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CHAPTER district of the colony, under Rigaud, were indeed disXIII. posed to maintain their connection with France; but 1798. that chief was obliged to submit to the superior genius and power of Toussaint.

This expulsion of the French led to a great diminution in the number of privateers issuing from the ports of that island; and Toussaint, desiring to renew commercial intercourse with America, sent an agent to the United States for that purpose.

The American naval force was divided into four squadrons; one of nine vessels, under Commodore Barry, the senior officer of the navy, cruised to the eastward, as far south as Tobago; a second of five vessels, under Commodore Truxton, had its rendezvous at St. Kitt's, its business being to watch the island of Guadaloupe; two smaller squadrons guarded, the one the passage between Cuba and St. Domingo, the other the neighborhood of the Havana, whence a number of privateers were accustomed to issue under French colors. Each of these squadrons captured several French privateers. merchants had eagerly availed themselves of the permission to arm; and by an official return at the end of the year, it appeared that, besides the public ships, there were commissioned not less than 365 private armed vessels, mounting together 2733 guns, and manned by 6874 seamen. This armament was chiefly for defense, the commissions, whether in the case of public or private vessels, authorizing only the capture of armed ships.

The

The French corvette which had been captured by Decatur, being refitted as the Retaliation, had been placed under the command of Bainbridge. While cruising off Nov. 20. the island of Guadaloupe, she fell into the hands of two French frigates, which came unexpectedly upon her, and was carried into that island. On board one of these frigates was Desforneaux, appointed to supersede Victor

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Hugues as commissioner of the Directory for that isl- CHAPTER and. Hugues, who had so long exercised despotic power, and whose unscrupulous vigor and energy had made 1798. him the terror of those seas- a terror felt by American ship-owners no less than by the inhabitants of the neighboring British islands-was presently arrested and sent a prisoner to France. Yet it was only by urgent and repeated remonstrances that Bainbridge could obtain of the new commissioner some relaxation of the extremely harsh and cruel treatment of numerous American prisoners at Guadaloupe, the crews of vessels captured and condemned. Bainbridge stated that while he remained in the island American prizes were brought in to a value far exceeding that of the Retaliation. There is reason, however, to believe that the greater part of these captures were collusive, the vessels having approached Guadaloupe for the very purpose of being nominally captured, and in that way evading the penalties of the act forbidding commercial intercourse with France and her possessions. Guadaloupe had suffered severely from this non-intercourse, and the new commissioner, anxious to bring it to an end, declared to Bainbridge, who, as a means of relieving his countrymen, had suggested an exchange of prisoners, that he did not consider the Americans in that light, but as friends, and that he would send them all home under a flag. Yet this did not prevent some twenty of them being pressed, in spite of Bainbridge's remonstrances, to complete the compliment of the frigate in which Victor Hugues was sent to France. Finally, the Retaliation, of which Bainbridge, much against his will, was compelled to assume the command, was sent to the United States, with two other vessels filled with the late prisoners, and carrying, also, an agent of Desforneaux's to solicit a renewal of trade.

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His plan was to seem to have restored the Retaliation XIII. in a friendly spirit, and great use was made of this in1798. cident, especially by Jefferson in his private correspondence, as a fresh proof of the anxiety of the French government for a reconciliation. But the American government refused to regard the restored prize in any other light than as a cartel, and she was presently sent back with a number of French sailors taken in the captured privateers. Meanwhile, however, the change of administration in St. Domingo and Guadaloupe, the presence of American as well as of British cruisers in the West India Seas, and the protection they afforded by way of convoy, gave comparative security to American comRates of insurance, which had been as high, on an average, as twenty per cent., fell about one half, thus affording unquestionable evidence of the efficiency of the protection afforded.

merce.

Meanwhile the great leader of the opposition was very busy in constructing machinery for the overthrow of the administration, to accomplish which he seemed willing to risk, notwithstanding his late judicious advice to Taylor, the destruction even of the Union itself. The pitch of excitement to which he had risen may be judged of Nov. 26. from another letter to the same correspondent, in which he declares it to be "a singular phenomenon, that while our state governments are the very best in the world, without exception or comparison, our general government has, in the rapid course of nine or ten years, become more arbitrary, and has swallowed up more of the public liberty than even that of England." It must have been while under the influence of feelings like these that Jefferson had prepared, after consultation with George Nicholas of Kentucky, Wilson C. Nicholas of Virginia (both brothers of John Nicholas), and probably with Mad

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ison, and under a pledge of that profound secrecy with CHAPTER which he so scrupulously shrouded all his movements, the original draft of those famous resolutions which had 1798. just been offered in the Legislature of Kentucky; reso- Nov. 10. lutions which revived the anti-Federal spirit in all its early virulence, and threatened to reduce the existing government to something no better than the old confederation, if so good. Indeed, had Jefferson's programme been entirely followed out, the State of Kentucky would have placed itself in a position of open rebellion against the authority of the Federal government.

The original draft, as still preserved in Jefferson's handwriting, began with a resolution that the Federal Constitution is a compact between the states as states, by which is created a general government for special purposes, each state reserving to itself the residuary mass of power and right; and "that, as in other cases of compact between parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress." This resolution involves two very questionable doctrines; first, that the Constitution, instead of being a form of government as it purports to be, is simply a compact or treaty; and, secondly, that the parties to it are not, as the Constitution itself declares, “the people of the United States," but only the states as political corporations. Then followed five resolutions practically applying to three acts of the last Congress this alleged right of the states to judge of infractions and their remedy, not merely as matter of opinion, but, officially and constitutionally, as parties to the compact, and as the foundation of important legislation. These three acts were, one to punish counterfeiters of the bills of the United States Bank, the Sedition Law, and the Alien Law; all of

CHAPTER which, for various reasons assigned, were successively proXIII. nounced "not law, but altogether void and of no force." 1798. The seventh resolution postponed "to a time of greater

tranquillity" the "revisal and correction" of sundry other acts of Congress, alleged to have been founded upon an unconstitutional interpretation of the right to impose taxes and excises, and to provide for the common defense. and general welfare, and to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution the powers vested in the government of the United States. The right to act,

and cases for immediate as well as prospective action being thus laid down, the eighth resolution directed the appointment (as was done at the commencement of the Revolutionary quarrel with Great Britain) of a "committee of conference and correspondence," to communicate the foregoing resolutions to the several states, and to inform them that the commonwealth of Kentucky, with all her esteem for her "co-states" and for the Union, was determined "to submit to undelegated, and, consequently, unlimited powers in no man or body of men on earth; that, in cases of an abuse of the delegated powers, the members of the general government being chosen by the people, a change by the people would be the constitutional remedy; but where powers are assumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the right remedy; and that every state has a natural right, in cases not within the compact, to nullify, of their own authority, all assumptions of power by others within their limits." After many arguments to show that such is the only doctrine consistent with liberty, and that to appeal in such a case to Congress would be quite out of place, Congress being not a party to the compact, but merely its creature, the eighth resolution proceeded to authorize and instruct the committee of correspondence to

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