HYSTERICS
I
The meeting of Congress in the early winter of 1797 found the war party
in fine fettle and the Jeffersonians fighting desperately for peace.
Early in the session, Adams called for the advice of his Cabinet on the
policy to be pursued in the event of the failure of the envoys. The
three Hamiltonian members had conferred and McHenry was instructed to
write Hamilton for instructions. ‘I am sure I cannot do justice to the
subject as you can,’ wrote the Secretary of War to the President’s enemy
in New York. Agreeing, no doubt, with the sentiment, the power behind
the Cabinet speedily complied, and the response to the President of his
advisers was the recommendations of Hamilton copied into the handwriting
of McHenry.[1401] These did not contemplate a declaration of war, but a
resort to warlike measures. Merchant vessels should be armed, twenty
sloops of the line built, an immediate army of sixteen thousand men
recruited with provision for twenty thousand more, the French treaty
abrogated, a loan authorized, and the tax system put upon a war basis.
An alliance with England? Not improper, perhaps, but inexpedient; though
Rufus King in London should make overtures to the British for a loan,
the aid of convoys, perhaps the transfer of ten ships of the line, and,
in the event of a definite rupture with France, he should be authorized
to work out a plan of coöperation with England.[1402]
All this while the debates in Congress were increasing in bitterness.
Monroe was accused and defended, democrats denounced and damned,
aristocrats and monocrats assailed. Orators were mobilized and paraded
in war-paint spluttering their most vituperative phrases, and the most
insignificant pack-horse of the war party attacked Jefferson’s letter to
Mazzei as ‘a disgraceful performance.’[1403] The chest of the flamboyant
Harper was never so protuberant as in those days when he strutted
through the Dictionary hurling the most offensive words in the language
at the Jeffersonians, rattling his sword, waving his pistol, and
offering to meet gentlemen outside the House. All revolutions he thought
the work of fools and knaves, philosophers, Jacobins, and
_sans-culottes_. The Jeffersonians were conspiring to prostrate popular
liberty and establish tyranny by curtailing the power of the Executive
and increasing the power of the House. It was all very simple. The
President crushed, the Senate next destroyed, three or four audacious
demagogues would dominate the House until the strongest cut the throats
of the others and seized the scepter. The Federalists were
delighted--what a wonderful man was Harper![1404] Day by day the
violence increased. Harper snapped at Giles, who snapped back, and when
Otis made a nasty attack on the Virginian and the latter dared him to
repeat it ‘out of doors,’ there were loud cries of ‘order.’ Only
Gallatin remained cool, in possession of his senses. He contented
himself with the assertion that only on information that had not been
given could war measures be excused.[1405]
The superheat of the House cooled the passions of the people and
remonstrances against the arming of merchant ships poured in. Even from
New England they came, maddening to Cabot and Ames, reassuring to
Jefferson, who made the most of them in his correspondence.[1406] When
the town meeting at Cambridge joined the remonstrators, the Boston
‘Centinel’ fumed over ‘the indecent abuse of the merchants,’ and the
‘forestalling knavery’ of the town.[1407] Then, to revive the failing
spirits of the war party, Adams came to the rescue with a Message
announcing the failure of the envoys and recommending warlike measures.
How the little patriot would have winced had he known that in adopting
the recommendations of McHenry he was accepting the dictations of
Alexander Hamilton! Jefferson wrote Madison that it was ‘an insane
message,’ and the Jeffersonians, no longer doubting that war was the
purpose, arranged to force a show-down.[1408] Thus appeared the Sprigg
Resolutions providing for purely defensive measures for the coast and
the interior, and declaring that ‘under existing conditions it is not
expedient for the United States to resort to war against the French
Republic.’[1409]
Momentarily taken unaware, the Federalists were stunned. Harper
blundered into the admission that he could see no objections, but Otis,
with keener insight, proposed to substitute the word ‘declare’ for
‘resort to’ war--and the cat was out of the bag. The Jeffersonians
feared, not so much a declaration of war as warlike measures that would
force a state of war, and to forestall that was the purpose of the
Resolutions. Thus the debate proceeded, more bitter and personal, with
Giles and Harper resembling the wenches of the fishmarket without their
skirts.
Meanwhile, the Federalist leaders were familiar with the X Y Z papers of
which the Democrats were kept in ignorance. Hamilton, private citizen of
New York, knew their contents; Jefferson, Vice-President of the United
States, did not. This was the trump card of the war party, and no one
saw it so quickly as Hamilton, who immediately began to work secretly,
through his agents in the Cabinet, for their publication. ‘Nothing
certainly can be more proper,’ he wrote Pickering. ‘Confidence will
otherwise be wanting.’[1410] In utter ignorance of their contents, the
Jeffersonians began to demand their production. Only a few days before,
the Jeffersonian organ in Boston was charging that Adams withheld the
papers because they ‘contain an account of some resentful expressions of
the French respecting our Cabinet, and Mr. Adams does not expect any
credit by publishing them.’[1411] Thus, when the motion was made that
the papers be produced, Gallatin, Giles, Livingston, and Nicholas
supported it, and the next day they were sent with the request that they
be considered in confidence until the effect of their publication could
be discussed.
The galleries were cleared--the doors locked and guarded--and for three
days and into the fourth the secret discussion continued. Then the doors
were opened and the crowd in the galleries heard a brief discussion of
the number of copies to be printed for circulation. ‘One thousand, two
hundred,’ said Bayard of Delaware. ‘Three thousand,’ urged Harper.
