While striving thus
to lay the West open to the march of the settler, he threw himself
into the great struggle, where Hamilton and Madison, and all who
"thought continentally," were laboring for that union without which
all else was worse than futile.
From the presidency of the convention that formed the Constitution, he
went to the presidency of the government which that convention brought
into being; and in all that followed, the one guiding thought was to
clear the way for the advance of the people, and to make that people
and their government independent in thought, in policy, and in
character, as the Revolution had made them independent politically.
The same spirit which led him to write during the war that our battles
must be fought and our victories won by Americans, if victory and
independence were to be won at all, or to have any real and solid
worth, pervaded his whole administration. We see it in his Indian
policy, which was directed not only to pacifying the tribes, but
to putting it out of their power to arrest or even delay western
settlement. We see it in his attitude toward foreign ministers, and in
his watchful persistence in regard to the Mississippi, which ended in
our securing the navigation of the great river. We see it again in his
anxious desire to keep peace until we had passed the point where war
might bring a dissolution; and how real that danger was, and how clear
and just his perception of it, is shown by the Kentucky and Virginia
Resolutions and by the separatist movement in New England during the
later war of 1812.
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