THE AMERECAN RESPONSE TO THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION 1789 - 1801

Dissertation for theDegree of Ph. D.
MiCHIGAN STATE UNIVERSH‘Y
' RICHARD JAMES MOSS
1974

'1 ..
l3
'9
".0.
”3

I

m I

y“
Jill?!"

I.

1...?"

.-

7::‘1

v.-

\ .
\J! ‘-‘-"

“W'

A

 

 

 

’VR 31/

f1} 3&3
N

I {f/ u.) =
, /'W.

“‘7‘,

.‘* _-_ E f
, 3 _z - .. ctr-p

MHiz'mgg

‘. ”AI-n6 “ “'W

047 K091

.5 - .‘
WU;

no K105

W29"’87':.~:‘“
f5 K119
MB "8 7’35;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABSTRACT

THE AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION 1789-1801

BY

Richard J. Moss

This work is a psychological interpretation
of the American response to the French Revolution.
The response Americans made to events in Europe between
1789 and 1801 offers the historian a unique chance to
investigate what Americans thought and felt about the
American Revolution and revolution in general. In the
past historians have seen the French revolt as having
only political impact in the United States. Such a
view neglects the important psychological changes the
French Revolution produced in America.

At first, Americans overwhelmingly approved
of the French revolt. Until 1793 there were only
isolated but important murmurs of uneasiness about the
news from France. In many cities there were large
and riotous celebrations to mark French political and
military triumphs. Americans, generally, believed
that the French were following in American footsteps

and throwing off the chains of tyranny.

Richard J. Moss

After 1793 an increased number of critical

voices were heard. Essentially, they simply expanded

on the themes that had characterized the earlier

expressions of disapproval. Events, however, gave

the post-1793 criticism added urgency. The Reign of

Terror in France and the belief that French revolution-
ary principles were infiltrating America caused great
anxiety and forced the turn against the French.
Psychologically, the revolutionary age, including the

American Revolution, caused Americans to seek order

and stability. Guilt about America's role in the

revolutionary era was a major cause of the anxiety

that led Americans to desire more security and order.
To many it seemed as if all authority and absolute

moral law were being banished from the world. The
execution of Louis XVI, the visit of Citizen Genet,
the growth of the democratic-republican clubs, the
Whiskey Rebellion and the violent public opposition

to the Jay Treaty and the Neutrality Proclamation all

helped to creat a psychological predisposition toward

order and stability. These events illustrated to many

Americans that the revolutionary attack on authority
of all kinds had left the nation without a strong

center of authority and in reaction they sought to

regain such authority.

Richard J. Moss

This psychological predispositon was also largely
responsible for the passionate anti-French activities
in the last half of the 1790's. These activities took
many forms. First, there was widespread growth of
conspiracy theories to explain the French Revolution.
Led by some prominent New England clergy, many Americans
believed that the French Revolution was caused by a
secret organization called the Bavarian Illuminati.
Feelings of anxiety and fear also caused a rise in

xenophobia and a related desire to repress domestic

<:ri1:ics of the government. More generally, Americans

sought ways to restore order and coherence to their
lives. There was a marked return to more traditional
fcnnns of religious belief after years of growing

liberality and innovation during the revolutionary

'period. Also, George Washington, and more importantly,

the Presidency, emerged as a basic source of stability
and authority in American life.

Thus, by the time Jefferson took office in
1801 America had, in large part, escaped the furor

and chaos of a revolutionary existence. When revolu-

tion continued to challenge fundamental religious, social
and political beliefs and the pressure of freedom became
too great. A majority of Americans sought escape. In

escaping they significantly altered the course of the

new nation.

THE AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE

FRENCH REVOLUTION 1789-1801

BY

Richard James Moss

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of History

1974

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During my career as a graduate student I have
acxzumulated a number of debts that I will never be

attle to adequately repay. Thus, I am left with only

tluis chance to express my gratitude.

I have had the good fortunate to study under

Prxafessors Douglas T. Miller, Russel Blaine Nye and

Vtilliam.J. Brazill. These three men have freely given

tflneir'time, patience, comfort and consideration to a

gyraduate student who has become difficult and cranky

knefore his time. It was a pleasure and honor to have

loeen their student. My mother, Mrs. Winifred G. Moss
and.nw'late father, James Preston Moss provided support

and comfort at crucial times. Several people have

graciously aided me during the preparation of this
dissertation - Professor Blaine McKinley and a good
friend, D. M. Scumper, both made significant contri-
butions at the various stages of research and writing.
My wife Linda has lovingly and patiently done
so much that the debt to her must surely be the largest.

To repay her would be impossible.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
Chapter

I. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

II. THE FLAME IS PAST . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

III. OPINION SHIFT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

IV. WATCHMEN ON THE WALLS OF ZION . . . . . . 136

V. MOMENTUM OF REACTION . . . . . . . . . . 188

VI. ADAMS, JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION O O O O O O O I O O O O O O O 2 3 3

VII. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

BIBLIOGRAPHY C O O O O O O O O O O O I O O O O O 282

iii

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The French Revolution was the first revolution
whose motive force was a determination to re-
construct life upon rational principles after
all that reason perceived to be the weeds of
human society had been ruthlessly plucked up
and cast into the flames.

Karl Jaspers, Man in the
Modern Age (1951)

 

 

The relationship between America and Europe
has been and still remains a complex maze of diplo-
matic, economic, intellectual and psychological
connections. Perhaps the complexity of the relation-
ship partially explains why historians have tradition-
ally neglected the continuing role of the Old World
in the development of the New. The American past has
been largely portrayed as free from the influence of
events in Europe. More often the historian has placed
the emphasis on indigeneous factors such as the frontier
or the rise of democracy which are seen as special and
unique to American experience and foreign events of
great magnitude are acknowledged only in footnotes

and brief references.

The French Revolution stands as an example of
a European event that changed the course of American
history. During the Federalist period the news from
Europe forced Americans of all political persuasions
to readjust their thinking about revolution, authority,
freedom and the individuals role in society. The
adjustment was rooted in a complex psychological
reaction to the broad-based attack on authority that
many Americans eventually perceived the French Revolu-
tion to be. With the memory of their own revolt still
fresh in their minds, Americans after briefly approving
the French Revolt became anxious that the tide of
revolution would sweep all authority and stability
away and that life would degenerate into chaos and
anarchy. In response to this feeling many Americans,
during the 1790's, sought ways to restore order and
cohesion to an infant nation born in an act of rebellion.
To a great extent, the effort to restore a sense of
order was carried on by what have traditionally been
called conservatives but the need for stability was
general and the message of this vocal conservative
element had a powerful impact in many areas of society
and was crucial in the first anxious years of the new
republic.

In order properly to understand the impact

of France's Revolution on America one must have some

picture of what America was like when the news of
revolution began arriving from Europe. The Federalist
era was a tense and crucial time in American history,
the memory of their own revolt against England was
still fresh and the meaning of that revolt was the
subject of much debate. The debate over the meaning
of the American Revolution that took place late in
the 1780's and into the 1790's is a large topic that
might be confined to four crucial areas--the conflict
over the Constitution, religious change, the developing
attitude toward Europe and the growth of propaganda
and the amount of information available to the average
citizen. The debate over these issues reveals, that
Americans were deeply anxious about the meaning of
their revolution and about the nature of revolution
generally.

Anxiety was clearly present in much of what
was said regarding the new Constitution. As the 1780's
drew to a close many people felt that the Articles of
Confederation were simply inadequate to govern the
new nation. Beneath the feeling was a sense that the
revolution had created a spirit hostile to order and
efficient government. Benjamin Rush, an active par-
ticipant in the revolution, by 1787 believed "the
temple of tyranny has two doors" and in opposing

monarchy "we bolted one of them by proper restraints;

but left the other open, by neglecting to guard against

0 I I l
the effects of our own ignorance and licentiousness"

Rush, physician and pioneer psychologist saw the
passion for liberty as a form of insanity:

The termination of the war by the peace of 1783,
did not terminate the American Revolution. The
minds of the citizens of the United States were
wholly unprepared for their new situation. The
excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by
the sucessful issue of the war, produced in many
people, opinions and conduct which could not be
removed by reason nor restrainted by government.
For awhile, they threatened to render abortive
the goodness of heaven to the United States, in
delivering them from the evils of slavery and
war. The extensive influence which these opinions
had upon the understanding, passions and morals
of many of the citizens of the United States
constituted a species of insanity, which I shall
take the libsrty of distinguishing by the name
of Anarchia.

Not everyone saw the problem in such scientific
terms, but it was common among the proponents of the
Constitution to see the new government it promised as
a check on disorder and the excessive passion for
liberty.3 As Gordon Wood has shown, the Federalists
and the Anti-Federalists debated the issue on grounds
that were essentially social. The Federalists saw

the passion for liberty they feared manifesting itself

 

lBenjamin Rush, Selected Writing§_g£ Benjamin
Rush, ed. by Dagobert D. Runes, (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1947), p. 126.

2

 

 

Ibid., Oct. 1, 1788, pp. 332-333.

3Gordon Wood, Creation 9£_the American Republic
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). p. 176.

in the form of "new men" coming to power in the states.
The Anti-Federalists justified the infusion of new
blood with a radical challenge to the fundamental
Federalist belief in a hierarchical society and elite
rule. They contended that society was no longer a
homogeneous unit for which an elite could speak.
Society had changed from a organic hierachy of ranks
and degrees eternally linked to each other to a
heterogenous mixture of many classes in which only a
member of a certain class could speak for the wants
and interests of that class. Faced with a fundamental
thrust at their basic beliefs the Federalists, at
first, refused to debate the Constitution on its social
merits and implications. In the end they vigorously
sought to defend the elitism at the center of their
conception of politics and constitutional system.
Wood concluded that all the Federalist hopes for a
strong self-reliant nation and a healthy economy
"in short, all of what the Federalists wanted out of
the new central government seemed in the final analysis
dependent upon the prerequsite maintenance of aris-
tocratic politics".4

The fundamental debate over the Constitution

was one of the most bitter in American history but

 

4Ibid., pp. 490-93.

perhaps nearly as bitter was the conflict over religious
matters. By the end of the Revolution religious
orthrodoxy in America was in retreat. Indeed it had
been under challenge since the early seventeenth

century when the Puritans arrived to create their

city of saints in the wilderness, only to find the
freedom of the wilderness a stronger force than the

pull of salvation. The revolution gave impetus to

this gradual process by bringing the American soldiers
into contact with the multitude of vistors from Europe
at the time.5 Perhaps the extent of this religious
change was seen most clearly at Yale. During the

early years of the 18th century Yale, under President
Thomas Clap, had been a stern bulwark against infidelity.
After Ezra Stiles replaced Clap the college began to
change. The influence of European Enlightenment
thinkers made a profound impression on the Yale

students who debated whether religion had been a

benefit to man and took for themselves nicknames such

as Voltaire and Rousseau.6

 

5G. Adolf Koch, Republican Religion: The

American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (New York:
Henry Holt, 1973), p. 23.

6Richard J. Purcell, Connecticut in Transition:
1775-1818 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan U. Press, 1963),
pp. 19-200

 

 

 

 

 

The growing religious liberalism did not go
unopposed however. Late in the 1780's and continuing
through the 1790's the defenders of religious orth-
rodoxy launched a counter-offensive. In 1790, a
Connecticut minister looked back fondly to 1740 as a
time of religious purity and harmony. He claimed
that "in those days . . . but few infants were not

baptized, 99 families were prayerless, profane swearing

 

was but little known and open violations of the Sabbath
not practiced as is common now". He also noted that
in 1740, "there were no Deists among us . . ." and
after leveling a blast at the "neglect of family,
religion, unrightousness, intemperance, imbibing of
modern errors and heresies and the crying prevalance
of infidelity against the clearest light" he concluded
that his day was "peculiar for man's throwing off

the fear of the Lord".7 Such reactions are common

in periods when religious opinions are changing and
usually serve to moderate the gradual transformation
of religious thought. In the last two decades of the
eighteenth century such anxiety over religious matters
has a special meaning. In the context of rapid poli-

tical change, religious radicalism can create the

feeling that all authority is being washed away and

 

7Quoted in Ibid., p. 13.

leads to a desire to reestablish the old beliefs or
in some way institute religious restraints on the social
and political transformation of the time. Anyone
reading the documents from the late eighteenth century
encounters, incessantly, the idea that republicanism
must be rooted in sound morals and the populace committed
to a restraining religion.8

While the new nation was attempting to find
its political bearings (in the Constitution) and its
religious orientations, it was confronted with another
problem. Since the founding the New World's position
in relation to Europe had been at best problematical,
after the Revolution the problem took on even greater
complexity with the need to establish an identity in
a world of growing nation-states. No single view of
the relationship between New and Old Worlds had developed
by the end of the eighteenth century; in the nearly
two-hundred years of colonial existence, the colonies'
attitude toward Europe was "troubled with a baffling
mixture of defiant independence, righteous good will
and humble piety".9 This odd mixture carried over

into the post-revolutionary years and created a tension

 

8Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Orgins of the
American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press,_1967),
pp. 315-200

 

 

 

9Cushing Strout, The American Image of the
Old World (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 16.

 

 

between a positive and negative view of Europe. On
the positive side, Europe was seen as the fountain
of culture and taste. Jefferson, who in other areas
harbored no great love for Europe, saw the Old World
as the source of true learning and culture. Upon
returning from Europe in 1789 Jefferson carried fifty
cases of luggage and over eighty packing cases of
books and furniture he had acquired in Paris. In
addition, his love of classical architecture and his
attempts to hire European professors for the University
of Virginia are further evidence of his submission
to Europe as the arbiter of taste and learning.1
Jefferson was not alone in this reliance on European
culture; for even today Americans still turn to
Europe as one of the main sources of high culture and
art.

On the negative side the issue was not so
clear cut. The motivations that drove men to the
New World were, no doubt, complex. The evidence,
however, is overwhelming that many, if not most people,
abandoned Europe for America with the sense of leaving
a corrupt decaying civilization for a bright promising
new chance. Of course the Puritans were the most
noted example of such a frame of mind. They came to

the wilderness to create a society of purer principles

 

lOIbid., p. 29.

10

and they saw their small communities as beacon lights
of rightousness in contrast to the discord and im-
morality of the Europe they had escaped. The sense

of this contrast between Europe and America survived
in a more general way after the religious motivation
was muted and the contrast became a central tenet in
the American mind. What developed was the idea of
historical mission; an historical mission to be the
society where true freedom and rightousness existed.
The sense of mission was compounded of three national
goals: non-involvement with Europe and its politics
and wars; the expansion of republican institutions

in the new world; and the creation of an on-going
example of freedom to enslaved people everywhere
(including, of course, Europe). These national pur-
poses contained within them three ideas of Europe which
drew heavily on the Puritan contrast between Old World
and New. Americans had come to see Europe as an alien
stranger (isolation from European wars and politics),
a threatening enemy in the path of American expansion,
and as a potential pupil to whom Americans might

teach the lessons they had learned in the colonial

and revolutionary years.ll

 

llIbid., p. 18.

11

So from the beginning Europe has lurked as
the dark antithesis to a purer, more virtuous America.
The Revolution gave great impetus to the contrast and
in the years between 1783 and 1789 the Americans were
eager to condemn Europe as a lost cause. For instance
Timothy Dwight in his poem "Greenfield Hill" advised
Americans

Look not to Europe, for examples just

Of order, manners, customes, doctrines, laws
Of happiness, or virtue. Cast around

The eyes of searching reason and declare
What Europe offers, but a patchwork sway;
The garment Gothic, worked to frittered shreds,
And eked from every loom of following times.
Such is his sway, the system shows entire

Of silly pomp, and meaness train'd t'adore;
Of wealth enormous, and enormous want

Of lazy sinecures, and suffering toil;

Of grey-beard systems, meteorous dreams;

Of lordly churchs and dissention fierce
Rites farcial, and phrenzied unbelief.

What Dwight said in poetic flights Noah Webster said
straight forwardly when he wrote "Europe is grown old
with folly, corruption and tyranny - in that country
laws are perverted, manners are licentious, literature
is declining and human nature debased".13
Implied in Webster's and Dwight's criticism

was a firm belief in isolation from the rotten civili-

zation they perceived in Europe. There was another

 

12Timothy Dwight, Greenfield Hill: A Poem
(New York: 1794), p. 18.

13Emily E. F. Ford, Notes gn_the Life of Noah
Webster, Vol. I (New York: Private printing, 1912),
p. 61.

 

12

side, however, because many people perceived Europe
as a potential student of America. As early as 1765
John Adams had written that "the settlement of America
was part of a grand scheme and design in Providence
for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish
part of mankind all over the world"14 After the
Revolution such sentiments took on new meaning, America
could now go to the world and especially Europe with
concrete evidence of its superiority and teach the
methods they had used.

The Americans view of Europe discussed to
this point has contained no special reference to
France. At the deepest level Americans generalized
Europe into one amorphous mass. At the same time,
however, there were definite opinions about individual
countries. While the view of Europe was composed of
different conflicting elements the same was true of
the perception of France. The French had long been
hated in America, first as a powerful Catholic nation
all too close to their Protestant haven in the New
World and later as the enemy of England in the eigh-

teenth century wars which drew the colonists in on

 

14John Adams, Works of John Adams, Vol. III,
ed. by Charles F. Adams (Boston: 1850-56), p. 452.

 

13

the side of the mother country. In opposition to

the long standing hostility was the aid offered to
the rebels by Louis XVI during the Revolution and
formalized in the French Alliance of 1778. While
such aid engendered a warm regard for France in many
Americans the alliance was seen by many as a "bitter
necessity"15 which ran counter to their strong desire
to remain free of attachments to European powers. In
a more generalized way France was warmly regarded in
the 1780's and 1790's as the traditional enemy of
England against whom the colonies had just fought

a bitter war. In any case with France, as with Europe,
American opinion was divided and new events would
determine the position of Europe and France in the
scale of American opinion. The French Revolution
would be a major event in turning Americans away from
France and the problems of Europe in general.

Thus far in this brief portrait of the new
nation in the late 1780's one can see deep divisions
over the Constitution, religious opinions and a con-
fusing view of Europe in relation to America. The
growing complexity and confusion of attitude and

belief was deepened and promoted by steady growth

 

5Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe
Doctrine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). p. 6.

 

14

in the availability of information. Of course, this
means newspapers to a large extent but there was also
a spurt in the publication of books, pamphlets and
orations and an exceptional increase in the production
of material of all kinds that was openly ideological,
agressive and, at times, scandalous.l6 In the years
between 1783 and 1801 Americans saw the birth of 450
newspapers, but many of these papers enjoyed only a

17 Along with the growth of news-

brief life span.
papers came the emergence of newspaper editors as

public figures.18 These editors helped set the tone

of hostility and the bitter feelings which characterized

the Federalist period. Men such as Philip Freneau,

the editor of the National Gazette, made American

 

political journalism a battlefield characterized by
violent rhetoric and verbal abuse.19 There were many
others, such as Ben Franklin's grandson Benjamin

Bache, editor of the Aurora, who tangled with several

 

l6This emotionalism of the 1790's is made
clear in Marshall Smelser, "The Federalist Era as an
Age of Passion", American Quarterly, vol. X (1958).

17Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: .5
History pf Newspapers ip the United States Through
250 Years. 1690-1940. (New York: MacMillan, 1941),
p. 113. In 1801 there were 202 newspapers.

18

 

 

 

 

 

Ibid., p. 114.

lgIbid., p. 124.

15

of the other partisan editors. Bache and John Fenno,

editor of the Federalist, Gazette pf the United States,

 

fought in public to what appears to have been a draw.
Bache also carried on a feud with another conservative
editor, William Cobbett (better known as Peter Por-
cupine) who went so far as to slander the memory of
Bache's grandfather. Cobbett called Franklin a "lech-
erous old hypocrite" and wrote that "the statue of
Franklin in Philadelphia seems to gloat on the wenchs
as they walk the State House yard".20
Along with the growth of vio1ent political
journalism came an increase in the output of books
and pamphlets of a highly opinionated and critical
kind. The debate over the Constitution produced a
large crop of such works but as that issue died out
others took its place and the battles fought in print
continued. The best example of this situation was
the conflict between Paine and Burke over the French
Revolution. Americans debated the virtues of Paine
and Burke and their only sources were the books since
neither man set foot in America in the 1790's. Perhaps
the largest producers of pamphlets were clergymen

reacting not only to religious issues but a broad

 

20Quoted in Ibid., p. 130.

16

range of topics. It was not uncommon for a sermon
or oration to strike the public fancy and end up in
print.

The period 1789 to 1800 produced a great deal
of literature on a multitude of topics. To a large
extent the newspapers and fiery literature were a
product of the highly charged revolutionary years
which had also produced its quota of partisan rhetoric.
There is, however, a deeper meaning to the growth of
printed material in this period. Obviously, American
society during Federalist period had no real center
or concensus and the newspapers and books were violent
testimony to the fact that Americans were desparately
searching for stability, both political and intellec—
tual. In 1800 a Connecticut paper put the issue
this way:

Here various news we tell of love and strife,

Of peace and war, health, sickness, death and life,
Of loss and gain of famine and of store,

Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore.
Of prodigies, and portents seen in the air,

Of fires, and plaques, and stars with blazing hair,
Of times of fortune, changes in the state,

The fall of fav'rites, projects of the great

Of old missmanagements, taxations new 21
All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.

 

 

 

21New London (Conn.) Bee, March 26, 1800,
quoted in Donald H. Stewart, THE Opposition Press pf
the Federalist Period (Albany, N.Y.: State U. Press
of New York, 1969), p. 14.

 

 

 

17

The above may seem to be a bit of newspaper space-
filler but it reveals alot about the 1790's, espec-
ially the last line which the writer chose to under-
line. It indicates a fundamental problem of the age,
a growing belief that truth, final and absolute, was
a thing of the past and only opinion and "prodigies
and portents seen in the air" remained.

Such was the situation in 1789 when the news
of the French Revolution arrived in America. The
new government had just taken office but the bitter-
ness of the debate over the Constitution still lingered
and all parties anxiously watched to see how Washington
and his administration would function. In addition,
there were religious anxieties as the new religious
point of View boldly confronted the established Pro-
testant orthrodoxy and both sides saw the other as
a fundamental threat to America's well-being. The
question of the relation to Europe in the post-revo-
lutionary era was another vexing problem. Europe seemed
to offer so much in the areas of trade and culture
but this attraction was in conflict with a profound
and long standing sense of Europe as a corrupt civil-
ization from which so many Americans had fled. Thus
in 1789 many people in the United States came to
see the new nation in terms of their historical mission

and this view included instructing the Old World in

18

the nature of true freedom while maintaining a strict
separation from their intended pupil. Promoting the
discussion of these questions was the rapid growth

of information available to the people. Newspapers,
books and pamphlets produced sudden outbreaks of
rhetoric all appealing to the public for their vote

or support in issues. So by 1789 it seems that the
meaning of the American Revolution was still in doubt.
The Constitution had by no means settled the political
implications of the revolution nor had the religious
conflict been settled, while at the same time, America's
role in the world and the question of the average
citizen's right to information were still being de-
bated.

Taken together these four problems are, in
reality, part of a larger problem. In sum they sym-
bolized the question which confronted the United
States in the twenty years after the revolution: to
what extent human freedom should be allowed to increase?
This question was really the central issue in the
debate over the Constitution, in religion, and in the
press. Americans were seeking the limits of political
freedom in the case of the Constitution; the limits
of religious and philosophical freedom in the conflict
over religion and the limits of a free press in the

bitter journalism of the time. At first glance the

l9

uncertainity over Europe may seem not to be a

question of expanding freedom. However, at the heart

of the dilemma over America's relation to Europe was

the question of the applicability of the American
experience with freedom to the Old World context.

For people like John Adams, only in the unique setting

of America could freedom be safely extended and ex-
panded, while for others the American success, especially
in the revolution, should, and must be, extended to
Europe and all parts of the world.

