nor Clinton of New York withheld his approval of a measure to
improve a system of taxation to which the other twelve States had
assented; so Rhode Island, the smallest of all, blocked another reform
which twelve States had approved. Our foreign relations must be
described as ignominious. Jefferson had taken Franklin's place as
Minister to France, but we had no credit and he could not secure the
loan he was seeking. John Adams in London, and John Jay in Madrid,
were likewise balked. Jay had to submit to the closing of the lower
Mississippi to American shipping. He did this in the hope of thereby
conciliating Spain to make a commercial treaty which he thought
was far more important than shipping. Our people in the Southwest,
however, regarded the closing of the river as portending their ruin,
and they threatened to secede if it were persisted in. Pennsylvania
and New Jersey threw their weight with the Southerners and Congress
voted against the Jay treaty. That was the time when the corsairs of
the Barbary States preyed upon American shipping in the Mediterranean
and seized crews of our vessels and sold them into slavery in Northern
Africa. That there was not in the thirteen States sufficient feeling
of dignity to resent and punish these outrages marks both their
dispersed power and lack of regard for National honor.

After 1783 the States, virtually bankrupt at home, discordant, fickle,
and aimless, and without credit or prestige abroad, were filled with
many citizens who recognized that the system was bad and must be
amended. The wise among them wrote treatises on the remedies they
proposed. The wisest went to school of experience and sought in
history how confederations and other political unions had fared.
Washington wrote for his own use an account of the classical
constitutions of Greece and Rome and of the more modern states; of the
Amphictyonic Council among the ancient, and the Helvetic, Belgic, and
Germanic among the more recent. John Adams devoted two massive volumes
to an account of the medieval Italian republics. James Madison studied
the Achaian League and other ancient combinations. There were many
other men less eminent than these--there was a Peletiah Webster, for
instance.

Washington viewed the situation as a pessimist. Was it because the
high hopes that he had held during the war, that America should be the
noblest among the nations, had been disappointed, or was it because he
saw farther into the fut