‘Seven thousand,’ sneered the hot-headed Matthew Lyon, ‘for the papers
are so trifling and unimportant that no printer would risk the printing
of them in a pamphlet.’ Otis incredulously inquired if he had rightly
understood the Vermont fire-eater. Lyon unblushingly repeated his
strange assertion. The suggestion of Bayard was adopted, and, when the
members filed out of the little room in which they deliberated that day,
Harper and the war hawks could already hear the thunder of the guns.
II
Thus did the shadows close in on the Jeffersonians. The blow was
staggering. On the appearance of the damaging documents, most of the
Democratic papers were silent, while printing them in full. One made a
brave show of satisfaction by criticizing Adams for withholding them so
long, and suggesting that perhaps ‘the most important papers’ had been
withheld.[1412] Even the buoyancy of Jefferson suffered a momentary
collapse. Writing Madison the day the papers were read, he did not have
the heart to indicate the nature of their contents.[1413] The next day
he had recovered sufficiently to write that his first impressions were
‘very disagreeable and confused,’ and that this would be the first
impression of the public. A more mature consideration, he thought, would
disclose no new ground for war, but war psychology and fear of false
imputations might drive the people to the war hawks.[1414] Madison,
equally astonished, thought Talleyrand’s conduct ‘incredible,’ not
because of its ‘depravity, which, however heinous, is not without
example,’ but because of its ‘unparalleled stupidity.’[1415] Monroe, who
had spent the night with Madison in Virginia, thought the incident
‘evidently a swindling experiment,’ which was clear enough on its
face.[1416] The public, in the meantime, was reading one of the most
grotesque stories of political infamy and personal cupidity on record.
The envoys had been treated with contempt, refused an audience, insulted
by unofficial blackmailers sent by the unscrupulous Talleyrand to demand
a loan for France and, more particularly, a bribe for himself. The
envoys had conducted themselves with becoming dignity and spirit.
‘Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,’ was a clarion call
to battle. The pride of the people was touched, and overnight the
political complexion of the country had been changed. A wave of
hysterical patriotism swept over the Nation, and the war hawks set to
work to turn it into frenzy. It was now or never.
III
For once John Adams was on top of the world. He who had so longed for
popularity had found it. Everywhere, in cities, on Southern plantations,
under the primeval forests of the frontiers, men were wildly waving
flags and saluting the President. Addresses pledging life and fortune
poured in to be prominently printed in the papers, and nowhere more than
in the Jeffersonian States.[1417] Most were the spontaneous expressions
of an excited people, some were unquestionably engineered by the
politicians.[1418] But on the surface the country was aflame. Down the
Philadelphia streets one day swung twelve hundred young men, keeping
step to martial music, the streets lined with the cheering populace,
and, as ‘Porcupine’ observed, with ‘every female in the city whose face
is worth looking at’ gladdening ‘the way with her smiles.’[1419] At
Adams’s house the little man, who had always wanted to be a warrior,
appeared on the steps to greet them, wearing a cockade, in full military
regalia, his sword dangling at his side. Intoxicated by the adulation,
he plunged impetuously into a denunciation of France and its
Revolution.[1420] Madison thought his language ‘the most abominable and
degrading that could fall from the lips of a first magistrate of an
independent people, and particularly from a Revolutionary
patriot.’[1421] Aroused by the philippic of the President, the young men
spent the day marching the streets, and in the evening wined and dined
until ten o’clock, when they sallied forth to exercise their patriotism
in deeds of violence. The Terror had begun. Reeling and shouting, they
bore down upon the home of Bache. With only women and children in the
house, they fell in right gallant fashion on the doors and windows and
were making headway when the neighbors interfered and sent the drunken
youngsters upon their way.[1422] But with the war hawks, the attack on
the home of Bache was not least among the virtues of the mob, and the
Federalist press was unstinted in its praise.
Then, on May 9th, came the day of fasting and prayer, set by Adams in
happy ignorance that when he yielded to the importunities of Pickering
for a proclamation, he was again acting under the direction of the hated
Hamilton.[1423] The President had worked himself into a morbid state of
mind. Some mysterious wag had sent him a warning that the city would be
burned that night. The Jeffersonians smiled and shrugged their
shoulders, and one editor suggested that, since the conflagration was
promised for the fast day, ‘the incendiaries meant political or
ecclesiastical fire.’[1424] But Adams, taking it seriously, saw
conspirators all about, incendiaries, assassins. Determined to die
resisting at his post, he had his servants carry arms and ammunition
into the house by the back way to withstand a siege.