The American response to the French Revolution
was based on the question of the nature of human
freedom. The French Revolution acted as a test case
for many Americans: a test case to answer the ques-
tion, how far should human freedom be expanded? In
the first years of the French revolt Americans were
overwhelmingly in favor of what was happening in
France. To them it seemed as if their fears about
the spread of their revolutionary ideas to foreign-
shores were unfounded and that other countries could
enjoy the blessing of liberty which America had
secured. The mood of enthusiastic approval was the
dominant mood from 1789 until 1793 when criticism
began to grow. It would be a mistake, however, to
see American opinion during these three years as

completely approving the events in France. Amid the

20

loud chorus of praise for French revolutionaries there
can be found important but somewhat isolated criticism
which in time would come to serve as the basis for

the negative reaction which characterized the years
after 1793. From 1793 until 1800 the American view

of events in France grew increasingly negative, but
again, it would be a mistake to see this reaction as
entirely dominant. Even during the bitterly anti-
French years of 1798-9 there was a small but persis-
tant group of people who defended the revolution in
the face of overwhelming opposition. In this pattern
of approval changing into condemnation the theme of
expanding freedom was central for as the revolution

in France passed into its more violent and innovative
stage Americans could see before their eyes (or in
their newspapers) their worst fears coming true.

So it is the theme of expanding freedom and
the resulting contraction to a more limited view of
liberty which must serve as the basic framework for
understanding the American reaction to the French
Revolution. In the early years of the revolution in
France the exhileration in America was widespread and
vocal. Americans were reacting to what was in their
minds a startling event. It was welcome, however,
because it bolstered the pride of Americans in their

own revolutionary accomplishments and in their sense

21

that their revolution was having an impact all over
the world. Also, the early French successes seemed
to enhance the chances of America pushing her revo-
lution to a successful conclusion. Finally, it
appealed to the American anti-European bias. To
many Americans Europe meant priests, kings, Catholicism
and England. The French Revolution seemed to be
directed against all those things, especially England
after the French and English went to war in January
of 1793. The anti-English motivation should not be
underestimated, Anglo-American relations were not
cordial and thus the coming of a revolutionary France
in Europe to battle reactionary England was greeted
as a blessing. The French Revolution was also welcome
because it provided Americans with ammunition to use
against what they saw as a growing anti-revolutionary
sentiment. Thus, for many reasons Americans welcomed
the news of revolution in France, however, all these
reasons came under one general heading - Americans
were thrilled by new evidence that freedom and liberty
were growing and prospering not only in the United
States but in France as well.

After 1792 however, more and more voices
were heard critical of the revolt and critical of
Americans who supported it. The reaction was dominated

by a set of themes heard again and again. The

22

disapproval of the French Revolution was rooted, first
of all, in a fear of the religious innovations pur-
posed in the more radical stages of the revolution.
This criticism of religious changes later in the
revolution was embarassing to clergymen and others
who had approved of the anti—Catholic tone of the
early years but could not accept the religion of
reason and the generally anti-religious nature of
what they read was happening in France during the
Reign of Terror. The idea of equality ran counter

to the basic desire of some in America to establish

a firm government in the wake of the revolutionary
period. Third, the negative opinion of the events

in France resulted from what Americans saw as a
fundamental attack by the French Revolutionaries on
sacred social institutions such as marriage and the
family. Continually, without specific references,
Americans pointed with horror to so—called French
legislation and other actions which, to their minds,
seemed to destroy marriage and the family and in turn
legalize prostitution and separate children from
their parents. Fourth, racial fear was to some extent
important in turning Americans against the revolution.
The bloody uprisings in Santo Domingo early in the
revolutionary years struck fear in the hearts of many

Americans "burdened" with responsibility for the care

23

of slaves of their own. It was common in the South
to connect the massacres in Santo Domingo with the
French revolutionary doctrines which seemed to be
in the air everywhere. Lastly, many Americans saw
the French Revolution as the direct outgrowth of
unbridled factions and the resultant lack of political
and social cohesion. This idea was an extremely common
weapon in the anti-revolutionary arsenal. They pointed
to the excesses of the French Revolution and declared
them the work of ambitious and often secret factions.
The lesson to be learned, they continued, was that
harmony and patience were virtues, a lesson they felt
many Americans needed to learn.

Thus far the discussion has concerned only
the response or opinion Americans made to the events
in France. While this is an important question it
leaves another question unanswered. It is logical
to ask, at this point, exactly what did Americans
dg,22 if anything, in reaction to the events in
France. The answer to this question is complex since
it is often impossible to separate the motivations
for any action. During the 1790's there was a great

deal of discussion of fundamental issues, there was

 

22In this case the word "do" should be under-
stood to include not only overt actions but internal
psychological and intellectural reactions over and
above simple opinion.

24

perhaps, more discussion of basic questions than
American history has witnessed since. Many Americans
felt that they were charged with the duty of setting
the basic forms in which the nation would operate.23
The French experimentation served America as a case
study in various methods of organizing a nation.

As the French attempted an experiment in political
structure, religion or social organization the
Americans would also instantly relate its merit or
lack of merit to the American situation. When a
French innovation seemed to produce unwanted results
such as violence or inefficiency Americans immediately
began seeking ways of avoiding that innovation and

the unwanted results. The situation was further
complicated by what can be called secondary reactions.
For example, when one group in America saw the French
Revolution in a totally negative way the proponents

of the revolution would react in a variety of ways

to counter this anti—revolutionary sentiment.

In order to make some sense of this confusing

matrix of reaction and counter-reaction it is best

 

23A number of works on the Federalist Period
make this point, among them are, John C. Miller, Th3
Federalist Era: 1789-1801 (New York: Harpers, 1960),
pp. 3-5, William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties
£2 a New Nation (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1963),
pp. 9-10.

 

 

 

 

25

to keep in mind the watershed year of 1793. Up to
that time most Americans had found little to critize
in the French Revolution. After that time however
one begins to see the pattern of conflict emerging.

On both sides of the issue individuals began to make
similar reactions, some responding to events in
France, some to related events in America. When it
became apparent to the proponents of the French Revo-
lution that there was a significant opposition to the
revolution they made several important responses.
Among them was the growth of a conspiracy theory which
held that in America there was a group of men who
advocated monarchy and, in general, a blunting of the
revolutionary spirit in America, France and the world.
Those who believed in this theory had some basis in
fact for their belief. There were men such as Noah
Webster who had confessed that he would "infinitely
prefer a limited monarchy . . . to the ignorance and
passions of the multitude".24 Also, to many, the

new government seemed to be gradually introducing
monarchical tendencies in the form of excessive pomp
and the use of kingly titles. Even with this evidence,
those who saw a conspiracy to introduce monarchy went

far beyond reasoned debate in promoting their theory.

 

4Connecticut Courant, Nov. 20, 1786.

 

26

The suspicion and distrust evidenced in the
growth of the conspiracy theory was also central in
the development of the democratic-societies. Obviously,
the forces that led to the birth of these infant
political organizations were many and complex. The
French Revolution, however, was vitally important in
their founding, growth and policy. For example, the
visit of Edmund Genet, the first minister from revo-
lutionary France, served as an impetus to the societies
though they were founded before his arrival. Also,

a reading of the platforms and charters of these
groups shows an intense interest in French affairs
and in the opposition to the French Revolution in
America.

When the opposition to the French Revolution
became clear those who favored the Revolution turned
to propaganda and education in order to fight the
criticism coming from these conservative circles.

To the twentieth-century mind inured to the constant
outpouring of propaganda and education geared to
ideological and social ends such a response would
seem normal. In the late eighteenth century, however,
there had not yet developed either a firm basis for
opposition to government or a philosophy of education
in the new republic. So when the proponents of the

French Revolution protested in response to the Neutrality

27

Proclamation or the Jay Treaty they were treading

a new and highly controversial path. When they called
for education in republican principles and education
for equality they were running counter to the common
belief that education served to train an individual

to occupy his natural station in life.

Thus those who favored the French Revolution
made three basic responses. They developed and pro-
moted the theory, which had roots prior to 1780,
that there was a conspiracy to promote monarchy in
the United States. They developed the democratic
societies as a new form of political awareness and
organization. Last, they turned to propaganda and
education as a means of promoting both their pro-
French sentiments and countering what they saw as
an anti-French and anti-revolutionary movement.

Quite frankly, the reaction of the anti—
French group was to me more interesting and signifi-
cant. They also developed a conspiracy theory but
it was more fantastic and widespread. In order to
explain events which seemed to run counter to so
much they held dear the conservatives created a variety
of conspiracies to explain the historical process that
swirled about them. Certainly the most significant
of these was the widely held theory first put forth

by the Englishman John Robison, that the French

28

Revolution was only part of a plot against virtue
and truth by a secret sect connected to the Masonic
Order called the Bavarian Illuminati. It might be
easy to shrug this theory off as the temporary de-
lusion of the New England ministers who promoted it
if it were not for the variety of people who believed
it. Clearly Abigail Adams accepted it as fact, and
’in a letter to Reverend G. W. Snyder, George Washington
indicated he believed the Illuminati were not only
behind the events in France but that their doctrines
had spread to the United States.25 In addition to
the Illuminati conspiracy, conservatives came to
see dangerous plots nearly everywhere. For example,
they created a short lived but loud scare over some
documents found hidden in a tub in Charleston, South
Carolina. There were several other instances of
individuals finding conspiratorial design in the
most innocent event.

The conservatives also developed a higher
political awareness in response to the French Revo-
lution and the efforts of its supporters in America.

They launched an attack on the whole idea of factional

 

25John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings pf
George Washington, vol. XXXVI, (Washington D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1941), pp. 518-519.

 

 

29

politics and sought to establish the idea that
opposition to government was unhealthy, unpatriotic
and even sinful. Figures in the Federalist adminis—
trations and supporters of them outside government
pointed to the factions in France and the excesses
they caused and claimed that the United States could
expect similar excesses if factions were allowed to
exist in the new political system. For awhile the
Federalists were willing simply to talk against
faction such as in Washington's Address to Congress
in November 1794 where he condemned the "self—created
societies" as a danger to the republic. Late in the
1790's, however, they came to feel that stronger
measures were needed to fight the danger of faction
and open criticism of the government. So, in great
measure, in reaction to the French Revolution and
its influence in America the Congress passed the
Alien and Sedition Laws in hopes of silencing criticism
and inhibiting the influence of foreigners who too
often sided with the critics of government.

These acts were motivated largely by fear
and it was also fear that drove the conservatives
to the use of propaganda and education to fight what
they saw as the evil influences of the French Revo-
lution. As indicated earlier they were not alone:

the pro-French sympathizers had also become convinced

30

of the importance of swaying opinion and educating

the young. To a great extent the battle took place

in the primitive newspapers of the day, but, especially
in the case of the Federalists, the sermon and oration
were also utilized. Of special interest was the role
of the New England ministers who, found the French
Revolution to be a fundamental threat to their beliefs.
The literature produced by these men provides an
important insight into the workings of the conserva—
tive reaction to a revolutionary age. Most signifi-
cantly, these ministers used their sermons to spread
their conspiracy theories concerning the French Revo-
lution. If the New England divines really believed
these theories is an almost impossible question to
answer but there is no doubt that it was propaganda
designed to turn their audiences away from an attach-
ment to the revolution.

Obviously, the reaction of the anti-revolution
forces was markedly similar to the pro-revolution
group. They both developed higher political aware-
ness, conspiracy theories and turned to propaganda
and education to promote their point of view. The
conservatives, however, reacted in one way that the
pro-French faction failed to do. For many in America
at the time, the French Revolution symbolized the

flux and discontinuity that had characterized the

31

revolutionary years in America. By the 1790's, there
developed an obvious desire for stability which many
conservatives found in the figure of Washington. The
process whereby Washington was made a demigod was
complex both politically and psychologically. It

of course went far beyond the reaction to the French
Revolution, involving Washington's military record
and the need for a stabilizing influence before the
French rebellion began. Nevertheless, it is clear
that the figure of Washington was evoked in an attempt
to break the attachment many Americans had for the
revolution in France.

The use of Washington as a hero-figure to
create stability went beyond mere propaganda and leads
to the heart of the reaction to the French Revolution.
Clearly the period was one of high passions and anxieties
and to some extent these passions and anxieties can
be seen more clearly if we limit the discussion to the
reaction to the French Revolution. It must be noted,
however, that people were passionate and anxious over
more than just the news from France. As indicated
earlier, when the French Revolution began the Americans
were confronted with a number of profound questions
on fundamental issues. The reaction to the French

Revolution was, to a great extent, a product of the

32

concern over those issues. The course of the revolu-
tion in France added to their anxiety, however, and
created a situation where the historian can see
clearly the manifestations of anxiety arising from
great historical changes.

In the most general sense the anxiety was rooted
in the expansion of human freedom which was evident to
everyone in the 1790's. Of course the process of
expansion was gradual but the last twenty-five years
of the eighteenth centruy seemed to many individuals
a time when every restraint on man was called into
question. Around the world many people were straining
at the bands of political, social and religious authority.
By the 1790's, however, the cost of the long war
against authority was, in the United States at least,
becoming apparent. Freed from the restraints of
feudal, pre-individualistic society, which gave man
a feeling of security as they limited him, man dis-
covered that while the external political and social
restraints had been broken there were also internal
restraints on freedom. Independence and freedom had
produced isolation, anxiety and a sense of powerless-
ness. Confronted with these feelings man may either
escape from the new freedom he has acquired into new
or old forms of dependence and submission or he may

seek to take full advantage of the opportunities

33

freedom offers.26 In the 1790's Americans, more often
than not, sought to establish new dependencies and,

in general, escape from the challenge of individual
freedom. While this reaction was rooted in a general
reaction to the times, the response to the French
Revolution allows one to examine it in a limited
context. Also, the French Revolution was seen as

the key symbol of expanding freedom thus making the
reaction to it significant.

In the attempt to flee from freedom and
independence man utilized several methods. One of the
most important was a tendency toward authoritarianism.
As the pressure of freedom became too much to bear
one of the responses was "to fuse one's self with
somebody or something outside of oneself in order to
acquire the strength which the individual self is

27 Very often this process will include the

lacking."
development of secondary bonds to replace the primary
bonds which have been broken. During the Federalist

Era men were rapidly establishing such secondary

 

26Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York:
Avon Books, 1965), p. VIII. Much of the following
discussion owes its besic outlines to Fromm's in-
sights about the nature of freedom.

27

 

Ibid., p. 163.

34

bonds in an attempt to allay their worry over the
lack of cohesion in their society. The near deifica—
tion of Washington was an attempt to create a stable
bond between people and leader in the wake of continued
revolt against authority. The Americans had rebelled
against their king, the French had beheaded theirs,
to many people it seemed as if there would never be
stable rule again. Against such a background the
figure of Washington was a welcome substitute for a
king, and people gave their trust and independence

to him.

Beyond the figure of Washington there were
several develOpments which show this submerging of the
self into a larger and more powerful unit. The growth
of political parties during this period was aided by
the sense of isolation and powerlessness among the people.
As a member of a party, a person could gain a sense
of effectiveness and direction in a new confusing
political system, but more important party member-
ship allowed one to give over his burdensome freedom
to a larger unit and let the party take care of it.
People also sought reassurance in the traditions of
their section of the country. Sectionalism was evident
in New England where, in the face of innovation, many
turned to the New England traditions as a source of

stability. To some extent, the sense of nation and

35

national pride also served as a larger unit in which
people submerged their new freedom. Of course, the
rise of American nationalism had causes which go beyond
the anxieties of the age but it is clear that in the
1790's the nation gave many people a sense of belonging
and power that they badly needed. The sentiment "my
country right or wrong" is partially an easy way of
avoiding freedom and allowing vital decisions to be
made by some larger group. In all the varieties of
escape from freedom by acquiescence to authority the
individual surrenders his newly emancipated self and
loses intergrity and freedom but gains "a new security
and a new pride in the participation in the power in
which one submerges".28

A second form of escape from freedom quite
different from authoritarianism was an inclination toward
destructiveness and violence. At the root of this
tendency was the anxiety produced in the free indi-
vidual by the massive forces of the outside world.
Without a sense of unity and power the individual seeks
to wreck that which threatens him, and during the 1790's
there were numerous examples of such violence. The

newspapers of the decade were filled with violent and

 

28Ibid., p. 177.

36

destructive rhetoric much of which was aimed at crippling
or destroying opposing views on social and political
questions. Late in the nineties the destructive and
violent mood peaked with the war frenzy against France.
While the XYZ Affair and French attacks on American
commerce were important causes of anti-French feelings,
clearly there was more to it than that. Americans
feared France and her revolution as a threat to
cherished assumptions and beliefs. This threat pro-
duced great anxiety and a desire to lash out at the
object that was so threatening. France, thus was seen
as a source of ethical corruption which had to be
resisted in order to insure American righteousness.

The passionate desire to seek a war with France may
partially be seen in this light.

A third form of escape from the new freedom
was the need for conformity and the desire to produce
or enforce conformity. This method of escape often
dealt with what seemed like trivial matters. In some
cases, the mere wearing of a cockade could set off
an incident. Some Americans showed great desire to
attack any sign or symbol that indicated an attachment
to an opposing position. Largely a very generalized
reaction, it often indicated only the fear that some
Americans were more attached to France or England than

to their native land. Also, much of the thinking

37

during this period on education showed a strong desire
to use the schoolhouse as a tool to produce conformity
among the young. The French Revolution became the
opposite of conformity, often it would be characterized
as rampant innovation and then it would be compared
with the security of adherance to traditional values
and beliefs.

The root of these reactions was the growth
of a profound anxiety about the way the world was
changing. Too often anxiety is used as a completely
negative term indicating needless irrational worry
or dread. Anxiety may be actual worry over a real
problem. In many ways the anxiety generated by the
French Revolution was real; the Revolution did pose
a serious threat to the American people. John Adams
and his thoughtful concern about the Revolution was
an example of such real anxiety. Anxiety may also
be neurotic and the outcome of the desire to avoid
even the remotest sign of danger. When anxiety is
of this type the response is often uncontrolled.and
irrational.29 The conspiracy theory of history and

29This analysis of anxiety is common. See,

”Anxiety and Politics" in Franz Neumann, The Democratic
§§g_the Authoritarian State: Essays 13 Political and
Legal Theory (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1957),
PP. 270-300. Cited hereafter as Neumann.

 

 

38

the three reactions of authoritariansim, destructiveness
and conformity were largely products of neurotic anxiety
over what the French Revolution represented.

At this point it might be in order to defend
the emphasis on anxiety as a force in history. It
seems that power, politics, economics or perceived
progmatic necessity are presented as basic motivating
historical forces without great hesitation. The use
of human anxiety has no such clear sanction but many
historical problems can be dealt with only by examining
the effect anxiety had on historical actors. The
conspiracy theories which have regularly appeared in
American history are too often seen as "fun" history
where Americans go a bit daffy for no particular
reason and soon return to normal. These theories,
on the contrary, may be the manifestation of profound
anxiety rooted in a variety of historical circumstances.30
In any event, the impact of anxiety ought to be a
central concern of scholars since anxiety inhibits

freedom and indeed it may make freedom impossible.31

 

30In recent years this tendency to develop

conspiracy theories has received some serious treatment.
For example, the introduction in David Brion Davis, ed.
The Fear pf Conspiracy: Images pf Un-American Subversion
from the Revolution pg the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.:

Cornell U. Press, 1971).

31Neumann, p. 270.

 

 

 

 

39

One of the purposes of the chapters that follow is
to investigate the role of anxiety in the American
reaction to the French Revolution.

It seems worthwhile also to explain the extent
to which this investigation seeks to find a Freudian
pattern in the American reaction to revolution. It
is tempting to see eighteenth-century revolution as
a form of father-killing and to see the reaction to
the revolutions as guilt over the deed. To a great
extent the pattern is born out by the events and
tenor of thought in the 1790's. It, however, would
be a mistake to try to fit the facts into a rigid
Freudian pattern. In the aftermath of so much direct
attack on authority (the father) during the eighteenth
century the sons did come to feel a sense of guilt or
sin and this sense was important in shaping the reaction
to the French Revolution. But, perhaps, one should
follow Norman 0. Brown's suggestion that

Freud's myth of the rebellion of the sons against
the father in the primal, prehistoric hords is not
a historical explanation of origins, but a supra-

historical archetype; externally recurrent; a myth;
an old, old story. 2

_In the 1790's there was a recurrence of this "old, old
story" and there is no need to connect the deeds of that
time with the primal rebellion so central to the Freudian

view.

 

2Norman 0. Brown, Love's Body (New York:
Vintage Books, 1966), p. 3.

 

4O

Regarded in this less rigid way, the Freudian
emphasis on the rebellion of sons against fathers offers
an insight into the pattern of revolution and counter-
revolution. The destruction of the father was motivated
by a desire to be free of his dominance but the act
of toppling the father produced a sense of guilt and
anxiety and a lack of cohesion among the sons. Their
sense of common crime and the chaos of life without
supreme authority produced a desire to seek surrogate
forms of the missing father. Thus, Freud's historical
insight was to see the interplay of freedom and re-
straint in the workings of society and history. Man's
need for liberty has always co—existed with the need
for dependence - each having its moment in history
and always followed by the other. In the 1790's,
many Americans found the vision of human freedom less
than alluring and consequently sought, in many ways,
restraints on their lives and the lives of others.

The turn against the French Revolution (a symbol of
freedom and chaos in their minds) was caused largely
by the internal, often unconscious, psychological
transformation.

The American reaction to the Great Revolution
in France was a complex development of opinion and
response. The upheaval in France came to the United

States at a time when there was great uncertainity over

41

the final outcome of our own revolution. The political,
social, religious and international implications of

the American Revolution were still unsettled. In the
years between 1789 and 1792 Americans generally hailed
the French Revolution as an advance in human history;
often Americans saw it as a continuation of their

own revolution. After 1792 the general approval began
to decline and turned gradually into widespread con-
demnation. Beyond the basic change of attitude the
reaction to the news from France was complex and varied.
Growth of the explanatory conspiracy theories and
elevated political awareness was common to both pro

and anti-revolution partisans. Both sides turned to
propaganda and education in order to promote their
positions. As the nation turned against the French
Revolution after 1793 it was clear that anxiety about
it played an important role. The anxiety was rooted

in the prospect of expanding freedom and the breakdown
of traditional religious, social and political restraints.
In dealing with the anxiety Americans tended to seek
ways of escaping the new freedom by giving over their
independence to authority figures such as Washington

or to larger units such as the nation or political
parties. Growing anxiety also produced a desire to

destroy the threatening new world - and France seemed

42

for a time the symbol of that new order. There was,

in response to the anxiety, a growing desire to con-
form; to seek comfortable, traditional ways of thinking
and living.

Clearly if the French Revolution had never
happened much of the reaction would have occurred
anyway. The American reaction the the events in France
gives us a test case on which we can isolate our
vision and come, in a small way, to understand the
human reaction to profound changes in the world.

The French Revolution of 1789, in obvious conjunction
with other events, started a major reorientation in
American thought. That reorientation is the subject

of the chapters which follow.

 

.
\‘20

'V1.

‘Ai-

'w‘n.

<
.A~,

M. ._.~

 

 

~
-\

‘.
‘.

k

\ ‘.

 

»

 

CHAPTER II

THE FLAME IS PASSED

Boy! fill the generous goblet high;
Success to France shall be the toast:

Philip Freneau, "On the
Fourteenth of July" (1792)

In April 1789, the new government of the United
States was assembling in New York City. There was a
measure of uncertainty about how to address various
members of the new system. John Adams was at a loss
as to how the Congress should greet General Washington
when he appeared to be sworn in as President. Should
the Congress stand or sit when the President addressed
them? While the Senate fussed over these questions
the city of New York greeted the old General with
roaring cannons and pealing bells. Dressed in a plain
suit of blue and buff and accompanied by thirteen
pilots in white, Washington arrived by barge at the
Wall Street wharf. After a brisk walk on Wall, Pearl
and Queen Streets he arrived at his new home on Cherry
Street. The next day he appeared on the balcony of
the Senate Chamber and was sworn in as the first
President of the United States, while the cheers of

43

44

the people rang in his ears he entered and, with some
awkwardness, spoke to the Congress. During all this
the city was gaily decorated with flowers and wreaths
hanging from the windows and giant paintings of
Washington to mark his coming to the Presidency. To
the people the old General had come to make the nation--
to create a court and a government.1 A few weeks
later the Estates General of France would meet and
begin the long process of taking their government
apart and putting it back together again. Americans,
ironically, cheered as loudly for the French as they
had for George Washington.

From 1789 to 1793 Americans almost as a body
expressed sympathy and approval for the amazing course
of the French Revolution. A time of happy celebra-
tions and toasts to the French, Americans somewhat
smugly wished the French good luck as they began on
the path America had so recently taken. Emotional
poetry and foreign news drove the shipping schedules
and domestic news out of the primitive newspapers of
the day. The general approval was rooted in three
main motivations. First, the Americans had immense

pride in their own revolution and were quick to see

 

lClaude Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton: The
Struggle for Democrapy i3 America (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1925). F. 6-7. Cited hereafter as Bowers.

