Meanwhile, the envoys were lost in the mists of the sea, and nothing had reached the public regarding their reception. In November, the atmosphere charged with the electricity of war, Adams returned to the capital from his seat at Braintree, to be escorted with military pomp into the city. The war propagandists were good psychologists sometimes. When Governor Mifflin, Democrat, ordered out the militia to parade in the President’s honor, ‘Porcupine’ graciously declared it ‘the first decent act he had ever been guilty of.’[1392] On the night of his arrival there was a dinner at O’Eller’s in honor of ‘His Serene Highness of Braintree,’ as Bache put it, and so noisy was the demonstration that ‘some ignorant people imagined a boxing match was on the carpet.’[1393]
This was the spirit of the hour when Congress met in November—the bitterness among the members fully as intense as among the loungers in the streets.
VIII
And yet it was not to be without its touch of comedy. Before the crisis came, two incidents had set the country roaring. Matthew Lyon, the Vermont Democrat, was a constant provocation to the Federalists. Hot-tempered, ardent, uncouth in his manners, but thoroughly honest at heart, he had outraged the clubby spirit of the Federalists. During the Revolution he had been shamefully cashiered for an act deserving of a medal, but almost immediately he had been vindicated. The vindication was thoroughly understood in Philadelphia, but it suited the purpose of his political foes to ignore the facts for the benefit of the slander.
The House was sitting, but in a state of confusion—every one including the Speaker talking—Lyon holding forth in conversation on the ease with which Connecticut could be converted to Democracy through a Democratic paper in that State. Roger Griswold, a Federalist leader, made a slurring reference to Lyon’s ‘wooden sword.’ The latter, hearing it, preferred to ignore the insult. Whereupon Griswold, following him and plucking at his coat, repeated the slander. At this Lyon made an unpardonable blunder—instead of slapping Griswold’s face, he spat in it. Instantly the Federalists were in ferment. The ‘little beast’ was unfit to associate with gentlemen, anyway, and should be expelled. There was an investigation, with denunciatory speeches as indecent as the act denounced. The purpose was clear—to get rid of Lyon’s vote. The Jeffersonians thereupon rallied to his support. Neither condoning the act nor asking that it go unpunished, Gallatin opposed the expulsion resolution on the ground that Congress was not a fashionable club and had no right to deprive a district of its representation on the basis of manners. A two-thirds vote was necessary to expel, and this was lacking. It was a party vote.
A few days later, Lyon was seated at his desk buried in papers, oblivious to his surroundings, and Griswold, armed with a hickory stick, approached from the rear and began striking him on the head. Several blows were struck before the victim of the assault
could extricate himself from his desk. Then, grasping some coal tongs, he advanced on Griswold, who, finding his enemy also armed, gallantly retreated, striking wildly. They clinched, rolled on the floor, and colleagues intervened. Here was another insult to the dignity of the House, but the Federalists were delighted with it. Since nothing could be done to Lyon without doing as much to Griswold, the matter was dropped. The scribes fell upon the morsel with a zest, the first political caricature in American history resulted, the public shrugged its shoulders and laughed, Jefferson thought the whole affair ‘dirty business,’[1394] but Gallatin, quite as much of a gentleman as Otis, thought that ‘nobody can blame Lyon for resenting the insult,’ since there was ‘a notable lack of delicacy in the conversation of most Connecticut gentlemen.’[1395] Fenno called Lyon a ‘filthy beast.’ ‘Porcupine,’ who had rather urged that some one spit in the face of Bache, gloated over Griswold’s assault,[1396] dubbed those who voted against expulsion ‘Knights of the Wooden Sword,’[1397] and virtuously resolved ‘to make the whole business as notorious as the courage of Alexander or the cruelty of Nero.’[1398] Speaker Dayton, whom he had recently denounced as a ‘double-faced weather-cock,’ having voted for expulsion, became an ornament over whom ‘New Jersey has indeed new reason to boast.’[1399] The real significance of the incident was that the war party had fared forth, chesty and cocky, to intimidate the Jeffersonians and had met a check—but they were to have another chance at Lyon.[1400]
CHAPTER XVI
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.