ernment was chosen as the soother. The
contest had narrowed, geographically, so that it lay between
Philadelphia on the Delaware and Georgetown on the Potomac. It was
proposed to give it to Philadelphia for ten years, and to Georgetown
permanently thereafter, believing that "that might, as an anodyne, calm
in some degree the ferment which might be excited by the other measure
alone." "Two of the Potomac members agreed to change their votes," says
Jefferson, "and Hamilton undertook to carry the other point. In doing
this, the influence he had established over the eastern members, with
the agency of Robert Morris with those of the middle states, effected
his side of the engagement." The assumption bill was carried, and the
location of the seat of government was settled. Congress agreed to make
Philadelphia its residence for ten years, during which time the public
buildings should be erected at some point on the Potomac that the
president might select. Subsequently a territory ten miles square, lying
on both sides of the Potomac in Maryland and Virginia, was ceded by
those states to the United States, and called the district of Columbia.
Thus the matter was settled.

When Jefferson's sensitive republicanism took the alarm to which we have
alluded, he became suspicious of all around him. His feelings toward
Hamilton changed, until he considered him a monarchist in principle, and
regarded all his financial schemes as intended to strengthen the general
government, centralize power, and make the treasury the controlling
lever of public affairs, the chief of which, with almost autocratic
puissance, might direct everything to suit his own political views. With
this impression, retrospection made him angry and resentful. He regarded
the manner in which Hamilton had procured his aid in effecting the
measure of assumption as a snare by which he had been entrapped, and he
characterized the measure itself as a fiscal manoeuvre, to which he
had "ignorantly and innocently been made to hold the candle."

This was the beginning of those dissentions in his cabinet which
afterward gave the president so much trouble. They had grown to
mischievous proportions at a time when he believed there was perfect
harmony among his constitutional advisers. He had never experienced the
sentiment of jealousy himself, and he was the last man to suspect it in
others; and at the time when Jefferson and Hamilton were regarding each
other with a spirit of ri