 

 

45

the French efforts as the extension and vindication

of the revolutionary spirit they had felt in 1776.
This led to the idea that revolution in the name of
freedom was spreading around the world. Second, the
Americans were quick to see that the existence of a
revolutionary France could aid them in preserving and
extending their revolutionary gains. Many Americans
believed that no revolution was safe from counter-
revolution and many believed the aid of the powerful
French would help them preserve their revolution.
Also, the example and ideology of the new revolution
in Europe served as a useful tool against conservatives
at home who wanted to temper the revolutionary spirit.
Third, the French attack on aristocracy and Catholicism
appealed directly to a deep bias in the American mind.
The widespread approval of pre-l793 French reforms in
religion and society were rooted in the predominately
Protestant nature of the United States and nearly

two hundred years of American life without the feudal,
European distinctions of class. It must be noted that
the dominant theme of these early years of approval
was an emotionalism and freedom from anxiety rooted

in the fact that until 1793 the news from France told
of only mild innovations and heroic deeds that most
Americans could accept. With the execution of Louis

XVI, the violence of September 1793 and Genét's

46

blunders in America, approval of the revolution
became much more problematical.

Before these problems became apparent, Americans
felt that there would be a short period of disorder
but authority would soon be restored on a basis which
allowed more individual freedom. Even before the
Estates General met, Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the
man most closely associated with Franco-American
brotherhood, wrote,

The Convulsions in France are attended with some

disagreeable circumstances; but if by the Struggle

she obtains and secures for the Nation its future

Liberty, and a good Constitution, a few years

Enjoyment of those Blessings will amply repair all

the Damages their Acquistion may have occasioned.
Franklin concluded with the hope that the spirit of
revolution would spread to all the lands of the earth.
Both in his disregard for the "disagreeable Circum-
stances" and his hope for the spread of revolution
Franklin touched two basic themes of the American
response to the news from France.

For awhile at least, few cared about the con-

vulsions that always come with revolution, instead

they emphasized the notion of freedom's spread to other

 

2Benjamin Franklin to David Hartley, Dec. 4,
1789 quoted in, Adrienne Koch, ed., The American
Enlightenment (New York: George Braziller, 1965),
p. 107.

 

 

47

parts of the world. Theodore Dwight, who later turned
against the French Revolution, stated that "the fire
of freedom" had been caught from America and "flames
with godlike ardour in the other parts of the earth"
while "the forces of tyranny are consumed by its power,
and the sinews of despotism shrink from before it."3
Dwight made it clear that freedom was not only spreading
to the civilized people of the world, but also to the
most enslaved of all - the blacks. He said "the negroes
of Africa, whose injuries exceed computation, concep—
tion or credulity, behold the day-star of liberty,
rising on the gloomy, and desparate region of slavery."4
Dwight's view was very common, he started an oration
on the revolution in France and progressed easily from
approving that revolt to forecasting the spread of
freedom to all parts of the earth.

Even the conservative newspapers promoted
the idea that freedom was making great advances from
its inception in America. In the autumn of 1789, a

writer in the Gazette pf the United States felt that

 

"liberty will have another feather in her cap. The

 

3Theodore Dwight, Ag Oration Spoken before the
Society pf the Cinncinati, pf the State pf Connecticut,
July 4, 1792. (Hartford: 179277 p. 17.

4Ibid., p. 16.

 

 

 

 

48

seraphic contagion was caught from Britain, - it crossed
the Atlantic to North America — from whence the flame
has been communicated to France."5 Later, in the issue
that reported in great detail the fall of the Bastille,
a Gazette reporter contended that "Europe, from America
has caught the sacred frame of freedom - it has illum-
inated their darkness."6 It was the custom of the
Gazette to print a summary of the year's major events
and this summing up for 1789 was significant. It
began with praise for the new central government in
the United States, ("the dreams of anarchy are no more")
but it also commented that "our enjoyments may justly
be heightened with the reflection that our example
has proven contagious to the Nations of Europe . .
and that they, "under the favor of Providence are now
on the high road to the glorious state of freedom
and just government."7

The feeling that liberty's hour had come was

clearly expressed in the pages of the Massachusetts

 

Mercury. The following paragraph shows that they
were not thinking of only a small advance for freedom,

but rather a world—wide movement.

 

5Gazette pf the United States, Sept. 2, 1789.
6

 

Ibid., Sept. 26, 1789.

7Ibid., Dec. 30, 1789.

49

The flame of liberty, which is now pervading

the European dominions will shortly spread itself
into the remotest corners of the globe: The
galling chain of the tyrant, and the iron rod of
the despot, must vanish at its appearance: proud
Castles and lofty places, with their lordly mon-
archs shall sink together in the general conflaga—
tion: Even the gally slave of Turkey, and the
miserable wretch in the mines of Golconda, shall
feel its powerful ray, and enjoy the rights of
mankind.8

The poets responded with much the same senti-
ments using both newspapers and the spoken word as
mediums. Poetry was a common feature of the early
newspapers and, in general, played a larger role in
the eighteenth century than in the largely poetryless
twentieth century. The often anonymous newspaper
poet found the French Revolution to be a popular sub—
ject. Such poems continued the theme of spreading
liberty and revolution. For example, one poet wrote,

Now freedom is the universal call
The love of freedom, Heav'n inspires in all;
From shore to shore aloud resounds her fame,
And Afric's swarthy sons now bless her name:
Bright, bright from Gaul her silver star ascends,
And every patriot at her altar bends.9

Such poetry was not restricted to newspapers.

The oration was an important aspect of American life

and poetry was often a part of these speeches and

 

8Massachusetts Mercugy, Aug. 20, 1793.

 

9Dunlaps American Daily Advertiser, Jan. 3,
1793.

50

addresses. Noah Webster, during his 1790 "newsboy
address" included this verse on revolution and freedom

Fair LIBERTY, whose gentle sway

First blest these shores has cross'd the sea,
To visit Gallia, and inflame

Her sons their ancient rights to claim.

From realm to realm she still shall fly,

As lightning shoots across the sky,

And tyrants her empire over, 10

And at her feet submit their crown.

Towns commonly set aside a day to celebrate
the French Revolution and often poetry was part of the
festivities. At Plymouth, Massachusetts, Joseph
Croswell presented his poem, "To Liberty", at a civic
feast, January 23, 1793. The people of Plymouth heard
him say,

Hark from the Gallic shore,

Hear the loud cannon roar
Fame's trumpet sounds;

Despotic armies fly,

France gains the victory
Freedom abounds.

See the bright flame arise

In yonder eastern skies

Spreading in veins;

Tis pure Democracy,

Setting all nations free
Melting their chains. 1

 

10Quoted in Harry R. Warfel, Noah Webster:
Schoolmaster pp America (New York: MacMillan, 1936),
p. 200-1.

 

 

llJoseph Croswell, "To Liberty" printed in Chandler
Robbins, An Address Delivered at Plymouth on the 24th, Day
of Januagy, 1793, pp the Inhabitants of that Town: Assem-
bled to Celebrate the Victories of the —French Republic
Over Their Invaders (Boston: 1793), p. 25. Cited hereafter
as Robbins. Croswell's poem was read as part of the
celebration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

51

The poems from the newspapers, Webster and the
Plymouth civic feast were occasional poetry of a very
common type. Such poetry was written rapidly and
served to mark special events. In comparison, more
serious poets responded to the French Revolution with
poems they hoped would have a more permanent place.
Joel Barlow was, to a great extent, responding to the

French Revolution when he wrote his Conspiracy pf Kings.

 

Barlow had spent more time in France and had seen more
of the Revolution than any American and he never gave
up his deep approval of it. He felt the French, by
revolting against their role as "the tyrants sport,/
Machines in war and sycophants at court" had become
men in the true sense and were "lords of themselves
and leaders of mankind."12 Even Royal Tyler, who by
nature had no great love for revolution was happy to
see that America's revolutionary spirit had spread to
Europe.

He [God] taught us to discern

Blest Freedom's sacred plan;

And Europe's kingdoms learn
From us the rights of man

 

12Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus, :9
which is Added the Conspiracy pf Kifigs Paris: 1793),

. 299. Cited hereafter as Conspiragy.

 

 

 

"U

 

52

From us the rights of man
Your voices raise!
To him who broke

Oppressions yoke,
Be Endless praise.

13

In reality, it was almost impossible to separate
serious poetry from daily newspaper fare. Perhaps the
best example of the blending of forms was the work of
Philip Freneau. Freneau was one of the few serious
poets of his time, but even his work was often first
produced for newspapers. For instance, Freneau's first

word on the French Revolution appeared in the Daily

Advertiser of New York. In this poem, entitled "On

 

the Prospect of a Revolution in France", Freneau also
expressed the idea that the United States had provided
the first spark that was growing into a world—wide
conflagation of revolution against tyranny,
From the bright spark which first illumed these lands,
See Europe kindling, as the blaze expands,
Each gloomy tyrant, sworn to chain the mind,
Presumes no more to trample on mankind:
Later, in 1792, Freneau was still writing on the same

theme. In a poem that first appeared in the National

Gazette he saw July 14 as "a Day ever memorable to

 

 

l3Marius B. Peladeau, ed., The Verse pf Royal
T ler (Charlottesville, Vir.: U. of Virginia Press,
1968 , p. l9.

14

Fred Lewis Potter, ed., The Poems pf Philip
Freneau: Poet pf the American Revolution, vol. II,
(Princeton, N. J.: University Library, 1903), p. 385.

 

 

53

Regenerated France" and acknowledged that the United
States was "a partner in thy joy."15
Clearly, the poetry and newspaper opinion
of the day reflected a common feeling and belief about
the French Revolution. Americans felt a pride in what

they perceived as the spread of their revolution to
Europe and they also felt that it was destined to spread
to all parts of the world. If one looks carefully at
this emotional rhetoric there was a deep internal con-
tradiction in it. The image of freedom as an ever
increasing flame or blaze was so common that it was
nearly universal, but in contrast to this, and nearly
as universal, was the belief that both French and
American Revolutions were regenerative not innovative
movements. The emphasis was on the elimination of
monarchy and privilege, not on the new system that
would replace them. Freneau saw the fall of the
Bastille as regenerating France, not freeing her to
create new social and political structures. Thus, as
it became clear that France was going beyond the vague
boundaries of traditional structures in religion,
society and politics this emotional wave of approval

crested and fell.

 

lsIbid., vol. 111, pp. 72—73.

54

The American approval of the French Revolution
was based on more than pride and emotionalism. Many
Americans saw that the situation in France was closely
connected to the situation in the United States. As
the new central government began to function fears
arose that the democratic gains of the revolution
might be eroded. While it was a small matter, the
debate over titles in the Congress was seen by some
as a sign of growing aristocratic tendencies. William
Maclay, the Senator from Pennsylvania, wrote that it
was "strange, indeed, that in the very country, where
the flame of freedom had been kindled . . ." men should
be attempting "to introduce these absurdities and
humiliating distinctions [titles] which the head of
reason, aided by our example was prostrating in
Europe".16 The fear of a rising nobility went far
beyond the fear of titles and indications of rank.

To many people the French Revolution operated against
the creation of an aristocracy in America for a

Freneau's National Gazette claimed "the downfall of

 

Nobility in France has operated like an early-frost

towards killing the germ of it in America".17

 

16The Journal pf William Maclay, (New York:
Albert and Charles Boni, 1927), p. 12. Cited here-
after as Maclay.

17National Gazette, Jan. 19, 1792.

 

 

 

55

Beyond the fear of aristocracy was a more
generalized fear of "absolute power" or "conspiracy
of monarchies" and their intentions toward the infant
American Republic. Twentieth-century Americans often
fail to realize that once the United States was a
relatively weak nation with much to fear from stronger
powers. Yet in the 1790's this was a great concern.
The revolution in France and the prospect of her
becoming a sister republic was seen as a great stroke
of luck. The fact that France had aided the American
Revolution added to the sense of a growing alliance
of republican nations in opposition to the combined
monarchies. The newly formed democratic-republican
societies expressed this sentiment often in their
charters and circulars. For example, a circular of
the Republican Society of Charleston, South Carolina
claimed

The interest of absolute power requires that the
voice of liberty should be heard no more, and in
the event of the overthrow of the French Republic,
the United States, then without ally, ma be
forced to yield to European confederacy.

Nearly every democratic-republican society expressed

a similar sentiment in their constitution or statement

 

18Quoted in Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-
Republican Societies: 1790-1800 (New York: Columbia
U. Press, 1942), pp. 126-127. Cited hereafter as
Link.

 

 

 

56

of principles. Clearly, however, this sentiment was
not lacking in practical and material motivation. The
enthusiasm for the French Revolution, especially in
the West, was partially rooted in the hope that French
success might force England to relinguish the western
forts they held in violation of the Treaty of Paris.19
Of course, when war broke out between the
combined powers of Europe and the French Republic
the issue of the Revolution heated up in America.
The question in the United States was to what extent
should we become involved in this war. The pact of
1778 with France seemed to oblige us to aid France,
yet in many quarters there was a desire to escape that
obligation. The desire was particularly strong in the
executive branch of the government and resulted in the
Neutrality Proclamation of April, 1793. Among the
people there was a strong sentiment to aid France
and hostility toward those who wished to remain neutral.

A writer for the Newark Gazette found the talk of

 

neutrality "curious" and claimed that "the times demand

decision . . . and that neutrality was only aid to

 

19Judah Adelson, "The Vermont Democratic-

Republican Societies and the French Revolution",
Vermont Histopy, vol. 32 (Jan. 1964), p. 6. Here-
after cited as Adelson.

 

57

the anti-French faction "under the specious name of

impartiality."20

The democratic-republican societies
were enraged by the decision for neutrality. They
resolved that any treaties made with a nation that
acts honestly and faithfully toward us "ought to be
inviolably adhered to and guarded from infraction at
every risque . . . ." They also announced that "the
causes of France is our own; that our interest,
liberty and public happiness are involved in her
fate . . . ." For those in America who would not
support France they maintained undisguised hostility,

for any man or set of men, either in private

or public and particularly those to whom the

welfare of our community is intrusted, to

advocate doctrines and principles derogatory

to the cause of France, or her commerce in

America, or in support of the base measures

of the combined despots of Europe, parti-

cularly Great Britain, is a convincing

manifestation of sentiments treacherous

and hostile to the interest of the United

States, and well deserves the severest

censure from all true republican citizens

of America.

The Neutrality Crisis produced one of the first

basic conflicts between the American people and their
government. While the people were animated by a bro-

therly sense of affection and obligation toward France,

the government was forced to act in a strategic and

 

20Newark Gazette, Sept. 4, 1789.

 

21Independent Chronicle, Apr. 8, 1794.

 

58

realistic manner. On one side of the neutrality issue
were those who felt France could aid them in preserving
their revolutionary gains and on the other side were
those willing to abandon the sense of revolutionary
brotherhood in favor of the security and stability

of neutrality. The outcome was predictable; both sides
saw perfidous design in the actions of the other. Those
attached to the government saw foreign influence luring
the people away from their government. The pro—French
element saw the government as the tool of British or
monarchical interests.

The third factor promoting the wave of approval
for the French was a deep bias against what many Americans
saw as the way of life in Europe. In the wake of the
American Revolution suspicion and condemnation of
Europe increased. Many Americans believed that Europe
was riddled with political tyranny and religious error.
In the rhetoric touching on the French Revolution during
the years of 1789-1793 no terms were more common than
despotism, tyranny, religious superstition and the like.
Americans conceived of Europe as opressed by a aris-
tocratic political system and a repressive religious
establishment. The American Revolution had been a major
revolt against both and they thrilled when it appeared
France was doing the same. It should be noted, however,

that the Americans in no way rejected God as a force

59

in history; on the contrary, they often noted that
the French Revolution was another step in the coming
of true religion to the world.

At the head of those who condemned the kings
and priests of Europe was Joel Barlow. He concluded
that soon there would be no more monarchs, no more
titles but rather, the only title would be "Man"

Tis Reason's choice, tis Wisdom's final plan,

To drop the monarch and assume the man.

Hail Man, exulted title! first and best,

On God's own image by his hand imprest;

To which at last the rea'ning race is driv'n, 2
And seeks anew what first it ga1ned from Heav'n.

Barlow felt that all human problems were
rooted in "those prolific monsters Courts and kings."
He saw deference to kings as rooted in a "habit of
thinking." From Barlow's point of View subjects do
not submit to a king because he was born to govern,
or because he was physically or intellectually
stronger, they submit because they were in the habit
of submitting. For him the idea that some were born
to rule and some to be ruled was a dying habit of
thinking and that the National Assembly of France had
expressed the new habit when it claimed "men are born

and always continue free and equal in respect to their

rights."23 Logically, this led him to see the importance

 

23Joel Barlow, Advice 39 the Priviledged Orders,
in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the
Necessipy and Propriety of a General Revolution in E82
Principle of Government, Part 1., (London: 1791),

p. 17- 22. Cited herafter as Advice.

 

 

 

 

60

of education. He wrote that children are taught "to
repeat about fifty Latin prayers" and that this exercise
sets up "the POpe, the Bishop and the King, as the

trinity of his adoration . . . . Children were then

taught that "the powers that pg are ordained 9; God,

 

 

and therefore the soldier quartered in the parish has
the right to cut his throat." Barlow went on to note
that "half this instruction upon opposite principles

would go a great way . . . . for if we teach each

person that "all men are eqpal £2 rights and that the

 

government £3 their own and then persuade him to sell

 

 

his crucifix and buy a musquet . . . you have made

him a good citizen."24 Barlow's continued devotion

to the French Revolution was rooted in his dislike of
priviledged orders and the belief that the Revolution
was bringing a new day of equality and freedom.
Significantly, he was not going to leave the transition
to chance - education was the key.

While Barlow stated his position in lofty
intellectual terms the same general dislike of kings
and priests filled the daily newspapers, public addresses
and private reflection. For many Americans the
Bastille was a symbol of aristocratic outrages and when

it fell Americans saw clearly that the blow had, in

reality, been against the aristocracy.

 

24Ibido’ p. 27-28.

61
Here many a fathom down, despotic rage,
Hung victims in the dreadful cage -

To sooth a mistress, wanton Louis gave 25
To one who dared be just, this lingering grave.

Often Americans saw the monarchy and the
nobility as the cause of the Revolution. For example,
C. Robbins saw "the yoke of monarchical oppression
and ecclesiastical avarice . . ." and the debt created
by the king's greed and the "wanton profligacy of the
court" as the two main causes of the Revolution.26
Robbins felt that amid the applause for the French,
Americans should stop and "drop a tear of commiseration
and sorrow, at some instances of intemperate fervor"
but he immediately excuses this fevor by noting that
"oppression will make a wise man mad."27 The Maryland
Gazette story noted that "the dreadful massacre of the
2nd of September cannot be thought of without horror . . ."
but quickly went on to state that such violence can not
injure the cause of France in the minds of thinking
men because the major cause of that violence was the
intrusion into French affairs by "the conspiring
princes" and that nothing threatened the life of Louis

XVI more than the designs of the united monarchs then

invading France.28

 

 

zsggggppg'gfi the United States, Oct. 14, 1789.
26Robbins, p. 7.
27

Ibid., p. 11.

28Maryland Gazette, Nov. 15, 1792.

 

62

While the newspapers and orators carried on a
running attack against monarchy and aristocracy, William
Maclay, wrote the following in his journal.

By this and yesterdays papers France seems

travailing in the birth of freedom. Her

throes and pangs of labor are violent. God

give her a happy delivery! Royality, No-

bility, and the vile pagentry, by which a

few of the human race lord it over and

tread on the necks of their fellow—mortals

seem likely to be demolished with their

kindred Bastille [sic], which is said to

be laid in ashes. Ye gods, with what indig-

nation do I review the late attempt of

some creatures among us to revive the vile

machineryé9 0 Adams, Adams, what a wretch

art thou!
This unguarded journal entry illustrated not only that
the coming destruction of "Royality, nobility, and
vile pagantry" was wonderful news to Maclay but also
that he saw the return of monarchy and aristocracy to
America as a possibility.

Indeed, after the international war broke out
in 1792 some Americans came to see the struggle as a
conflict between good (the French people) and evil
(the forces of monarchy and aristocracy). Robbins
felt that the "repeated acts of deceit, equivacation
and treachery" by Louis had turned the good people of

France against him. When Louis was deposed the Euro-

pean monarchs were enraged and frightened and attacked

 

29Maclay, p. 151.

63

France. This produced "the brightest part of the
scene . . . a whole nation animated with but one soul . . ."
to repel the attack from outside.30
It was generally believed that the people of
France were ignorant rabble incapable of orderly
political change. Between the years 1789-1793,
Americans often expressed amazement at the virtue
maintained by the French in their revolution. One
newspaper wrote that they had "showed that is possible
for a most dispicable rable [sic] . . . to arise into
the first consequence in the scale of nations . . . ."31
Barlow, for one, found French mobs preferable to English
mobs especially on the "point of indiscriminate
ferocity and private plunder." He wrote, as an eye-
witness that "a popular commotion in Paris was
uniformly directed to a certain well explained object;
from which it was never known to deviate . . . .",
they were composed of "honest and industrious people,
who had nothing in view but the public good."32

The Americans not only saw the French revolting

against political tyranny but also against religious

 

30Robbins, pp. 13-14.

3J'DunlappDailyAmerican Advertiser, Jan. 3,

 

1793.

32Advice, p. 6.

64

superstition and bigotry. God, as defined by Americans,
played a central role in the coming of the Revolution.
Robbins, for example, concluded his 1793 address by
asserting that the French Revolution
. . . affords this pleasing reflection to every
serious and devout mind, that such revolutions,
in the hand of Providence prepare the way for
a more free, rapid, entensive diffusion of the
gospel light and truth, and thereby for the
advancement of that kingdom, which is founded
in benevolence, exalted by righteousness, and
which will be consummated in glory.3
A play written and produced by the students of Dart-
mouth College also illustrated sensitivity to the
religious issue. A French noble in the play expressed
hope that the new France will be like the United
States where
Men assert their native rights:
They know no soverign but the one supreme.

The unshackled mind there wades immensity
Bound to no popish farsical religion.

 

However, while Americans saw "popish farsical
religion" as a target in the Revolution, they also

felt that the era of revolution was part of God's plan.

 

33Robbins, p. 18.

34The French Revolution: Including 3 Story
Founded ip Fact, Leontine and Matilda: A Drama (New
Bredford, Mass.: 1793), p. 9. The play was written
and first produced in 1790 by the United Fraternity
of Dartmouth College.

 

 

 

 

65

The expansion of human freedom was under "the governing

Providence of Jehovah . . . ."35 One unknown poet

wrote:

Thus was he [God] rambling thro' his sphere,

And watching (what he held most dear)

The "rights of man" below;

He saw the chains with which they're bound,

He heaves the groan, the heavggs rebound
"Np_more shall £E.E§ pg."

 

The brief bit of popular poetry above illustrates
the emotional quality of the American response to the
French Revolution. There was a sense of great drama;

a sense of living in fabulous times in which great
historical changes were taking place. Some Americans
sensed that the American Revolution had been the spark
for the events in France and they took great pride in
this. Further, they sensed that the French and American
Revolutions were clear evidence that man was shedding
his age-old chains to embrace a freer life. Many
Americans were glad to see France enter the thin ranks
of republics because then America would not be so alone
in a world of powerful monarchies. Added to this was
the hope that French success would help preserve the

liberty America had gained in her own revolution against

 

35Robbins, p. 4.

36"The Decree 9: pp: SEE; pp, France Regen-
erated. A Poem ip Three Cantos" (Boston: 1793), p. 6.
The title—page lists this work as "The first offering
of a Youth Muse."

 

 

 

66

Great Britain. Finally, the French assault on aris-
tocracy and Catholicism touched a deep prejudice against
those institutions which were so much a part of the
typical American's image of Europe. The conjunction
of these feelings and beliefs created a highly emotional
situation. When the French and the monarchies of
Europe came in conflict the tension in America rose
noticeably. Rumors of French victories or defeats
were daily newspaper items; one of the most persistant
rumors insisted that George Washington was going to
France to lead the revolutionary troops.37 In any
event, early in 1793, the victories by the French at
Valmy and the Duke of Brunswick's retreat were greeted
in America with a round of civic celebrations, meetings
and general approval. During the later stages of 1792
and especially the first half of 1793 the approval
of the French Revolution reached its peak.

