Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

X

Meanwhile, a serio-comedy in New York State which was working effectively for the Democrats. In the early spring of 1800, John Armstrong, author of the ‘Newburgh Letters,’ and until this time an ardent Federalist, outraged by the brazen attempt to suppress free speech and the freedom of the press, prepared a powerful and vituperative petition for the repeal of the Sedition Law and sent it into several counties to be circulated for signatures. In Otsego, then a new and undeveloped part of the State, it was entrusted to Jedekiah Peck, an eccentric character known to every man, woman, and child in the county. Poor to poverty, he had combined the work of an itinerant surveyor with that of a preacher, and was popular as both. Wandering through the country surveying land by day, night found him in some settler’s home preaching and praying, and, in the intervals between, he talked politics. He had baptized the infant, preached the funeral sermons for the dead, married the young, prayed for and with the old. His sincerity was apparent, his innate kindliness manifest. Many smiled at the diminutive old man, but most men and all children loved him. Burr, who had a genius for using the right man in the right place, took him up and had him sent to the Legislature as a Federalist.[1558]

Right joyously the little old man started on his rounds with the petition. When his activity was made known to Judge William Cooper, father of the novelist, and temperamentally as unfit for the Bench as a large number of the Judges of the time, he boiled with rage. Instantly he wrote the District Attorney of Peck’s heinous sedition. Immediately a grand jury was empaneled in the city of New York. A bench warrant for Peck’s arrest was issued. At midnight he was dragged from his bed, placed in manacles like a dangerous criminal, and the two-hundred-mile march to New York began. The roads were bad, progress was slow, the news spread, and in every village and at every crossroads crowds poured forth to look upon the pitiful spectacle and to sympathize with the victim. Jefferson could not have planned a more effective campaign tour. The plain people of the countryside knew Peck—and they turned away with a sense of personal outrage. For five days the march continued—it was a triumphant march for democracy.

Thus the uneducated, itinerant preacher and surveyor of Otsego County made his contribution to the election of Jefferson, marching in manacles to illustrate the Federalist conception of liberty.[1559]

Merrily the Terror sped along.

XI

The New London ‘Bee,’ under the editorship of Charles Holt, a Jeffersonian, had greatly annoyed the Federalists of the surrounding States, and a remedy was now at hand. Had it not attacked the French war—and therefore tried to prevent enlistments? Here was sedition. The editor was arrested, his own brother summoned as a witness against him. There was more than one War of the Roses in those days. The paper on which he was indicted was furnished by two Federalist editors, one of whom had two brothers on the jury that brought in the indictment. The foreman of the grand jury was an Amos Bull who had been a British commissary in New York during the Revolution.[1560] Bushrod Washington presided at the trial. The defense undertook to show the Sedition Law unconstitutional and the charges of the ‘Bee’ true. The friends of Holt ‘had collected from Dan to Beersheba to hear the trial and afford aid and comfort to their brother.’ When he was quickly convicted and sentenced to jail for three months and to pay a fine of two hundred dollars, a Federalist paper smugly commented upon the ‘mildness of the punishment’ and ‘the humanity of the Judges.’[1561] Like the other victims of the Terror, Holt took his punishment standing up, with shoulders thrown back. A few days before his trial he wrote boldly of the things he had refrained from saying—‘the insults and threats offered to peaceable inhabitants and helpless women in the neighborhood, and the alarm and disturbance excited by firing in the streets and under the windows at all hours of the night.’[1562]

During the two years of the Terror the press was sprinkled with brief reports on arrests, mostly of Democratic editors. One at Mount Pleasant, New York, was arrested ‘in the name of the President for reprinting a paragraph from the New Windsor Gazette supposed to be a libel against the President,’ and he was forced to give bond for four thousand dollars.[1563] By November, 1798, it was announced that twenty-one ‘printers’ had ‘fallen victims to the ... Sedition Law.’[1564] In enumerating the arrests that month, the ‘Chronicle’ commented that no Federalist editor was included ‘because they vilify none but Jefferson, Livingston, and Gallatin.’[1565] Everywhere men were being intimidated into silence. Sometimes there was a touch of comedy to the Terror. One poor wight was dragged into court because of a comment, when a salute was fired in honor of Adams, that it was a pity the ball did not find lodgment ‘in the seat of his pants.’

Strangely enough, there was no serious attempt to make use of the Alien Law. We have seen that about the time of its passage many Frenchmen chartered a boat to escape its operations, and America thus rid herself of the peril of Volney. General Victor Collot, an officer in the army of Rochambeau, escaped deportation by leaving voluntarily. The only appeal to the Alien Law was by indirection in the case of John D. Burk, editor of the ‘Time Piece,’ a democratic paper in New York City. He had left his native Ireland to escape the terror there under Pitt, and finally ran foul of the law here by charging that a letter of Gerry to Adams, which the latter had sent to Congress, had been tampered with. The terrorists were not slow to act. When the offensive article stared at Pickering through his spectacles, he wrote the District Attorney: ‘If Burk is an alien no man is a fitter object for the operation of the Alien Law. Even if Burk should prove to be an alien it may be expedient to punish him for his libels before he is sent away.’ He had already been arrested for sedition, however, and the prosecution was finally dropped on condition that he would leave the country. Instead of leaving, he went into hiding, only emerging from his obscurity with the inauguration of Jefferson.[1566]

Many of the terrorists were infuriated by the failure to use the Alien Law for wholesale deportations. ‘Why in God’s name is the Alien Law not enforced?’ wrote the intolerant Tracy to McHenry.[1567] Everywhere the Sedition Law was keeping men ‘on the run.’ E. S. Thomas, learning that Thomas Adams, of the ‘Independent Chronicle,’ had been arrested for the publication of an article by the former, fled to South Carolina just in time.[1568] In the capital at Philadelphia, the Jeffersonians, fearing an attack, met in secret and made plans for defense. Moreau De Saint Merys, a scholarly Frenchman who kept a bookstore, was given keys to two houses where he could take refuge should his own be attacked. He was quite incapable of anything that would have made him amenable to the law, and President Adams had not only lounged in his bookstore frequently, but the two had exchanged copies of their books. Hearing that Adams had written him down among the proscribed, Moreau appealed to Senator Langdon for the reason. ‘No reason,’ grunted Langdon, ‘beyond the fact that you are French.’ Finally, thanks to the courtesy of Liston, the British Minister, Moreau secured a passport and left the land of liberty with his books, maps, and papers.[1569]