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.