Expressions of this approval ranged from wearing
a liberty cap with a French cockade to massive city-
wide celebrations. Those who supported the French

Revolution often showed it by wearing a liberty

cap. The Massachusetts Mercupy said, the liberty

 

 

37South Carolina Gazette July 24, 1793; Concord
N.H. Mirror Nov. 26, 1793; New Haven Conn. Journal
Jan. 2, 1793; Donald H. Steward, The Opposition Press
of the Federalist Period (Albany N.Y.: State U. of
NTY. Press, 1969), p. 119.

 

 

 

 

 

67

caps . . . may well represent a freedom from abject
submission, and a restoration to the rights of man."
They also noted that "the cap is found not to inspire
its wearer with odd notions of superiority, unlike a
crown."38 Joel Barlow found deep significance in the
liberty cap and other revolutionary symbols. He
claimed that their origin was in the phallic symbols
used to worship Osiris in Egypt. He found that they
had later been adopted for the worship of the gods
Bacchus and Liber and were the symbols of freedom

for the bacchanalia. The cap itself symbolized the
stalk of grain growing from the abdomen of Osiris and
he also noted that in Rome the cap had symbolized the
freed slave (the Phrygian cap).39 The historical
accuracy of Barlow's interpretation was not really
important; what was important was the fact that he
linked these revolutionary symbols with past symbols
of total freedom and abandon. Barlow's comments
indicate a key fact about the spirit of the times.
There was a sense that the restraints on man were
breaking down; many associated themselves with this
phenomenon by responding to such symbols as the liberty

pole and cap.

 

38Massachusetts Mercury, Aug. 20, 1793.

 

39From "Genealogy of the Tree of Liberty" in Joel
Barlow's Notebook, Box 4, Barlow Papers. Quoted in Link,
p. 22.

68

The sense of increasing freedom and relaxing
restraint was clearly evident in the civic celebrations
in early 1793. At the celebration in Alexandria,

Virginia the Americans Daily Advertiser reported that

 

"the emotions of those assembled . . . can be conceived
only by being £313." At the festivities there was

much drinking and some of the toasts give an indication
of the mood of the day. They drank to speedy success

for the French Revolution and to the sentiment, may
the flame of Liberty, kindled at the Taper of the
American Revolution, illumine the whole world." In-
cluded in the many other toasts were ones to freedom
of the press and "the Rights of Women".40 In
Carlisle, Pennsylvania bells were rung from three
in the afternoon to nine in the evening and the whole
town agreed to place signs "in large letters legible
at a great distance" over the court house windows -
they read,

1. LET MAN BE FREE

2. TYRANNY IS ABOUT TO CEASE41

 

4ODunlaps American Daily Advertiser, Jan. 3,

 

 

1793.

41Ibid., Jan. 1, 1793.

69

In New York City Tammany Hall rang with toasts and
congradulations to France and this song,
By hell inspir'd with brutal rage
Austria and Prussia both engage
To crush fair freedom's flame;
But the intrepid sons of France
Have led them such a glorious dance
They've turned their backs for shame.
May Heaven continue still to bless
The arms of freedom with success,
Til tyrants are no more;
And still as Gallia's sons shall fly
From victory to victory, 42
We'll, shouting, cry Encore!

Perhaps the largest, and surely the grandest,
of these celebrations took place in Boston on January
24, 1793.43 A group of citizens announced that they
would provide an ox and ample drink to make attending
worthwhile. On the day of the festivities a parade
was formed to escort the ox, whose horns had been
gilded with gold, over 1800 loaves of bread and a
hogshead of punch to the site of the feast. As the

food and drink rolled along on carts the procession

became gradually larger; at one point it stopped at

 

42Columbian Centinel Jan. 9, 1793.

43The discussion of this celebration is based
on several sources. Charles D. Hazen, Contemporary
0 inion pf the French Revolution (Baltimore: John
Hopkins Press, 1897), pp. 165-167; Charles Warren,
Jacobin and Junto (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press,
1931), pp. 46-47; Justin Winsor, Memorial History 9:
Boston (Boston: 1881), pp. 10-12; and the Columbian
Centinel Jan. 23, 24, 25, 26, 1793.

 

 

 

 

 

 

7O

Olivers Dock and re-named it Liberty Square. The ban-
quet took place on State Street where tables stretched
all the way to Kilby Street. In the afternoon a more
sedate banquet for about four hundred was held in
Faneuil Hall presided over by Samuel Adams and the
French Consul. That evening there were fireworks and,
significantly, during the whole day Bostonians were
careful to include the young so as "to impress the
tender minds of the younger generations with the
percepts of equal liberty . . . ." To that end each
youth was presented with a cake impressed with the
words "Liberty and Equality."

In sum, the accounts of the festivities make
it sound like a Boston version of the Bacchanalia.
It was a Boston January and yet the main events were
held outside and it was reported that "bevies of our
amiable and beautiful women, by their smiles and
approbation cast a pleasing lustre over the festive
scene." The presence of the fairer sex was not
enough to prevent the event from ending in a small riot
in which drunken throngs tore the remainder of the ox
apart and, according to reports, threw it in the air
and at the "bevies of . . . amiable and beautiful
women."

The theater became a stage for the expression

of this emotional revolutionary spirit. Gradually,

71

since 1789 the theaters in Boston had adopted the
practice of playing the French Revolutionary songs,

E3 Ira or £3 Marseillaise, before the performances.

 

On several occasions, more conservative patrons had
"politely" objected by hissing and hooting. Such
"Aristocrats" were warned to stop such behavior or
they would be turned out of the theater by the "Sons

"44 It was common for audiences to boo

of Liberty.
anything they perceived as anti-French. On one
occasion, the famous actor Hodkinson appeared in
British uniform and the crowd hissed their disapproval;
Hodkinson turned to the audience and remarked that
he was playing the bully and the hisses turned to
cheers.45

In conclusion, Americans overwhelmingly approved
the early stages of the French Revolution. They felt
a strong sense that liberty, sparked by their revo-
lution, was spreading to Europe and would spread
beyond to the whole world. They also felt the inclusion
of France into the list of republics would help America

maintain their newly won republican system against

enemies both foreign and domestic. Last, the French

 

44Independents Chronicle, Apr. 25, 1792.

 

45Bowers, p. 222.

l(.f. [11.0

72

attack on aristocracy and Catholicism touched an
American bias against these institutions and the pro-
spect of their reduction or destruction in a major
nation such as France provoked great enthusiasm in
America. Also, the conjunction of these three
motivations and the war between France and her mon-
archical enemies produced a wildly emotional display
by Americans.

Too often historians View the impact of the
French Revolution in totally political terms. Typically,
the French Revolution has been characterized as
accelerating indigeneous movements or as bringing
foreign principles to America.46 This emphasis on the
development of political parties and politics in general
has hidden the broader significance of the impact of
the French Revolution. At first it produced a great
roar of approval and in the wake of that approval
came the feeling that restraint was loosening, that
human freedom had broken the chains of tyranny. In
response to this feeling in America and the growing
violence and innovation in France came a strong re-

action in the name of control and limitations on human

 

46R. R. Palmer, The Age 9f Democratic Revolutions,
vol. II, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press, 1964),
p. 509.

 

73

freedom. The roots and growth of that reaction are

the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER III

OPINION SHIFTS

Jacobin, n. the member of a private club to
overturn or manage government, one who opposes
government, in a secret or unlawful manner or
from a unreasonable spirit of discontent

Noah Webster, A Compendious
Dictionary of the English-

Language 71856)

In 1793 American opinion about the French

 

 

 

Revolution began to change. Prior to that year
Americans warmly endorsed the efforts of the
French, although there had been isolated but signi-
ficant grumblings of discontent. After 1793, in
response to an intricate series of foreign and domestic
events, the themes of the earlier criticism of the
Revolution began to have more proponents and received
a wider hearing.

For the most part, these events have been
exhaustively treated by historians, however, no one
has yet investigated their total impact. It is hard,
but profitable, to attempt to assay the meaning and
effect of the following incidents.

l. Genét's visit and public response, 1793.

2. Neutrality Crisis and public response, 1793.

74

75

3. Whiskey Rebellion, 1794.
4. Jay Treaty and public response, 1795.
5. Formation of the Democratic-Republican

Societies, 1793—1795.

6. Execution of Louis XVI and European War,
1793.

7. The Reign of Terror under Robespierre,
1793-1794.

All these events were packed into a relatively short
period of time and were seen in the context of the wild
enthusiasm for the French Revolution prior to 1793

and the problems of launching a new nation in a
revolutionary time.

To a great extent, the response to these events
was a generalized fear and anxiety. While the fear and
anxiety was highly generalized or non—specific there
were certain specific elements in it. A definite fear
of the religious changes coming from France and also
present in America characterized the growing anxiety.
Also, Americans feared that the moral and religious
foundations of good order were in danger and that the
sense of duty to some higher law was weakening. In
close conjunction with the religious fear was the
feeling that French innovations were undermining the
traditional institutions necessary for social order.

Some Americans pressed the fear that marriage, the

76

family and the deferential class system were threatened
and that infidelity, prostitution and rule by the
unfit would characterize the new age.

Closely connected to the fear of social change
was the feeling that the French emphasis on equality
would spread. In the South especially many came to
believe that this equalitarian spirit would swamp not
only the political system in America but also the
racial system. The black uprisings in Santo Domingo
inspired by the French Revolution caused a small
shiver of fear to run through many Americans especially
when they became aware that blacks were capable of
tremendous violence. Most important of all however,
was the fear that all social, political and intel-
lectual cohesion was under attack. This anxiety
encompasses all the other fears into a more general
but also more virulent dread. A feeling arose that
all the past certanties about politics, society and
belief were being eroded and that life was becoming
more relative and less absolute. The rise of factions
both in France and America was important to the develop-
ment of this fear. The idea that groups or individuals
could freely critize the government or the elite and
could transcend national loyality to support France
and the general notion of revolution was seen by many

as heresy. More than a political problem; it was a

77

question of the nature of human freedom and its
limitations. After 1793, the perceived need for social
and political cohesion led many to view the emphasis

on freedom with alarm and to turn to ways of preserving
order and harmony in American society.

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be
two-fold. First, to outline the early pre-1793 criti-
cism and show that it grew into a more widespread mood
of disapproval. Second, this chapter will attempt to
prove that the French Revolution and collateral events
produced a sense of fear and anxiety in America after
1793 and that this fear was central to the turn
against the Revolution.

In the period between 1789 and 1793 most of
the American people found the French Revolution to
be a source of great hope and pride. Mixed in with
this approval however, were some significant grumblings
of discontent and worry about the news from France.
While most Americans saw only the prospect of twenty-
five million Frenchmen in revolt against tyranny some
saw that the revolt threatened more than tyranny.
Subtle fears were expressed and clearly some Americans
hoped that "prudence teach them not to go too far,

nor whelm their country in war".1 Some felt that the

 

1Gazette g: the United States, Jan. 2, 1789.

 

78

comparison between the French and American Revolution

was absurd. A writer in the Gazette pf the United

 

States found a clear difference in the people who
had participated in the two revolutions. The American
Revolution was the product of "the united exertions
of an oppressed people . . ." while the French revolt
was the product of "a frantic populace, who always
clamor against the Government in time of scarcity, and
return to admiration and submission upon the appearance
of plenty . . . ."2
The sceptical attitude regarding the French
people was a common theme in the anti—revolutionary
criticism. Later in the 1790's it grew into a funda-
mental assumption that there was a basic difference
between the French and American people. Gradually
Americans came to see themselves as morally and
politically able to carry on a experiment in repub-
licanism while the French were seen as unfit to be
entrusted with a freer political system. In the
[earlier period, prior to 1793, several important

Americans expressed this belief before it became a

common theme. John Adams grumbled that a nation of

 

2Ibid., Jan. 13, 1790. Reprinted from
Massachusetts Mercury (N.d.).

 

79

atheists could not carry off a successful revolution,3
but perhaps the most persistant holder of this posi-
tion was Gouverneur Morris, the United States ambas-
sador to France during the early revolutionary years.
As he watched the French revolt he concluded that
while they wanted to become like America they did not
realize that their citizens were unlike American
citizens.4 The clear implication was that the French
were too politically inexperienced and too morally
weak to support a social and political system which
provided for more individual freedom. Without
actually saying it both Adams and Morris implied that
the religious nature of the American people was a
key factor in their thinking. They felt that Americans
were restrained by their religious commitment while the
French had no such commitment, only the oppressive
Catholic heirarchy which produced no sense of duty
to higher law but only taught obedience and submission
to the inscrutable and to superstition.

Another aspect of the early negative criticism

of the French Revolution was rooted in the fact that

 

3Edward Handler, America and Europe i3 the
Political: Thought g£_John Adams—ICambridge, Mass.:
Harvard U. Press, 1964), pp. 163-5.

 

 

 

4Cushing Strout, The American Image pf the
Old World (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). P. 43.

 

 

80

the infant American nation had to deal realistically
with the foreign policy implications of the French
revolt and the war that developed from it. In these
considerations there was no room for emotional
attachments or any feeling that ran counter to what
the policy makers saw as national interest. The
United States was in a difficult position, caught in
the continuing struggle between France and England.
The problem was to stay out of the affairs of these
European powers. The 1778 alliance with France was
the greatest problem since it committed the United
States to come to the aid of France in the event of
war. The pact had been formed during the American
Revolution when French aid was essential, but there
had been much anxiety about it since it committed the
United States to involvement in European quarrels.

In 1790, anxiety found its object when the spectre

of a Anglo-French war arose and it became likely that
France might call on America to hold up her end of the
alliance. Alexander Hamilton, Washington's closest
advisor, tried to lay the groundwork for an escape
from those obligations. He argued that France had
aided us not out of any attachment "to our independence
and liberty . . ." but because they sought to diminish

the strength of the British Empire. Hamilton thus

81

concluded that the advantages stemming from the
French aid to America had been mutual and that "the
account is balanced . . . ."5
In the largest sense, Hamilton was simply
playing the role of strategic thinker. He viewed the
revolution in France in cooler terms than most of his
countrymen. He saw that France, because of the revo-
lution, would be difficult to appraise and deal with.
From his point of view he concluded that the change
"from slavery to liberty . . ." might make France
stronger but he also saw that "the ebullitions of
enthusiasm must ever be a precarious reliance."
Thus any calculation of France's future actions "must
be universally fallible . . . ."6 It was important
that Hamilton was so advising Washington in September,
1790. At that time the vast majority of the American
people were shouting their approval of the news from
France and the idea of Franco-American brotherhood
was running rampant. So as early as 1790 one can see
the faint outlines of the impending conflict between

the people and the government which would flare over

Genét, Neutrality and the Jay Treaty.

 

5Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander

 

 

Hamilton (New York: Columbia U. Press, 19657, vol.
VII, p. 43.

6Ibid., pp. 50-1.

82

The sense that the United States had a stra-
tegic interest in the European world was not limited
to the government. A desire to stay out of European
affairs was rooted in American colonial history but
this desire had other elements. A letter reprinted
in several newspapers in 1790 goes to the heart of the
matter.

Happily situated out to the vortex of this
secene of pell-mell, havoek [sic] and con-
fusion every principle of interest must
induce the United States to observe a
strict neutrality - and by cultivating

the earth, and the arts of peace, become

a granary to supply the wants of the

elder world and an asyslum to its un-
happy citizens.7

Such a statement reflected several strong
currents in the American mind, especially the feeling
'that America was distinct from Europe and must remain
that way. It also subtly illustrated the pro-agrarian,
anti-urban bias that was part of the desire to reject
the over-urbanized (from the American point of view)
Europe. Again there was a conflict within American
opinion, while most Americans were deeply involved in
the universal issues of the French Revolution there
was also the belief that they were none of their con-

cern. At the crux of the matter was a simple question -

was America involved in the world and its problems or

 

7Maryland Gazette, Sept. 9, 1790. Reprinted
from "a Boston paper".

83

by some special dispensation had they been separated
from the rest of the world to serve as "a granary"

and "an asyslum". The celebrations and general approval
of the French Revolution before 1793 indicated that

many Americans rejected the idea of an isolated America
and willingly were caught up in world affairs but
beneath this was muted but important evidence of an
opposite inclination toward isolationism.

While the question was important in the early
criticism of the French Revolution it was only a part
of a larger theme. The desire to stay aloof from
European affairs was rooted in a desire for order and
harmony. America had just emerged from several de-
cades of turmoil and change and the desire for a
stabilization period was deep and profound. The most
important aspects of this early disaproval derived
from and appealed to this need. The Gazette 9: £23.

United States, for example, printed a remarkable piece

 

on the French Revolution by an Englishman during the
summer of 1790. In most cases it ran next to John

Adams' Discourses pp Davila and presented a unique

 

contrast to the scholarly, slightly ponderous opin-

ions of Adams. The author, J. Countenay, was alarmed
by "the dangerous and rapid progress of democracy in
France." Democracy, in his View, ran counter to "the

political truth, confirmed by the ages that the

84

tranquility and happiness of a well regulated community
can only be maintained by implicit obedience and uncon-
ditional submission."8

From this basic position, Countenay goes on
to show that France was tampering with the eternal
verities of human existence. First, he purposed that
the Christian religion was dead in France and that
"the National Assembly have covertly and insidiously
introduced a system of atheism in its stead."9 As
evidence for this conclusion he cited the seizure of
church land and church revenue to aid the poor.10
Second, he claimed that "a new sect of philoSOphers"
had appealed to the common man and "have had perverted
their understandings and corrupted their morals . . ."
by leading them to neglect the mysteries and complex—
ities of theology in favor of a simple belief in

11 The opinions of these philosophers

"nature's God."
were presented in the form of novels "amidst the
feigned adventures and passionate endearments of

lovers" and this added to their influence. He listed

 

8Aug. 11, 1790.

9Aug. 14, 1790.

lOIbid.

11Aug. 18, 1790.

85

Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau as the main villians
who had "with combined force assailed and unsettled

the consecrated opinions of the ages."12

Third, he
was alarmed by the growing disregard for chasity and
celebacy. He was particularly anxious that the people
would no longer have the sublime sexlessness of the
monks and nuns as an example since he understood they
had been released from their vows. Fourth, Countenay
sought to alert his readers by pointing out that France
was going to attack the institution of slavery. In
his view, "it is our indispenable duty to accomplish
the divine predications of Noah, and hold Ham's de-
scendents in chains forever." Since the National
Assembly had sought "to weaken the credibility of this
sacred history, by emancipating the negroes," Countenay
suggested that all slave ships be supplied with Bibles
so the negroes could be informed of their position
in the Bibical scheme of things.1

While Countenay was an Englishman his position
was significant for American opinion in that Fenno,
editor of the Gazette, saw fit to print it and that

Americans read it. Clearly much of what Countenay had

to say hit a nerve in many Americans. His position

 

lzIbid.

13Aug. 18, 21, 1790.

86

was similar to the Puritan stance on sensuality and on
literature while his defense of slavery had been a

standard one in the South for many years. The Discourses

 

gp_Davila by John Adams, which appeared at the same
time in the same paper, has received considerable
attention, while Countenay's treatise no doubt has
been neglected as the work of a crank. The arch-
conservative opinions of Countenay may have received
a wider hearing than those of Adams. Countenay was
one of those conservatives who took wild swings at
the historical changes around him and in so doing
became a precursor of similar activities by native
Americans later in the decade.

Countenay was not the only writer in the
British Isles to have an impact on American opinion.
Edmund Burke, defender of the American cause in 1776,
added to the defense of the established order with

his Reflections pp the Revolution ip France. Published

 

 

originally in England in November of 1790, Reflections

 

quickly found its way to America. John Adams was

praising it in the spring of 179114 and soon it was

a common topic of discussion.15 Burke was the ideal

 

14Journal 9: William Maclay (New York: Albert
and Charles Boni, 1927). p. 243.

15Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time with

 

 

Reminiscences g; the Men and Events gifthe Revolution
Philadelphia: Littell, 1846), p. 358. Cited hereafter

as Graydon.

 

 

 

87

spokesman for the conservative position. He was seen
as a defender of the American Revolution and thus
avoided the stigma of Tory, but more important he had
the tools of a propagandist. Among these tools was
an excellent and highly emotional style and the instinc-
tive sense of what appealed to man's need for order
and peace. His work appealed to those, like John
Adams, who were seeking stability for the new nation.
Such men liked Burke's insistence that one should not
pass judgment on the events in France until it became
clear how the "new liberty . . . had been combined
with government; with public force; with discipline
and obedience of armies; with the collection of . . .
revenue; with peace and order; with civil and social
manners." Burke claimed that "all these . . . are

good things too . . . and without them this new free-
dom was not progress and would not last.16

From this firm stand in favor of order Burke
moved on to show that the French Revolution was indeed
an enemy to order. He was not against change but he
was against change that did not take its form from

the example of history. He held up the English

Constitution and its transformations as the model

 

16Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, Reflections
pp the Revolution ip France and The Rights 9: Man
(Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1961), p. 20.

 

 

 

88

for orderly progress and expressed the hope that any
future changes "will be carefully formed upon the
analogical precedent, authority, and example."17
France, he saw, had ignored precedent and was trying

to create a government out of new cloth. One of the
basic precedents the French had ignored was the central
role of religious sentiment in the establishment of

new governments. He claimed that when other nations
have created a new government they have secured some
measure of peace and order "by establishing originally,
or by enforcing with greater exactness some rites or
other of religion." France, in his View, had failed

to do this and by this failure had "doubled the license"

so common in periods of change.18

Change in political
sentiments was difficult enough when regligious senti-
ments remained steady but Burke was obviously frightened
by the changes in both politics and religion. Without
stability in one area the prospects for the future

were grim. On a variety of fronts, Burke appealed

to the innate sense of order in the Americans who read
his work. He wrote that "hair-dressers and tallow-

chandlers should not be oppressed by the state . . .

 

l71bid., p. 43.

lBIbid., p. 50.

89

but neither should they be allowed to rule for if such
people should come to power "you are not combating
prejudice, you are at war with nature."19 Burke saw
government as a restraint on the passions of men and
this restraint was only effective if the power came

from outside themselves. The power to restraint passion
can not be "subject to that will and to those passions
which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this
sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties,

"20 Both the

are to be reckoned among their rights.
attack on equality and the defense of a restrainting
power outside men made a strong appeal to those in
America who believed in the deferential system and

the idea that man was not fit to entirely rule him-
self.

Perhaps Burke's position rested most completely
on an appeal to what might be called the conservative
emotional matrix. The arguments for the centrality
of precedent, for religion as a control, for govern-
ment as a restraint and the attack on leveling or
equality all served to bolster the flagging conser-

vative cause in a revolutionary time. The appeal to

the emotions hit its highest note when it dealt with

 

lgIbid., p. 62.

20Ibid., pp. 72073.

90

women, children and the past. One of the emotional

peaks of the book was the indignate criticism of the
rough handling of the king, queen and her children.

He saw ominous meaning in this -

. . . the age of chivalry is gone - that of
sophisters, oeconomists and calculators, has
succeeded: and the glory of Europe is
extinguished for ever. Never, never more,
shall we behold that generous loyality to
rank and sex, that proud submission, that
dignified obedience, that subordination of
the heart, which kept alive even in servitude
itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.

From this point Burke looked to the future
where he saw all absolutes dissolved, all stability
vanished and the roots of life gone.

No certain laws, establishing invariable
grounds of hOpe and fear, would keep the
actions of men in a certain course, or
direct them to a certain end. Nothing
stable in the modes of holding property,
or exercising function, could form a solid
ground on which any parent could speculate
in the education of his offspring, or in a
choice for their future establishment in
the world. No principles would be early
worked into the habits.22

Fear of a relative world without certainties or pattern
coincided with the faith of many conservatives. Later,
Americans would turn against the French Revolution for

the very reason that it seemed to destroy the old

 

ZlIbid., pp. 88-89.

221bid., p. 109.

91

absolutes and rendered every opinion or practice equally
valid.

Of nearly equal interest to Reflections was

 

the storm of controversy that followed in its wake.
Thomas Paine almost immediately responded to Burke
with The Rights g£_Man. Soon the conflict between
Paine and Burke was a staple of discussion. Paine
was, like Burke, able to speak to Americans with some
favorable credentials. He was remembered as a hero
of the revolution and no doubt received a wider hearing
because of that service to America. While Burke had
argued for the maintainance of traditional absolutes
that bound all generations, Paine claimed that no
such absolutes existed. In Paine's view,
That which a whole nation chooses to do, it has
a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where does
the right exist? I am contending for the rights
of the living, and against their being willed
away, and controlled and contracted for, by the
manuscript assumed authority of the dead; and
Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of thS
dead over the rights and freedom of the living. 3
Paine, in this statement, by using the dualism
of "living" and "dead" argued for what Burke feared
so much - the banishment of tradition to the ashcan

of irrelevancy. Paine chose his words carefully, it

would seem that by "authority of the dead" he means

 

23Ibid., p. 278.