The day was quiet enough, with business suspended and the churches
filled. Preachers pounced upon the Democrats and infidels with demoniac
fury. But in the evening the Terror came--and even as an old man Adams
could recall it only with a shudder. The Administration papers of the
time, eager to paint the picture black, could find nothing serious to
report, however. A few butcher boys, none the wiser for drink, exercised
their lungs in the State House yard until the soldiers swept down upon
them, arresting a few who were dismissed on the morrow, and frightening
the others home.[1425] But that was not the only mob that roved the
streets that night. The patriots had their inning, too, smashing the
windows of Bache’s house and smearing the statue of that filthy
Democrat, Benjamin Franklin, with mud from the gutters. The war
propagandists fairly fluttered with activity. Hopkinson’s new song,
‘Hail Columbia,’ was wildly cheered at the theaters, much to the disgust
of the Democrats, who resented the complimentary reference to
Adams,[1426] and, when the author was soon given a Government position,
it was suggested that Hopkinson had certainly ‘written his song to the
right tune.’[1427] When Fox the actor sang the song at the theater in
Baltimore, it was observed that ‘some Jacobins left the room.’[1428]
Even this hysteria did not satisfy the war hawks who stood in the wings
beating tom-toms and crying, ‘War! War! War!’ Hamilton was urging
Washington ‘under some pretext of health’ to tour Virginia and North
Carolina to give occasion for dinners and warlike addresses. From his
retreat at Dedham, Fisher Ames was writing nervously to Pickering that
‘we must make haste to wage war or we shall be lost.’[1429] Hopkinson,
the song-writer, observing the serenity of New York, was wishing that he
were a despot that he might ‘order the whole city to undergo the Turkish
ceremony of the bastinado’ and ‘rouse the lazy drones with a
whip.’[1430] In far-off Lisbon, William Smith was nauseated with ‘the
old womanish whining about our reluctance to war.’[1431]
Then John Marshall returned and the tired voices of the shouters found a
tonic. Out to Kensington they went to meet him, sour-visaged Pickering
in a carriage looking stern and warlike despite his spectacles, three
companies of cavalry on prancing steeds, citizens and Congressmen in
conveyances or on horseback. Long before the town was reached, ‘the
streets and windows, even the housetops in many instances, were crowded
with people.’[1432] The bells in the steeple of Christ Church began to
peal, and peal they did far into the night. The reverberations of cannon
mingled with the huzzas of the populace as the procession moved slowly
on through as many streets as possible to the City Tavern. ‘All this was
to secure him to their views that he might say nothing that would oppose
the game they were playing,’ Jefferson wrote Madison.[1433] The next
morning the war party thronged the tavern, a dinner was given, and there
was much satisfaction when Jefferson, who had called, was unable to see
the hero.[1434] Livingston, who had accompanied Marshall from New York,
had been assured that France had no thought of war, but soon stories
were afloat through the city, as emanating from the envoy, of a
contradictory nature.[1435]
Again the prancing of cavalry in the streets when Marshall departed for
Virginia--a series of ovations all the way.[1436] Then Pinckney
returned--and more pageants. Soldiers and citizens vied at Princeton and
Trenton, and a dinner was given and the French damned.[1437] All the
time the country was being overwhelmed with propaganda such as it had
never known before. Hamilton was writing his bitter invectives against
the French,[1438] in which France was ‘a den of pillage and slaughter’
and Frenchmen ‘foul birds of prey.’ These letters, running in Fenno’s
paper, alarmed Jefferson, who wrote to prod Madison from the lethargy of
retirement. ‘Sir, take up your pen against this champion. You know the
ingenuity of his talents, and there is not a person but yourself who can
foil him. For heaven’s sake, then, take up your pen and do not desert
the public cause entirely.’[1439] But even more damaging than the pen of
Hamilton was that of William Cobbett, ‘Peter Porcupine.’ As a
manufacturer of horrors he makes the wildest propagandists of the World
War pale like a candle held against the sun. Childishly happy was the
‘Porcupine’ of those days when he could fight, on American soil, ‘for
his country’ and his King. Thus ‘the sans-culottes’ had ‘taken vessels
off the bar at Charleston’ and the French had landed and were plundering
farmhouses.[1440] Thus a French invasion plot was discovered.
‘Porcupine’ had the particulars. The negro slaves were to be armed and
used as allies against the whites. ‘What a pretty figure Nicholas and
Giles will cut,’ wrote the jubilant Peter, ‘when Citizen Pompey and
Citizen Cæsar shall have tied their hands behind them.... Could its
miseries be confined to these, I would say, God hasten it.’[1441] ‘Gaunt
Gallatin’ working hard all night? Useless, useless--‘war, frightful war
there will be in spite of all his teeth and his nails too.’[1442] And
then again, the invasion. Rumor had it that the French were buying three
thousand stand of arms for the West Indies. ‘That these arms were
bought for Virginia and Georgia is much more likely,’ commented
‘Porcupine.’ ‘Take care, take care, you sleepy southern fools. Your
negroes will probably be your masters this day twelve month.’[1443]
‘Extra!’ ‘Extra!’ ‘Startling News from Virginia’--‘these villians have
actually begun to tamper with our negroes.’ An ‘ill-looking fellow on
horseback’ had been seen talking with some slaves. It was understood he
had come from Philadelphia, and the ruffian was a refugee from English
justice in Ireland.[1444] And then, another lurid article on ‘Horrors of
a French Invasion,’ with bloodcurdling pictures of the outraging of
American wives and daughters.[1445]
The French invasion at hand--slaves armed--masters murdered in their
beds--churches burned--women outraged--girls kidnaped--horrors piled on
horrors, and all because of democracy. Little wonder that the
apprehensive Adams, who temperamentally sniffed treachery in every
breeze, all but trembled as he turned the pages of his ‘Porcupine’ that
year. In Boston the presses were kept busy turning out Harper’s war
speech,[1446] and Cabot was spurring Harper on to greater efforts.
