Unless we mean ourselves to bare (sic)
The palm of their disgrace.
No! God forbid, the man who feels
The force of pity’s call,
To join those Brutes, whose sentence seals,
Whose hearts are made of gall.”
(The Tragedy of Louis Capet, and Printed next the venerable Stump of Liberty Tree, for J. Plumer, Jun., Trader, of Newbury-port.) (In vol. 21 of Broadsides, Library of Congress.)
[178] Webster, The Revolution in France considered in Respect to its Progress and Effects, New York, 1794. Webster’s discriminating pamphlet is one of the most suggestive of all American contemporaneous documents. Cf. Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, p. 259.
[179] For characteristic outbursts of this nature, cf. Adams, Life and Works, vol. ii, p. 160; Gibbs, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, vol. i, p. 90. Typical newspaper comment similar in vein may be found in the Western Star (Stockbridge, Mass.), March 11, 1794, and the Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), April 13, 1793.
[180] As early as 1790 John Adams had spoken of the French nation as a “republic of atheists.” (Works, vol. ix, p. 563.) Other leaders responded to similar sentiments. (Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, p. 266.) Familiarity with French philosophical and religious opinions before the French Revolution had supplied a basis for this concern.