92

tradition and if he had used that word his position
would have lost supporters. In the end, however, the
Paine - Burke conflict is fundamentally concerned with
the nature of truth. Paine claiming that truth is
the creation of each generation while Burke held to
the view that certain truths were absolute and that
each generation can only make changes with these
principles as a guide.

In America, John Quincy Adams came to the
defense of Burke's position. This defense took the
form of a series of letters which appeared in $22.

Columbian Centeniel in the summer of 1791. These

 

letters were part of the widening split between
Jefferson and John Adams. Jefferson believed that
they were written by John Adams and were, at least
in part, an attack on Jefferson's support of Paine's
work. Jefferson had added a note to the American

edition of The Rights pg Man in which he claimed Paine's

 

book would answer "the political heresies that have
sprung up among us."24 In the first letter John Quincy
Adams criticized Jefferson for seeing heresy when

there was none and for trying to force political

orthordoxy on the American people.25 In sum, the

 

24Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., The Writings
pf John Quincy Adams, vol. I (Letter I), p. 67. Cited
hereafter as JQA Writings.

251bid., p. 68.

 

 

 

93

episode was evidence that at least the Adams family
was not going to accept the standard version of the
French Revolution and that they perceived in Jefferson
a man willing to accept the French doctrine they were
slowly coming to fear.

After the first letter which dealt with these
personal and political anomosities, John Quincy Adams
turned to a consideration of Paine's work. Most
significantly, he found that Paine's main point was
that "what a nation chooses to do, it has a right
to do."26 Adams disagreed in terms that Burke would
have liked; the younger Adams claimed "the eternal
and immutable laws of justice and of morality are

"27

paramount to all human legislation. So in other

words there were absolutes that transcend the flux

of coming and going generations and these "immutable

laws" must be obeyed. He had a fear of government

that did not ascribe to these laws -
If a majority thus constituted [in a representative
body] are bound by no law human or divine, and
have no other rule but their sovereign will and
pleasure to direct them, what possible security

can any citizen of the nation hgye for the protec-
tion of his unalienable rights?

 

26Ibid., (Letter II), p. 70.

27Ibid.

28Ibid., pp. 70—71.

94

Behind this fear was an equal fear and distrust
of the people and especially the lower classes. He
felt relief that America had only a few such peOple,
or as he put it ". . . it is the happiness of Americans
scarcely to be able to form an idea . . ." of this
class of men. In both France and England, such classes
"can not be considered free agents, and therefore are
neither the subjects of praise or blame . . . ." They
can be aroused to action only "upon no other principles
than those of a frantic enthusiasm and ungovernable
fury . . .," and thus they are "the proper tools for
any man who can inflame their passions . . . they have
nothing to lose by the disolation of civil society . . . ."29

Fear of the people and the fear that the "immut-
able 1aws" were losing out were clearly connected. If
man gave up his attachment to these laws then only the
opinions and power of the isolated man would be left.
There would be no control on the fury of the vast bulk
of mankind and passion would reign. In America he
believed that the people possessed the "gentleness

"30

of manners and habits of virtue . . . in sufficient

amounts to allow them to enjoy their natural rights

 

29Ibid., (Letter V), p. 82.

30Ibid., (Letter VIII), p. 95,

95

and still maintain order in the land. Such was not
the case in France, they did not have these qualities
and they certainly lacked the religious restraint
found in America. Thus, in Adams' mind, France was
headed for chaos. The French people were not ready
for American-style freedom.

The deepest theme of this pre-l793 criticism
was the real fear that human freedom was expanding
past the safety point. Countenay, for example, feared
that the new freedom threatened the traditions of the
church, the family and race relations. He saw the
French Revolution as creating new doctrines of liberty
that overturned old restraints. With Burke, there
was the concern for tradition, the tradition of Old
Europe, which seemed to hold men in check. John Quincy
Adams felt much the same way. He saw that French
innovations might conflict with his "immutable laws."
More than any specific cause it was this vague dread
of relativism that motivated their work. Perhaps
their deepest fear was of a world with no deference,
no elite and no certainities - of a world in which
opinion, propaganda and discord had replaced final
absolute judgment and eternal order.

After 1793, these and other doubts gradually
become more widespread. No fine lines can be drawn

concerning so illusive a subject as fear, but beginning

96

with 1793 and progressing on to the end of the decade
Americans, building on the earlier criticism, became
generally more anxious and apprehensive about the
French Revolution and its implications.

To begin with, Americans became alarmed about
the religious changes taking place in France, especially
after the Jacobins came to power in June, 1793. In
1814 Lyman Beecher looked back on this period and
after discussing the general decline of churches in
the later part of the eighteenth century he claimed
that French Revolution "brought to our shores contagion
and death." A spirit was created in which "no maxims
were deemed to wise to be abandoned, none too horrid
to be adopted, no foundation too deep laid to be torn
up, and no superstructure too venerable to be torn

down . . . . The outcome was "a brood of infidels,

heretics and profligates . . . who responded to

every new idea in religious matters.31
One of the people to respond quickly to the

religious changes in France was Noah Webster. In

Webster's view the French had substituted "atheism

and materialism" for Christianity. As evidence for

 

31Quoted in Vernon Stauffer, New England and
the Bavarian Illuminati (New York: ColumbiEiU. Press,
1918). pp. 101-102.

 

 

97

this conclusion he cited the fact that France
"acknowledged no doctrine except that of national

sovereignity and omnipotence" and that France had

 

 

also decreed death to be only "an everlasting sleep."
He found this position on death to be "an explicit
denial of the immortality of the soul and the
establishment of materialism by law."32
Webster attempted to put the religious sit-
uation in France into a larger context. Before 1789
the French, he believed, were torn between the false
religion of Catholicism and atheism; the one holding
its "mock devotions at Nortre Dame"; the other
celebrating with "revels of prostitution." The
Revolution, in Webster's mind, began as an attack
on political evil but soon found religious error
mixed with politics. So instead of carefully cutting
away the error Robespierre and the Jacobins "waged

an inveterate war with Christianity."33

The impor-
tance Webster placed on the religious factor was
indicated by the organization of his essay "Revolution

in France, Considered in Respect to its Progress and

 

32Noah Webster, "The Revolution in France
Considered in Respect to its Progress and Effects",
in A Collection 9: Papers pp Political Literary and
Moral Subjects (New York: Webster and Clark, 1843),
p. 10. The essay originally appeared in 1794. Cited
hereafter as Revolution Considered.

33

 

 

 

 

Ibid.

98

and Effects". His purpose in this essay was to deter—
mine the effect of the Revolution on a variety of
areas such as the national debt, agriculture and
commerce but most of these areas were dealt with in
a few vague paragraphs. The subject of the Revolution's
effect on "Religion" and "Morality" moved him to nearly
twelve pages of discussion.
William Cobbett, the transplanted Englishman,

who was perhaps the most vocal propagandist against
the French Revolution, attacked the French for their
religious eXperiments. He saw such innovations as
a conscious plot to harden the hearts of the lower
classes,

they were to be rendered brutal; all fear of

the hereafter was to be rooted from their souls,

before they could be instruments in the hands

of the hellish Assembly. With this object in

View, they declared our blessed Lord and redeemer

to be an Imposter, forbade the acknowled ement

of him and the exercise of his worship.3

Even the realistic and somewhat callous hearted

Alexander Hamilton claimed to be horrified by the
religious heresay in France. After reviewing "the

disgusting Spectacle of the French Revolution . . ."

he found it hard to ignore "those features of it which

 

34Peter Porcupine (William Cobbett), The Bloody

Buqy Thrown Out . . . (Philadelphia: 1796), p. 232.

 

 

99

betray a plan to disorganize the human mind itself,

as well as undermine the venerable pillars — that

support the edifice of civil society." He concluded

that the French have tried "to destroy all religious

opinion, and to pervert a whole nation to atheism."35
The fear of the religious change in France

went beyond political divisions. While men such as

Hamilton, Cobbett and Webster might have had political

reasons for their religious views such was not the

case with Samuel Adams. In general, Adams was a

staunch supporter of the French Revolution and polit-

ically far to the left of Hamilton and Webster yet

he also found the news of radical religion in France

disturbing. In his 1794 Fast Day proclamation he

expressed the hope that God might return the French

"to a spirit of wisdom and true religion . . . ." He

hoped France would rely on God in their quest for a

just government but "above all" Adams wanted the religion

of Jesus Christ in its true spirit to spread far and

wide "till the whole earth shall be filled with His

glory."36

 

35Richard B. Morris, ed., Alexander Hamilton
and the Founding 9: the Nation (New York: Harper and
Row, 1957), p. 431. Cited hereafter as Morris.

36

 

 

 

Independent Chronicle, Mar. 6, 1794.

 

I (I (II ‘.l\l u.‘

100

Anxiety about religious change was not isolated
from the other issues. For one thing, men like Hamilton
felt that some form of religious belief was necessary
for the maintainance of society. So in this respect
religion was part of the larger question of order and
restraint in society. Religion was a power outside
man that kept him in line and insured a measure of
restraint on his passions. Without such restraint
man's passions and cravings might be released and
this fear of the repressed devils in man's soul
caused much anxiety.

The social institutions of the family and
marriage were also seen as restraints. When Americans
saw that these institutions were under attack in
France they responded much as they had to religious
innovations. Noah Webster felt that the people of
France "are let loose in the widefield of mental
licentiousness." One aspect of this licentiousness
which upset him was the new laws on divorce in France,
which offered "allurements to infidelity."37 Hamilton
also found the changed divorce laws disturbing; he
was also incensed by the fact that "the journals of
the convention record with guilty applause the accusa-

tions preferred by children against their parents."38

 

37Revolution Considered, p. 19.

 

38Morris, p. 430.

101

The fear for the existence of traditional
social arrangements went far beyond the issue of
marriage and family life. To begin with, there was
a growing fear of the equalitarian movement in France.
Chauncy Goodrich wrote his friend Oliver Wolcott Jr.
"our greatest danger is from the contagion of levelism
. . . what folly is it that has set the world agog
to be all equal to French barbers."39 The apprehen-
siveness about equality, however, was almost never
so Clear cut, often it appeared as a vague uneasiness
about the French Revolution in general. For example,
Alexander Grayden found that in "this rage for French
liberty and fraternity, there has been all along an
utter disregard of the most obvious dicates of justice,
humanity and consistency." In attempting to expand
on this vague sentiment he notes "that 32 $53 was the
word, and no matter by what monsters the business was
conducted." He was upset by the fact that power had
become "the criterion of right" and that while the
French were attempting to make "a huge republic of
the world, wherein all men were to be equal . . ."

those men who did rise to power did so by "their

intellectual acuteness in the acquistion of pelf,

 

39Quoted in Richard B. Morris, Emerging Nations,

 

p. 68.

102

or popular suffrage . . . without question to super-
iority among men!"40 Grayden was clearly struggling
with something he found difficult to understand and
deal with. Deference was a keystone of American
society at the time and it was so ingrained that
any challenge to deferential arrangements came as
a profound shock.

The issue of names and titles illustrates
the nature of the social fear generated by the French
Revolution. Noah Webster maintained that while the
French dealt with feudal and papal systems their cause
was just but "when they descended to legislate upon
REESE! opinions and customs . . . they became contemp-
tible . . . ." While he felt that some changes would
be just and necessary, he was shocked "that the common
titles of civility and respect should be attacked . . . "
Webster cited the abolition of Monsieur and Madame
as evidence of French disregard for the animities of
the deferential system. He strongly objected to the
use of the term "citizen" in the place of deferential
titles. For him, "citizen" was a badge of distinction
just as the feudal titles had been. He kept the

reasons for this assertion to himself, yet one can

 

4OGraydon, p. 370.

103

surmise that citizen and, its female counterpart
citness, implied an equality of persons that he was
unwilling to accept.

French innovations such as the term "citizen"
made some headway in America. By 1793, however, there
was clearly a counter—attack on such practices. The

Columbian Centinel published the following satirical

 

poem on the use of the term citness,
No citness to my name, I'll have, says Kate,
Though Boston lads so much about it prate;
I've asked its meaning, and our Tom, the clown,
Says darn it 't means "women of the town."42
In this simple popular poem was the essence of the
attack on the revolutionary French social theory.
From 1793, many Americans tried to show that French
ways were clearly and simply immoral.

In the United States the characterization of
the French as immoral was reflected in a growing social
division between the supporters of France and those
who were shocked by the news of violent excesses. In
effect, the French Revolution became the issue on which
society turned. In Washington's administration the

social life reflected this view of "the Jacobins"

(American version) as ill-mannered and beyond the pale.

 

41Revolution Considered, p. 15, 21.

 

42Columbian Centinel, Mar. 16, 1793.

 

104

Martha Washington openly denounced "the filthy
democrates" and her example was followed by Mrs.
William Bingham and Mrs. Robert Morris, leaders of
the younger and older Federalist social sets, both
of whom made it a strict practice to exclude Repub-
lican gentlemen from their social affairs.43 Theophilus
Parsons remembered that, as a child, he believed
Jacobins were monsters and that once there was a great
stir in the house because a Jacobin was coming to dinner.
Parsons recalled that he had experienced both a great
fear of the monster and an equal desire to see such
a creature.44

The cane fields of Santo Domingo were far
removed from the social whirl of Washington but the
black uprising in the French island colony was
connected to the growing concern about the social
implications of the French Revolution. The situation
in Santo Domingo prior to the Revolution was tense.
Approximately 40,000 whites controlled nearly 500,000
blacks and the situation was further complicated by

divisions between the rich and poor whites and between

 

43Chester McArthur Destler, Joshua Coit:

American Federalist (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
U. Press, 1962), p. 56.

 

 

4Memoir 9: TheOphilus Parsons (Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1859), p. 108.

 

105

the free mulattos or EEEE ge couleur and the black
slave pOpulation. On May 15, 1791, the Constituent
Assembly of France granted citizenship rights to free
mulattoes, causing isolated black revolts and the
decree was revoked on September 24, 1791. News of

this was the cause of further rioting and in April

of 1792, with the Girondins in power both mulattoes

and free blacks were given the same political rights

as whites. Three commissioners were sent to the island
to inforce the April decree. Soon the ruthless com-
missioners came into conflict with the new governor

of the island, General Galband, as a result Galband
agreed to return to France but before he could sail

his men were insulted by some mulattoes. This touched
off armed conflict between Galband's forces and the
commissioner's troops and as Galband gradually gained
the upper hand the commissioners, in desperation, opened
the city to the blacks and this started a general
massacre. Thousands of whites fought to board the

few available ships and on June 23, 1792 they sailed
for the United States. They brought with them not only
the story of horrible blood baths but, more importantly,
they came with news of what the French Revolution was

all about.45

 

45Winthrop D. Jordon, White Over Black: American
Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1969), pp. 376-77. Cited hereafter as White Over

 

 

 

106

To Americans "Santo Domingo assumed the character
of a terrifying volcano of violence . . . ."46 for while
a single black revolt was bad this was worse because it
dragged on for years. Even this was not the most terrible
part, in Santo Domingo the blacks had been successful
"and for the first time Americans could see what a com-
munity really looked like upside down."47
The vision of a black dominated island was only
part of the anxiety Americans felt in response to the
events in Santo Domingo. There was also fear about
what influence the Santo Domingo situation would have
on American race relations. The fear was made all too
real by the influx of emigres from Santo Domingo. There
was a great outpouring of charity for the white exiles.
The United States Congress appropriated fifteen thou-
sand dollars, against the debt to France, for the use
of those fleeing the island. The city of Baltimore
produced twelve thousand dollars while New York built

a hospice on Vesey Street to shelter the homeless

exiles.48 There was quite another type of greeting

 

Black. Francis 8. Childs, French Refuges Life $2 the
United States, 1790—1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1940), pp. 13-18. Cited hereafter as Refugee Lifg.

46

 

 

White Over Black, p. 380.

 

47Ibid.

48Refugee Life, pp. 85-87.

 

107

for the blacks who came either with their masters or
alone. In 1793, Georgia barred the admission of free
Negroes from the West Indies and South Carolina followed
suit in 1794. In North Carolina all Negroes over
fifteen years old were denied entry into the state.
Maryland dealt with those slaves who succeeded in
entering the state by passing a law that called for
the arrest of any disorderly French slaves and their
removal from Maryland by their owner. If the owner
refused to remove the slave the state had the right
to sell the slave back to the West Indies.49
Behind these laws was the great fear that
slaves and free blacks from Santo Domingo would spread
the French revolutionary doctrines of equality and
freedom among the American black population. It was
reported in the newspapers "that the NEGROES have be-
come very insolent . . ." and that citizens in the
South were keeping the militia on constant guard. The
cause of this new outbreak of insolence, it was agreed,
was the fact "that the St. Domingo negroes have sown
"50

these seeds of revolt . . . . In response to this

contagion the slave codes in the South were tightened

 

49White Over Black, p. 382.

 

50New York Journal and Patriotic Register,
Oct. 16. 1793. Quoted White Over Black, p. 381.

 

 

108

to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas. In South
Carolina, gatherings of blacks for worship or educa-
tion were prohibited before dawn and after dark.51
There also developed a movement to end the slave trade.
To many in the South, the slave trade came to be the
method of introducing dangerous ideas to America and

by ending it they did not invision the end of slavery
but rather the sealing of America against notions of
black equality and revolt. In fact, the events in
Santo Domingo were a severe blow to the small aboli-
tionist movement in the United States. The movement
was caught between its impulse toward abolition and

its reluctance to support violence. In the end the
abhorrance of violence proved a stronger sentiment

and by late 1790's the antislavery movement was clearly
52

being weakened by the news from Santo Domingo.

In August 1789, the Gazette 9f the United

 

States had pronounced that "among the innumberable
advantages derived to the world from the revolution
in America . . ." was the beginning of a profound

feeling in favour of a movement "to vindicate the

rights, and redress the accumulated injuries of the

 

natives of Africa."53
51Ibid., p. 383.
52Ibid., pp. 379-80.
53

Gazette pf United States, Aug. 29, 1789.

 

109

They called for France, England and Spain to join in
this movement and aid the spread of freedom to their
black brothers. When this sentiment returned to the
United States, via France and Santo Domingo, it was
apparent that they had not been totally sincere.

In reality, the anxiety about racial turmoil,
religious and social change that began to appear in
America in 1793 was only part of larger, more inclusive
fears. Americans responded to specific events in
France as they happened and this might lead to seeing
the total reaction to the French Revolution as a series
of unconnected responses. But in truth, there was a
more general and more important reaction. Many Americans
began to exhibit a fear for the cohesion and order of
their society. They came to feel that the legimate
bounds of human liberty had been reached and that the
very existence of civil society was threatened. To a
large extent, this fear was rooted in their interpre-
tation of certain domestic events but it was never
detached from the vision they constructed of the
French Revolution. They saw, both in France and the
United States, the coming of relativism and the decline
of the absolute doctrines that had existed for so
long. No longer were government decrees submissivly
accepted, no longer were government officials free

from the scandalous satire and criticism and perhaps

110

most important, the events of the middle 1790's seemed
to say that every voice was of equal weight and that
the hierarchical system, in all its ramifications,

was being profoundly challenged. John Quincy Adams
was talking about more than politics when he wrote

his mother and said that France suffers most from one
error; "the unqualified submission and the unwise

veneration for gpinion publique . . . ." He felt no

 

nation could function by the dictates of the people

and that if any nation tried to operate that way it

would be "inconsistent with any regular permanent

system of government or of policy."54
One important event that stirred the anxiety

of Americans was the visit of the revolutionary minister

from France, Edmund Genét. Closely connected to Genét

was the fundamental threat to the government's Neutrality

Proclamation and the desire to stay uninvolved in the

European war. To those in the government and their

supporters Genet seemed like the Devil come to Amer-

ican shores. He stirred the people to turn against

the express policy of their government and he was, in

sum, the sower of fragmentation and pluralism and the

destroyer of unity and harmony.

 

54JQA Writings, vol. I, p. 210.

 

111

Before Genét uttered a word against the govern-
ment he seemed to pose a threat to order. He landed
in Charleston, South Carolina and staged a triumphant
march to Philadelphia. Along the way he was greeted
by enthusiastic throngs of Americans who expressed
their support of him and France. He had been dropped

at Charleston by the ship l'Ambuscade which sailed

 

to Philadelphia to announce Genét's arrival. The

ship itself seemed as threatening as Genét. It was

a floating propaganda machine with the foremast em-
blazoned with the motto "Enemies of equality, reform
or tremble!". The bow and stern figures both wore
liberty caps as did the top gallant mast and on the
main mast was written "Freeman, behold, we are your
friends and brethren". Finally, toinsure that every-
one knew she was a warship, the mizzen mast carried
the words "We are in arms to defend the rights of

55 The reception of Genét was looked on by some

man".
as a clear indication of future trouble. Alexander

Grayden saw the whole affair as "hugging and tugging

 

. . .addressing and caressing!" and a perfect example

of "sans culotte foolery!". But more important he

wrote, that from the start ". . . it was evident that
55

National Gazette, July 10, 1793.

 

112

the government was to be forced from its neutrality. . . ."
He thanked God that Washington had control of the govern-
ment and that he had turned back "the rage for universal
republicanism . . . ."56
Soon Genét took steps that were aimed at forcing
the United States from the policy of neutrality.
Bolstered by the pro-French response of the people,
Genét set out to make the United States a base from
which pirvateers could prey on British shipping. He
issued commissions to American citizens and used
American ports to outfit ships. Gradually the hos-

tility of the government grew and when Genét was re-

quested not to send the Little Sarah to sea he became

 

outraged and reportedly said he would appeal to the
people over the government. Apparently, Genét had been
influenced by his popularity among the people and led
by this to believe that the people would support France
rather than their own government.57 There was some
basis for this view besides the thunderous welcome

he had recieved. Since his arrival Genét had been

part of the running critique of the Neutrality Pro-

clamation. For example, the National Gazette felt

 

 

56Graydon, pp. 363-4.

57John C. Miller, The Federalist Era 1789-1801
(New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 137-41. Cited
hereafter as Federalist Era.

 

 

113

that Genét should "act with firmness and with spirit . . ."
since "the people are his friends, or the friends of
France, and he will have nothing to apprehend; for as

yet, the people are sovereign in the United States."58
In any event, Genét issued a challenge with his brash-
ness and revolutionary ardor. In substance, his actions
asked who ruled in America, the government or the
people.

The question was answered quickly by the govern-
ment when Washington asked France to recall Genét, which
they did in exchange for the American recall of Gouver—
nor Morris. This mutual recall, however, by no means
settled the question. Genét and the general opposi-
tion to neutrality had stirred the feelings of those
attached to order and government. They announced that
neutrality was "the law of land" and that "surely it
is the spirit of cavil or design" to claim that
Washington was acting out of anything but the purest
motives.59 William Cobbett asked what else could
Americans expect from a French minister "educated in
the subaltan walks of the most intriguing court in

EurOpe . . . versed in all the menial offices of

 

58National Gazette, July 10, 1793.

 

59Massachusetts Mercury, Aug. 16, 1793.

 

114

corruption . . . ."60 There were celebrations in

favor of neutrality that mirrored the earlier pro-
French feasts. In June 1793, at Richardets Tavern,
in Philadelphia, a large group gathered to celebrate
the birthday of George III. They ate an elegant
dinner and toasted the British consul, Phineas Bons,
George Washington and most of all, neutrality.61
By far the most important aspect of the Genét
episode was the response to Genét's challenge to the
government. As a representative of the French Revo-
lution Genét gave Americans their first real look
at the meaning of the EurOpean uprising. Genét, in
effect, took seriously the revolutionary doctrine that
the people were absolutely sovereign and such a posi-
tion ran counter to the ingrained deferential and

hierarchical pattern shared by many Americans. The

Gazette pg United States put this position in focus

 

when after taking note Of the raging debate on
neutrality announced that "this discussion must
cease . . . the government has said we must be neutral

and the people have no right to question its wisdom."62

 

60From Porcupine's Appendix, "History of American

Jocobins" in William Playfair, The History 9: Jacobinism
. . . (Philadelphia: 1796), p. 10.

