treet which was vilifying Jay, Hamilton was stoned and forced to give
way with the blood streaming down his face. Personal abuse of the
coarsest kind was heaped upon Washington by the opposition press, while
a host of pamphleteers assailed him under cover of anonymity. Congress
expressed its hostility toward the President by omitting to congratulate
him on his birthday.

In the face of this denunciation, Washington might well have hesitated
to press the ratification of the amended treaty upon Great Britain. His
perplexities were further increased by the tidings that the Ministry
had renewed the earlier orders for the seizure of provisions on neutral
vessels bound for French ports. Hamilton was of the opinion that the
President should insist upon the withdrawal of this order in council and
upon the acceptance of the Senate amendment before he ratified the
treaty. The delicate task of securing the consent of Great Britain to
these conditions was entrusted to John Quincy Adams, then Minister at
The Hague.

Meanwhile the skies cleared in the Northwest. Wayne's punitive
expedition had done its work. With their towns destroyed and their crops
ruined, the Indians had passed a terrible winter. By the following
summer they were ready to sue for peace. In a great council at
Greenville, on August 4, 1795, they agreed to a treaty which ceded to
the United States all the region south and east of a line running from
the intersection of the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers to Lake Erie. Only one
thing was needed to secure the Northwest and that was the evacuation of
the British posts.

During this same summer, Thomas Pinckney, at the Court of Madrid, was
trying to secure the liberation of the Southwest from the control of
Spain. On October 27, 1795, the treaty of San Lorenzo was signed, which
conceded the thirty-first parallel as the northern boundary of West
Florida from the Mississippi to the Apalachicola. This was in itself a
notable achievement; but even more important to the people of the
Western world was the declaration that the Mississippi River should be
open to their commerce with the right of deposit at New Orleans.

The mission of Adams at the Court of St. James was not less successful.
The Ministry agreed to modify the objectionable order in council and to
accept the treaty without the twelfth article. With a deep sense of
relief Washington promulgated the treaty as the law of the land on
February 27, 1795. With these three t