yet finished the plaster was not even dry on the walls. It was built on a grand and superb scale, but the thrifty New England spirit of the President's wife was appalled at the prospect of having to employ thirty servants to keep the apartments in order and to tend the fires which had everywhere to be kept up to drive away the ague. The ordinary conveniences were wanting. For lack of a yard, Mrs. Adams made a drying-room out of the great unfinished audience room. And the only society which she might enjoy was in Georgetown, two miles away. "We have, indeed," she wrote, "come into a new country." But with true pioneer spirit, she added, "It is a beautiful spot, capable of every improvement, and, the more I view it, the more I am delighted with it."

The gloom which enveloped the Federalists after the elections of the year deepened as they straggled into the new capital in November. They approached their labors as men who would save what they could of a falling world. For some time there had been an urgent demand for the reorganization of the federal judiciary. The justices of the Supreme Court objected to circuit duty and urged the erection of a circuit court with a permanent bench of judges. Such a reform was inevitable, it was said; therefore let the Federalists find what consolation they might from the possession of these new judgeships. Patriotism, too, suggested the wisdom of filling the judiciary with men who would uphold the established order. "In the future administration of our country," President Adams wrote to Jay, "the firmest security we

can have against the effects of visionary schemes or fluctuating theories will be in a solid judiciary.”

The Judiciary Act of February 13, 1801, which embodied these aims, added five new districts to those which had been established in 1789, and grouped the twenty-two districts into six circuits. The amount of patronage which thus fell into the President's hands was very considerable, though it was grossly exaggerated by Republicans. The partisan press pictured President John Adams signing the commissions of these new judgeships to the very stroke of twelve on the night of March 3, and then entering his coach and driving in haste from the city.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

On the organization of parties at the close of the century there are two works of importance: G. D. Luetscher, Early Political Machinery in the United States (1903), and M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (2 vols., 1902. Vol. II deals with parties in the United States). Prosecutions under the Sedition Act are reported in F. Wharton, State Trials of the United States during the Administrations of Washington and Adams (2 vols., 1846). F. T. Hill, Decisive Battles of the Law (1907), gives an interesting account of the trial of Callender. Two special studies should be mentioned: E. D. Warfield, The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (1887), and F. M. Anderson, "Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions," in the American Historical Review, vol. v. The spirit of American politics at this time can be best appreciated by perusing Porcupine's Works, the writings of Callender and Tom Paine, and the letters of Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Timothy Pickering.

CHAPTER VII

JEFFERSONIAN REFORMS

THE Society over whose political destiny Thomas Jefferson was to preside for eight years was for the most part still rural and primitive. Evidences of a higher culture were wanting outside of communities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston. Even in Philadelphia, the literary as well as the social and political capital, the poet Moore could find only a sacred few whom "'t was bliss to live with, and 't was pain to leave." American life had not yet created an atmosphere in which poetry, or even science, could thrive. The scientific curiosity of the younger generation does not seem to have been whetted in the least by the startling experiments of Franklin ; and the figure of Philip Freneau stands almost alone, though Connecticut, to be sure, boasted of her Dwight, her Trumbull, and her Barlow. The "Connecticut wits" are interesting personalities; but the society which could read, with anything akin to pleasure, Dwight's Conquest of Canaan - an epic in eleven books with nearly ten thousand lines—was more admirable for its physical endurance than for its poetical intuitions. Latrobe was quite right when he wrote that in America the labor of the hand took precedence over that of the mind.

The American people were still engaged almost exclusively in agriculture and commerce. Manufac

turing was in its infancy. In his report on nanufactures in 1791, Hamilton had named seventeen industries which had made notable progress, but most of these were household crafts. In 1790, Samuel Slater had duplicated the inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright, and had, with Moses Brown, of Rhode Island, set up a successful cotton mill at Pawtucket; but ten years later only four factories were in operation in the whole country.

The wars in Europe had created an unprecedented and ever-increasing demand for American agricul tural products. The price of foodstuffs like flour and meal reached a point which made possible enormous profits. Shipping became, therefore, the indispensable handmaid of agriculture, as Jefferson observed. The volume of trade expanded at an astonishing rate. The total value of exports mounted from $20,000,000 in 1790 to $94,000,000 in the year of Jefferson's inauguration. One half of this amount, however, represented the value of commodities like sugar, coffee, and cocoa, which had been brought into the country for exportation. The easy and almost certain profits of this trade attracted capital which might otherwise have gone into manufacturing.

Shipping was stimulated also by the Navigation Act of 1789, which imposed lower tonnage duties in American ports on vessels built or owned by American citizens, and by the Tariff Act of the same year, which allowed a ten per cent deduction from the customs duties levied on goods imported in American vessels. These discriminating duties, together with the law of 1792, which excluded foreign-built ships