterest Presidential contest that had ever been fought. Jackson was attacked with unexampled ferocity. One day at his Tennessee home, the Hermitage, his wife found him in tears. “Myself I can defend,” he said, pointing to a newspaper which he had been reading; “you I can defend; but now they have assailed even the memory of my mother.” And it was, in great part, her distress at the invective that was heaped upon her husband that caused the death of Mrs. Jackson just after the election.
It was a pitched battle between the “classes” and the “masses.” As James Parton says, in his biography of Jackson: “Nearly all the talent, nearly all the learning, nearly all the ancient wealth, nearly all the business activity, nearly all the book-nourished intelligence, nearly all the silver-forked civilization of the country, united in opposition to General Jackson, who represented the country’s untutored instincts.”
Revolt from aristocracy and detestation of “caste” in politics, in religion, and in society, have been the key-notes of the whole history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. They were the incentives that first led men of that race to seek homes beyond the Atlantic, and have ever been the cardinal principles of the nation those pioneers founded.
The westward movement began with that era of English history marked by the intolerable pretensions, in matters both of Church and State, of the Stuart monarchs. The doctrine of the “divine right of kings,” which cost Charles I. his head, was, with all that it meant, the grievance that drove from England the settlers of the American colonies.
When James I., soon after his accession, was petitioned to allow liberty of assembling and of discussion to all classes and sects of his subjects, he replied that such a privilege “agrees with monarchy as well as God and the devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand upand say: ‘It must be thus;’ then Dick shall reply and say: ‘Nay, marry, but we will have it thus;’ and, therefore, here I must say: ‘The king forbids.’”
The king forbade, but the native spirit of English liberty did not acquiesce without a murmur. There were mutterings of the storm that was to burst upon his son and successor in the full fury of rebellion. The subservient Wentworth complained that “the very genius of this nation of people leads them always to oppose, both civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them.”
Most outspoken in opposition to royal encroachment were the Puritans—those stern disciples of Calvin, who had furnished England her first Protestant martyrs, Hooper and Rogers, and who, in the early seventeenth century, were, as Hallam says, “the depositories of the sacred fire of liberty.”
Many Puritans preferred to leave their native country rather than submit. In 1607, a company of them were about to take sail for Holland from the Humber, when they were arrested and forced to return to their homes. In the following spring, they again attempted to escape. They reached the Lincolnshire coast, and were embarking, when soldiers, who had been dispatched in pursuit, rode down to the shore, and seized some of the womenand children. As the only fault of these prisoners was that they had followed their husbands and fathers, they were afterward released.
The fugitives, whose leaders were John Robinson, their minister, and William Brewster, their ruling elder, first tarried at Amsterdam, and the next year settled at Leyden. There they lived for eleven years—a body of exiles, who did not fraternize with their Dutch neighbors, and who gradually formed a plan of migrating to the new country beyond the Atlantic, where they might be under their old flag, and yet hope for civil and religious liberty.
In 1617, they sent two of their number to England, to secure for their project the consent of the London Company, to which James I. had granted proprietary rights over Virginia—then the general name of the North American coast. The two embassies received a permit, although they put no great trust in it. “If,” said they, “there should afterward be a purpose to wrong us, though we had a seal as broad as the house floor, there would be means enough found to recall or reverse.” They did not foresee their future strength against oppression.
Thus it was that in the August of 1620 the Pilgrims set sail from Delft Haven, and in November landed on the shores of Massachusetts—forty-one families, numbering in all a hundred and twosouls. Before they landed, they signed a mutual agreement, covenanting “to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws as shall be thought most convenient for the general good of the colony.” The agreement was loyally kept in the face of hardship and danger from within and without. The colony they planted grew in the spirit of popular liberty as it grew from penury to prosperity.
Bancroft remarks that “in the early history of the United States, popular assemblies burst everywhere into life, with a consciousness of their importance and immediate efficiency.” This development of freedom was attained in Virginia even earlier than in Massachusetts.
Virginia’s first struggle against usurping pretension was in 1624, when James I. sent out royal commissioners with orders “to enquire into the state of the plantation.” The colonists protested against the commissioners’ proposal of absolute governors, and demanded the liberty of their Assembly; “for nothing,” they said, “can conduce more to the public satisfaction and public utility.” And the Assembly succeeded in retaining its rights.
Thirty years later, a domestic attempt at usurpation was met with equal firmness. Samuel Cotton, the elected governor of the colony, had a quarrel with the Assembly, and arbitrarily proclaimed it dissolved. The representative defiedhis authority, and speedily forced him to yield. For even in that colony in America, where existed more of the inclination to class distinction than in many other of the colonies, the same spirit of hatred to “caste,” and the exercise of any assumed superiority was deep-rooted, and thus early gave evidence of its presence.
At the foundation of Virginia’s sister colony of Maryland, the king expressly covenanted that neither he nor his successors would lay any imposition, custom, or tax upon the inhabitants of the province. The proprietors had the right to establish a colonial aristocracy, but it was never exercised. “Feudal institutions,” says Bancroft, “could not be perpetuated in the lands of their origin, far less renew their youth in America. Sooner might the oldest oaks in Windsor forest be transplanted across the Atlantic, than antiquated social forms. The seeds of popular liberty, contained in the charter, would find in the New World the soil best suited to quicken them.” One of the early acts of the Provincial Assembly of Maryland was the framing of a declaration of rights. And yet, it was in Baltimore, the metropolis of the State of Maryland, that the first resistance was offered to the soldiers of the people, who were going to enforce the will of the majority upon the minority. Maryland, while, from proximity to the Federal capital, was less inclinedtoward the secession movement, was still sufficiently influenced by the aristocratic slave-holding part of her population as to be the scene of the first actual resistance to the will of the people in 1861.
