Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

When thwarted in their plans against the leaders, the terrorists turned upon the weak and lowly, demanding the discharge of Jeffersonian artisans employed in the manufacture of war material. Out with them! ‘It is a notorious fact,’ complained Fenno, ‘that a number of artisans ... are of politics destructive of the Constitution.’[1523] Everywhere, in the pulpits of political preachers, from the Bench of Federal Judges, through the press and on the streets, men were beating upon the tom-toms arousing the apprehensions of the people; and when, one night, some pirates, sentenced to execution, escaped from the Philadelphia jail, the clatter of the mounted soldiers in pursuit was enough to fill the streets with affrighted people. The Germans of Northampton were marching on the city with pitchforks. The soldiers were out after Duane, whispered others, and armed Democrats rushed to the rescue. At length the fever subsided and order was restored. ‘Nothing more serious than the disturbance of love-making,’ said the

‘Aurora.’[1524] These were minor incidents—the background for the real terror to come. Judges were terrorizing the people with wild charges to grand juries.[1525] The Right Reverend Bishop White of Philadelphia was preaching piously and patriotically from the text: ‘Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. For there is no purpose but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God. Whoso therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.’[1526] The Administration organ in New York was laying down the dictum: ‘When a man is heard to inveigh against the Sedition Law, set him down as one who would submit to no restraint which is calculated for the peace of society. He deserves to be suspected.’[1527] And Timothy Pickering was nervously peering through his spectacles over Jeffersonian papers seeking some phrase on which a prosecution for sedition could be brought, and prodding the district attorneys to action. ‘Heads, more heads!’ screamed Marat from his tub. ‘Heads, more heads!’ echoed Pickering from his office.

CHAPTER XVII
THE REIGN OF TERROR

I

IT is not surprising that the first notable victim of the Terror was Matthew Lyon whom we have seen insulted at various points when homeward bound from Philadelphia. Bitter though he was, he had sound sense and realized his danger. When the Rutland ‘Herald’ refused to publish his address to his constituents, he launched his own paper, ‘The Scourge of Aristocracy,’ with a defiant challenge: ‘When every aristocratic hireling from the English Porcupine ... to the dirty hedge-hogs and groveling animals of his race in this and neighboring States are vomiting forth columns of lies, malicious abuse and deception, the Scourge will be devoted to politics.’ How Pickering must have stared through his spectacles at that defiance! But patience! If speeches and papers offered no case, there still were letters, and one was found. Here surely was ‘sedition.’ Had Lyon not referred to Adams’s ‘continual grasp for power,’ to his ‘unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice’? Had he not charged that the President had turned men out of office for party reasons, and that ‘the sacred name of religion’ was ‘employed as a state engine to make mankind hate and persecute one another’? Had he not printed a letter from Barlow, the poet, referring to ‘the bullying speech of your President and the stupid answer of your Senate’? It was enough. True, the letter had been published before the Sedition Law was passed, but this was the Reign of Terror. The trial before Judge Peters was a farce, and the culprit was found guilty. ‘Matthew Lyon,’ said Peters in fixing the sentence, ‘as a member of the Federal Legislature you must be well acquainted with the mischiefs which flow from the unlicensed abuse of Government’—and Lyon was sentenced to four months in jail and to pay a fine of a thousand dollars.

Then the Terror began to work in earnest. There was a fairly respectable jail at Rutland where the trial was held, but not for Lyon. There was something worse at Vergennes, forty miles away, a loathsome pen in a miserable little town of sixty houses, and thither he was ordered. Refusing his request to return to his house for some papers, he was ordered to mount a horse, and with two troopers with pistols, riding behind, the forty-mile journey through the wilderness was made. At Vergennes they pushed him into a cell, sixteen by twelve, ordinarily used for common felons of the lowest order. In one corner was a toilet emitting a sickening stench. A half-moon door opened on the corridor, through which his coarse food was passed. Through a window with heavy iron bars he got some light. There was no stove and the cold of autumn nights came in through the window. When it became dangerously chilly, the prisoner put on his overcoat and paced the cell. He was refused pen and paper until the indignation of the public forced a concession. A visitor peering through the half-moon of the door a little later would have seen a table strewn with paper, Volney’s ‘Ruins,’ some Messages of the President.

Meanwhile the Vermont hills were aflame with fury. The Green Mountain Boys, the Minute Men, the soldiers who, with Lyon, had followed Ethan Allen, were talking of tearing the jail down. Then, from the filthy, foul-smelling hole, into which the Federalists had thrown a member of Congress, came letters from the ‘convict,’ brave, cheerful letters, exhorting these men to observe the law. One day, however, Lyon was forced to plead through the iron bars of his window for the furious mob without to seek redress legally at the polls. Thus popular resentment increased with the growth of the prisoner’s popularity. Thousands of the yeomanry of Vermont signed a petition for a pardon and sent it to Adams, who refused to receive it. Aha, ‘the despicable, cringing, fawning puppy!’ exulted Fenno.[1528] The indignation of the yeomanry of Vermont now blazed high. The Administration was amazed, almost appalled. When this ‘convict’ in a hideous cell was nominated for Congress, there were not jails enough in Vermont for the talkers of ‘sedition.’ He was elected overwhelmingly with 4576 votes to 2444 for his nearest competitor.

Again the terrorists consulted on plans to thwart the public will. His term was about to expire, but where would this pauper get a thousand dollars? True, the farmers, the comrades of the Revolution, were going into their pockets to get the money—but a thousand dollars! Still there was a chance. The Marshal summoned Federalist lawyers to go over Lyon’s letters and find more sedition on which he could be arrested on emerging from the jail. His triumphant election was more than the terrorists could bear. ‘Must our national councils be again disgraced by that vile beast?’ asked their New York organ.[1529] Meanwhile, the problem of the fine was being solved. The eyes of the Nation were on that dirty little cell at Vergennes. Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, John Taylor of Caroline, Senator Mason of Virginia—he who had given the Jay Treaty to the ‘Aurora’—and Apollis Austen, a wealthy Vermont Democrat, were solving the problem of the fine. On the day of Lyon’s delivery, the Virginia Senator rode into the village, his saddle-bags bulging with a thousand and more in gold. There he met Austen with a strong-box containing more than a thousand in silver. Mason paid the money.