Washington did not repudiate Jay’s Treaty and after long debate the Senate ratified it in June 1795. After a bitter debate, with most Republicans opposing the measure, the House passed the requisite funding resolution. The treaty marked an important step toward the regularization of Anglo-American relations, which in the long run was essential for both the economic and political security of the nation. And the evacuation of the British forts in the Northwest was of enormous immediate benefit.
A photo of George Washington's dentures. That his teeth were made of wood is a myth.
Still another benefit was totally unplanned. Unexpectedly, the Jay Treaty enabled the United States to solve its problems on its southeastern frontier. During the early 1790s Spain had entered into alliances with the Cherokee, Creek, and other Indian tribes hostile to the Americans and built forts on territory ceded to the United States by Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris. In 1795, however, Spain intended to withdraw from the European war against France. Fearing a joint Anglo-American attack on Louisiana and its other American possessions, it decided to improve relations with the United States. Therefore the king’s chief minister, Manuel de Godoy, known as “the Prince of Peace,” offered the American envoy Thomas Pinckney a treaty that granted the United States the free navigation of the Mississippi River and the right of deposit at New Orleans that western Americans so urgently needed. This Treaty of San Lorenzo, popularly known as Pinckney’s Treaty, also accepted the American version of the boundary between Spanish Florida and the United States.
The Senate ratified the Jay Treaty in June. Pinckney signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo in October that same year. These agreements put an end, at least temporarily, to European pressures in the trans-Appalachian region. Between the signings, in August 1795, as an aftermath of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, twelve tribes signed the Treaty of Greenville. The Indians surrendered huge sections of their lands, thus ending a struggle that had consumed a major portion of the government’s revenues for years.
After the events of 1794 and 1795, settlers poured into the West as water bursts through a broken dike. “I believe scarcely anything short of a Chinese Wall or a line of Troops will restrain. . . the Incroachment of Settlers, upon the Indian Territory,” President Washington explained in 1796. Kentucky Had become a state in 1792; now, in 1796, Tennessee was admitted. Two years later the Mississippi Territory was organized, and at the end of the century, the Indiana Territory was organized as well. The great westward flood reached full tide.
World History