The same spirit animated the pioneers of Connecticut, where Hooker declared that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.” When John Clark and William Coddington founded the settlement of Newport, it was “unanimously agreed upon” among their people that the body politic should be “aDemocracieor popular government.” The colonization of Pennsylvania—“the holy experiment,” as Penn called it—was inaugurated by its great leader with a solemn pledge of “liberty of conscience and civil freedom.” And similar incidents accompanied the birth of nearly every new colony.
As Massachusetts grew to be the most prosperous of the northern colonies, she “echoed the voice of Virginia like deep calling unto deep. The State was filled with the hum of village politicians; the freemen of every town on the Bay were busily inquiring into their liberties and privileges.” [Bancroft.] The American spirit, which was to leaven the world with a new ideal of liberty, found its philosophers and statesmen in the farms and hamlets of the young and simple community. It found, of course, its critics and its doubters. Lechford, a Boston lawyer, prophesiedthat “elections cannot be safe long here,” where manhood suffrage was the rule. John Cotton spoke against the accepted principle of rotation in office; but neither could stem the current of democratic doctrine, because the early settlers of America still retained the scars of their recent conflict with the aristocrats of Europe. Their arrival in the then wilderness of America had been too recent to obliterate the impression made on their minds by “caste” in Europe.
In 1635, there was a short-lived possibility that the aristocratic system of Britain might be transplanted to Massachusetts. Henry Vane, younger son of a titled English family, emigrated to the colony, where he was kindly received, and elected governor a few years after; and two noblemen, Lord Brooke and Lord Say-and-Seal, expressed their intention to follow him if the colonists would agree to establish a second chamber of their legislature and constitute them hereditary members of it. But the burgesses, easily perceiving the trend of such a proposal, declined it, courteously but decidedly.
Aristocracy never found a foothold in any of the colonies. The only approach to it was the privileges accorded in some of them to the “proprietors,” and these were, while they lasted, regarded with some jealousy. For instance, when Pennsylvania, after Braddock’s defeat at FortDuquesne, decided to raise £50,000 for self-defence by an estate tax, the proprietors—heirs of William Penn—claimed exemption from the levy; but, though Governor Morris approved the claim, the Assembly refused it.
Bancroft thus characterizes the elemental beginnings of the American nation: “Nothing came from Europe but a free people. The people, separating itself from all other elements of previous civilization; the people, self-confident and industrious; the people, wise by all traditions that favored its culture and happiness—alone broke away from European influence, and in the New World laid the foundations of our Republic.” And periodically, as we see from the records of our nation, the might of the majority has been exercised to suppress anything like the attempted institution of “caste” in our country. This often-recurring crime begins to upraise its head, slowly at first, after each defeat, but eventually its growth becomes sufficiently great to attract the attention of the “Common People,” and, as a result, receives its punishment, so justly due.
And the same historian adds: “Of the nations of Europe, the chief emigration was from that Germanic race most famed for the love of personal independence. The immense majority of American families were not of ‘the high folk of Normandie,’ but were of ‘the low men,’ whowere Saxons. This is true of New England; it is true of the South.”
It is true of the South, in spite of the fact—influential throughout the history of that section—that its population contained an element drawn from the wealthier classes of the mother country. It has indeed been said that Virginia was “a continuation of English society.” The seeds of privilege may have existed in the Old Dominion, but, nevertheless, in no colony was the spirit of personal independence more signally evinced. “With consistent firmness of character,” to quote again from Bancroft, “the Virginians welcomed representative assemblies; displaced an unpopular governor; rebelled against the politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles that prevailed in their forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of the age at the polls.”
With the aims of the English rebellion against Charles I., the American colonies were in full sympathy. Immediately after its outbreak, the general court of Massachusetts directed the governor to omit the oath of allegiance to the king, “seeing that he had violated the privileges of Parliament.” But the civil war had no effect upon the colonial governments. In England, the monarchy, the peerage, and the prelacy were at swords’ points with the people; in America, there was neither peerage nor prelacy, and monarchywas rendered remote by the Atlantic, so that there were no two parties to join battle.
The Restoration opened a new era in the history of the colonies—a period of conflict between royal usurpation and aristocratic oppression on the one hand, and popular liberties on the other; a period that, after many years of difficulty and struggle, culminated in events that gave rationality and independence to the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.
It was a period marked in England by the political ascendency of the aristocracy. At the Restoration, the nobility resumed possession of the hereditary branch of the Parliament. Through their influence over elections, they, to a great extent, controlled the House of Commons—and through it the crown, over which the Commons had given recent and striking proofs of power. It was the aristocratic element that dictated the policy which goaded the colonies into secession from the mother country. It supplied the office-holders—“carpet-baggers” they might have been termed in modern political slang—whom the home government quartered upon the colonials by an official system tainted with nepotism and corruption. Its foe—Pitt, the great Commoner—was the friend of America, and one of her few champions in Parliament.
Equally the friend of America was the English democracy—politically far less powerful during the century after the Restoration than in the preceding and the subsequent periods. When the hated Stamp Act was repealed, the “Common People” of London lit bonfires and illuminated the streets, rang the historic Bow Bells, and decked the shipping in the Thames with flags.
But the House of Commons, before whom came the critical measures of legislation for the colonies, reflected the feeling of the aristocracy and not that of the populace. “The majority,” said a member, during a debate on American affairs in 1770, “is no better than an ignorant multitude.” Sir George Saville, a man of rare independence and integrity, replied in strong words. “The greatest evil that can befall this nation,” he declared, “is the invasion of the people’s rights by the authority of this house. I do not say that the members have sold the rights of their constituents; but I do say, I have said, and I shall always say, that they have betrayed them.” But his protest was shouted down as treason, and Parliament blindly pursued its course of usurpation.
