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the Indians. Indian discontent and even lawlessness had been going on for years, with only a desultory and ineffectual show of vigor on the part of the whites. Washington, who detested whatever was ineffectual and lacking in purpose, determined to beat down the Indians into submission. He sent out a first army under General St. Clair, but it was taken in ambush by the Indians and nearly wiped out--a disaster which caused almost a panic throughout the Western country. Washington felt the losses deeply, but he had no intention of being beaten there. He organized a second army, gave it to General Wayne to command, who finally brought the Six Nations to terms. The Indians in the South still remained unpacified and lawless. Washington made another prolonged trip, this time through the Southern States, which greatly improved his health and gave an opportunity of seeing many of the public men, and enabled the population to greet for the first time their President. Meanwhile the seeds of partisan feuds grew apace, as they could not fail to do where two of the ablest politicians ever known in the United States sat in the same Cabinet and pursued with unremitting energy ideas that were mutually uncompromising. Thomas Jefferson, although born of the old aristocratic stock of Virginia, had early announced himself a Democrat, and had led that faction throughout the Revolution. His facile and fiery mind gave to the Declaration of Independence an irresistible appeal, and it still remains after nearly one hundred and fifty years one of the most contagious documents ever drawn up. Going to France at the outbreak of the French Revolution, he found the French nation about to put into practice the principles on which he had long fed his imagination--principles which he accepted without qualification and without scruple. Returning to America after the organization of the Government, he accepted with evident reluctance the position of Secretary of State which Washington offered to him. In the Cabinet his chief adversary or competitor was Alexander Hamilton, his junior by fourteen years, a man equally versatile and equally facile--and still more enthralling as an orator. Hamilton harbored the anxiety that the United States under their new Constitution would be too loosely held together. He promoted, therefore, every measure that tended to strengthen the Central Government and to save it from dissolution either by the collapse of its unifyi
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