was inaugurated first President of the
United States, on March 4, 1789. Washington's writings have been
collected by Jared Sparks. They consist of journals, letters,
messages, addresses, and public documents, for the most part plain and
business-like in manner, and without any literary pretensions. The
most elaborate and the best known of them is his _Farewell Address_,
issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In the
composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It
is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in
expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the
United States, and his _Diary_, kept from 1755-85, should also be
mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of this period.

In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain against the French
Republic and its successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in
this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian
Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping
abstractions of the French Revolution and clung to the conservative
notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English
precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On
their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French
atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural
order of things, the strength of the Federalist party was in New
England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the
Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure--owing to the
system of slavery--was intensely aristocratic. The War of 1812 with
England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which
it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention
of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the
secession of New England from the Union. A good deal of oratory was
called out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain
negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and
by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the downfall of
that party and the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800.
The best of the Federalist orators during those years was Fisher Ames,
of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech
on the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 18, 1796.
The speech was, in grea