There, too, the rabid war speech of a Harvard professor made on Fast Day
in Brattle Street was being published as a pamphlet,[1447] and the
clergy were urging the hate of French democracy as a Christian duty, and
converting their pulpits into pedestals of Mars. Dr. Tappan of Boston
was making political harangues that Federalist politicians were
praising,[1448] and Father Thayer was clamoring for slaughter in pious
accents.[1449] Sometimes Democratic members of congregations who sought
Christ instead of Cæsar in the temples indignantly left, and on one
occasion an audacious and irreverent Jeffersonian paused on his way out
to exclaim in Latin, ‘Why so much anger in the heart of a divine?’[1450]
Nor were some of the war propagandists on the Bench to be outdone by
those in the pulpit. Judge Rush was thundering vituperative phrases at
the French in a charge to a jury.[1451] Chief Justice Dana of
Massachusetts phrased one of his charges like a participant in a
congressional party scrimmage.[1452] Much earlier, Chief Justice
Ellsworth of the United States Supreme Court made a grand jury charge
the occasion for an amazing attack on the Jeffersonian Party.[1453] As
early as May, Jefferson was utterly disheartened by the ‘war spirit
worked up in the town.’[1454] By June he was writing Kosciusko that he
thought war ‘almost inevitable.’[1455] In August he felt that ‘there is
no event however atrocious which may not be expected,’ and was promising
to meet the Maratists ‘in such a way as shall not be derogatory either
to the public liberty or my own personal honor.’[1456]
The country was rushing toward the Terror, with the war party rattling
sabers and threatening their opponents with violence. ‘Porcupine’ was
predicting gleefully that ‘when the occasion requires, the Yankees will
show themselves as ready at stringing up insurgents as in stringing
onions.’[1457] It was an open season for physical assaults on
Jeffersonian editors and Bache was being attacked in his office,[1458]
and another assailant who had sought to murder him found his
fifty-dollar fine paid by the politicians when he proffered the money,
and Adams sent him on a mission to Europe.[1459] The Federalists, for
the moment, were cocks of the walk, and even Hamilton was rushing into
print with a letter that would have endeared him to the Three
Musketeers. A nondescript had referred in the press to his ambition and
his affair with Mrs. Reynolds. Ludicrously interpreting it as a threat
of assassination because of a reference to Cæsar, Hamilton lost his head
and published a signed statement promising that the ‘assassin’ would
‘not find me unprepared to repel attack.’[1460] This childish boast
played into the hands of the obscure assailant, who replied: ‘Armed with
a cane (whether with a sword therein I cannot say) you walk about,
prepared, you say, to defy attack. By this you fall beneath resentment
and excite my pity.’[1461] A few days later he was writing of ‘the
declaration made in company’ by ‘a Mr. Patterson, a clerk to Alexander
Hamilton,’ that the writer would be murdered, and offering five hundred
dollars reward for the apprehension of the prospective assassin.[1462]
Wild days, wild days!
This was the temper in which Congress resumed its deliberations after
the publication of the X Y Z papers. Jefferson advised his followers to
seek an adjournment to permit the members to consult the people, and had
this procedure been adopted the Federalists might have escaped the
pitfalls to which they were reeling.[1463] The Democrats in the streets
were cowed and only the most audacious met threats with bravado or
courage. The braves of Tammany at a public dinner drank to the toast:
‘May the old Tories and all who wish to engage the United States in a
war with any nation, realize the felicity they anticipate by being
placed in the front of the first battle.’[1464] The Boston ‘Chronicle’
was publishing letters from ‘Benedict Arnold’ offering his services in
the war for England, and rejoicing ‘to hear that so many of my
countrymen have shaken off their delusion, as I predicted they would
only eighteen years ago.’[1465] Day after day it published Josiah
Quincy’s speech, made in 1774, against standing armies. Soon it was
calling attention to profiteering of war patriots in Boston who had a
monopoly on Raven’s Duck which would be wanted for tents.[1466]
III
But the Democratic leaders required all their courage to stand up before
the fusillade--Jefferson most of all. With the Philadelphia streets
filled with swaggering young men in uniforms, many nights he heard ‘The
Rogue’s March’ played beneath his windows. Bitter, threatening letters
burdened his mail. Spies crept to his dinner table to pick up the stray
threads of casual conversation that could be given a sinister twist, and
he was forced to deny himself to all but his most intimate
friends.[1467] When forced to appear in company, he simulated an
abstracted silence, ignored personal affronts, and talked calmly when at
all. ‘All the passions are boiling over,’ he wrote in May, ‘and he who
would keep himself cool and clear of the contagion is so far below the
point of ordinary conversation that he finds himself isolated in every
society.’[1468] Convinced that even his correspondence was tampered
with, he no longer dared write freely in letters entrusted to the
mails.[1469] Spies dogged his footsteps and kept guard at his
door.[1470] When on a visit to Virginia he accepted an entertainment on
Sunday, the floodgates were opened upon him, and his enemies boasted
that ‘this fact has been trumpeted from one end of the country to the
other as irrefutable proof of his contempt for the Christian religion,
and his devotion to the new religion of France.’[1471] Sad that Rufus
King and Christopher Gore had continued their English tour on Sunday,
and too bad that the Federalists persisted in holding their political
caucuses in Boston on Sunday evenings, retorted the ‘Independent
Chronicle.’[1472]
No dinner of the war party was complete without an insulting toast on
Jefferson. ‘Jefferson--May he deserve better of his country than he has
hitherto done.’[1473] ‘The Vice-President--May his heart be purged of
Gallicism in the pure fire of Federalism or be lost in the
furnace’--with groans.[1474] ‘John Adams--May he like Samson slay
thousands of Frenchmen with the jaw bone of Jefferson.’[1475] And in the
midst of the mobbing, the self-contained philosopher kept his mouth shut
and his feet upon the ground. With ‘The Rogue’s March’ ringing in his
ears he was able to write a long letter on the value of crop
rotation;[1476] another on a plough he had invented;[1477] and in the
midst of the Sedition Bill debate, learning that an acquaintance was
going west of the Mississippi where wild horses roved the plains, he
sent the suggestion that this was ‘the last opportunity to study them in
a state of nature,’ and requesting him to prepare a report for the
Philosophical Society.[1478] Many days found him alone in the library of
this Society, and once, during that hectic summer, he stole away from
the turmoil and hate to the beautiful country home of the Logans where
he could forget the bitterness of the battle browsing in its great
library or lounging beneath its majestic trees.[1479]
Everywhere the Democrats were fair game for persecution. Matthew Lyon
found a band playing ‘The Rogue’s March’ in front of his tavern at
Trenton and New Brunswick where crowds shouted imprecations.[1480] In
New York, only the appearance of fighting Irish friends prevented the
war hawks from serenading Edward Livingston’s home with the offensive
March.[1481] In Boston the ‘patriots’ expelled Thomas Adams, editor of
the ‘Chronicle,’ from the Fire Society of which he had been a faithful
member for fourteen years.
