There were, however, much more serious movements made by the
Democratic party than well-meant and meddling attempts to make
peace with France. This was the year of the Kentucky and Virginia
resolutions, the first note of that disunion sentiment which was
destined one day to involve the country in civil war and be fought out
on a hundred battlefields. Washington, with his love for the Union and
for nationality ever uppermost in his heart, was quick to take alarm,
and it cut him especially to think that a movement which he esteemed
at once desperate and wicked should emanate from his own State, and as
we now know, and as he perhaps suspected, from a great Virginian
whom he had once trusted. He straightway set himself to oppose this
movement with all his might, and he summoned to his aid that other
great Virginian who in his early days had been the first to rouse the
people against oppression, and who now in his old age, in response to
Washington's appeal, came again into the forefront in behalf of the
Constitution and the union of the States. The letter which Washington
wrote to Patrick Henry on this occasion is one of the most important
that he ever penned, but there is room to quote only a single passage
here.
"At such a crisis as this," he said, "when everything dear and
valuable to us is assailed, when this party hangs upon the wheels of
government as a dead weight, opposing every measure that is calculated
for defense and self-preservation, abetting the nefarious views of
another nation upon our rights, preferring, as long as they dare
contend openly against the spirit and resentment of the people, the
interest of France to the welfare of their own country, justifying
the former at the expense of the latter; when every act of their own
government is tortured, by constructions they will not bear, into
attempts to infringe and trample upon the Constitution with a view to
introduce monarchy; when the most unceasing and the purest exertions
which were making to maintain a neutrality .
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