A History of the American People

years later by the Salem-based Grand Turk. This coincided with the opening up of the New
England-northwest (Oregon) route by Captain Robert Gray (1755-1806), the great American
trader and circumnavigator in 1787-90, whose pioneering activities in Oregon were the
foundation for all American's subsequent claims to the area. It started a valuable triangular
commerce: New England manufacturers to the northwest Indians, their furs to China, and then
China tea to Boston. When Washington took office in 1789, an observer noted that of forty-six
ships in Canton, eighteen were American; when Washington stood for a second term, the China
trade had doubled and, when he finally left office, it had trebled.
Internal economic activity boomed correspondingly in the Washington years. Hamilton's
policy of encouraging manufactures was not built on nothing. When Franklin got back to
Philadelphia from Paris in 1785, he was astonished at the changes-new stagecoach routes, coal,
iron, and woolen industries flourishing, frantic speculation everywhere. The states issued major
charters to thirty-three companies-and huge enterprises were set up to build key bridges,
turnpikes, and canals. In 1787 the first American cotton factory was built at Beverley,
Massachusetts. The next year the first woolen factory followed at Hartford, with a £1,28o capital
raised on the open market in £10 shares. Steam was coming and in 1789, already, John Fitch was
experimenting in Philadelphia with a working steamship. Washington did not want America to
become a manufacturing country like Britain any more than Jefferson did, and for the same
reasons, but he was a realist and knew it was coming. He was also a military man who knew how
important it was for the United States to have modern military equipment, including the latest
warships and cannon, and how closely this was linked to military capacity. So, with all due
misgivings, he backed Hamilton's industrial policy, and it was during his presidency that
America achieved takeoff into self-sustaining industrial growth.
Washington gave a public valediction to the American people by means of a farewell address,
the text which filled an entire page of the American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796.
There is a bit of a mystery about this document. Washington wrote a rough draft of his
declaration, intended as his political testament and considered advice to the nation, in May, and
sent it to Hamilton for his approval. Hamilton rewrote it, and both men worked on the text. So it
is a joint venture, from two men who had been intimately associated for twenty years and knew
each other's thoughts. Some of the phrases are clearly Hamilton's. But the philosophy as a whole
is his master's. The result is an encapsulation of what the first President thought America was, or
ought to be, about.
He has three main points. He pleads at length, and passionately, against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party.' America, he says, is a country which is united by tradition and nature:With
slight shades of difference, you have the same Religion, Manners, Habits and Political
Principles. The economies of North and South, the eastern seaboard and the western interior, far
from dividing the nation, are complementary.' Differences, arguments and debates there must be.
But a common devotion to the Union, as the source of your collective and individual happiness,' is the very foundation of the state. Central to this is respect for the Constitution:The
Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole
People, is sacredly obligatory on all.' The fact that the people have the power and right to establish Government' presupposedthe duty of every individual to obey it.' Hence, `all
obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever
plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract or awe the regular
deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental
principle, and of fatal tendency.'