[588] Marshall to Washington, The Hague, Sept. 15, 1797; Amer. Hist. Rev., ii, no. 2, Jan., 1897; and MS., Lib. Cong.
[589] See infra, next chapter.
[590] Washington to Marshall, Dec. 4, 1797; Writings: Ford, xiii, 432-34.
[591] To justify the violence of the 18th Fructidor, the Directory asserted that the French elections, in which a majority of conservatives and anti-revolutionists were returned and General Pichegru chosen President of the French Legislature, were parts of a royal conspiracy to destroy liberty and again place a king upon the throne of France. In these elections the French liberals, who were not in the army, did not vote; while all conservatives, who wished above all things for a stable and orderly government of law and for peace with other countries, flocked to the polls.
Among the latter, of course, were the few Royalists who still remained in France. Such, at least, was the view Marshall took of this episode. To understand Marshall's subsequent career, too much weight cannot be given this fact and, indeed, all the startling events in France during the six historic months of Marshall's stay in Paris.
But Marshall did not take into account the vital fact that the French soldiers had no chance to vote at this election. They were scattered far and wide—in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. Yet these very men were the soul of the Revolutionary cause. And the private soldiers were more enraged by the result of the French elections than their generals—even than General Augereau, who was tigerish in his wrath.
They felt that, while they were fighting on the battlefield, they had been betrayed at the ballot box. To the soldiers of France the revolution of the 18th Fructidor was the overthrow of their enemies in their own country. The army felt that it had answered with loyal bayonets a conspiracy of treasonable ballots. It now seems probable that the soldiers and officers of the French armies were right in this view.
Pinckney was absurdly accused of interfering in the elections in behalf of the "Royalist Conspiracy." (Vans Murray to J. Q. Adams, April 3, 1798; Letters: Ford, 391.) Such a thing, of course, was perfectly impossible.
[592] Marshall to Lee, Antwerp, Sept. 22, 1797; MS., New York Pub. Lib.
[593] Gouverneur Morris to Washington, Feb., 1793; Morris, ii, 37. While Morris was an aristocrat, thoroughly hostile to democracy and without sympathy with or understanding of the French Revolution, his statements of facts have proved to be generally accurate. (See Lyman: Diplomacy of the United States, i, 352, on corruption of the Directory.)