YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA. 245 XIII. cessful iand speculations, began to be added a host of CHAPTER others, resulting from rash commercial ventures and the depredations of the belligerents, particularly the French, 1798. among which number were Swanwick and M'Clenachan, the two opposition members from the city and county of Philadelphia. The high rate of interest consequent upon these financial disturbances made it very difficult to fill up the new loans. The New York Legislature, called together in special August session by Governor Jay, had appropriated $1,200,000 to be expended, under the direction of the president, for fortifying the harbor of New York, and to go, acccording to the offer of Congress already mentioned, in liquidation of so much of the Revolutionary balance due from that state. The further sum of $221,000 was also voted for the purchase of arms. Partly in consequence of the difficulty about rank already mentioned, no step had yet been taken toward the enlistment of the twelve additional regiments; and this matter was still further delayed by the reappearance of the yellow fever at Philadelphia, where it raged with even greater violence than during the memorable autumn of 1793. It appeared also, though with less violence, in New London, New York, Wilmington, and other towns. Those who were able almost universally fled from Philadelphia. Many of the poorer inhabitants left their dwellings and encamped in the fields. The public offices of the Federal government were removed for a month or two to Trenton, in New Jersey. Among the victims was Bache, editor and publisher of the Aurora; but another editor, not less violent and unscrupulous, and decidedly abler, stepped at once into the vacant seat. This was James Duane, born of Irish parents somewhere on the shores of Lake Champlain, but who had left the country in his XIII. CHAPTER youth, previous to the commencement of the Revolu tion, and having gone to his friends in Ireland, had there 1798. learned the trade of a printer, whence he proceeded to Calcutta, where he had set up an English newspaper, one of the first established in India. It is only within a recent period that the liberty of the press has been in troduced into that part of the British dominions. In Duane's time no such thing was thought of; and having given offense by the insertion of some articles not agree able to the authorities, his whole establishment had beer seized, and he himself shipped back to England. After some attempts to obtain redress for the heavy pecuniary losses thus inflicted upon him, he had emigrated to America, and had obtained employment sometimes as editor, sometimes as reporter for one or other of the Philadelphia papers. Filled, naturally enough, with bitter hatred of the British government, he entered with great zeal into the politics of the opposition. Employed, after Bache's death, to edit the Aurora, he soon made himself master of the establishment by intermarriage with the widow, and thus suddenly found himself raised to a posi tion of no mean influence. Fenno, printer to the Senate and publisher of the United States Gazette, the principal Federal organ at the seat of government, was car ried off by the same disease a few days after Bache's death, but the paper was continued by his son. The running of the lines under the treaty of Houlston, when at last it was completed, had disclosed the fact that several considerable tracts in the State of Tennessee, already occupied by white settlers, fell within the Cherokee territory. An attempt to remove these settlers having produced the greatest discontent, the president had thought it best to buy out the Indians, and commission. ers for negotiating a treaty with them had been appoint NORTHEASTERN BOUNDARY. 247 XIIL 1798. ed during the late session of Congress. By a new treaty, CHAPTER signed at Tellico, in consideration of $5000 in goods and an annual payment of $1000, the Cherokees ceded the lands in question, conceding, also, a free passage through their lands to all travelers on the road to Kentucky passing through the Cumberland Gap. Much about the same time the Mississippi Territory was organized, under Winthrop Sargent, late secretary of the Northwest Territory, as governor. Among other provisions of Jay's treaty had been the creation of a commission for determining the eastern boundary of the United States. Massachusetts had claimed as the true St. Croix mentioned in the treaty of 1773, the Maguadavick. The British not only claimed the Passamaquoddy as the true St. Croix, but they insisted upon the western branch of it, called the Schoodie, as the main stream. The commissioners decided that the Passamaquoddy was the true St. Croix, of which the identity was established by the discovery of the ruins of a fort built on an island at its mouth by the early French settlers near two hundred years before. At the same time they decided that the main stream of the river, from the source of which the boundary was to proceed in a due northerly direction, was not the Schoodic, but the eastern branch. The effect of this decision was to confirm existing land-grants and to divide the disputed country between the two nations in nearly equal proportions. One point, however, was left unsettled, as not within the powers of the commission, the ownership, namely, of the numerous islands in the Bay of Passamaquoddy. The first victim under the new Sedition Law was no other than Matthew Lyon, a candidate for re-election to Congress, but in whose district at the first trial no choice Oct. 2 CHAPTER had been made, as besides the Federal candidate, he had XIII. a republican competitor of somewhat less violent politics. 1798. One charge against him was founded on a letter written from Philadelphia while the bill was still pending in Congress, and published, after its passage, in a Vermont paper, in which letter Lyon alleged that on the part of the executive "every consideration of the public welfare was swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice;" that men of merit were turned out of office or were refused office for no other cause but "independency of sentiment," while "mean men" were preferred for their readiness in advocating measures about which they knew nothing; and that the "sacred name of religion" was employed-an allusion to the late proclamation for a fast-as "a state engine to make mankind hate and persecute each other." A second count charged him with publishing, by reading and commenting upon it at public political meet. ings, a private letter from Barlow in Paris to his brotherin-law Baldwin, in which the policy of the administration was fiercely attacked; the passage relied upon being one in which that renegade American had expressed his surprise that the answer of the House to the president's speech, of which the Directory had complained, had not been "an order to send him to the mad-house." A third count charged him with abetting the publication in a pamphlet contrary, it would seem, to his express agreement with Baldwin, from whom he had re ceived it in confidence of the whole of this letter of Barlow's, a letter not more abusive of Adams than of Washington, who was accused in it of having sacrificed the dignity of the nation by "thrusting Jay's treaty down the throats of the people of America by means LYON'S TRIAL. 249 XIII. of a monstrous influence, an inexplicable contrast to CHAPTER the weakness of his political talents." Lyon, who managed his own cause, undertook to prove by Judge Patterson, before whom the trial took place, the truth of a part of his charges. He asked the judge whether he had not frequently dined with the president, and observed his ridiculous pomp and parade; to which Patterson answered that he had sometimes dined with the president, but instead of pomp and parade, had seen only a decent simplicity. Lyon made a long harangue to the jury; but they found him guilty, and after a severe lecture from the judge, he was sentenced to four months' imprisonment and a fine of $1000, the amount being diminished in consequence of evidence that Lyon was embarrassed in his circumstances, and not far from insolvency. Some of Lyon's friends revenged his cause shortly after by girdling the apple-trees of the principal witnesses against him. A numerously-signed petition was sent to the president, asking Lyon's release from the prison, a very small, filthy, and uncomfortable one; but the president declined to grant this petition unless Lyon would signify his repentance by signing it himself. So far from that, the imprisoned patriot dispatched from his jail a highly-colored account of his trial, and especially of his prison accommodations, in a letter addressed to Mason, the Virginia senator, the friend of Callender; and indeed his treatment would seem to have been vindictively harsh and severe. Mason wrote back a sympathizing reply, in which he suggested that the amount of the fine might be made up by subscription. Lyon, meanwhile, to relieve his pecuniary embarrassments, adopted an expedi ent which, in the end, Jefferson himself was fain to imitate-that of a private lottery, the prizes to consist of 1798. Oct. 7. |