61Gazette 9: the United States, June 8, 1793.

62Ibid., June 15, 1793.

 

 

 

115

The case of Noah Webster provides an individual
example of the reaction to Genet. Webster was an early
supporter of the French Revolution. On August 12,

1793 he came to New York City and lodged at Bradley's
Tavern on Maiden Lane; one of the people lodging there
was Genét. During his stay in New York Webster toured

the l'Ambuscade and one night, at dinner, Genét and

 

he had a fierce debate. After this incident Webster's
support for the French Revolution waned considerably
and it was no accident that four days after his arrival
in New York a group of government supporters including
John Jay, Rufus King and Alexander Hamilton convinced
Webster to start a newspaper to counter the pro-French
propaganda.63 Later, in 1797, Webster looked back on
the incident and recalled that he had "exulted" at the
beginning of the revolution in France, "but the

mission of Mr. Genét compelled me to abandon my faith."

 

To him the Genét mission was evidence that France
was seeking more than the return of their rights,
they sought to control or conquer the world. More
important, however, Webster saw that France and her
revolutionary dogma justified and promoted "defiance

to the constitutional authorities."64

 

63Harry R. Warfel, Noah Webster: Schoolmaster

pg America (New York: MacMillan, 1936), pp. 226-30.

 

 

64Harry R. Warfel, Letters 9: Noah Webster (New
York: Library Publishers, 1953), "To the Public", Mar.
4, 1797, pp. 145-7.

 

116

While Genét and his antics were important in
generating anti-French and anti-Revolution sentiments
in America, the rise of the Democratic-Republican
societies also produced a strong reaction. Many
Americans in the 1790's believed that Genet had
spawned these peculiar organizations, but in reality,
they were modeled after earlier organizations in the
United States and England such as the Sons of Liberty
in America and the Revolutionary Society in Great
Britain. What caused the strong reaction against
them was that they purposed to function as a watch-
dog over the actions of the government and "to guard
against every encroachment on the equality of freemen."

No phenomenon during the 1790's provoked more
virulent and continuing criticism than these societies.
A lady in Virginia who signed herself as "Xantippe"
wrote that the Democratic Society in Kentucky was

that horrible sink of treason - that hated

synagogue of anarchy - that odious conclave
of tumult, - that frightful cathedral of
discord, - that poisonous garden of con-

spiracy, - that hellish school of rebellion
and opposition to all regular and well-
balanced authority.

 

65Eugene Perry Link, The Democratic-Republican
Societies, 1790-1800 (New York: Columbia U. Press,
1942), p. 20. Cited hereafter as Link.

66

 

 

 

Virginia Chronicle, July 17, 1794.

 

65

117

Such violent sentiments came not only from Virginia
ladies but from northern conservatives such as Fisher
Ames. To him the societies "were born in sin, the
impure offspring of Genét. They are the few against
the many, the sons of darkness (for their meetings
are secret) against those of the light . . . ."67
Both of these statements reflect the growing generalized
feeling that some insidous form of evil had sprouted
from the French Revolution and that, with Genét, this
evil had come to the United States.

In many cases this evil went under the name
faction. There was a common belief that factions
were the major reason republics failed. At the time
the Constitution was written there was much discussion
of faction and how to deal with it. When the demo-
cratic societies and clubs appeared on the scene it
seemed as if these earlier fears were coming true.
Noah Webster quickly made the connection between the
French Revolution and the rise of factions in America.
He pointed to the excesses of the revolution in
France and found their cause to be faction. Thus,

he concluded that the events in France should show

 

67George Gibbs, ed., Memoirs 9: the Administra-
tions of Washington and John Adams, edited from the
Pa ers—Sf Oliver, Secretary 9: the Treasury (New York:
18%87, 551. I, p. 179. Cited hereafter as Gibbs.

 

 

 

 

 

118

Americans that "in America . . . there can exist no
necessity for private societies to watch over the
government." Most significantly, he added that the

French should learn "that the executive power must

 

be vested in a single hand . . . and to secure
liberty the executive must have force and energy."68
To Webster,1he idea of private clubs, factions
or any popular check on the government raised the
spectre of perpetual disharmony and the absence of
absolute power in society. In effect, this position
is both political and psychological. Webster was a
Federalist and a strong supporter of General Washing-
ton and thus his criticism of Jeffersonian democratic
societies was political in that he was attacking the
opposition. But the reaction was also deeply rooted
in the psychology of the situation. Webster was
steeped in the traditions of a deferential society.
He looked upon authority as absolute. To him society
was based on the submission of the people and their
passions to authority and the idea that the people had
the right to challenge the government or any form
of authority was a threat to him. In response to this

threat he sought to link himself with, and promote

any idea or institution that would blunt that threat.

 

68Revolution Considered, p. 23, 41.

 

119

He found both the idea and the institution in the
concept of a strong, single executive as personified
by Washington. The vision of a leader such as
Washington dispelled the clouds of uncertainities
for Webster. Washington provided a guiding light
in a time when the obligations and anxieties of
newly expanded freedom seemed too heavy to bear.
Webster was a man trying to adjust to the
flow of history. He saw around him great changes in
attitudes and beliefs. His response to the democratic
societies was only the outward manifestation of much
more massive inner anxiety. Perhaps nothing indicated
the presence of anxiety more than his invention and
use of the word "demoralizing". This small footnote
in his long and busy life was significant. He
sought for some way to deal with the history that
buzzed about him and the word "demoralizing" was an
important response. He used the word to describe the
effect of the revolution in France and resultant
war. The people of France were "released, not only
from the ordinary restraints of law, but from all
their former habits of thinking." They were "let
loose in the wide field of mental licentiousness . . ."
and, significantly, he choose the new easy divorce
laws in France as "singular proof" of the low regard

for morality there. Most of all, however, "demoralizing"

120

meant the efforts of France "to exterminate everything
that looks like imposing restraint on the passion
by fear of a supreme being and future punishments

. . . ."69 Thus, a large part of Webster's response

 

 

to history was a vision of two worlds, one was the
moral world of restraints and checks on freedom
while the other was the "demoralized" world of the
French Revolution.

When the Whiskey Rebellion broke out, it
seemed that Noah Webster's "demoralized" world had
come to the United States with a vengence. The issue
at the center of the rebellion was the high exise
tax on whiskey passed by Congress in 1791. The high
rate and the fact that those indicted for violation
of the law were often forced to travel far from their
homes for trial caused a smoldering resentment until
open rebellion broke out in the summer of 1794. The
rebellion was quickly associated with the democratic
societies and with the French Revolution. To some
extent this connection had a basis in fact. When
the large contingent of troops sent under Hamilton
to crush the revolt arrived they found the French

flag flying from the court house. The rebellion was,

 

691bid., pp. 19-20.

121

however, not inspired by the French or the societies
and the societies in Pennsylvania denounced it
publically.70
In general, however, the response to the

Whiskey Revolt neglected the essential grievences
of the rebels and emphasized the influence of the
clubs and their connection to French influence.
David Tappan found that secret clubs were an "unhappy
influence in this country" and that they were direct
imitations of the clubs which had caused so much
trouble in France. This influence was

exemplified in that spirit of falsehood, of

party and faction, which some of them, at

least, assiduously and too successfully pro-

mote, and especially in the late dangerous

and expensive western insurrection, which

may be traced, in a great degree, to the

inflamatory representations and proceedings
of these clubs, their abettors and friends.

71

The association of the clubs and the rebellion
was further generalized to include the influence of
France. Many conservatives saw that the revolt against

authority in Pennsylvania was part of a larger move-

ment which a writer in the Newark Gazette described

 

in "A New Chapter - Political".

1. This is the book of the generation and
downfall of Jacobinism.

 

7OFederalist Era, pp. 155-60.

 

71David Tappan, Christian Thankfulness Explained
and Enforced . . . (Boston: 1795), p. 36.

 

 

122

2. Brissot begat the Jacobin clubs of Paris.
The Jacobin clubs of Paris begat Genét, and
His French brethern:

3. Genét begat the Democratic Societies in
America; the Democratic Societies begat the
Pittsburg Rebellion and its consequences:

4. The Pittsubrg Rebellion begat an armament
of 15,000 men:

5. The armament of 15,000 men will begat an
expense of near two million dollars, of
which all the people of the United States
must bear a proportion:

6. The expense will beget an attention of the
people to the rise and origin of the clubs:
and

7. That attention will beget the detestion and
downfall of Jacobinism . . .

Thus endeth the first political chapter.

72
One of the most significant responses to the
revolt in Pennsylvania was Washington's message to
Congress on November 19, 1794. In it Washington
found the cause of the rebellion in "certain self-
created societies" which had taken it upon themselves
to resist the operation of the law. Washington's
choice of words was revealing. By labeling the demo-
cratic clubs "self-created" he illustrated the basic
objection to such societies. The implication conveyed
by the term was that only organizations established
by law or tradition were justified and that the "self"
or individuals had no right to create agencies out-

side this pale of legality. Again the fear was the

fear of relativism and the decline of authority. If

 

72Newark Gazette, Oct. 15, 1794.

 

123

anyone (selves) could, at any time, create a group
to promote a cause then would not life degenerate into
a constant battle between conflicting groups and vio-
lence be the logical outcome. Thus, behind the term
"self-created" was a real fear for the continued
existence of absolute authority and control in
society.73
In addition, the feeling that the "Pittsburg
Rebellion" was an outgrowth of French influence
spawned mild stirrings of nativist sentiments. There
was a tendency to see disorder as a foreign import
and to blame foreigners for the Whiskey Rebellion.
Oliver Wolcott Sr. wrote to his son that "there is
much to be apprehended from the great numbers of
violent men who emigrate to this country from every
part of Europe."74 His son agreed and felt that
the Whiskey Rebellion was "a specimen of what we
are to expect from European immigrants."75 Later
in the decade this distrust of foreign elements

would blossom into full-blown nativism and urgent

calls to seal America from the contagion of Europe.

 

73John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings pf
George Washington (Washington: U.S. Printing Office,
1941), vol. 34, p. 29.

74

 

 

Gibbs, vol. I, pp. 136-137.

75Ibid., p. 153.

124

Even before the anxiety over the Whiskey Re-
bellion had subsided, another event arose to further
stir the fear for order and harmony, John Jay returned
from England with a treaty which was to settle the
long standing differences between America and England.
In several areas Jay had capitulated to the British
and when the provisions of the treaty became PUbliCly
known the people showed their disapproval with vocal
and violent demonstrations. The Fourth of July in
1795 served as an occasion to insult the treaty and
Jay in every possible manner. The Boston Town Meeting
condemned the treaty and both it and Jay were burned
in effigy. During the entire summer and early fall
mobs roamed the streets of Boston protesting the
treaty.76

To those attached to the Washington adminis-
tration this popular reaction was frightening. Fisher
Ames wrote that "Boston is in a very inflammatory
State . . ." and he had "learnt that the Jacobins
have been successful in prejudicing the multitude
against the treaty." What worried him the most was
that "the merchants and steady men" lack the courage

to resist the popular outcry.77 John Quincy Adams,

 

76Charles Warren, Jacobin and Junto (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard U. Press, 1931), pp. 58-60.

 

77Gibbs, p. 210.

I. [14 Ill ‘11:! '.§All" l l'llll I 1‘ ('lll‘ [ {I’ll l.l-I>‘l.f|' I. 1:11.1(11‘ (I [.ii( (I Y

125

writing from Europe, saw the resistance to the treaty

as "a combination of personal envy . . . factions
enmity against the government . . . and foreign in-
fluence operating unseen . . . ."78 Perhaps worst

of all those who attacked the treaty, attacked the
person of Washington in the most violent terms.
Benjamin Bache claimed that, via the treaty, Washing-
ton had "debauched" the nation. Bache saw Washington's
behavior as a lesson "that no man may be an idol, and
that a people must confide in themselves rather than

in an individual."79 To those conservatives, like
Webster for example, who looked to Washington as a
source of stability, Bache's statement must have been
profoundly frightening.

In essence, the fear was rooted in the discovery
that the people, inspired by the American and French
Revolutions, were insistent upon exercising their new
freedom. It was one thing for the masses to elect
their leaders, but it was something else for the
people to maintain a stream of criticism against those

leaders between elections. To those who sought order

and stability in society it was necessary that the

 

78JQA Writings, vol. I, p. 418.

79Aurora, Dec. 23, 1796.

 

126

people submit to the leaders they had elected. Free-
dom was, in simple terms, the right to choose your
leaders, not the right to control them. A writer
named "Order" made this very clear when he claimed
that the people

know that the majesty 9: the people is vested
in the constitution they have adopted; that
the sovereigntygi the people is delegated to
those whom they have freely appointed to
administer the constitution, and by them alone
can be rightfully exercised, save at the stated
periods of election, when the sovereignty is
again at the disposal of the whole people.

The idea of delegating power and reserving the
right to exercise 1E! is too absurd to be for
a moment entertained by any but such as
chiefly compose our Jacobin societies.

 

 

 

 

 

This view of the nature of freedom was at
the heart of growing reaction against the French
Revolution. Both the events at home and the events
in France seemed to be in opposition to any kind
of rational liberty. As noted earlier, the religious
and social innovations of the more radical stage of
the revolution had frightened men like Webster and
made them aware that France was intent on the destruc-
tion of Christianity and such social pillars as the
family. The execution of Louis XVI even more than
the social and religious issue, alerted them to the

fact that the French Revolution was a threat to order

 

8OColumbian Centinel, Sept. 3, 1794.

 

127

and harmony. William Cobbett warned that what happened
in France could happen in America and he drew a parallel
between the execution of Louis and the attacks on
Washington. Across the United States the people
responded with remorse and dejection at the king's

death and in many towns bells tolled in mourning. To
some the regicide was part of growing evidence that

the French Revolution was markedly different than the
American. John Trumbull compared "the calm splendor

of our own Revolution . . . which "scarcely stained

the scared robe of rational liberty with a single

drop of blood . . ." with the "horrible blaze of
glory of republican France . . ." which made "the
81

very streets of Paris flow with blood."
There was a growing sense that the French

had passed the point of justified revolution and were

sinking back into barbarism. Royal Tyler and Joseph

Dennie compared the French to savage Indians

We hear from France, that our ancient brothers,
the French, the friends of Hurons, have toma-
hawked their chief Sachern, and his squaw . . .
It is said they made great canoes and bound
their brethern, their sisters, and their infants,
with moose thongs, and sunk them in the river,
without allowing them time to sing their death
song.

 

81Bloody Buoy, pp. 239-40. John Trumbull,

Autobiography . . . (New Haven: 1841), pp. 168-9. See
also, Diary 9: William Bentley (Salem, Mass: Essex
Institute, 1905), p. 13.

 

 

 

82Marius B. Peladeau, ed., The Prose g£ Royal Tyler
(Rutland, Vermont: Vermont Historical Society, 1972), p. 211.

 

 

128

The execution of the king had a profound
psychological impact on the French and, to a lesser
extent, the similar reaction was present in the United
States. Louis had held a high position in the hearts
of Americans mainly for his aid to them during their
own revolution and when he was beheaded some Americans
wondered why such a benevolent king should fall before
the rapidly expanding revolution. Some thought that
if Louis had been less kind and more tyranical he
would have escaped the quillotine.83 At the deepest
level, however, the reaction to the execution was
rooted in unspoken feelings about the nature of
authority. If the people had the right to kill
kings what then might be the limit of their rights?
Were there to be no restraints on man's passions?

Was civil society going to be the subject of constant
assault? Was there no "greater authority" than the
whim of the people? Regicide and the associated
violence in France was evidence that these questions
were valid and urgent.

Thus a combination of factors promoted the
development of a strong sense of disapproval and fear

of the French Revolution. The antics of Genét, the

democratic clubs, and the Whiskey Rebellion, the Jay

 

83Dunlaps Daily Advertiser, April 22, 1793.

 

129

Treaty and events in France all worked together to
.create a sizable opposition to the Revolution. This
does not mean that the enthusiasm for it disappeared
over night. There was a continuing effort to defend
the French and to defend those developments in America
which were seen as the ominous products of Gallic
influence.

First, there was an attempt to defend France
against the charge that her revolution was bringing
on general immorality. For example, "a Citizen of
Philadelphia" translated what he claimed was an
authentic French school textbook.84 The translator
noted that some in America had tried to make the French
Revolution odious to Americans his translation, he
claimed, was made to show that the French had not
lost their morality. The book was full of maxims
that defended the family, Christianity, soberiety, hard
work and "submission to the Laws". One maxim was
directed at the common criticism of the French experi-
ments with divorce laws and infidelity. It advised
"suffer not thyself to be led astray by bad women,

but live in happiness with her whom thou has chosen

 

84The Morality 9: the Sons-Culottes 9: Every
Age, Sex, Country, and Condition; pp, the Republican
SSE eI_by Chemin, trans. by a Citizen of Philadelphia
(Phil.: 1794).

 

 

 

 

 

130

85 Truly Spartan advice. In summary,

for a wife."
the book argued that the French emphasis on equality
would not lead to chaos but rather that "equality
enjoins virtue, the practice of which forms the true
republican and which only can bring . . . that happiness
which tyranny and fanaticism have banished from it for
so many ages."86

While such books sought to defend the Revolution
as moral and upright, others sought to defend French
actions as justified. While many Americans were re-
pelled by the execution of Louis some were joyous that
the life of a despot had been taken. The witticism
"Louis Capet has lost Caput" made the rounds and was
reprinted in the newspapers several times.87 One of
the most gentle and sincere Americans of the period
found no cause to blame the French for their use of
the guillotine. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale,
wrote that he never had doubts that France would gain
her "glourious Triumph of Liberty". He believed,
however, that "there must be more Use of the Guillo-

tine . . . as I believe it has been exercised with

Great Justice in general . . . ." This further use

 

 

851bid., p. 12

86Ibid., p. 28

87National Gazette, April 20, 1793.

 

131

of terror was justified, he felt, because there remained
in France "more hurtful and poisonous Weeds to be mown
down in the Field of Liberty, before Right Liberty

and Tranquillity can be established." He signed the
letter "an unchanged Son of Liberty", indicating his
awareness of the turn against the Revolution in

America.

There were other signs that the regicide had
not completely dampened the approval of the French
revolt. For example there was a pOpular song which
some attributed to Joel Barlow. The song gloried in
the fall of Louis and implied that freedom would be
possible only after all the monarchs had experienced
a similar fate.

When all the sceptred crew
Have paid their homage to

The Guillotine
Let freedoms flag advance
Till all the world, like France
O'er tyrants' graves shall dance,

And peace begin.89

Similarly, there were attempts to defend those

domestic developments which were connected to the

French Jacobins. Ezra Stiles, from his prominent

 

88Quoted in, Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle
Puritan: A Life 9: Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (New Haven:
Yale U. Press, 1962), pp. 456-457.

89Quoted in Esther E. Brown, The French Revolution

 

 

 

 

and the American Man 9: Letters (Columbia, Missouri: U.
of Missouri Studies, 1951). p. 88.

 

 

132

position at Yale, came forward to defend the existence
of political clubs. He found that the Jacobin societies
had been "the salvation of France". He concluded that
no good government need fear criticism from any quarter
and "none but tyrants need fear them." In the end,
he felt, they would be worthwhile if they only pro-
moted discussion and informed the people on public
issues, but ultimately they were to be valued as
critics of unjust governments.90
Most important, there was an attempt to shift

the blame of events in France and the United States
from the revolutionaries to the insidous practices
of the aristocracy. Concerning the situation in
France, it was common for people like Joel Barlow to
excuse the violence on the grounds that it was the
product of the "complicated wiles of expiring despotism."
James Sullivan, Massachusetts Republican and pamphleteer,
felt that

The man, who supposes that a nation can emerge

from a long state of slavery with all the order,

regularity and stability, which may be expected:

in a well regulated government, is a maniac

himself. Whenever a revolution is attempted it

must of necessity produce convulsions, ravages
and bloody carnage.

 

90Ezra Stiles, A History g£ the Three Judges 2:
Charles A (Hartford: 1794), p. 70.

 

lJames Sullivan, An Impartial Review of the Causes

 

 

and Principles 9: the FrenEh Revolution (BostoH? 1798),
p. 83.

 

 

133

The problem, as Sullivan saw it, was analogous
to surgery. The body had to be operated on to save
it from its disease and in the process some violence
would be done to the whole body. But he asks, should
we not try the operation and let the patient die? He
concluded that the French must endure the pain of
removing monarchy and false religion and that the
pain was the product of despotism fighting to main-
tain its hold.92

Perhaps, however, the most important reaction
to the growing sense of disapproval over the events
in France was the development of a conspiratorial
frame of mind. Before 1793, approval of the French
had been nearly automatic so when some began to turn
away from it, there were expressions of distrust and

suspicion. The idea of a conspiracy took hold. A

writer to the National Gazette saw a conspiracy against

 

France in the Washington administration. He saw the
handling of Genet and neutrality as marked by "a
mysterious darkness, an assuming conduct, intrique
and chicane . . . ." He sensed that the government
had turned against the principles of republicanism

and that "arbitrary measures, intriguing conduct and

dark policy are totally inconsistent with the generous

 

92Ibid. , pp. 84-86.

134

sentiments and undissembling meanners that should
characterize a republic." Most ominously, he claimed
that behind all this deviousness aristocracy was
making rapid strides in the United States.93
The Norfolk and Portsmouth Republican Society
in Virginia also expressed this tendency to see a
conspiracy against the expansion of liberty. In a
circular they argued that apathy, aided by the wiles
of tyrants, would lead to the destruction of freedom
in America. For the moment, they claimed, France
was the major target of "the tyrants of the world
combined" but there was no guarantee that America
would be spared. The fear of aristocracy was based
on the belief "that in the bosom of our own country
we have men whose principles and sentiments are
Opposed to all free governments and such are just
objects of suspicion."94
Thus in response to growing criticism of the
French Revolution and radical developments at home
the tone of debate changed. Before 1793, there was

isolated but important anti-revolutionary sentiment,

but starting with Genét and moving through a series

 

93National Gazette, July 15, 1793. Reprinted
in Massachusetts Mercury, July 26, 1793.

94Virginia Chronicle, June 8, 1793. Quoted
in Link, p. 9.

 

 

 

135

of both foreign and domestic events disapproval and
reaction began to grow. There was some resistance
to this criticism but by 1795 pro-French sentiment
was clearly waning. Those who spoke out against the
revolution in Europe had considerable material to work
with; the French, to American eyes did seem to be
transgressing sacred traditions and mores. To challenge
the structure of marriage, the family and all religion
seemed to indicate that the French had lost their
senses.

An important part of the reaction against the
French Revolution was the appearance of a group of
men in New England who used the sermon and oration with
effectivness, and who sought to show that France had
let loose ideas and movements counter to the eternal
laws of morality. They also sought to warn their
listeners to the threat these ideas posed to America.
The subject of the next chapter deals with the attempts
of these men to perserve America from the French

Revolution.

CHAPTER IV

WATCHMEN ON THE WALLS OF ZION

When formidable innovations and convulsions
in EurOpe threaten destruction to morals and
religion; when scenes of devastation and blood-
shed, unexampled in the history of modern
nations, have convulsed the world; and when our
country is threatened with similar calamities,
insensibility in us would be stupidity, silence
would be criminal. The watchmen on Zion's walls
are bound by their commission to sound a general
alarm . . . . We are filled with deep concern
and an awful dread, whilst we announce it as our
real conviction, that the eternal God has a
controversy with our nation, and is about to
visit us in his sore displeasure.

Acts and Proceedings of the
General Assembly of the
Presbyterian Church in the
United States of America,
May 17, 1798

George Santayana knew that high culture in

America was not entirely detached from the general

culture. He observed that at important ceremonies

the American people produced their writers, poets

and thinkers so that they may bless the occasion.

Such figures, however, have a more important role

to play, according to Santayana. They give speeches -

orations - and in them "the impulses of the community

can be brought to expression; consecrated maxims

136

137

could be reapplied; the whole latent manliness and
shrewdness of the nation could be mobilised."l Thus,
at public meetings, in the pulpit and the press the
oration and its shadow (the printed speech) serve

as a narrow conduit for the passage of ideas from

a nation's thinkers to the people.

In the 1790's the oration played a vital role
in the formulation of collective opinion. No group
issued more sermons and orations than the clergy and
thus they were often at the center of controversy.
The large public role for the clergy was rooted in a
long New England tradition. Since the early settle-
ments the New England divine had spoken out on public
issues and his congregation had listened and had
often been swayed. So when the clergy spoke out on
the French Revolution and related matters they were
not taking on a new role, only carrying on the tra-
dition.