Long before that time, there had been in America thoughts of independence as a refuge from usurpation. The colonists cherished a genuine loyalty to the old flag, and a strong pride inthe Saxon blood, whose latest and, indeed, most typical product they themselves were. Yet, as far back as 1638, when Charles I. tried to revoke the original patent of Massachusetts, the settlers threatened to “confederate themselves under a new government for their necessary safety and subsistence.”
In 1698, Governor Nicholson, of Virginia, reported that “a great many in the plantations think that no law of England ought to be in force and binding upon them without their own consent.” Three years later, a public document noted that “the independence the colonies thirst after is now notorious.”
The sentiment grew gradually during the reigns of the Georges, slowly overcoming the strength of the old attachment to the mother country. Every encroachment attempted by royalty or officialism aroused a hostility that reinforced the spirit of liberty. For instance, when Samuel Shute, Governor of Massachusetts in 1719, tried to prevent the publication of the Assembly’s answer to one of his speeches, claiming power over the press as his prerogative, he only succeeded in evoking a vigorous resistance, that finally disposed of his pretension, and gave the press untrammeled freedom.
And thus it was that a generation later the patriotic Otis, of Boston, the man “who dared tolove his country and be poor,” spoke so boldly in reply to Hutchinson, who summed up his aristocratic preferences in the odious Horatian maxim,Odi profanum vulgus, and who avowed his dissatisfaction that “liberty and property should be enjoyed by the vulgar.”
“God made all men naturally equal,” said Otis. “The ideas of earthly grandeur are acquired, not innate. No government has a right to make a slave of the subject.” And again, “to bring the powers of all into the hands of one or some few, and to make them hereditary, is the interested work of the weak and wicked.”
Such was the philosophy that was daily preached among the burghers of Boston. Such was the doctrine that Patrick Henry came from the Virginia backwoods to voice with his burning eloquence. Such was the spirit that was everywhere animating the colonies, while Parliament enacted one unjust and oppressive law after another. “The sun of American liberty has set,” Ben Franklin wrote from Europe to a friend in America, when he heard of the enactment of the ill-fated Stamp Act; “now we must light the torches of industry and economy.” “Be assured that we shall light torches of another sort,” replied his friend.
The torches were lit; they blazed forth in the shots fired at Lexington, and on Bunker Hill, andin the Declaration of Independence, at Philadelphia; and they were not put out until Parliamentary oppression had been forever ended, and a new nation—a plebeian democracy—took its place by the side of the proudest of earth’s empires.
The war was fought and won by the “Common People,” in the face of the armed force of the foreigner, and the treachery, active or passive, of not a few colonists, whose aristocratic connections or pretensions held them aloof from the movement for liberty. Even in the darkest days of the struggle, when Washington, driven from New York, was retreating before Howe’s advance, and many men of prominence were giving up the patriotic cause as hopeless—Joseph Galloway and Andrew Allen, of Pennsylvania, Samuel Tucker, of New Jersey, John Dickinson, of Delaware, and others—even then the Commander’s wonderful faith and courage was reflected in the fidelity of the populace. That alone made possible the final triumph.
“When the war of independence was terminated,” remarks DeTocqueville, in his famous study of “Democracy in America,” “and the foundations of the new government were to be laid down, the nation was divided between two opinions—two opinions which are as old as the world, and which are perpetually to be met withunder different forms and various names, in all free communities—the one tending to limit, the other to extend, indefinitely, the power of the people. The conflict between these two opinions never assumed that degree of violence in America which it has frequently displayed elsewhere. Both parties were agreed on the most essential points, and neither of them had to destroy an old constitution, or to overthrow the structure of society, in order to triumph. In neither of them, consequently, were a great number of private interests affected by success or defeat; but moral principles of a high order, such as the love of equality and of independence, were concerned in the struggle, and these sufficed to kindle violent passions.”
The party that sought to limit the power of the people was that of the Federalists; its opponents took the name of Republican, which afterwards became Democratic-Republican, and finally, under Andrew Jackson, Democratic. In view of the fixed bent of the American national character, it is not difficult to discern the inevitable result of the conflict between them. The Federalists were certain to be ultimately overcome. America is the land of democracy, and the anti-democratic partisans were always in a minority.
Thus for the brief period succeeding the Civil War, while the wounds of the conflict were stillfresh upon the body politic, the party of the aristocracy—for such had the Republican party become—utilizing the soreness still existing as the result of the conflict, succeeded, by the clamor of sectionalism, in diverting the attention of the masses from the tendency towards social superiority and “caste,” which the continuance of the Republican party in power was creating.
This brief ascendency during the first twelve years of the republic was due to several temporary causes. Most of the great leaders of the war for independence believed in a strong, centralized government, and therefore ranked themselves with the Federalists. The failure of the first attempt at federal control—the Continental Congress—and the local disorders that arose after the war, had inspired the people with a dread of anarchy. They were willing to accept, for a time, restrictive political theories, which it soon became safe to throw off.
The Federalist leaders were more than suspected of aristocratic tendencies. Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, declared in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, that “the ills of the country come from an excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue,” he added, as if in apology, “but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”
Sherman, of Connecticut, said at the same time and place that “the people should have aslittle to do directly with the government as possible.”
John Adams repeatedly advocated, in his writings “a liberal use of titles and ceremonials for those in office,” and the establishment of an upper legislative chamber to be filled by “the rich, the well-born, and the able.” The words, “well-born,” gave intense offence. Their inconsistency with the grand democracy of the Declaration of Independence was bitterly commented on. The whole Federalist party was sarcastically called “the well-born”—a fatal appellation!
The expression “well-bred,” as describing the commander of the Pennsylvania militia at Homestead, will be recalled by the mass of the people long after every vestige of the militia’s visit to Homestead has departed. To the American mind such expressions as “well-born” and “well-bred” present an absurd attempt at class distinction.