IV
In this atmosphere, the Federalist machinery in Congress was set in
motion at high speed on war measures. Provisions were made for the
strengthening of the coast defenses, a navy was created, an army
provided, taxes levied, and through all this the Jeffersonians, under
the calm, courageous leadership of Albert Gallatin, merely sought to
exercise a moderating influence. If war was to come, provision had to be
made. But that was not enough for the radicals among the
Federalists--the conditions were ripe for the crushing of domestic foes
as well as foreign enemies. Here was the opportunity to destroy the
party of democracy.
The first manifestation of this intent came with the introduction of the
Alien Bill in the Senate--aimed at the Irish more than at the French, if
we may judge from the correspondence of the Hamiltonian leaders and the
tone of the Federalist press. Both fairly bristled with hatred of the
Irish immigrant who was beginning to make himself felt in American
politics. This, in part a by-product of the Federalist partiality for
England, was, in large measure, an expression of the Federalist
abhorrence of insurrections against constituted authority everywhere.
From the Ireland of that day, seething with rebellion, incoming vessels
were bringing Irish refugees, most of whom were members of the
revolutionary United Irishmen. Instinct and observation took them in a
body into the Jeffersonian Party, of which they became the shock troops
in many parts of the country. It was only at Jeffersonian dinners that
glasses were drained to the Liberal leaders in England, Fox and
Sheridan, and to the success of the Irish Rebellion; and only in
Jeffersonian papers that sympathy was expressed. It was during this
time that Irish patriots were being hurried to the gallows, and John
Philpot Curran was making his incomparable orations, now classics, in
their defense. His burning phrases were being punctuated by the rattle
of the soldiers’ musketry intended to awe him into silence. The patriot
press was being crushed in Dublin. Castlereagh was busy with his dirty
money buying members of the Irish Parliament where money would buy them,
and finding renegades ready to cut their country’s throat for a title, a
place, or a ribbon to pin on their coats. Of these latter the most
loathsome was Lord Clare, whose infamy has been embalmed in the
eloquence of Curran.
It is not without significance that the Jeffersonian dinners in those
days were toasting John Philpot Curran, and that his speeches were
printed by the column in the Jeffersonian press,[1482] while Cobbett was
giving three full pages to Lord Clare’s excoriation of his
countrymen.[1483] A month before the Alien Bill reached the House,
Cobbett was devoting a full page to a weird story involving the Irish in
America in a conspiracy with the French for the destruction of the
Government of the United States.[1484] ‘That restless, rebellious tribe,
the emigrated United Irishman,’ snorted ‘Porcupine,’ the English
citizen.
All this was on the surface, but it did not reveal half the story. With
the Irish patriots, crushed by the soldiers of Cornwallis, seeking an
asylum in America, Rufus King, the Federalist Minister in London, was
writing Hamilton rejoicing over the suppression of the Irish Rebellion,
and expressing the hope that ‘our Government ... will have the power and
inclination to exclude these disaffected characters, who will be
suffered to seek an asylum among us.’[1485] It was King’s aggressive
protest to the British Government that delayed for four years the
release of the Irish prisoners who had planned an extensive settlement
in America. Ten years later, the most brilliant of these, Thomas Addis
Emmet, who was to become one of the ornaments of the New York Bar and to
sleep at length by the roaring traffic of Broadway in Saint Paul’s
churchyard, wrote King in bitter rebuke: ‘I should have brought along
with me a brother [Robert Emmet] whose name perhaps will you even not
read without emotions of sympathy and respect.’[1486] The Ministry had
been favorable to the release and migration until King’s hot
remonstrance against admitting such desperadoes as Thomas Addis Emmet!
This Federalist hate of the Irish reeked in the sneers of its press,
exposed itself in the ‘wild Irish’ speech of Otis, in the official
actions of King, in the correspondence of the leaders, in the
description by Gibbs[1487] of the victims of Cornwallis’s bayonets and
Castlereagh’s bribes as ‘fugitives from the justice of Great Britain.’
Many thought, when the Alien Bill was introduced, that it was aimed at
Gallatin, and it was boasted in the coffee-houses of New York that it
would soon be easy to ‘ship him off.’[1488] Terrorized by the threat of
the measure, many harmless Frenchmen, including Volney, hastily
chartered a ship and sailed away,[1489] but when a little later some
emigrant French royalists came knocking at the door they were
admitted.[1490] Jefferson thought the bill ‘detestable,’[1491] and
Madison, ‘a monster that will disgrace its parents.’[1492] Even Hamilton
was shocked at the bill introduced in the Senate, and he hastened a
letter to Pickering urging moderation. ‘Let us not be cruel or violent,’
he wrote.[1493]
The purpose of the Sedition Bill was to crush the opposition press and
silence criticism of the ruling powers. Among the extreme and dominant
Federalists criticism had long been confused with sedition, and Fenno
had long described attacks on Administration measures as treason.
