‘I am not for war,’ said Smith of Charleston. ‘I do not believe that the gentleman wishes for peace,’ retorted Gallatin, who had written four days before that ‘Wolcott, Pickering, William Smith, Fisher Ames, and perhaps a few more are disposed to go to war’ and ‘to carry their party any length they please.’[1347] Thus the debate continued until Jonathan Dayton, the Speaker, proposed a substitute amendment that received the support of the Democrats. Seizing upon a passage in Adams’s Message, this commended the President’s decision to seek further negotiations and cherished ‘the hope that a mutual spirit of conciliation and a disposition on the part of the United States to place France on grounds as favorable as other countries in their relations and connection with us, will produce an accommodation compatible with the engagements, rights, duties, and honor of the United States.’[1348] With the Democrats joining the more moderate Federalists under Dayton, the contest was speedily ended to the disgust of the war party. The batteries of scurrility were turned upon the Speaker. ‘A double-faced weather-cock,’ screamed ‘Porcupine’ the Englishman. ‘His duplicity has been too bare-faced for decency. He is, indeed, but a shallow, superficial fellow—a bawler to the galleries, and unfit to play the cunning part he has undertaken.’[1349]
Then, after the heroics, the comedy. Matthew Lyon, a Vermont Democrat and a new member, shocked the formalists with a characterization of the practice of marching in stately procession to the President to present the Reply as ‘a boyish piece of business.’ The time had come to end the silliness. ‘Blood will tell,’ sneered a colleague, referring to Lyon’s humble origin. ‘I cannot say,’ replied Lyon, ‘that I am descended from the bastards of Oliver Cromwell, or his courtiers, or from the Puritans who punish their horses for breaking the Sabbath, or from those who persecuted the Quakers and burned the witches.’[1350] Some chortled, others snorted with rage. Vulgar Irish immigrant! But their wounded culture was soon soothed by a salvo from ‘Porcupine.’ How society must have screamed its delight in reading that Lyon as a child ‘had been caught in a bog, and when a whelp transported to America’; how he had become so ‘domesticated’ that Governor Crittenden’s daughter (his wife) ‘would stroke him and play with him as a monkey’; how ‘his gestures bear a remarkable affinity to the bear’ because of ‘his having been in the habit of associating with that species of wild beast in the mountains.’[1351] The majority of the House, lacking Lyon’s sense of humor, continued for a while their pompous strut through Market Street to read solemnly the meaningless Reply that had consumed weeks of futile debate.
Then Congress proceeded to measures of defense, prohibiting the exportation of arms and ammunition, providing for the strengthening of the coast fortifications, creating a naval armament, authorizing a detachment of militia, and adjourned. But the atmosphere had been one of intense party bitterness which had ostracized the Democrats, from Jefferson down, from the ‘society’ of the ‘best people.’
VI
Mounted, booted, and spurred, and swinging their sabers, the Federalists started out to ride roughshod over their opponents. It was their strategy to attach a stigma to Democrats, and treat them as political outlaws and social outcasts. No one was to be spared—Jefferson least of all. A year before he had written the confidential letter to his friend Philip Mazzei, stating his oft-repeated views on the anti-republican trend in Federalist circles, and saying that men who had been ‘Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council ... had had their heads shorn by the harlot England.’[1352] Sent to an Italian paper, it was translated from Italian into French for a Parisian journal, as we have seen, and thence translated again into English for political purposes in America. The translators had unintentionally taken liberties with the text and in the final translation it was quite different from the original. At last, it seemed, the cautious Jefferson had delivered himself into the hands of his enemies, for had he not attacked Washington? At Alexandria, en route to Philadelphia, Jefferson first learned of the renewed attack in Fenno’s paper. Reaching the capital, he found the vials of wrath let loose upon his head. A politician of less self-possession or finesse would have offered some explanation or defense. None of the courtesies of warfare were to be shown him—he was to be mobbed, his character assailed, his reputation blackened, his personal honor besmirched, and he was to be rejected socially as unfit to associate with the Harpers, Sedgwicks, and Wolcotts. An open letter greeted him in Fenno’s paper on his arrival. ‘For the honor of the American name,’ it read, ‘I would wish the letter to be a forgery, although I must confess that your silence ... leaves but little probability of its not having proceeded from you.’[1353] Jefferson ignored it. ‘You are the author of the abominable letter to Mazzei,’ ran a second open letter. ‘Your silence is complete evidence of your guilt.’[1354] ‘Slanderer of Washington!’ ‘Assassin!’ ‘Liar!’—and Jefferson was silent.