Hamilton shared the same theories. He was openly accused by Jefferson, while both men were members of Washington’s cabinet, of a desire to overthrow the republic. He was closely connected with the rising financial power of New York. The people, while they admired his able and amiable personality, never quite forgave him for the part he took in defending one Holt, a rich Tory of New York, in a suit for redress broughtby a poor widow whose house he had seized during the British occupation.
George Washington himself, who was a Federalist so far as he belonged to any party, was a man of ceremony andhauteur. He never forgot that he had descended from a titled English family, and belonged to the wealthiest class of Southern landed proprietors. When he assumed the Presidency, he established an almost courtly etiquette. On Tuesdays and Fridays he gave stately receptions to visitors; on Thursdays, Congressional dinners. While New York was the Capital of the Union, he had a Presidential box at the theatre (the only theatre the city then boasted), elaborately decorated, and whenever he occupied it, the orchestra played the “Presidential March” (now known as “Hail Columbia”).
At his inauguration, the House of Representatives addressed him simply as “President.” The Senate, probably cognizant of his personal wishes, sought a more high-sounding title. “His Excellency” was rejected as too plain, and after some debate the Senators decided upon “His Highness, the President of the United States, and Protector of their Liberties.”
The Senate’s suggestion was referred to the House, where it aroused no little opposition. Congressman Tucker, of South Carolina, inquired: “Will it not alarm our fellow-citizens? Will theynot say that they have been deceived by the Convention that framed the Constitution? One of its warmest advocates—nay, one of its framers—has recommended it by calling it a pure democracy. Does giving titles look like a pure democracy? Surely not. Some one has said that to give dignity to our government we must give a lofty title to our chief magistrate. If so, then to make our dignity complete, we must give first a high title, then an embroidered robe, then a princely equipage, and finally a crown and hereditary succession. This spirit of imitation, sir, this spirit of mimicry and apery, will be the ruin of our country. Instead of giving us dignity in the eyes of foreigners, it will expose us to be laughed at as apes.”
So decided was the feeling of the House against the adoption of a sonorous title for the chief executive, that the Senate’s proposal was dropped. Nevertheless, a more elaborate ceremonial was maintained at the Presidential mansion—at first in New York, then in Philadelphia, and finally at Washington—during the first twelve years of the government, than after Jefferson’s accession in 1801.
Washington’s two elections to the Presidency was the nation’s tribute to the splendid personal character and military record of the man who, above all others, gave it nationality. When herefused a third election, the honor went to John Adams, as his political heir, although the Federalists, whose candidate Adams was, had only a bare majority of the electoral college—seventy-one votes against sixty-eight for Jefferson. It was at that time the almost invariable rule for the electors to be chosen by the State Legislatures, not, as now, by a popular vote. Had the conflict between Adams and Jefferson been waged before the people at large, it is probable that the latter, the champion of advanced democracy, would have been successful.
John Adams was a man of decided aristocratic tendencies. He was the first American minister to England, and had spent ten years at the courts of Europe. He did not conceal his admiration for English institutions. While in London he wrote a “Defence of the American Constitution,” which proved to be a laudation of the British form of government rather than that of the United States. In his “Discourses on Davilla,” he advocated a powerful centralized executive and a system of titles. He was frequently charged with favoring a monarchy and a hereditary legislature like the House of Lords. His political opponents nicknamed him “the Duke of Braintree”—Braintree being the Massachusetts town where he lived.
Thus early in the existence of the nation was evident the detestation on the part of the people at any attempted introduction of “caste” in the country. The Stamp Act, and taxes, and unjust discrimination while truly expressed caused the revolution in 1776, were only supplemental causes. In the record of every colony will be found traces of the opposition to “caste,” and the strong objection that existed among the people to the introduction of class distinctions among them. While the immediate cause of the rebellion on the part of the colonies, the revolution, and consequent creation of a nation, may appear to be the resistance to the imposition of taxes and therefore a matter of pocketbook; still, beneath it all, the foundation upon which the strength and duration of the resistance to the British power rested, was the strong sentiment in the hearts of the early patriots, demandingequality, social as well as “equality before the law.” Our forefathers endured suffering at Valley Forge, not for the sake of the pocketbook, but because they had in their bosoms that ever-present sentiment of the Anglo-Saxon people, that all must be equal in every respect. It is rather a petty cause to assign for the revolution and the exhibition of heroism upon the part of the forefathers of the Americans—a matter of taxes.
Feudalism, introduced in France a thousand years ago, reconstructed society on the only basis then possible. It was a bridge from barbarism to monarchy. The invasion of the Northmen, though apparently a calamity, was a blessing. They brought fresh, lusty life. Their courage and vigor gave the country a new and needed impulse in progress and civilization.
William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066, and proved an able and stern ruler.
While many of her nobles were engaged in the Crusades in the East, a social revolution was going on in France, full of significance. This was the rise of free cities. The feudal bishops became so intolerably oppressive that the people succeeded in buying the privilege of electing their own magistrates; then the king, for a goodly sum of money, confirmed it. Appeal was thus secured from the bishop to the king. He encouraged the practice, for it freed him, to a degree, from dependence on his nobles, and gave him greatercontrol over the cities. The process went on during the eleventh, twelfth, and the first part of the thirteenth century.
The result was shown at the battle of Bouvines (A.D. 1214). King John of England, in the hope of recovering Normandy and other provinces which he had ignominiously lost, attacked France. He formed an alliance with the German emperor and with the Court of Flanders.
The army of Philip, the French king, made up of barons, bishops, and knights, clad in steel, and a large body of foot-soldiers sent by sixteen free cities and towns, gained a complete victory. It was one of the most memorable contests of the Middle Ages, for on that hard-fought field three great branches of the Teutonic race—German, Flemish, and English—went down before the furious onset of “hostile blood and speech.” Lords, clergy, and Common People fought side by side against a foreign foe, and henceforth were united by a common bond of pride. It was the hardy yeomanry of Edward, the Black Prince, who won the battle of Crecy (1346), at the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, against three times as many Frenchmen.