Scurrility in the press was all too common, but the worst of the
Jeffersonian organs could be matched by the Federalists; and no one in
1798 imagined that a Sedition Law would ever be evoked against
‘Porcupine’ or Russell. The Hamiltonians were moving with such celerity
toward repression that a Congressman’s circularization of his
constituents with comments on policies and measures was being denounced
as seditious, and Judge Iredell, a narrow partisan, had actually called
the attention of the Richmond Grand Jury to a letter from Representative
Cabell. ‘Porcupine’ had published this letter with abusive comments as
though it were a treasonable correspondence with an alien enemy.[1494]
The next day he published with enthusiastic praise a letter that Otis
the Federalist had written to a constituent in Boston.[1495]
The moment these measures were introduced, every one knew that Gallatin
was in danger because of his Genevese accent, but that ‘Porcupine,’ the
English subject, had no fears. Men like Hamilton Rowan, Dr. James
Priestley, and Volney could be sent away, but the putrid offal of the
defunct court of Versailles could continue to count upon a dinner at the
Binghams’. Cabell was subject to indictment for an action that was
commendable in Otis, and the merest child knew that the Sedition Law
would be applied to Jeffersonian papers alone.
V
Bad as was the Alien Law, it did not approach the viciousness of the
Sedition Act; and the Sedition Bill as passed was mild compared with the
one the Federalist leaders in the Senate originally framed. Albeit
America and France were not at war, the bill declared the French people
enemies of the American people, and that any one giving the former aid
and comfort should be punishable with death. A strict enforcement of
such an act would have sent Jefferson to the gallows. Under the Fourth
Article any one questioning the constitutionality or justice of an
Administration measure could be sent to herd with felons. It would have
sealed the lips of members of Congress.
When this monstrous measure reached Hamilton, he was dumbfounded at the
temerity and brutality of his followers. Grasping his pen, he hurriedly
sent a note of warning to Wolcott. There were provisions that were
‘highly exceptionable’ that would ‘endanger civil war.’ He hoped that
‘the thing will not be hurried through.’ Why ‘establish a tyranny?’ Was
not ‘energy a very different thing from violence?’[1496] Reeling drunk
with intolerance, even Hamilton’s warning only coaxed a slight
concession to liberty, and it was a thoroughly vicious and tyrannical
measure that was debated in the House. These debates were conducted
under conditions of disorder that would have disgraced a discussion of
brigands wrangling over a division of spoils in a wayside cave.
Gallatin, Livingston, and Nicholas were forced to talk against coughs,
laughter, conversation, and the scraping of the feet of the apostles of
‘law and order.’ No personal insult too foul, no nincompoop too
insignificant to sneer in the face of Gallatin. Despite these
terrorizing tactics, the Jeffersonians stood firm and made their record.
Even the customary courtesy of Gallatin deserted him, however, and when
the sneering Harper darkly hinted at traitors in the House, he retorted
sharply that he knew ‘nothing in the character of [Harper], either
public or private, to entitle him to the ground he so boldly assumes.’
On the last day of the debate on the Alien Bill, Edward Livingston
closed for the opposition; and in discussing the constitutional phase,
he anticipated the doctrine of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions,
indicating probable conferences with the tall, silent man who was
presiding over the Senate. ‘If we are ready to violate the
Constitution,’ he said, ‘will the people submit to our unauthorized
acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that
these measures are forging for them.’ The effect of such a measure? ‘The
country will swarm with informers, spies, delators, and all the odious
reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of despotic power.... The hours
of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendship, or the
recesses of domestic retirement, afford no security. The companion whom
you must trust, the friend in whom you must confide, the domestic who
waits in your chamber, are all tempted to betray your imprudent or
unguarded follies; to misrepresent your words; to convey them, distorted
by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides--where fear
officiates as accuser, and suspicion is the only evidence that is
heard.... Do not let us be told that we are to excite a fervor against a
foreign aggression to establish a tyranny at home; that like the arch
traitor we cry “Hail Columbia”[1497] at the moment we are betraying her
to destruction; that we sing, “Happy Land,” when we are plunging it in
ruin and disgrace; and that we are absurd enough to call ourselves free
and enlightened while we advocate principles that would have disgraced
the age of Gothic barbarity.’[1498]
The vote was taken and the Alien Bill passed, 46 to 40.
Livingston was to hear a few days later when the debate on the Sedition
Bill was reached that he had been guilty of sedition in his speech on
the Alien Bill. Not least among the grotesque features of the crazy
times was the prominence, amounting to leadership, attained by John
Allen of Connecticut--a tall, hectic, sour-visaged fanatic. It was
reserved for him to indict the Jeffersonians generally for sedition. Had
not Livingston been guilty of sedition when he proposed that Gerry be
authorized to renew negotiations? Was not the ‘Aurora’s’ explanation of
the effect of the Alien Law upon the Irish treason? Were not members of
Congress who dared write their views to their constituents traitors?
From a want-wit like this fanatic such views were more ludicrous than
depressing, but Harper rose to give his full assent to the buffoonery of
Allen. ‘What!’ exclaimed Nicholas, ‘is it proposed to prevent members
from speaking what they please or prohibit them from reaching the people
with their views?’ And Harper, disclaiming any desire to curtail the
freedom of speech upon the floor, bravely admitted a desire to prevent
the speeches from reaching the people ‘out of doors.’ This astounding
doctrine brought Gallatin to his feet with a scornful denunciation of
Allen’s criticism of Cabell’s letter. It ‘contained more information and
more sense than the gentleman from Connecticut has displayed or can
display.’ Taking up every assertion in Cabell’s letter and making it his
own, he challenged a denial of its truth. Then, referring to the attack
on Livingston’s speech, Gallatin gave his full sanction to the New York
statesman’s doctrine of resistance to unconstitutional measures. ‘I
believe that doctrine is absolutely correct and neither seditious nor
treasonable.’