Knowing the curative powers of time and patience, it was not until in August that he consulted Madison and Monroe as to his course. ‘Reply,’ urged the impulsive Monroe, ‘honest men will be encouraged by your owning and justifying the letter.’ Madison advised against it as more apt to give a ‘gratification and triumph’ to his foes.[1355] ‘Character assassin!’ ‘Libeler of Washington!’ ‘Atheist!’ ‘Anarchist!’ ‘Liar!’—these characterizations buzzed through the streets and in the drawing-rooms—and Jefferson was silent.
Then an attack from a new angle. In his ‘Notes on Virginia,’ published years before, in paying tribute to the red men and the eloquence of Logan, an Indian chief, he had referred to a Colonel Cresap as ‘a man infamous for the many murders he had committed on these much injured people.’ When the mass attack on Jefferson was at its height, a long open letter to him appeared in ‘Porcupine’s Gazette’ from the brilliant, erratic, and usually intoxicated Luther Martin, known as ‘the Federalist bull-dog,’ demanding Jefferson’s authority in the name of ‘two amiable daughters who are directly descended from that man whose character your pen ... had endeavored to stigmatize with indelible infamy.’ This had been preceded by no personal note and was manifestly a part of the political plot to wreck him—and he was silent.[1356] Time and again Martin returned to the attack in long open letters, to be ignored utterly as though he were as inconsequential as a ragpicker instead of being the leader of the Maryland Bar.[1357] ‘The mean and cowardly conduct of Mr. Jefferson,’ growled ‘Porcupine.’[1358]
An open season now for shooting at the Democratic leader, all the snipers were busy with their guns. At Harvard College, on Washington’s Birthday, there was a toast to Jefferson: ‘May he exercise his elegant literary talents for the benefit of the world in some retreat, secure from the troubles and danger of political life’—and the Federalist papers gloated over it.[1359] Bache was seen entering Jefferson’s rooms, and a Gallic conspiracy loomed before the affrighted vision of Fenno. ‘The brat may gasp,’ he promised, ‘but it will surely die in the infamy of its parents.’[1360] Jefferson a man of the people? snorted ‘Porcupine.’ ‘So is the swindling bankrupt Charles Fox who is continually vilifying his own government and stands ready to sell his country to France.’[1361] Nothing angered ‘Porcupine’ more than Jefferson’s suggestion in his ‘Notes on Virginia’ that British freedom had crossed the Atlantic. Freedom would live in England, he growled, when Jefferson’s ‘head will be rotting cheek by jowl with that of some toil-killed negro slave,’ and when nothing would be remembered of Jefferson ‘save thy cruel, unprovoked, and viperous slander of the family of Cresap.’[1362] And Jefferson was silent.
Philadelphia was a city of but seventy-five thousand people. The papers were generally read, or their contents were at any rate the talk of the town. They formed the topic for ladies at their teas. Their husbands were sulphurous in their attacks at the breakfast table. And Jefferson became, in the fashionable circles, a moral monster unfit to drink whiskey with a roué of the morally bankrupt French nobility at the table of the Binghams. He was ostracized. It was at this time that he wrote Edward Rutledge that ‘men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way lest they be obliged to touch their hats.’[1363] To his daughter Martha, he wrote of his disgust with the ‘jealousies, the hatreds and the malignant passions,’[1364] and of the ‘politics and party hatreds [that] seem like salamanders to consider fire as their element.’[1365]
Under these conditions he dropped out of the social life of the capital. In the evenings he consulted with his political associates; during the day he presented a calm, unruffled complacency to his enemies in the Senate over whom he presided with scrupulous impartiality. Driven from society, he found consolation in the little rooms of the Philosophical Society, among the relics of his friends Rittenhouse and Franklin.