It was in 1598 that Henry IV. issued the Edict of Nantes, which secured to the long and bitterly persecuted Huguenots the rights they demanded.It marked a new era in history. It was the first formal recognition of toleration in religion made by any leading power of Europe, and anticipated a similar act in England by nearly a century.
The king saw what all have since come to see, that freedom of conscience is one of the surest guarantees of national strength.
Henry IV. of France was essentially the people’s king. He was popular with the masses to the same extent that Louis XV. was unpopular. To the Common People in France, Henry IV. represented as much democracy in that age of tyranny as Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland do in a better age and country. Henry was murdered on the streets of Paris by the fanatic Ravaillac, whose dagger inflicted an almost mortal wound upon France herself.
With the aid of Richelieu, the absolute power of the crown was built up; then followed the despotisms of Louis XIV. and Louis XV.; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; the disastrous failure of the Mississippi Scheme; the struggle between England and France for mastery in the New World, and the complete triumph of the former, and the preparation for the awful revolution of 1789.
France had materially and powerfully assisted the American colonies in their struggle with GreatBritain for independence. Many illustrious sons of France, like Lafayette and Rochambeau, had joined and fought side by side with those sons of liberty who were then creating the great republic of America. America was a storehouse of freedom, liberty, and concentrated hate of “caste” and class distinction, from whence Frenchmen like Lafayette carried to France the spirit of freedom. It may fairly be said that the struggle on this continent lighted the torch of liberty which has illuminated the world since, torn Spain’s oppressed colonies in America from her grasp, and made possible the existence of the French Republic, which has now taken its place among the most powerful nations of the earth.
The dormant desire had long been present in the breasts of the poor of the French nation for equality and liberty. The quickening influences and light radiating from the new Republic of the West, among whose children the sons of France had served in the struggle for independence, soon ignited the fires in the heart of the impetuous Frenchman.
Louis XVI. had been more condescending than any of his predecessors; he occupied, possibly, a higher position in the hearts of the people than any king the French had had since Henry IV. But the time had come when, inspired by theexample of the Americans, the crime of “caste” in France had become unendurable. Louis XVI. was, of all the Bourbon kings, probably the least objectionable.
His character, while weak and influenced by the stronger will of Marie Antoinette, did not represent the worst phases of the character of Louis XV. or Louis XIV. Gradually, but irresistibly by attrition, the will of the people had been making marks upon the royalty of France. The tyranny, insolence, and arrogance of Louis XIV., in whose presence one dared not speak, had been lessened in Louis XV. to the extent that one could speak in a whisper; but in the presence of Louis XVI. one might speak aloud. With tireless, resistless, sullen determination the billows of the sea of humanity, wherein all is equality and fraternity, had beaten upon this rock of adamant until these divine Bourbon kings had become impressed by its constant, ceaseless energy.
Weak, amiable, and pliable as Louis XVI. was, poor Jacques had been so long deprived of one heart-beat of feeling that his bosom could no longer restrain the emotions of liberty and equality. The nobles of France, more than Louis XVI., retained the impress of the reign of Louis XIV., “the Glorious” (?), who had proclaimed that he was a Sun; and while the ruling monarch,as the bulwark of royalty, “caste,” and social inequality, had received the first shock of the wave and been marked thereby; still the nobility, sheltered behind the bulwark of the personality of the king, continued to indulge the wild license of their privileges and “caste” distinction, gamboling like lambs upon the greensward of their delusion, becoming fattened for the knife of that butcher that was sure to follow, the guillotine. A more powerful, touching, and realistic picture was never drawn of the arrogance and presumption of the nobles, privileged classes, “higher caste,” than that made by the people’s author, the man who of all others has nearer touched the hearts of the Common People, who will be loved and revered when others more learned may be forgotten, because he wrote of scenes of sensation, emotion, and relations of the Common People—Charles Dickens—in the “Tale of Two Cities,” and for our purpose it would be impossible to find words more fitting than those used by this master delineator of the feelings, thoughts, heart-throbs, and wrongs of the Common People:
“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out. A tall man in a night-cap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the horses and had laid it on the base of thefountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”“Why does he make that abominable noise—is it his child?”“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis, it is a pity—yes.”The fountain was a little removed, for the street opened where it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.“Killed!” shrieked the man in wild desperation, extending both arms at their lengths above his head and staring at him. “Dead!”The people closed round and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness; there was no visible menacing of anger. Neither did the people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken was flat and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all as though they had been mere rats come out of their holes. He took out his purse.“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever inthe way. How do I know what injury you have done to my horses. See! give him that.”He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down as it fell. The tall man called out again, with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder, sobbing and crying and pointing to the fountain, where some women were stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They were silent, however, as the men.“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my Gaspard. It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour as happily?”“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling.“How do they call you?”“They call me Defarge.”“Of what trade?”“Monsieur the Marquis, the vender of wine.”“Pick up that, philosopher and vender of wine,” said the Marquis, throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. The horses there; are they all right?”Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away withthe air of a gentleman who had accidentally broken some common thing, and had paid for it and could afford to pay for it, when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into the carriage, and ringing on its floor.“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! who threw that?”He looked to the spot where Defarge, the vender of wine, had stood a moment before; but the wretched father was groveling on his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of a dark, stout woman, knitting.“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to the spots on his nose; “I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.”So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men not one. But the woman who was knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed over her and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word, “Go on!”
“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out. A tall man in a night-cap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the horses and had laid it on the base of thefountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”
“Why does he make that abominable noise—is it his child?”
“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis, it is a pity—yes.”
The fountain was a little removed, for the street opened where it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
“Killed!” shrieked the man in wild desperation, extending both arms at their lengths above his head and staring at him. “Dead!”