On the last day Livingston spoke with his usual spirit and eloquence,
and Harper closed for the bill with an anti-climactic charge, apropos of
nothing, that the Jeffersonian plan of government was in the interest of
‘men of immoderate ambition, great family connections, hereditary
wealth, and extensive influence’ like Livingston. ‘Great patrician
families’ would walk over the heads ‘of we plebeian people.’ This
touching appeal for the plebeians could hardly have been meant for
Philadelphia where at that time ‘the great patricians’ were lavishly
wining and dining the Harpers, and rigidly excluding the Livingstons
and Gallatins from their tables. Thus the Federalists closed their case
and the bill passed, 44 to 41.[1499]
The press was peculiarly silent through the debates. Russell in the
Boston ‘Centinel’ observed that ‘Benedict Arnold complained bitterly of
the treason bill,’[1500] and his rival, Thomas Adams of the ‘Chronicle,’
announced the passage with the comment that ‘we are now abridged the
freedom of the press.’[1501] Soon the ‘Commercial Advertiser’ of New
York would be dubbing all men traitors who criticized the Sedition Law,
and Jefferson would be inviting Hamilton Rowan to the sanctuary of
Monticello with the assurance that the Habeas Corpus Act was still
operative in Virginia.[1502] Almost immediately the Reign of Terror
broke upon the land.
VI
In the midst of political terrors the yellow fever stalked again into
the haunts of men, striking in New York, in Boston, with special
virulence in Philadelphia. By the first of October, fourteen hundred had
died in New York City. Hamilton remained in town until persuaded by his
family to go to the country, but he continued to visit the city daily to
confer with his political friends.[1503] In Philadelphia those who could
afford it took to flight. Soon thousands were encamped in tents on the
common on the outskirts and by October not more than seven thousand
people remained in the stricken city. An English traveler, entering in
September, found the theaters, taverns, drinking-houses, gambling-dens,
and dance-halls closed, hospital carts moving slowly through abandoned
streets, the casket-makers alone busy. Sitting one night on the steps of
a house in Arch Street, where most houses were deserted, he could hear
nothing but the groans of the dying, the lamentations of the living, the
hammers of the coffin-makers, the dismal howling of deserted dogs.[1504]
Even the physicians took to their heels, but Dr. Rush, the head of his
profession, remained to battle with the disease.[1505] The health office
was kept open day and night.[1506]
But even in the midst of death the politicians fought with scarcely
diminished ferocity. ‘Porcupine’ and Fenno were stooping to the ghastly
business of maligning the methods of Dr. Rush in treating the disease.
Standing heroically to his duty where others had fled, he was forced,
day by day, to read the most scurrilous attacks upon him. The animus was
due to the fact that Rush was a Jeffersonian; and even from Lisbon,
William Smith contributed his slur in a letter to Wolcott manifesting
sympathy with the attacks because he had ‘always considered the Doctor a
wrong-headed politician.’[1507] Bache and Fenno clawed on, amidst the
dying and the dead, until one September day the fever entered the Fenno
house and struck down both the editor and his wife. When she died, the
‘Gazette’ was suspended, and the next day John Fenno ceased his attacks
on Dr. Rush, for Death had intervened.[1508] ‘Alas poor John Fenno,’
wrote Ames, ‘a worthy man, a true Federalist, always firm in his
principles, mild in maintaining them, and bitter against foes. No
printer was ever so correct in his politics.’[1509] A few days later,
Benjamin Franklin Bache of the ‘Aurora’ fought no more. The Boston
‘Chronicle’ announced his death in a black-bordered editorial lamenting
‘the loss of a man of inflexible virtue, unappalled by power or
persecution, and who, in dying, knew no anxieties but what was excited
by his apprehensions for his country and for his young family.’[1510]
The Jeffersonian press published long articles and poems of tribute. In
New York the Democrats lost the services of Greenleaf of the ‘Argus,’
another victim of the plague.
John Ward Fenno took up the work of his father, and the widows of Bache
and Greenleaf sought to continue the ‘Aurora’ and the ‘Argus,’ the
former calling to her assistance one of the ablest controversial
journalists of his time, William Duane. No Jeffersonian papers made an
unfeeling reference to the death of Fenno; the passing of Bache was
gloated over in ghoulish fashion by the Federalist press, and soon
‘Porcupine’ and young Fenno were making merry over ‘the widows Bache and
Greenleaf.’ It was part of the Reign of Terror--and the fight went on.
VII
It went on because there was a congressional election pending and both
parties were putting forth their utmost effort. The Federalists were
hoping that under the influence of war hysteria the Jeffersonians could
be annihilated; the Jeffersonians were fighting desperately to hold the
line. The most sensational feature of the campaign was the emergence as
an avowed party man of Washington, whose aristocratic viewpoint made
democracy offensive. He went the full length, finding nothing
objectionable in the Alien and Sedition Laws. When, on his persuasion,
Patrick Henry entered the campaign as a candidate for the Assembly, he
too defended these wretched measures with the silly and insincere
statement that they were ‘too deep’ for him and were the emanations of a
‘wise body.’[1511]
But more important than the emergence of Washington was the
congressional candidacy of John Marshall, who entered the fight on
Washington’s insistence. The Hamiltonian Federalists were delighted with
his candidacy until the publication of his letter opposing the Alien and
Sedition Laws, when they turned upon him with bitter scorn. ‘His
character is done for,’ wrote Ames.[1512] Noah Webster commented that
‘he speaks the language of true Americanism except on the Alien and
Sedition Laws.’[1513] ‘Porcupine’ added an editor’s note to the letter
in his paper: ‘The publication of these questions and answers will do
neither good nor harm. I insert them as a sort of record of Mr.
