On the last day of July, Morris sent to congress his budget for 1783, amounting at the least to nine millions of dollars; and he could think of no way to obtain this sum but by borrowing four millions and raising five millions by quotas. The best hopes of supporting the public credit lay in the proposal to endow congress with the right to levy a duty of five per cent on imports.

The request of congress, made in February 1781, to the states for this power, encountered hostility in Massachusetts. In a letter from its general court to congress complaint was made that the state was called upon for more than its proper share of contributions; that the duty on imports would be an unequal burden; that the proposition could not be acceded to unless the produce of the tax should be passed to the special credit of the commonwealth. Congress in its reply brought to mind that the interest on the public debt already exceeded a million of dollars; that Massachusetts enjoyed the peculiar blessing of great commercial advantages denied by the fortune of common war to their less happy sister states; that duties levied on imports are paid by the consumer, and ought not to be retained by the state which has the benefit of the importation; and it strongly urged a compliance with the proposition in question, as just and expedient, impartial and easy of execution, and alone offering a prospect of redressing the just complaints of the public creditors. After delays of more than a year, on the fourth of May 1782 the general court gave way by a majority of two in the house and of one in the senate. The exemption from duty of "wool-cards, cotton-cards, and wire for making them," shows the wish of congress to foster incipient manufactures. The act reserved to the general court the election of the collectors of the revenue, which it appropriated exclusively to the payment of the debts of the United States, contracted or to be contracted during the existing war. With their payment it was to expire. Even this meagre concession received the veto of Hancock, the governor, though it was given one day too late to be of force.

As the federal articles required the unanimous assent of the states for the adoption of an amendment, the negative of Rhode Island seemed still to throw in the way of a good gov

Yet union

ernment hindrances which could not be overcome. was rooted in the heart of the American people. The device for its great seal, adopted by congress in the midsummer of 1781, is the American eagle, as the emblem of strength which uses victory only for peace. It holds in its right talon the olive-branch; with the left it clasps thirteen arrows, emblems of the thirteen states. On an azure field over the head of the eagle appears a constellation of thirteen stars breaking gloriously through a cloud. In the eagle's beak is the scroll, “E pluribus unum,' many and one, out of diversity unity, freedom of each individual state and unity of all the states, as the expression of conscious nationality, the two ideas that make America great. By further emblems congress showed its faith that the unfinished commonwealth, standing upon the broadest foundation, would be built up in strength, that heaven approved what had been undertaken, that "a new line of ages" was begun.

The condition of the treasury of the United States was deplorable. Of the quotas for which requisitions had been made on the states, only four hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars were collected. Delaware and the three southernmost states paid nothing. Rhode Island, which paid thirtyeight thousand dollars, or a little more than a sixth of its quota, was proportionately the largest contributor. Only by the payment of usurious rates was the army rescued from being starved or disbanded. "Their patriotism and distress," wrote Washington in October, "have scarcely ever been paralleled, never been surpassed. Their long-sufferance is almost exhausted; it is high time for a peace."

VOL. V.-86

CHAPTER VII.

PEACE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND GREAT BRITAIN.

FROM SEPTEMBER FIRST TO THE END OF NOVEMBER 1782.

FRANCE needed peace; Vergennes and his king strove to hasten it. The French navy was declining; the peasantry were crushed by their burdens; no one saw a way to meet the cost of another campaign. In Paris the fashionable language was, that France had been the dupe of her allies, the Americans and the Spaniards.*

The French minister pursued peace through the complicated difficulties created by the conflicting interests of the four powers which were at war with England; and he saw no way to success except their pretensions could be brought into harmony by his controlling advice.

The family alliance of the Bourbons bound the king of France most closely to the king of Spain by a permanent federation. Spanish interests France had pledged itself to treat as its own; and Spain, at the cost of France, impeded peace by the extravagance of her demands.

The Netherlands consented for the time to lean on France, but neither France nor Holland could look forward to a long continuance of their connection.

Between France and the United States the mutual obligations by treaty, so far as they related to the continuance of the war, would end when Great Britain should acknowledge, or at least acquiesce in, their independence.

It was the passion of Spain to include within her dominions

* Fitzherbert to Lord Grantham, 3 October 1782.

every part of the Gulf of Mexico and both banks of the Mississippi. To that end she needed at the peace to regain West Florida, and to throw back the United States to the eastern side of the Alleghanies. The French officials secretly laughed at her attempt to resist the advance of the United States to the Mississippi; but France, without disguise, seconded her demands.

It was not the wish of Vergennes that the republic which he fostered should become a formidable power; he was willing to nurse a rivalry between the British in America and the United States, and his secretary did not scruple to point out to Lord Shelburne where proofs might be found that Canada of old included Oswego and Niagara and all the country on the south to the summit level from which the waters flow to the great lakes. Beyond the Alleghanies, he desired that all which was claimed by the United States to the west and northwest of Pittsburg should remain with Great Britain. But well as it suited his policy to encourage Great Britain in curbing the aspirations of the United States, he would rather see them succeed in all their objects than risk delay in ending the war.

In England peace was desired by the king and his ministry, by every class of politicians, by the merchants, the manufacturers, and the landholders. A ministry which can lay before parliament a good settlement with all the enemies of England may hope for the support of a safe majority. A meeting of the whole cabinet gave a careful consideration to the attitude of Jay; and by their direction, on the first of September 1782, Thomas Townshend, the secretary of state, who conducted the negotiations with America, wrote to Oswald:

"In order to give the most unequivocal proof of the king's earnest wish to remove every impediment to a speedy termination of the calamities of war, I am commanded to signify to you his majesty's disposition to agree to the plan of pacification proposed by Doctor Franklin himself, including as it does independence, full and complete in every sense, as part of the first article; a settlement of the boundaries; a confinement of the boundaries of Canada at least to what they were before the act of parliament of 1774, if not to a still more contracted state on an ancient footing; a freedom of fishing

on the banks of Newfoundland and elsewhere, the privilege of drying not being included. His majesty has authorized you to go to the full extent of" these articles. "His majesty is also pleased, for the salutary purposes of precluding all further delay or embarrassment of negotiation, to waive any stipulation by the treaty for the undoubted rights of the merchants whose debts accrued before the year 1775, and also for the claims of the refugees for compensation for their losses, as Doctor Franklin declares himself unauthorized to conclude upon that subject.

"But if, after having pressed this plan of treaty, you should find the American commissioners determined not to proceed unless the independence be irrevocably acknowledged without reference to the final settlement of the rest of the treaty, you are then, but in the very last resort, to inform them his majes ty is willing, without waiting for the other branches of the negotiation, to recommend to his parliament to enable him forthwith to acknowledge the independence of the thirteen united colonies absolutely and irrevocably, and not depending upon the event of any other part of the treaty."*

On the third of September, the day on which this dispatch was received, Oswald visited Franklin and took a letter from him to Jay, with whom he held an interview on that very evening. Jay, who was not familiar with the state of parties in England, nor aware how far he was imperilling the one safe moment for perfect success in the negotiation with England, nor keeping in mind that he was commissioned only to make peace, still refused to "proceed unless independence was previously so acknowledged as to be entirely distinct and unconnected with treaty." Oswald explained to him that, if he persisted in the demand, there could be nothing done until the meeting of parliament, and perhaps for some considerable time thereafter; but Jay would not accept the ample offer of all that the United States asked for, and so forfeited the consent of Britain to dispense with a stipulation by treaty in favor of the refugees and of British creditors for debts contracted before 1775. He was soon awakened to the danger in which delay was involving his country. De Grasse, as he passed through

* Townshend to Oswald, 1 September 1782.