The function of this chapter is to examine
some of these sermons and to interpret what they say
and to estimate what influence they might have had

on those who heard them. The sermons could have been

the reaction to new startling developments in the

 

lGeorge Santayana, Character and Opinion £3
the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967),
pp. 2-30

 

 

 

138

in the United States such as the growth of political
opposition to authority, the rise of deism or the
general decline in religious fervor. To some extent
they were reactions to these things but a careful
reading of them suggests an even more interesting
View.

In the largest sense, these clerics were
reacting to a staggering series of events which in-
cluded not only those listed above but also the American
and French Revolutions with all their implications.
Perhaps they were responding most of all to that!”
great vague movement of thought called the Enlighten-
ment. In the 1790's there was little historical
understanding of this movement, only a cloudy sense
that great changes had taken place and it was more
than a little frightening. At the bottom, such fear
was rooted in a growing vision of a world without
supreme authority. Another way to put this would
be to see their fear as the fear of a world without
"fathers" populated by "sons" who would be cursed to
constantly battle to fill the authority vacuum left
by the departed father. In the symbolic world of the
unconscious, the father took the form of any notion
of transcendence - any idea, concept or institution

above man that ordered the world, that gave it security,

139

stability and absolute moral law. Thus, religion,

in its most generalized form, was seen as a surrogate
father, as was government and the concept of the
nation or national interest. Many Americans believed
that all government originated in the family and it
was the image of the family with an absolute head
(father) and subordinate parts (mother, sons, daughters)
that appeared to be under attack in the 1790's. The
New England clergy responded strongly to this attack
and shared their worry with those who heard and read
their sermons.

One of the first clerics to find a significant
audience for anti—French sentiments was David Osgood.
In 1794, Osgood, from his pulpit in Medford, Massachu-
setts issued a scathing attack on the French Revolution
and its influence in the United States. At the core
of his sermon was the idea that all good flows from
obedience to the father, in the form of God or govern-
ment. He contended that all of man's troubles stem

from "not regarding the work pg the Lord, nor considering

 

the Operation of his hands." In Osgood's view the
duty of man in the present crisis was to learn God's
will and follow it exactly. America was specially
blessed because God was especially fond of them and

had given them the blessings of the true Gospel and

140

a republican political system. To ignore his will
was to risk these precious gifts and His special
concern.

If effect, Osgood assumed the existence of an
American family with God as the heavenly father and
constituted government as His agent on earth. Con-
stitutional government, in Osgood's View, had saved
the United States from anarchy and ruin under the
Articles of Confederation. Osgood, however, saw a
threat to this form of rule in the French Revolution
as represented in American by Citizen Genét. Genet,
armed with revolutionary doctrines, had appealed to
those "who envy the abilities of their superiors, and
covet their stations." Genet was also supported by
those "who can have pleasure in tumult and confusion"
and those who hope to advance to a better position
during a revolution in the government. To Osgood,
Genét was a stranger amid the family encouraging
the weaker members to seek higher, more powerful roles.
He turned the sons against the father.3

The true evidence of this, Osgood said, was
the democratic societies spawned by Genet. The trouble-

some minister from France had been recalled but his

 

2David Osgood, A Sermon Delivered on the Day
of Annual Thanksgiving, November g9, 1794 (Boston:
1795), PP. 5-8.

 

 

 

31bid., pp. 11-14.

141

offspring, the societies, remained to challenge the
government. Such political clubs were clear evidence
of the rise of faction and Osgood pointed to France
to show its influence. The French, he claimed, had
always abhorred violence but faction had destroyed
this abhorrance. If the factions had not arisen in
France, the leaders of the early part of the revolu-
tion would "never have been guilty of those excesses
and cruelties which chill all humane minds with
horror." So, in France, it was an ambitous group
of sons who banded together to challenge the father
and this led to the excesses and horror during the
Reign of Terror. Osgood stated that the American
societies were founded "on the same principles with
those in France. . . and should they become numerous
here as they are there, they will infallibly have
a similar effect."4

Not only did Osgood see a threat to the govern-
ment arising from France, he believed that there was
also a fundamental threat to traditional religion.
Quoting from the work of "Rev. Dr. Smith of Princeton"
he argued that a group of "political empirics" have

"sprung up" and seek to cast religion from the state

 

41bid., pp. 15-17.

142

"as they have cast it from their hearts." What upset
both Smith and Osgood was the elevation of "false and
misguided reason" and the purposed destruction of
the living God. They were upset because with reason
as God "each man carried his ridiculous deity in his
own brain." Therefore, there was no transcendence,
no common God, no moral law coming from that God to
which all must subscribe. When each man invented
his own deity there could be no order, only isolated
atoms with no nucleus, no family.5

Osgood's sermon did not go unanswered. James
Sullivan, writing under the name, "Citoyen De Novion",
tried to defend the French Revolution from this pulpit
attack. To a great extent, Sullivan put forth what
was the common defense of the Revolution and the
domestic events related to it. The excesses and vio-
lence, he claimed, were not the natural outgrowth of
faction but rather were the result of frightened
monarchs who refused to allow France to settle its
own problems. As for the so-called French inspired
'societies in the United States, Sullivan defended them
on constitutional grounds; claiming they were legal
under the right of the people to assemble. He argued

that the existence of such societies did not indicate

 

51bid., pp. 23-24.

143

a general disaffection among the people, only "a
few men chiefly English, Irish and Scotch people of
low education . . ." were in rebellion against the
laws, the great bulk of people supported the govern-
ment.6 Significantly, Sullivan believed that Osgood
was trying to create the myth of a disaffected people
in order to create the atmosphere for the establish-
ment of a monarchy. Furthermore, Sullivan saw
criticism of the French Revolution as part of the same
conspiracy.

Of the greatest interest, however, was Sullivan's
View of government and the differences and similarities
between his position and Osgood's. Osgood saw govern-
ment as acting in the role of father to a political
unit analogous to the family. Sullivan, on the other
hand, believed government was "the public opinion,
collected to a system, on certain general principles
and rules."8 In that statement, he expressed the
fundamental problem that the pro-revolutionary segment

had in justifying their position. The phrase on

 

6James Sullivan (Citoyen de Novion), The Altar
of Baal Thrown Down; or, the French Nation Defended
Against the Pulpit Slander of David Osgood, A;fl.: A
Sermon (Boston: 1795), pp. 10-12.

7Ibid., p. 7, 3o.

 

 

 

 

 

8Ibid., p. 10.

144

general principles and rules" was never defined and
was really the equal of the phrase "self-evident
truths" that had been crucial to the development of
a revolutionary ideology. Sullivan was appealing to
that ideology while Osgood was appealing to a deeper,
more traditional sentiment with his subtle allusions
to the necessity of a society and government modeled
on the family. The significant point was the need
both men felt to seek higher justification for their
conceptions of proper government.9

Early in 1795, David Tappan, Professor of
Divinity at Harvard College spoke out against the
French. Tappan had delivered his first anti-French
sermon in 1793.10 Perhaps encouraged by the success
of Osgood, he took the national day of Thanksgiving
as an excuse to again attack the French Revolution.
In this sermon he emphasized the central role of God
and argued that man should be as submissive children
to Him. Tappan claimed that "the thankful christian"

as he exalts God "proportionably abases himself."

More importantly, the Harvard divine poured scorn on

 

9Russell Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation,

1776-1830 (New York: Harpers, 1960), pp. 25-26, 32-33.

10David Tappan, A Sermon . . . 93 Occasion of

the Annual Fast . . . (Boston: 1793).

 

 

 

 

145

those who "proudly imagine themselves important and
meritious beings . . ." while the good citizen feels
his "unspeakable littleness and ill desert" and "ascribes
all enjoyments and hopes to the pure benevolence of the
Deity . . . ."11
Tappan was truly angry about those people who
would not submit to God's will. He called such a
person "a little atom" and "a creature so polluted
and offensive" and "so provoking a rebel." He asked
"what name then shall we give to the man, who is
unthankful to his God?" and he answered he shall be
called "a contradiction to, and a kind of outcast
from all nature; he has no parallel in the universe,
except in the abodes of perfect malignity and despair."
For Tappan, submission to God and submission to the
father were linked and the purpose of submission to
both was "to make us habitually contented and happy,
lowly and kind, virtuous and useful."12
While Tappan was critical of French innovations
clearly he was most concerned with the future of the

United States. Again the centrality of God was invoked

as the key to the future happiness of the nation.

 

llDavid Tappan, Christian Thankfulness Explained
and Enforced . . . . February A2, 1795 (Boston: 1795),
p. 8.

 

 

 

lZIbid., pp. 8-9, 13.

146

Americans must thank God for his great bounty and must
"fervently beseech the kind Author of our distinguished
national priviledges . . . to save us from that rest-
less, discontented and murmuring spirit, which is ever
ready to depreciate or censure the most beneficent and
prosperous course of affairs." We must also, according
to God's wish, avoid "disdaining the idea of dependence
and obligation" and avoid "pursuing the splendid
phantom of an undefined romantic liberty and equality
which would at once clash with social order, moral
justice and the present frame and condition of man."

The chaos in France, Tappan stated, should convince
"13

us of the effect of such a 'splendid phantom.
An important part of Tappan's sermon was a

dual definition of liberty. Without the sanction of

"eternal moral laws" liberty becomes licentiousness

so he created a refined version which was termed

"equal liberty". Pure liberty in his View was prey

to "its own excesses or abuse" and it was the role

of civil government and religion to insure that the

laws of morality were invoked to restrain the passions

of man in intoxicated by his freedom. Thus, the

government, God, and God's agent on earth, the church,

stand in relation to the citizen precisely as the

 

l3Ibid., p. 21.

147

father does to the subordinate members of his family.
Tappan was simply applying the most common pattern
of order, the family, to the confused political and
religious situation of the day.14
Logically, Tappan attempted to emphasize the
education and care of children. This he did by urging
his audience to "give our children an enlightened,
virtuous, and pious education, and thus establish
in their bosoms such principles and habits as may
render them future pillars of American order, freedom
and glory." Education should not only create a certain
kind of child but it should "guard their minds . . .
against the contagion of modern infidelity, dissipation
and vice; against a spirit of base ingratitude and
complaint . . . ." Furthermore, education should
keep children from developing "suspicions and cen—
sures of that Constitution of government, and of
those public men and measures, to which, under God,
we owe our confirmed tranquility and happiness."15
Thus, for Tappan, behind government and religion was

the deferential family pattern of the unchallenged

father to whose benevolence and power subordinate

 

l4Ibid., p. 22.

lSIbid., p. 24.

148

members owed their security and well-being. Tappan's
concern for education showed that he was worried about
the future of the patriarchal model and that he sought
to instill in his audience the awareness of the need
to train children to accept this deferential system.
Such early training took on added importance given

the existence of a serious challenge to that pattern.
To Tappan, the French Revolution symbolized that
challenge.

So, in the sermons of Tappan and Osgood there
was a similar theme. The theme had two parts. The
first point was to announce the existence of a growing
threat to both civil and religious authority. At the
deepest level this threat was, to Tappan, and Osgood,
a threat to the images of fatherhood. To them, the
deity, the deity's agents (the church) and governmental
leaders all were symbolic fathers who controlled and
structured the existence of their families, i.e. the
community. To challenge their right to rule was the
cause of great anxiety for if society was divested
of its fathers the outcome would certainly be the
fragmentation of the community into isolated individuals
ruled by their passions. The second part of the theme
was the insistence that the threat to authority had
sailed from France on the ships that carried Genét

and the works of Thomas Paine. The evidence was clear;

149

the democratic societies were copies of the Jacobin
Club; the opposition to government was the beginning
of the factionalism that had ruined France and the
rising spirit of irreligion was traceable to French
atheistic thinkers. In this vein, Nathan Strong
spoke for all those who saw America threatened

The dark omens are to be found at home. In
our hearts, in our homes, in our practice, and
in a licentious spirit disposed to breakdown
civil and religious order. In affecting to
depend on reason in the things of religion,
more than the word of God; so as to reject all
evangelical Holiness, faith in Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, and the ministrations of the
spirit in the heart. In substituting anarchy
and licentiousness, in the room of rational
and just liberty. In supposing that freedom
consists in men doing what is right in their
own eyes; even though their eyes look through
the mist of wicked ambition and lust. Here

is our real danger, these are the omens the
augur ill to us.1

It was really an old, old story. Strong, as
well as Tappan and Osgood, were giving expression to
the collective guilt of the American people. In the
thirty years prior to Strong's statement the entire
drift of events in America had been characterized by
the theme of father-killing. In other words, Americans
had sought to reject those earthly manifestations of

the eternal father. There had been a rejection of

 

——-——— ———————_——-—--—_

 

150

God as evidenced by the declining interest in churches
and the disestablishment movements. The American
Revolution was an obvious rejection of paternal authority
and this tendency had continued after independence in
the constant criticism and suspicion directed at their
new rulers. The French Revolution was the culmination
and most obvious instance of this rebellion against
the most traditional and ingrained symbol of authority.
Furthermore, Americans had seen the French revolt as
a continuation of the American Revolution and had
approved it with shouts of joy. When it became clear
that the spirit of the French Revolution was present
in America, the growing sense of guilt became apparent.
Thus, men such as Webster, Osgood, Tappan and Strong
gave expression to this quilt and the anxiety it
caused.

They sought to project this guilt on to the
French people and their revolution. The tendency to
project guilt feelings served to revive the belief
that Europe, and especially France, was hopelessly
corrupt and beyond regeneration. But to project
completely the accumulated guilt it was necessary to
sever the ties between the French and American Revolu-
tions. To do so it was necessary to destroy the
notion that there was a close ideological and historical

connection between the two events. In order to achieve

151

this there developed a broad-based belief that the
French Revolution was the product of an insidous con-
spiracy against all government and all religion.
At the center of this conspiracy was the shadowy organ-
ization called the Bavarian Illuminati. If the French
Revolution was the product of evil men acting secretly,
then psychologically Americans were absolved and also
gained an elusive, but tangible, object on which they
could project their guilt. It also provided a real
threat that served to promote solidarity among the
American people because a key part of the perceived
conspiracy included the United States as the next
target of the Illuminati. The invention of this
fearsome menace from Europe was a key part of the
contribution made by the watchmen on the walls of
Zion.

In America, the prime mover of the Illuminati
conspiracy theory was Jedidiah Morse, but he had
help. Often conspiracy theories have been the creations
of individuals on the fringe of society but Morse was
not such a man. Born in Woodstock, Connecticut in
1761, he graduated from Yale College in 1783 and served
as a Congregational minister in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Beyond this, he wrote the first American geography and

gazetter and must be considered one of the early promoters

152

of national awareness by prompting an interest in
American geography. He was also the father of Samuel
F. B. Morse, inventor of the Morse code and developer
of the telegraph. Morse did not produce the Illuminati
out of a hat, he was aided greatly by the arrival in
America of a book by John Robison, a professor of
Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh and Secretary to the
Royal Society there. Morse came upon this work in

the spring of 1798 and probably read it in April or
May of that year.

It was one of those books that dot American
intellectual history. They seem to appear as if called
to serve an urgent purpose. Robison gave to Morse the
"real" causes behind the French Revolution and Morse
gave them to America. According to Robison, the French
Revolution was only part of a gigantic plan to root
out true religion and government. He claimed that
"AN ASSOCIATION HAS BEEN FORMED for the express purpose
Of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND
OVERTURNING ALL EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE. Mem-
bers of this association had not only promoted and
controlled the course of the French Revolution but
had also infiltrated England and the United States
and were "endeavoring to propagate their detestable

doctrines . . . in those nations.

 

17John Robison, Proofs 9f Conspiracy . . .
(Edinburgh: 1797), p. 10. Cited hereafter as Proofs.

 

153

The association was an offshoot of the Order
of Masons which had been outlawed in Barvaria and
had subsequently become a secret organization somewhat
separate from Masonery. The most interesting aspect
of the Illuminati, as Robison conceived them, was their
ideology and program. First of all, the "express aim
of this Order was to abolish Christianity, and overturn
all civil government." They sought to do this by
undermining the basic morality which held society
together. As Robison put it
Sensual pleasures were restored to the rank they
held in Epicurean philosophy . . . death was
declared eternal sleep; patriotism and loyality
were called narrow-minded prejudices, and
incompatible with universal benevolence,
continually were liberty ang equality seen as
unaleinable rights of man.1
To insure this change in morality the Illuminati sought
"to break the bonds of domestic life, by destroying
the veneration for the marriage vows, and by taking

the education of children out of the hands of the

parents." Robison held "this was all tha: the Illuminati

 

 

could teach and THIS WAS PRECISELY WHAT FRANCE HAS DONE."19

 

Apparently, Robison was responding to the same

. . 2
fears and anXieties as Tappan and Osgood. O In essence,

 

 

lBIbid., pp. 106-7.
lgIbid., p. 375.
20

Charles I. Foster, A3_Errand 9f Mercy (Chapel Hill:
The U. of N. Carolina Press, 1960). Especially "Common
Problems of Great Britain and America", pp. 3-11.

[(1 it‘ll]! I.I.IIIIII.IIIII{III' lit] llr..‘

.ll‘llI (ll, Il'li.rif|ll\l.

154

he created the Illuminati as the secret brotherhood
behind the broad based challenge to all forms of
paternal authority. He saw the structure of patriarchal
society under seige but he was also particularly con-
cerned by the changed role for women in the Illuminati
plan. Working through the National Convention of
France, the Illuminati had it decreed that "there is
nothing criminal in the promiscous commerce of the
sexes." This was, in Robison's opinion, an attempt
to remove women from their traditional roles as "the
depository of all domestic satisfaction." Also, he
asked what would happen to the future of the family
if man, in order to obtain a woman, no longer had to
enlist in the ranks of the married.21 Robison also
saw the workings of the Illuminati in the increased
participation of women in the affairs of the state
and society.
There is nothing in the whole constitution of the
Illuminati that strikes me with more horror than
the proposal of Hercules and Minos [members of the
order] to enlist women in this shocking warfare
with all that is good, and pure and lovely, and of
good report.22

This passage illustrated a real fear Of the

power women might have if unleashed from the duties of

 

21Proofs, p. 437.

22Ibid., p. 243.

 

155

family life. Robison saw and condemned the evidence
of this power in the French Revolution

See Madame Tallien come into the public theatre
accompanied by other beautiful women (I was
about to have misnamed them Ladies) laying
aside all modesty,and presenting themselves to
the public View, with bared limbs, a AA Sauvage,
as the alluring objects of desire .—. . . Was
not their abombinable force in the church of
Nortre Dame a bait of the same kind.23 [A
reference to the Goddess of Reason]

 

When women were forced to play such a role in society
it was evidence of their true humiliation because,
in Robison's mind, to be removed from your eternal
part in the family structure was to lose your true
role and this was degradation.

Robison's book strongly appealed to Morse
and others and it was not long until the conspiracy
theory began to spread. President John Adams had
declared May 9, 1798 a day on which Americans should
fast, pray and feel "solemn humiliation", and Jedidiah
Morse, armed with new knowledge gained from Robison,
took the occasion to lay out the facts to the American
people. Actually, he took the occasion twice, once in
the morning at Boston's New North Church and again
at his own church at Charlestown in the afternoon.

In essence, the sermon he delivered two times

that day was not remarkable except for the inclusion

 

23Ibid., pp. 51-2.

156

of the Illuminati plot. He took as his Biblical text,
"This day of trouble, and of rebuke, (or reviling)

and blasphemy. Wherefore lift up thy prayer for the
remnant that are left" (2 kings 14:3,4). The text

was in keeping with the sermons of Tappan and Osgood
and summed up, Biblically, the sense of fear and
anxiety common at the time. Morse claimed that the
United States was facing "a day of trouble" for
several reasons. First, he noted the hostile actions
of France as a primary cause. He was strongly in-
fluenced by the recently exposed XYZ Affair but his
accusing finger pointed at France was a sign of a
general abhorrance of things French. Second, the
trouble was also a product of divisions among Americans
and especially the French inspired alienation of the
people from their government. He foreshadowed his
later announcement concerning the Illuminati by
noting that the domestic divisions were the result

of "a subtle and secretly operating foreign influence

 

among us . . . . Third, according to Morse, the
"day of trouble" was made even worse by "the aston-
ishing increase of irreligion."24 He supported his

charge of irreligion with the familar refrain

 

24Jeddidiah Morse, A Sermon . . . May 9th,

1798 (Boston: 1798), pp. 15-13. Cited hereafter as
May 9th, 1798.

 

157

Kings, princes, and rulers in all governments:

government itself . . . preists and ministers

of religion of all denominations; and the

institutions of Christianity of all kinds are

reviled and abused . . . . The existence of

God is boldly denied. Atheism and materialism

are systematically proggssed. Reason and Nature

are defied and adored.

Thus, this watchman of Zion saw the United
States troubled by France, internal division and
irreligion and asked for the salvation of "the remnant."
To this point, Morse's sermon was commonplace, but he
went further and asked "what can be the design and ten-
dency of all these things? Have we not reason to sus-
pect that there is some secret plan in operation . . . ."
Such a statement probably stirred the drowsy in the
back pews but he woke everyone when he announced that
the "secret plan" had been unveiled by John Robison.
He called Robison's book the best he had read on the
French Revolution. The French revolt, he recounted,
was the product of a secret society called the Illuminati
and that Thomas Paine was an agent of the society and
that the group had expanded secretly to America.26
Of even greater interest, however, was Morse's

characterization of the Illuminati program. He claimed

that the mysterious group sought to abolish Christianity

 

25Ibid., p. 18.

26Ibid., pp. 21—24.

158

and overturn all civil government. Thus he trans-

fered part of the blame for "the day of trouble" from
his audience's shoulders to the willing (and defense-
less) Shoulders of a secret Bavarian branch of the
Masonic Order. Next, the Illuminati planned to justify
suicide, establish "Epicurean sensuality" as the

ruling morality and destroy the idea of private pro-
perty. Again he transfered repressed wishes and

desires and the resulting guilt. Further, the Illuminati
"decried marriage, and advocated a promiscuous inter-

course among the sexes. . . . and, last, they argued
that evil means are justified to gain a good end.27
This last item was a clear indication of the
guilt felt by Morse and all those who had applauded
the French attack on Catholicism. Early in the decade
and continuing until as late as 1795 Morse and the
great majority of New England clergy had seen the

French Revolution as the means chosen by God to

destroy Catholicism.28 Gradually their desire to see

 

27Ibid., p. 21.

28Jedidiah Morse, The Present Situation pg Other
Nations of the World Contrasted with Our Own . . . £22.
19, 1795-TBoston: 1795). This sermon by Morse was a

good example of the clergy's continued approval of the
French Revolution even as late as 1795. However, Tappan's
early criticism, Osgood's efforts late in 1794, and some
notes of warning in the Morse sermon of 1795 indicate

that the reaction had begun.

 

 

 

 

 

159

Catholicism fall and their anxiety about the violent
and novel means being used to achieve that end in
France came in conflict and created an psychologically
intolerable situation. Thus, in 1798, Morse had to
resolve this situation and he did so by falling back
on a blind faith in the will of God the father. He
argued that the Illuminati and the rise of irreligion
were temporary means employed by God "to overthrow
popery and despotism," but he was quick to note that
we should not allow ourselves to become involved in
these evil means even if the end was justified.29
On the issue of means and ends Morse showed clearly
the intense conflicts and anxieties that arose out
of the French Revolution. At the same time he
projected the guilt for supporting certain means
onto a secret organization he also attributed the
existence of those means to the will of God. It
seems that history has occasionally produced Situa-
tions that force men into psychological corners.
Morse was in such a corner.

Finally, Morse concluded his sermon with three
recommendations to his audience. Of prime importance

was the reestablishment of conformity and Solidarity

 

29May 9th, 1798, pp. 25-26.

 

160

among the American people. He argued that Americans
should ignore the slander of their government and
"as citizens, we ought with one heart to cleave to,
and support, our own government." Further, in order
to insure religious and moral conformity the peOple
should rally to the support of the established church
and shun new religious opinions. Last, Morse asked
his audience to examine the social order and themselves
and to "repent of, and correct, what one finds amiss."30
The call for solidarity was rooted in the sense of
guilt over the revolutionary activity or the trans-
gressions against traditional authority. A sense of
common shared guilt promoted the frequent calls for
conformity (Morse's was only one of many such calls)
and helped to create some basis for a cohesive state
in the wake of the revolutionary period.3l

Morse's exposure of the Illuminati did not

produce a great deal of reaction at first but slowly

during the remainder of 1798 and into the next year

 

3OIbid., pp. 27—29.