The people closed round and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness; there was no visible menacing of anger. Neither did the people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken was flat and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all as though they had been mere rats come out of their holes. He took out his purse.
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever inthe way. How do I know what injury you have done to my horses. See! give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down as it fell. The tall man called out again, with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”
He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder, sobbing and crying and pointing to the fountain, where some women were stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They were silent, however, as the men.
“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my Gaspard. It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour as happily?”
“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling.
“How do they call you?”
“They call me Defarge.”
“Of what trade?”
“Monsieur the Marquis, the vender of wine.”
“Pick up that, philosopher and vender of wine,” said the Marquis, throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. The horses there; are they all right?”
Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away withthe air of a gentleman who had accidentally broken some common thing, and had paid for it and could afford to pay for it, when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into the carriage, and ringing on its floor.
“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! who threw that?”
He looked to the spot where Defarge, the vender of wine, had stood a moment before; but the wretched father was groveling on his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of a dark, stout woman, knitting.
“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to the spots on his nose; “I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.”
So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men not one. But the woman who was knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed over her and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word, “Go on!”
In vain would we seek for words describing better the horrible condition of the Common People, and the tremendous extent of the assumption of a superiority upon the part of the nobles, than in the foregoing picture so ably portrayed by Charles Dickens. Such a condition of the social life in France could produce but one result. The harvest was ripe for the sickle. The people had witnessed an illustration of the might of the Common People of America when opposed to the representatives of “caste” in the British army. That the storm should have burst that so long had been hovering over the heads of the French nobles is not a matter of surprise, in view of the fact that Dickens is historically correct in his picture of the oppressed condition of the poor in France. The only wonder to us Anglo-Saxons is that brave men, as the Frenchmen are, should have borne so long the cruel, heartless oppression of the rich nobility.
Duruy says: “The French Revolution was the establishment of a new order of society, founded on justice, not privileges. Such changes never take place without causing terrible suffering. It is the law of humanity that all new life shall be born in pain.”
When Louis XVI. ascended the throne, in 1774, revolution was in the air. The outwardsplendor of Versailles, as Carlyle intimates, was the rainbow above Niagara: beneath was destruction.
There was a general feeling that a crisis was at hand. The spirit of free inquiry aroused by the leading writers and thinkers was ominous. Government, religion, social institutions, were all burned in the crucible, and a new order of things was inevitable. The country was hopelessly deep in the mire of debt; the tax agents were brutal, and the peasants ground to the lowest depths of misery and suffering.
The power of the nobles over the peasants living on their estates was absolute. Large tracts of land were declared game-preserves, where wild boars and deer roamed at pleasure. To preserve the game with its flavor unimpaired, the starving peasants were not allowed to weed their little plots of ground. The nobility and clergy, who owned two-thirds of the land, were nearly exempt from taxation.
The peasant must grind his corn at the lord’s mill; bake his bread in the lord’s oven, and press his grapes at the lord’s wine-press, paying whatever the lord chose to charge. If the wife of the seigneur fell ill, the peasants must beat the neighboring marshes all night to prevent the frogs from croaking, and so disturbing the lady’s rest.
French agriculture had not advanced beyond the tenth century, and the plow in use was the same as that used before the Christian era. The picture of rural wretchedness is completed by the purchase and sale of 150,000 serfs with the land on which they were born.
Louis desired to redress the wrongs of his country, but did not know how. Ministers came and went in a continuous procession, Turgot, Necker, Colonne, Brienne, and Necker again, tried to solve the problem, and gave up in despair.
As a last resort, the States-General, which had not met for one hundred and seventy-five years, assembled May 5, 1789, and that day marked the opening of the Revolution.
The National Assembly, proving to be the most powerful body of the States-General, invited the nobles and clergy to join it, and declared itself the National Assembly. Louis closed the hall. The members repaired to a tennis-court near by, and swore not to separate until they had given France a constitution. The weak king soon yielded, and, at his request, the coronets and mitres met with the commons. The court decided to overawe the refractory Assembly, and collected 30,000 soldiers about Versailles.
Four members of that assembly were Lafayette,Count Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Guillotine, inventor of the fearful instrument of punishment bearing his name.
The Paris populace were infuriated by the menace from the soldiers. They stormed the old Bastile and razed its dungeons to the ground. The insurrection spread like a prairie-fire. Chateaux were burned, and tax-payers tortured to death. Soon a maddened mob surged toward Versailles, screeching “Bread! bread!” The palace was sacked and the royal family brought to Paris.
Political clubs sprang up like mushrooms, chief among which were the Jacobins and the Cordelies, whose leaders, Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, advocated sedition and organized the revolution.
The Assembly, in its burst of patriotism, extinguished feudal privileges, abolished serfdom, and equalized taxes. The estates of the clergy were confiscated, and upon this security notes were issued to meet the expenses of the government.
Austria and Prussia took up arms in behalf of Louis, and invaded France (1791). This step doomed the monarch and the monarchy. The approach of the “foreigners” kindled to unrestrainable fury the wrath of the masses. The “Marseillaise” was heard for the first time on thestreets of Paris; the palace of the Tuileries was sacked; the faithful Swiss guards were slain, and Louis sent to prison. The Jacobins were triumphant. They arrested all who spoke against their revolutionary projects; assassins were hired to go through the crowded prisons and murder the inmates. For four days during September the terrible carnival of blood raged.
The Prussian army was checked at Valmy, and soon recrossed the frontier. Then the Austrians were defeated at Jemmapes, and Belgium was proclaimed a republic. The leaders of the French revolution were electrified, and the next Assembly established a republic in France. The king was arraigned and guillotined. As the bleeding head tumbled into the basket the furious crowds shouted “Vive la Republique!” Europe was horrified, and a league, with England as its moving spirit, was formed to avenge the death of Louis. The royalists held Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons and Toulon.
