Only a strong, efficient central government, backed by a good fleet and a well organized army, could hope to wring from England what the French party, the forerunners of the Jeffersonian Democracy, demanded.  But the Jeffersonians were separatists and State’s-rights men.  They believed in a government so weak as to be ineffective, and showed a folly literally astounding in their unwillingness to provide for the wars which they were ready to provoke.  They resolutely refused to provide an army or a navy, or to give the Central Government the power necessary for waging war.  They were quite right in their feeling of hostility to England, and one of the fundamental and fatal weaknesses of the Federalists was the Federalist willingness to submit to England’s aggressions without retaliation; but the Jeffersonians had no gift for government, and were singularly deficient in masterful statesmen of the kind imperatively needed by any nation which wishes to hold an honorable place among other nations.  They showed their governmental ineptitude clearly enough later on when they came into power, for they at once stopped building the fleet which the Federalists had begun, and allowed the military forces of the nation to fall into utter disorganization, with, as a consequence, the shameful humiliations of the War of 1812.  This war was in itself eminently necessary and proper, and was excellent in its results, but it was attended by incidents of shame and disgrace to America for which Jefferson and Madison and their political friends and supporters among the politicians and the people have never received a sufficiently severe condemnation.

    Benefits of Jay’s Treaty to the West.

Jay’s treaty was signed late in 1794 and was ratified in 1795. [Footnote:  American State Papers, Foreign Relations, I., pp. 479, 484, 489, 502, 519, etc.] The indignation of the Kentuckians almost amounted to mania.  They denounced the treaty with frantic intemperance, and even threatened violence to those of their own number, headed by Humphrey Marshall, who supported it; yet they benefited much by it, for it got them what they would have been absolutely powerless to obtain for themselves, that is, the possession of the British posts on the Lakes.  In 1796 the Americans took formal possession of these posts, and the boundary line in the Northwest as nominally established by the treaty of Versailles became in fact the actual line of demarcation between the American and the British possessions.  The work of Jay capped the work of Wayne.  Federal garrisons were established at Detroit and elsewhere, and the Indians, who had already entered into the treaty of Greeneville, were prevented from breaking it by this intervention of the American military posts between themselves and their British allies.  Peace was firmly established for the time being in the Northwest, and our boundaries in that direction took the fixed form they still retain. [Footnote:  American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I., p. 573; Foreign Relations, I., passim, etc., etc.]