Marshall’s character. If I were a voter, however, I would sooner vote
for Gallatin than for Marshall.’[1514] The New England Federalists were
wrathy among themselves over Marshall’s apostasy. ‘Mr. Marshall,’ wrote
Cabot to Pickering, ‘has given us great uneasiness here by his
answers.... Mr. Marshall, I know, has much to learn on the subject of a
practical system of free government for the United States.... I believe,
however, that he will eventually prove a great acquisition.’[1515] It
was at this juncture that Cabot proved his superior political
perspicacity by taking up his pen in defense of Marshall for the Boston
‘Centinel.’[1516] The struggle in Virginia was bitter. The
Jeffersonians, long prepared for Washington’s action, were undismayed,
and they fought with increased vim. The result was that, while Marshall
won by 108 majority, the Jeffersonians elected all but eight of the
Representatives, carried the Legislature, and elected a United States
Senator.
The Federalists were chagrined with the general result. Cabot was
disappointed with Massachusetts[1517] and Maryland.[1518] A Senator had
been lost in North Carolina, and from South Carolina the Jeffersonians
had sent to the Senate their most resourceful leader, Charles Pinckney.
Theodore Sedgwick, surveying the field, and writing his observations to
King in London, could find no improvement in the Senate and but a slight
‘amelioration’ in the House. The Jeffersonians had won six out of ten
seats in New York, gained two in New Jersey, and eight out of thirteen
in Pennsylvania.
But Giles was gone--retiring in disgust to the Legislature of Virginia.
The election was over--and the Reign of Terror was beginning.
VIII
It began in the summer of 1798 and extended through the autumn of 1800.
The growing sentiment for democracy and the increasing popularity of
Jefferson were maddening to the Federalists, who fared forth to destroy
both with a club. The Alien and Sedition Laws were to be used for the
purpose. Democrats, from the highest to the most lowly, were to be
proscribed and treated with contempt. The New England clergy, for the
most part, entered heartily into the plan. The colleges joined. So
openly partisan became the institutions of learning that the
Jeffersonian press opened their batteries upon the ‘arbitrary spirit
which has been exposed in the eastern seminaries.’[1519] With much
ceremony Doctors’ Degrees were being bestowed upon Federalist
politicians, and Pickering and Wolcott were made Doctors of Law. ‘Except
Timothy’s vulgar diplomacy who ever heard of the qualifications in him?’
asked the irreverent Duane, and while ‘Oliver has dabbled in politics
and glittered in prose’ ‘he would never have been discovered by the
savants had he not been in the Cabinet of a New England
President.’[1520] Other Federalist politicians were thus given the
disguise of scholarship, but Jefferson, President of the Philosophical
Society, and friend of Franklin and Rittenhouse, received no degrees.
Very early, gangs of self-proclaimed patriots sallied forth into the
country to tear down the liberty poles erected by the Democrats, armed
with pistols and swords, and clattering over the country roads like
Cossacks on a rampage. One of these gangs under the leadership of a
Philip Strubling, operating in Berks County, Pennsylvania, had a
triumphant career, except where armed men showed fight, when the gallant
band found discretion the better part of valor.[1521] This sort of
outrage was being committed all over the country. Plans were made to
wreck the printing plant of Duane until it was found that his friends
had armed for defense, and the editor warned the conspirators that an
attempt at violence ‘would carry public vengeance to their
firesides.’[1522]
When thwarted in their plans against the leaders, the terrorists turned
upon the weak and lowly, demanding the discharge of Jeffersonian
artisans employed in the manufacture of war material. Out with them! ‘It
is a notorious fact,’ complained Fenno, ‘that a number of artisans ...
are of politics destructive of the Constitution.’[1523] Everywhere, in
the pulpits of political preachers, from the Bench of Federal Judges,
through the press and on the streets, men were beating upon the tom-toms
arousing the apprehensions of the people; and when, one night, some
pirates, sentenced to execution, escaped from the Philadelphia jail, the
clatter of the mounted soldiers in pursuit was enough to fill the
streets with affrighted people. The Germans of Northampton were marching
on the city with pitchforks. The soldiers were out after Duane,
whispered others, and armed Democrats rushed to the rescue. At length
the fever subsided and order was restored. ‘Nothing more serious than
the disturbance of love-making,’ said the
[Illustration: _MAD TOM in A RAGE_
A CONTEMPORARY CARTOON TYPICAL OF THE FEDERALIST ATTACKS ON JEFFERSON]
‘Aurora.’[1524] These were minor incidents--the background for the real
terror to come. Judges were terrorizing the people with wild charges to
grand juries.[1525] The Right Reverend Bishop White of Philadelphia was
preaching piously and patriotically from the text: ‘Let every soul be
subject to the higher powers. For there is no purpose but of God. The
powers that be are ordained of God. Whoso therefore resisteth the power,
resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist shall receive to
themselves damnation.’[1526] The Administration organ in New York was
laying down the dictum: ‘When a man is heard to inveigh against the
Sedition Law, set him down as one who would submit to no restraint which
is calculated for the peace of society. He deserves to be
suspected.’[1527] And Timothy Pickering was nervously peering through
his spectacles over Jeffersonian papers seeking some phrase on which a
prosecution for sedition could be brought, and prodding the district
attorneys to action. ‘Heads, more heads!’ screamed Marat from his tub.
‘Heads, more heads!’ echoed Pickering from his office.