The Convention appointed a Committee of Safety, which knew neither mercy nor pity. Revolutionary tribunals were set up, and the work of slaughter began and raged with a ferocity beyond the power of imagination to conceive. To charge a person with being in sympathy with the aristocrats was his death warrant. Mensaved themselves by denouncing their neighbors before their neighbors could denounce them. Intimate friends suspected each other, and members of the same family became mortal enemies.
Marie Antoinette, her head silvered by the awful woe and desolation and horror, perished on the same scaffold where her husband had died. At Lyons, the guillotine was too slow, and the victims were mowed down with grape-shot; at Nantes, boat-loads were rowed out and sunk in the Loire. The people were made frantic by their thirst for blood.
Marat rubbed his hands and chuckled with glee at the carnival of murder. He showed his admiring friends his reception room, papered with death warrants.
But his turn speedily came. Charlotte Corday, a young girl from Normandy, gained access to him, and, while he was jotting down the names of fresh victims, stabbed him to death, and then walked proudly to the guillotine.
Danton expressed a suspicion that the massacre had continued long enough, for which he was promptly guillotined, and then for nearly four months the appalling Robespierre reigned supreme. His aim was to destroy all the other leaders; the axe worked faster and faster, but not fast enough to suit the clamoring tigers; theaccused were forbidden defence, and were trieden masse.
Finally, when common safety demanded it, friends and foes united for the overthrow of the colossal monster. He was arrested and beheaded July 28, 1794. The reign of terror ended with his life. It had lasted little more than a year. But what a year of woe, massacre, murder, and blood! From the first outbreak of the revolution to its close, it has been estimated that 1,000,000 lives were sacrificed.
From this appalling furnace of fire and death emerged the true life of France. The revolutionary clubs were abolished; the prison doors flung wide; the churches opened, and the emigrant priests and nobles invited to return.
But, though the Convention had organized the government of the Directory in name, it had yet to fight for its existence. The Royalists hoped they might restore the monarchy. The National Guard was persuaded to join the monarchical party. In October, 1795, the combined forces, 40,000 strong, marched on the Tuileries to expel the Convention or prevent the establishment of the Directory.
The Convention called on General Barras to defend them. Barras asked a Corsican artillery officer of twenty-six, who had distinguished himself at Toulon, to act as his lieutenant. Hespeedily converted the palace into an intrenched camp. He had 7000 troops, but he planted his batteries with such admirable skill, and used his grape-shot with such effect that the advancing hosts were defeated and scattered, and the Convention, with its defender, Napoleon Bonaparte, was master of the situation.
Thankfulness should fill the hearts of all the citizens of the American Republic that the history of our own country will not present a duplicate picture of the scenes portrayed in this chapter. It certainly is not the fault of the good management of the sham aristocrats that these scenes of such monstrous horror, exhibiting the birth of liberty in France and the erasure of the word “caste” with its most objectionable features from French life, were not reproduced in America. Fortunately for the would-be aristocrats, the volcano, upon which they slept, had a crater known as theBALLOT-BOX, where the pent-up steam of the indignation of the people found a vent-hole. November 8, 1892, the safety-valve was opened by the people, and the believers in “caste” should be thankful that there existed some means of relief; had such not been the case, the pent-up energies and the indignation of the people would have caused another explosion, which would have rivalled in force, if not in the howling scenes of blood, the French Revolution.
The American regards England with more than kindly eyes. Her history has been the history of our race. The sterling valor of the Englishman early made itself felt in the demands made by him upon the reluctant kings who ruled him. At no time in the history of Great Britain, from the Norman Conquest, had the peasantry and “Common People” been submerged as completely by the power of the privileged classes as has been the case in France, and, in fact, as in all of continental Europe. When John, known as “Lackland,” the younger brother of Richard Cœur de Lion, came to the throne of England (1109-1216), he ruled weakly and lost nearly all the English possessions in France. The peasants rose against the imbecile monarch and, joined by the barons and feudal lords, compelled him to sign the Magna-Charta or Great Charter, at Runnymede (1215).
By this immortal instrument the king gave up the right to demand money when he pleased, to imprison or punish when he pleased. He was to take money only when the barons granted theprivilege, for public purposes, and no freeman was to be punished except when his countrymen judged him guilty of crime. The courts were to be open to all, and justice was not to be sold, refused, or withheld. The serf villein was to have his plow free from seizure. The church was secured against the interference of the king. No class was neglected, but each obtained some cherished right.
Thus, early in the history of England, we find the “Common People” of that nation from whom we derive our blood and many of our laws—the foundation, in fact of all of them—and much of our domestic and social conditions and manners, asserting rights for which Americans afterwards contended with the parent country, England. The Magna-Charta was wrested from King John not by the lords and barons alone—but by a union between the nobles and the “Common People.”
Thus early the “Common People” of England learned to appreciate their might and strength. And the Americans, as inheritors along with their blood of so many of the traditions and characteristics of the English, have not failed to possess themselves of that quality which is inherent in the Anglo-Saxon heart—the fearless demanding of the right to equality.
Pronouncedly did the American people, November 8, 1892, reiterate in an unmistakablemanner the sentiment of the race who, in 1214, had forced from King John of England the Magna-Charta which has been, ever since, the foundation of English liberty.
English kings have continually tried to break the Magna-Charta, but have ever failed in the attempt. They have been compelled, during reigns succeeding that of King John, to confirm its provisions thirty-six times. The early assertion of the right to representation by the people is interesting as a step onward in the march of the Anglo-Saxon toward equality and liberty.
