The year 1795 was the era of treaties,—establishing diplomatic lines to England,—which ever since the peace of 1783 had been uneasily bobbing up and down, neither fishing nor cutting bait; to Spain, whose American possessions of Florida and Louisiana were thereby staked and roped off from our greedy boundaries; to the dark Dey of Algiers, whose corsairs were thus enmeshed in the silken nets; and, finally, to the Northwestern Indian tribes, who, as usual, gave us a large piece of territory for a little piping peace with hot embers on the top. Through the Spanish treaty flowed, and ever since has continued to flow for us, the wide-elbowed Mississippi. The exertion of signing it exhausted the power of Spain in North America; for five years later she had not vitality enough to hold either of these possessions against Napoleon, and the orange and sugar States fell out of her ever-relaxing hand into the clutching and restless fingers of France. In 1796, Tennessee, making the sixteenth State, was welcomed into the household. Its capital, Nashville, settled in 1779, contained only a few cabins; but the folds of the Cumberland warmed them rapidly into life. Washington, then sixty-four years of age, announced in September, 1796, his intention to retire to the sunshine of private life. His farewell was the blessing of a ripe sage upon a sorrowing people. It was none the less genuine, rich, and good, because comically imitated by a few of his successors. Even Andrew Johnson’s did not belittle it. Several gentlemen, it was discovered, had a fancy to try the official shades which the great American was so glad to quit. Of course Virginia supposed that the rotation in the office should, like charity, begin at home. Such, too, was the opinion of sixty-eight electors; but as seventy-one disagreed with them, the short, stout, well-grained “column of Congress” was transferred, for the four following years, into the executive post. CHAPTER III. OLD FAMILY PORTRAITS.