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  THE CRITICAL PERIOD OF

  AMERICAN HISTORY

  1783-1789

  BY

  JOHN FISKE

  "I am uneasy and apprehensive, more so than during the war."
  JAY TO WASHINGTON, _June_ 27, 1786.

  [Illustration]

  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
  The Riverside Press, Cambridge




  Copyright, 1888,

  BY JOHN FISKE.

  _All rights reserved._

  _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._ Electrotyped and Printed
  by H.O. Houghton & Co.




  To

  MY DEAR CLASSMATES,

  FRANCIS LEE HIGGINSON

  AND

  CHARLES CABOT JACKSON,

  _I DEDICATE THIS BOOK._




PREFACE.


This book contains the substance of the course of lectures given in the
Old South Meeting-House in Boston in December, 1884, at the Washington
University in St. Louis in May, 1885, and in the theatre of the
University Club in New York in March, 1886. In its present shape it may
serve as a sketch of the political history of the United States from the
end of the Revolutionary War to the adoption of the Federal
Constitution. It makes no pretensions to completeness, either as a
summary of the events of that period or as a discussion of the political
questions involved in them. I have aimed especially at grouping facts in
such a way as to bring out and emphasize their causal sequence, and it
is accordingly hoped that the book may prove useful to the student of
American history.

My title was suggested by the fact of Thomas Paine's stopping the
publication of the "Crisis," on hearing the news of the treaty of 1783,
with the remark, "The times that tried men's souls are over." Commenting
upon this, on page 55 of the present work, I observed that so far from
the crisis being over in 1783, the next five years were to be the most
critical time of all. I had not then seen Mr. Trescot's "Diplomatic
History of the Administrations of Washington and Adams," on page 9 of
which he uses almost the same words: "It must not be supposed that the
treaty of peace secured the national life. Indeed, it would be more
correct to say that the most critical period of the country's history
embraced the time between 1783 and the adoption of the Constitution in
1788."

That period was preeminently the turning-point in the development of
political society in the western hemisphere. Though small in their mere
dimensions, the events here summarized were in a remarkable degree
germinal events, fraught with more tremendous alternatives of future
welfare or misery for mankind than it is easy for the imagination to
grasp. As we now stand upon the threshold of that mighty future, in the
light of which all events of the past are clearly destined to seem
dwindled in dimensions and significant only in the ratio of their
potency as causes; as we discern how large a part of that future must be
the outcome of the creative work, for good or ill, of men of English
speech; we are put into the proper mood for estimating the significance
of the causes which determined a century ago that the continent of North
America should be dominated by a single powerful and pacific federal
nation instead of being parcelled out among forty or fifty small
communities, wasting their strength and lowering their moral tone by
perpetual warfare, like the states of ancient Greece, or by perpetual
preparation for warfare, like the nations of modern Europe. In my book
entitled "American Political Ideas, viewed from the Standpoint of
Universal History," I have tried to indicate the pacific influence
likely to be exerted upon the world by the creation and maintenance of
such a political structure as our Federal Union. The present narrative
may serve as a commentary upon what I had in mind on page 133 of that
book, in speaking of the work of our Federal Convention as "the finest
specimen of constructive statesmanship that the world has ever seen." On
such a point it is pleasant to find one's self in accord with a
statesman so wise and noble as Mr. Gladstone, whose opinion is here
quoted on page 223.

To some persons it may seem as if the years 1861-65 were of more
cardinal importance than the years 1783-89. Our civil war was indeed an
event of prodigious magnitude, as measured by any standard that history
affords; and there can be little doubt as to its decisiveness. The
measure of that decisiveness is to be found