Henry II.’s foolish favoritism to foreigners caused a revolt, under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who defeated the king at Lewes. Earl Simon thereupon called together the Parliament, summoning, besides the barons, two knights from each county and two citizens from each city or borough to represent free-holders (1265). From this beginning, the English Parliament soon took on the form it has since retained of two assemblies—the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Thus, the thirteenth century became ever memorable in the history of the English-speaking people of the world, for the granting of the Magna-Charta and the forming of the House of Commons—that House of Commons, which, as its name indicates, was and is made up of the representatives of the“Common People,” and which has ever been the bulwark of the liberty of the “Common People” of England, resisting every attack of autocratic monarchs upon the rights of the people.
In the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377) the Normans and Saxons were fused completely, and created the English nationality; chivalry reached its highest exaltation; but the court and the upper classes were morally rotten. The laboring classes rose during this reign, and compelled their employers to pay them just wages, and rent to fragments the despotic edicts that effected them; just as the “Common People” will ever do, whether the attempt is made to beguile them by the cry of Protection, Free Trade, Force Bill, or other distracting exclamations.
Richard II. (1377-1399) was a tyrant, with neither the capacity nor courage of his father and grandfather. He lost all the respect and admiration with which the people of England had ever regarded his father and grandfather. One of Richard II.’s tax-gatherers insulted the daughter of one Watt Tyler, at Dartforth on Kent, in exactly the same manner as “Chappie” feels at liberty to do, by his glances, the daughters of the laboring men to-day. Watt Tyler, the wrathful father, killed the man with one blow, and a formidable revolt sprang at once into being.
The shouts of about 100,000 “Common People,” gathered on Black Heath, June 12, 1381, reverberated through the valley of Richard II. The vast horde poured into London, seized the Tower of London, put to death the Archbishop of Canterbury and others, and spared the cowering and cowardly King Richard II., only on his promise to abolish slavery and grant their demands.
That, my good and would-be lords and barons, is but another evidence of the Anglo-Saxon blood and its resentment of insult when offered to the female members of the race. Women ever have occasioned, in the Anglo-Saxon bosom, just and righteous indignation when insulted. The slights, sneers, and snubbing of the women of America by the snobs and sham aristocrats produced the reappearance of the same traits of character as led Watt Tyler and his horde of peasants to London. The women of America had become Democratic, and the result of their influence upon the voters of our country was revealed, November 8th, in an unmistakable manner.
James I. (1603-1625), the first Stuart to reign in England, was stubborn, conceited, weak, slovenly, dissipated, and cowardly. In his reign was first heard the prattle about “the divine right of kings, and the passive obedience of the subject.” He ostentatiously opposed his will to that of the people, and during his reign was in constantconflict with Parliament. He was obliged to beg the House of Commons for money, and that body adopted the principle, now one of the cornerstones of the British Constitution, that “a redress of grievances must precede a granting of supplies.”
Charles I. (1625-1649), the son of James I., was more refined and held more exalted ideas of his prerogatives; he repeatedly broke his promises made to the people; his reign was one long struggle with Parliament.
He was not as frivolous and false as his son Charles II., but James I., his father, had brought the idiotic doctrine of the divine right of kings into England along with the rest of his peculiar Stuart eccentricities,—for eccentric it was to the Anglo-Saxon people, who had forced from John the Magna-Charta at Runnymede before the amalgamation of the Norman and Saxon into one homogeneous race had been completed; who, while there still existed internal dissensions and race distinction, had been united upon the one great subject for which the Anglo-Saxon people, best and bravest representatives of the Aryan race, have ever fought—the equality of man in the representation in the legislation of the people.
Strange to the ear of the masses was the doctrine of the Stuart, that the king was one of the Lord’s anointed and could do no wrong. Theyhad seen kings do wrong when cursed with a wrong-doer as king, and supported any aspirant to the crown of England, no matter how slender may have been the thread of his claim thereto. Richard II. had played the autocratic ruler. Englishmen had resisted by espousing the cause of the first claimant who appeared upon the field. The assumption by the Stuarts of a divine right was the first stab that they gave to their own existence as the ruling House of an Anglo-Saxon people. Charles I. reaped where James I. had sown. The English people had forgiven before the bad faith of their sovereign, as they have since. They have endured the waste of their money because the Anglo-Saxon, whence we Americans derive the source of blood and laws, has not his tender spot upon the pocketbook, but in his heart, his home, his pride, believing himself, each man, equal to any other man.
In 1628, Parliament wrested from Charles I. the famous Petition of Rights, the second great charter of English liberty. It forbade the kings to levy taxes without the consent of Parliament, to imprison a subject without trial, or to billet soldiers in private houses. As usual, Charles disregarded his promises, and then for eleven years ruled like an autocrat.
During that period no Parliament was convoked, a thing unparalleled in English history.Buckingham having been assassinated by a Puritan fanatic, the Earl of Stafford and Archbishop Laud became its royal advisers. The Earl contrived a plan for making the king absolute. All who differed from Laud were tried in the High Commissioner’s Court, while the Star Chamber Court fined, whipped, and imprisoned those who spoke ill of the king’s policy or refused to pay the money he illegally demanded. The bitter persecution of the Puritans drove them to America. In Scotland, Charles carried matters with a high hand. Laud attempted to abolish Presbyterianism and introduce a liturgy. The Scotch roseen masse, and signed (some of them with their own blood) a covenant binding themselves to resist every innovation directed against their religious rights. Finally, an army of Scots crossed the border into England, and Charles was forced to assemble the famous “Long Parliament” (1640), which lasted twenty years. The old battle was renewed. Stafford, and afterward Laud, were brought to the block; the Star Chamber and High Commissioners’ Courts were abolished, and Parliament voted that it could not be adjourned without its own consent. Charles attempted to arrest five of the leaders of Parliament in the House of Commons itself. They hid in the City of London, whence a week later they were brought back to the House of Commonsin triumph. Charles hastened Northward, and unfurled the royal banner. For a time his supporters swept everything before them.