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]