On economic matters,the opinions of the two leaders were also hopelessly at variance.Hamilton,while cherishing agriculture,desired to see America a great commercial and industrial nation.Jefferson was equally set against this course for his country.He feared the accumulation of riches and the growth of a large urban working class.The mobs of great cities,he said,are sores on the body politic;artisans are usually the dangerous element that make revolutions;workshops should be kept in Europe and with them the artisans with their insidious morals and manners.The only substantial foundation for a republic,Jefferson believed to be agriculture.The spirit of independence could be kept alive only by free farmers,owning the land they tilled and looking to the sun in heaven and the labor of their hands for their sustenance.Trusting as he did in the innate goodness of human nature when nourished on a free soil,Jefferson advocated those measures calculated to favor agriculture and to enlarge the rights of persons rather than the powers of government.Thus he became the champion of the individual against the interference of the government,and an ardent advocate of freedom of the press,freedom of speech,and freedom of scientific inquiry.It was,accordingly,no mere factious spirit that drove him into opposition to Hamilton.
The Whisky Rebellion.-The political agitation of the Anti-Federalists was accompanied by an armed revolt against the government in 1794.The occasion for this uprising was another of Hamilton's measures,a law laying an excise tax on distilled spirits,for the purpose of increasing the revenue needed to pay the interest on the funded debt.It so happened that a very considerable part of the whisky manufactured in the country was made by the farmers,especially on the frontier,in their own stills.The new revenue law meant that federal of-ficers would now come into the homes of the people,measure their liquor,and take the tax out of their pockets.All the bitterness which farmers felt against the fiscal measures of the government was redoubled.In the western districts of Pennsylvania,Virginia,and North Carolina,they refused to pay the tax.In Pennsylvania,some of them sacked and burned the houses of the tax collec-tors,as the Revolutionists thirty years before had mobbed the agents of King George sent over to sell stamps.They were in a fair way to nullify the law in whole districts when Washington called out the troops to suppress "the Whisky Rebellion."Then the movement collapsed;but it left behind a deep-seated re-sentment which flared up in the election of several obdurate Anti-Federalist Congressmen from the disaffected regions.
Foreign Influences and Domestic Politics
The French Revolution.-In this exciting period,when all America was distracted by partisan disputes,a storm broke in Europe-the epoch-making French Revolution-which not only shook the thrones of the Old World but stirred to its depths the young republic of the New World.The first scene in this dramatic affair occurred in the spring of 1789,a few days after Washington was inaugurated.The king of France,Louis XVI,driven into bankruptcy by ex-travagance and costly wars,was forced to resort to his people for financial help.Accordingly he called,for the first time in more than one hundred fifty years,a meeting of the national parliament,the "Estates General,"composed of repre-sentatives of the "three estates"-the clergy,nobility,and commoners.Acting under powerful leaders,the commoners,or "third estate,"swept aside the cler-gy and nobility and resolved themselves into a national assembly.This stirred the country to its depths.
Louis XVI in the Hands of the Mob
Great events followed in swift succession.On July 14,1789,the Bastille,an old royal prison,symbol of the king's absolutism,was stormed by a Paris crowd and destroyed.On the night of August 4,the feudal privileges of the nobility were abolished by the national assembly amid great excitement.A few days later came the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man,proclaiming the sovereignty of the people and the privileges of citizens.In the autumn of1791,Louis XVI was forced to accept a new constitution for France vesting the legislative power in a popular assembly.Little disorder accompanied these startling changes.To all appearances a peaceful revolution had stripped the French king of his royal prerogatives and based the government of his country on the consent of the governed.
American Influence in France.-In undertaking their great political revolt the French had been encouraged by the outcome of the American Revolution.Officers and soldiers,who had served in the American war,reported to their French countrymen marvelous tales.At the frugal table of General Washington,in council with the unpretentious Franklin,or at conferences over the strategy of war,French noblemen of ancient lineage learned to respect both the talents and the simple character of the leaders in the great republican commonwealth beyond the seas.Travelers,who had gone to see the experiment in republican-ism with their own eyes,carried home to the king and ruling class stories of an astounding system of popular government.
On the other hand the dalliance with American democracy was regarded by French conservatives as playing with fire."When we think of the false ideas of government and philanthropy,"wrote one of Lafayette's aides,"which these youths acquired in America and propagated in France with so much enthusiasm and such deplorable success-for this mania of imitation powerfully aided the Revolution,though it was not the sole cause of it-we are bound to confess that it would have been better,both for themselves and for us,if these young philosophers in red-heeled shoes had stayed at home in attendance on the court."