31The idea that social cohesion is, at least
partily, the product of guilt arising from some common
crime has been discussed by several scholars. See Norman
0 Brown, Loves Body (New York: Vintage Books, 1968),
p. 16; Franz Neuman, The Democratic and the Authoritarian

 

 

State (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), PP. 290-
292. Both owe a debt to Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
(New York: Vintage Books, 1918), pp. 180-207.

 

161

acceptance of his position grew. One of the first
to praise Morse's efforts was John Thayer a Catholic
priest in Boston. Given Morse's anti-Catholic bias
Thayer's approval must be seen as one of those historical
oddities that make life interesting. Morse felt that,
in general, his effort had achieved good results. He
was proud that there had been no opposition to his
sermon "even in Charlestown, whose citizens, many of
them have been the most violently opposed to the
measures of the government and the most enthusiatic
in favor of France."32

It was not long until others took up the con-
spiracy theory and made it part of their orations
and sermons. On June 19, 1798, David Tappan addressed
the graduating class of Harvard and warned them that
the world outside the college walls was full of tempta-
tion and error. He also pointed out that there was "a
more recent system" which sought to bring about the

rebirth of an oppressed world and create a system of

equal liberty. This system was being promoted by the

 

32John Thayer, A Discourse, Delivered at the

Roman Catholic Church ii Boston 92.292 23A 9:.Eéy . . .
(Boston: 1798); Jedidiah Morse to Oliver Wolcott,

May 21, 1798, quoted in Vernon Stauffer, New England
and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1918), p. 240. Cited hereafter

as Stauffer.

 

 

 

 

 

162

Order of the Illuminati. He sketched the history
of the Illuminati and maintained that they had promoted
the French Revolution and represented a "most alarming
plan of hostility against the dearest interests of
man."33 John C. Smith, took the Fourth of July as

the occasion to tell the people of Sharon, Massachusetts

that the French Revolution was caused by "A combination

 

long since founded 12 Europe, by_Infidels and Atheists,

 

 

£9 root out and effectually destrgy Religion and
"34

 

Civil Government

 

Morse, however, received his greatest endor-
sement fromuhe Saint George of infidelity fighters,
Timothy Dwight. If the watchmen of Zion had a leader
it was Dwight. He had become president of Yale College
in 1795, and by 1798 he had turned it from a den of
infidelity into the bulwark of orthrodox religion.

On the Fourth of July, the citizens of New Haven
requested that he speak to them and he obliged them

with one of the truly Significant orations in American

 

 

 

 

 

history.

33David Tappan, A Discourse . . . June 12'
1798, Occasioned by the Approaching Departure gf the
Senior Class from the Universigy (Boston: 1798,
pp. 4-8.

34

John C. Smith, Afl_Oration . . . 4th _f July,
1798 (Litchfield: (n.d.)). pp. 6-7.

 

163

The structure and content of the sermon can
be partly deduced from the title and Biblical text.
The title was "THE DUTY OF AMERICANS AT THE PRESENT
CRISIS . . ." which indicated a continuity with Morse's,
Tappan's and Osgood's concern that America was threatened
and with their desire to advise their audiences on the
proper path to take. The Biblical text was "Behold I
come as a thief: Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepth
his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his
shame" (Rev. 16:15). The choice of this verse indicated
a concern with sin and uncleaness that was rooted in
the guilt and anxiety connected to the sense of having
disobeyed eternal moral law. Also the context of this
verse was interesting. In effect, the selection was
part of the story of the seven vials and the part
Dwight chose was the advice given upon the pouring of
the sixth vial which he interpretated as the epoch
that produced a great antichrist movement. He saw
the sixteenth chapter of Revelations as an historical
prediction that had come true. Was not antichrist
obviously at work in the World? And what should one
do - one should "watcheth, and keepth his garments,
lest he walk naked, and they see his shame."

The rest of the sermon spins out from this
beginning. He personified the spirit of antichrist

by making the Illuminati its concrete agent on earth.

164

His conception of the order's program was nearly
identical to that put forth by Morse and, of course,
he saw them as the formentors of the French Revolution
"and all its dreadful appendages . . . ." This dreaded
group, according to Dwight, had established several
societies in America prior to 1786 but their major
victory had been the complete triumph of their pro-
gram in France. They had reduced death to eternal
sleep; marriage had been degraded to a farce; atheism
was taught in the schools and "the community, by the
law of divorce, invited to universal prostitution."35
The content of the sermon, up to this point,
was common stuff, and when he turned to his suggestions
for what his audience should do in response to the
rise of antichrist his theme was much the same as
Tappan or Morse. But, when he turned from outlining
the Illuminati program he launched into a unique and
personal emotional appeal to resist the influx of
new ideas and new morality.
I am a father, I feel the usual parental tenderness
for my children . . . . But from cool conviction I
declare in this solemn place, I would far rather
follow them one by one to an untimely grave, than to

behold them, hgwever prosperous, the victims of
philosophism.3

 

35Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans at the

 

 

Present Crisis . . . Fourth gf_JulyT—l798 (New Haven:
1798). pp. 11-12.
36

Ibid., p. 25.

165

In the face of these new ideas and the new
freedom America's duty was clear. First, we must
affect a complete separation from those who promote
these ideas, in other words, from Europe generally
and France especially. He asked "for what end shall
we be connected, of whom this is the character and
conduct"? Is it that "our churches may become temples
of reason . . . our psalms Marseillois hymns . . .
that we may behold a strumpet personating a Goddess
on the alters of Jevovah." Or perhaps we seek union
with France so that "we may see our wives and daughters
the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonoured;
speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and
virtue, and the loathing of God and man."37 In these
statements Dwight was giving voice to the pycho-sexual
fears that have contributed so much to the American
hatred of Europe and to isolationist sentiment. He
was drawing on the old American fear of Europe as
corrupt and beyond regeneration. It was historical
irony of the first order that Dwight should find in
the French Revolution, which changed the face of

Europe, the evidence that Europe had not changed

at all.

 

37Ibid., p. 20.

 

166

Second, in addition to isolation from the
source of evil ideas Americans should endeavor to make
their personal lives the most virtuous possible. In
this time of trial "private, personal obedience and
reformation of life; personal piety, righteousness
and temperance" were called for by God's injunction.

To Dwight, personal virtue was the only foundation

for a good nation:
But it may be necessary to remind you, that
personal obedience and reformation is foundation,
and the sum, of all national worth and prosperity.
If each man conducts himself aright, the community
cannot be conducted wrong. If the private life be
unblamable38the public state must be commendable
and happy.

This notion had the didactic sound of the Puritan

conception from which it drew its inspiration. Also,

it was directly connected to the idea that a virtuous

people were a religious church-going people. Thus

Dwight urged his audience to return to the church and

religion with a new zeal for
Where religion prevails, Illuminati cannot make
disciples, a French directory cannot govern, a
nation cannot be made slaves, nor villians, nor
atheists, nor beasts. To destroy us . . . our

enemies must first destroy our Sagbath, and
seduce us from the house of God.

 

38Ibid., p. 16.

391bid., p. 18.

167

Thus, at a time when individual conscience and reason
were coming to the fore; when the boundaries of indi-
vidual freedom were being expanded, Dwight called for
a return to a sense of common virtue rooted in the
absolute precepts of the church. Also, he was not
above seeing the future of the nation as dependent
on the existence of this Shared morality.

Clearly, Dwight appealed to the anxiety
of those in his audience. The world was full of sin,
it seemed to be everywhere, the enemies of Christ
were growing and

the sins of these enemies of Christ, and Christians
are of numbers and degrees which mock account

and description. All that the malice and atheism
of the Dragon, the cruelity and rapacity of the
Beast, and the fraud and deceit of the false
prophet, can generate or accomplish, swell the
list. No personal or national interest of man

has been uninvaded; no impious sentiment, or

action against God, and his religion, has been
unattempted . . . . Chastity and decency have
alike been turned out of doors; and shame and
polution called out of their dens to the hall of
distinction and chair of state . . . . For what
end Shall we be connected with men of whom this

is the character and conduct? IS it that we may
assume the same character, and pursue the same
conduct? . . . Is it that we may see the Bible
cast into a bonfire . . . and our children, either
weedled or terrified, united in the mob, chanting
mockeries against God . . . Shall we, my bretheren,
become partakers of these sins? Shall we introduce
them into our government, our schools, our
families? Shall our sons become the disciples of
Voltaire, and dragoons of Marat; 36 our daughters
the concubines of the Illuminati?

 

4OIbid., pp. 20-21.

Ill"! [ ffl’ll l {I .[l II [ (lulellii-( .I' 'II‘ I {[.lrl.

168

Dwight, I submit, was possessed by a demon. In the
passage above the indefinite nature of the demon was
clear. He tried repeatedly to give shape to his
tormentor, first it was "these enemies of Christ"
but they "mock account and description". Next, it
became "the Dragon", "the Beast" and "the false

prophet,‘ later he personified it by evoking Voltaire,
Marat and the Illuminati.

What was it that so disturbed Timothy Dwight?
In part, it was history. His lifetime (1752-1817)
had produced sweeping historical changes symbolized
by the American and French Revolutions but beyond
them there had been great shifts in belief. By 1798
the notion that man should be freed from the restraints
of a divinely ordained structure was common currency
and was being put into practice. At the highest
level of generalization, man was struggling to be
free of the family in its individual, social and
political forms. Man was rejecting the father. By
1798, there were indications that a reaction to this
prolonged period of rebellion was setting in and the
reaction was largely psychological. Dwight was also
reacting to this psychological change. When man has
struggled to be free it seems that there has been an

inevitable accumulation of guilt and anxiety resulting

from that struggle. Dwight was giving vent to those

169

feelings and was also seeking to project them out on
to an external object. The object took several forms,
but by far the most interesting and significant was
the Illuminati. The program of this secret society
was the mirror image of all those impulses which
Dwight and others sought to expel. Nothing provided
a clearer indication of this than the repeated emphasis
on those parts of the Illumanati program, such as
sexual liberty, easy divorce and the separation of
children from parents, which struck at the role of
the family as the touchstone of order in the world.

In any event, this passionate sermon by the
Yale president was welcome support to Jedidiah Morse.
Another Dwight, Timothy's brother Theodore, picked
up Morse's conspiracy theory and on that same Fourth
of July in 1798 informed the good people in Hartford
of the danger that confronted them. He told them
that the French Revolution was the product of a group
of men who aimed to destroy all religion and govern-
ment. France was, he stated, being run by men trained
and controlled by the Illumanati. In one significant
passage, Dwight claimed, that at the beginning Americans
rightfully approved the revolution in France but when
the king was overthrown and killed this was the point

where Americans had stopped to "reflect coolly on the

170

situation." In the wake of the king's death the
ingenuity of the French "has been exhausted in the
discovery of new species of wickedness." France was
"not satisfied with guilt of a common dye . . . ."
the Jacobin "delights in murdering the wife of his
bosom, in destroying the life of a Sinking infant,
in plunging a dagger into a parent's heart."41 It
was only six years earlier that Theodore Dwight had
praised the French Revolution in another oration,
but that was before the Revolution had changed, and
had not those changes been the product of a secret
society? A society which sought anarchy and chaos
and Theodore Dwight had never wanted those things.

In addition to the Dwight brothers, Morse had
others who spoke on his side. But he also quickly
drew a round of sharp criticism. A writer who called
himself "Censor" wrote to a Boston newspaper and asked
for an examination of Morse's sources. He argued,
with some obvious hostility, that Robison was three
thousand miles away and that Americans had no real

hint as to his character and truthfulness.42 Morse

answered these charges in subsequent issues of the

 

41Theodore Dwight, An Oration Spoken SE Hartford

. . . July 4th., 1798 (Hartford: 1798), p. 6, 24.

 

42Massachusetts Mercury, July 27, 1798.

 

171

same paper. These articles were confusing and to some
extent inconclusive. The major thrust was to defend
Robison because of the vast scholarly trappings attached
to his book. Americans should also believe the book
because of the high positions Robison was known to

hold in great Britain. Surely, argued Morse, a man

who was Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

and a professor at that great university was to be
believed. In a further attempt to support Robison,

Morse cited the conclusion of the British Critic

 

that Robison's work and the new work of Barruel,

 

Memoirs 9: Jacobinism, were in substantial agreement.
Morse also pointed to the great men of New England
such as Tappan and the Dwight brothers who had pro—
nounced the book authentic and valuable.43

One of Morse's thorniest problems was the anger
of the Masons who resented his insinuations that their
order was the basis of the Illuminati infiltration
of America. In his May 9th sermon Morse had attached
a long note to the printed edition explaining that
the Illuminati were not really Masons but a perversion

of the order which Morse sought to portray as good and

pure.44 In the newspapers, however, Morse found

 

43;p;g., August 3, 10, 17, 21, 28, 31, 1798,

44May 9th, 1798, pp. 21-22.

 

172

insidous meaning in the criticism coming from the
Masons. He contended that since the Free Masons
were so angry with Robison "it must be because he
has touched and exposed their secret friends."45
Statements such as this clearly indicated the non-
political nature of Morse's crusade. If he was
attempting to aid the Federalist party he must have
forgotten that the highest Mason in the land was
George Washington.

Gradually, it became apparent that Morse would
have to make another extended statement on the sub-
ject to defend his views. When the governor of
Massachusetts, Increase Sumner, appointed Thanksgiving
Day as a special day to thank God for his mercies,
Morse had his occasion. When he stepped into his
pulpit at Charlestown he was slightly more emboldened
by the support given his cause and also aroused by
the opposition to it. The basic message was much the
same as in his sermon in May. America was faced with
great troubles which he listed as moral laxity, materia-
lism, atheism, "increase of luxury", "a spirit of
insubordination to civil authority" and, most important,
"foreign intrigue". He saw this last threat as our

"greatest peril" Since France has systematically

 

45Massachusetts Mercury, Sept. 14, 1798.

 

173

destroyed true liberty in Europe She was to be feared
if evidences of her presence were detected in America.
Of course, such evidence was clearly present to Morse -
the Illuminati were in America.4
In order to substantiate this charge, Morse
attached an extremely long appendix to the printed
edition. The appendix was a clear indication of the
fact that Morse's crusade was no longer a local move-
ment and that the printed edition was conceived of
as more important than the spoken sermon. In the
appendix, he tried to prove that foreign intrigue
was operating against the United States. He summed
up with the following statement:
The intrigue, and consequent influence of France,
in this country, I conceive, have corrupted, to
an incalculable extent, all the sources of our
true happiness. Our political divisions and
embarrassments, and much of that Atheistical
infidelity and irreligion, which, during the
last twenty years, have made such alarming pro-
gress among us, are probably but the poisonous
fruits of our alliance and intimate intercourse
with the French nation.47
The details of this "intimate intercourse"
were by then, widely known, but Morse ran through

them again. He pointed to the similarity between

the democratic societies and the Jacobin clubs, finding

 

46Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon . . . Ngvember
A9, 1798 (Boston: 1798), pp. 11-16.
47

Ibid. 1 pp. 30—310

174

them to be essentially the same. He saw the coming
of men such as Volney to the United States and the
warm reception given Paine's work as laying out the
welcome mat for the devil.48 In effect, Morse was
painting a picture that showed pure and virtuous
America infiltrated by the agents of evil. No agent
was more feared than the Illuminati. In May 1798,
he had asserted that they were among us and by Novem-
ber he had gathered some further proof. Using a
sermon by Joseph Lathop as the basis of his charge
Morse claimed that in the northern part of Massachusetts
there was
a company of beings who discard the principles
of religion, and the obligations of morality,
trample on the bonds of matrimony, the separate
rights of property, and the civil laws of
society, spend the sabbath in labour and diver-
tion [sic] as fancy dicates; and the nights in
riotous excess and promiscuous concubinage, as
lust impels . . . . That a society of this
description, which would disgrace the natives
of Caffraria, should be formed in this land of
civilization and Gospel light, is an evidence
that the devil is at this time gone forth, 49
having great influence, as well as great wrath.

Beyond this claim of a real Illuminati cell

in Massachusetts Morse attempted to connect the

 

democratic clubs with the Illuminati movement. Because
48%., pp. 67-68.
49;§£§., p. 22. The sermon used by Morse was

Joseph Lathrop, A Sermon 92 the Dangers 9: the Times . .
delivered . . . 3E Springfield (Springfield: 1798).

 

 

 

 

175

the societies had Spread the program of Illuminism
and had sought to spread ideas in opposition to
Christianity Morse felt justified to claim they were
"apostles of Illuminism". Since the government and
the people frowned on their open activities they
ceased to act publicly. Thus, Morse claimed they
had followed the pattern established by the European
order and abandoned their public form only to reappear
as the American Society of United Irishmen.SO There
was such a group founded in Ireland in 1791, to some
extent, the product of the revolutionary spirit
spreading from France. The English government re-
pressed the group and many of them came to the United
States and, later, more came after the Irish Rebellion
of 1798. They exhibited such violent revolutionary
ardor that their presence was alarming but there was
no reason to connect them to the democratic societies.
Aside from these further details the sermon
adds little to the general conception of conspiracy
Morse sought to convey. It does offer an insight
into the total reaction Morse had to the entire span
of the French Revolution. In what amounts to a con~

fession, he admitted that in the beginning he had felt

 

50Ibid., p. 67.

176

graditude to France for her aid to America during the

American Revolution and that he had totally approved

the initial stages of the French Revolution. However,

he continued "this graditude and joy were the offspring

of ignorance" and he had now seen the light and recanted.51
In this same context he added a most interesting

statement. He claimed that "judging from the fruits

of the French Revolution, it must have had an impure

. . "52
origin.

The implications of this passage are
meaningful. For one thing, it implied a certain
methodology in the judgement of historical events.

By "the fruits of the French Revolution" he must mean
generally the Terror and he finds the cause of this

in the impurity of the original thrust of the revolt.
Such a View was consistent with the absolutist tenor
of his thought and illustrated the strength of moral
law in his thinking. To him there were certain immut-
able principles and the French had begun their revolu-
tion without regard to these principles and the outcome
had been continually increasing perversity in the
working out of the Revolution. At a deeper level the

short passage illustrated the root of Morse's harsh

rejection of the French try for freedom. He, consciously

 

SlIbid., p. 31.

521bid., p. 32.

177

or unconsciously, felt guilt over his early support
of a revolt rooted in such impure principles. The
harshness and irrationality of his rejection was a
direct result of this early support and part of his
personal attempt to expiate himself for his earlier
approval. The creation of a secret society as the
motive force behind the revolution was a perfect
device to insure this expiation because Morse could
attribute to this secret group the earlier beneficent
nature of the Revolution which hid the "impure origins."
If everything had been open and above board Morse, told
himself, he would have seen the evil from the beginning.
In addition to Morse's sermon there were a
goodly number of similar efforts by other New England
clergy. In sum, they all resemble Morse's point of
View and added up to a complete airing of the subject
in New England. While New England was flooded with
rhetoric on conspiracy and the threat to the United
States the rest of the Union certainly was not spared.
The sermons of Morse and others were printed and widely
distributed outside the New England states. William
Cobbett, in Philadelphia, became a conduit for the
ideas of the New England clergy and spread the con-
Spiracy alarm to the nation in the pages of his

Porcupine's Gazette.53

 

 

53Porcupines Gazette, April 12, 13, 1798; Feb.
25, 1799.

 

178

Certainly the conspiracy view of the French
Revolution did not go unOpposed. Benjamin Franklin
Bache, in the pages of the Aurora labeled Robison's
book an "absurd collection of stories" and "contemptible
mummery." He also implied that Morse's affection for
Robison's efforts was rooted in the fact that both men
had earned their doctor's degrees from Scotish univer-
sities. Perhaps this goes some distance toward proving
that some disputes are eternal.54

Confronted with some formidable support and
equally formidable hostility, Morse was not about to
halt his efforts to inform the people of the menace in
their midst. When President Adams declared April 25,

1799 a national day of fasting and prayer, Morse took
advantage of the event to deliver his last major
address on the conspiracy threatening the nation.
After reading the sermon one has the impression that
Morse attempted to deliver the final blow in favor of
his theory, that he wanted to prove to everyone that
a tremendous peril confronted them.

To begin, he chose a Biblical text that summed
up his concern. To him, "If the foundations be destroyed,
what can the rightous do?" - (Psalm 11:3) was a clear

statement of the problem. This text lead him to a

 

54Aurora, Aug. 3, 1798.

179

statement of his purpose; he was "an honest and
faithful watchman" who sought to alert those who would
listen to the dangers menacing the religious and
political foundations of the country. He felt that
"subtil and secret assailants" were gathering for
prolonged attack and he believed that it would be
"criminal" for him to remain silent.55
The source of this hostile design was France.
Morse saw this clearly: the French had made war on
our commerce and treated captured Americans with savage
and cruel inhumanity. Plus, the French Directory had
plotted to invade the southern states from St. Domingo
employing an army of blacks. The army also had the
goal of inciting the blacks of America to revolt
against their masters. This was a reflection and
endorsement of a common fear early in 1799 and illus-
trated that a fear of black revolt stemming from the
French Revolution was not solely a southern concern.56
These opening remarks were only prologue to
the heart of the sermon. Morse's main purpose was to
prove that secret societies, inspired by the French,

existed in America. In a remarkable statement, Morse

claimed

 

55Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Exhibiting the Present

 

Dangers, and Consequent Duties pg the Citizens g: the
United States . . . April 25, 1799 (Charlestown: 1799),
pp. 9-10.

56Ibid., p. 14.

 

 

 

 

180

I have now in my possession complete and
indubitable proof that such societies do
exist and have for many years existed, in
the United States. I have, my brothren,

an official, authenticated list of names,
ages, places of nativity, professions . . .
of the officers and members of Society of
Illuminati . . . consisting of one hundred
members, instituted in Virginia, by the
Grand Orient of FRANCE.57

 

 

 

He continued that he also had evidence of a similar
society in New York and that the New York group had
spawned fourteen additional such societies.

Next, Morse listed "the fruits" of these
societies. He saw them as the cause of the political
divisions which unsettled the nation, the abuse of
"our wise and faithful rulers, the opposition to laws
and "the measures of the Supreme Executive," the
Whiskey Rebellion, the existence of "baneful and
corrupting books," the spread of infidelity and
immorality and the attempts to destroy the influence
and existence of the clergy.58 He had ascribed to
a shadowy secret organization almost all of the his-
torical changes of the preceeding thirty years.

Thus, he and his audience might deny responsibility

for these broad transformations.

 

57Ibid., p. 14.

581bid., p. 17.

181

After laying out the proof for his charges,

he followed his previous pattern and turned to the
subject of the citizen's duty given this grave
menace. First, he extorted his listeners to return
to that sense of God's will governs all and that
God punishes and rewards according to your righteous-
ness.

Our pious ancestors saw the hand of God in

everything, more especially in all signal

events, such as pestilence, famine, earthquakes,

war and other calamities. It has been

fashionable of late, to ascribe these things to

the uncontrolled operations of natural causes

and to keep out of View the Divine agency.59
Morse advised that his audience return to the practices
of "our pious ancestors" and see natural events as
divine warnings. Specifically, he asked them to see
the cholera epidemics of the 1790's as God's punish-
ment for the sin of allowing infidelity and immorality
to reside in their nation. He warned that the
epidemics would not stop "until we acknowledge the
righteous hand of God in it, and are truly humble
for our sins and reform our lives."60

The desire to submit to the judgment of God

in all things was more than a return to the past.

It was a symptom of the desire to escape the oppor-

tunities and responsibilities of the new freedom

 

591bid., p. 28.

6OIbid., p. 29.

182

which had blossomed in the revolutionary era. The
desire to totally subject oneself to God‘s will
has psychological as well as religious roots. Sub-
mitting totally to God‘s will frees the individual
from all responsibility created by the new freedom.
After the Fast Day sermon, Morse's fortunes
waned. He was bitterly attacked by the Republican
press. The story came out that Morse had received
a letter for a Professor Ebeling in Germany stating
that, in Europe, Robison and his book were given
no credence and that Robison's character was believed
to be unsavory. This thrust against Morse had
considerable influence and gradually Morse and his
theory lost standing in the public eye.61
While Morse seems to have lost public support
it would be wrong to assume that the idea of a secret
sect of subversives died a quick and quiet death.
The concepts and terms used in the Illuminati scare
entered the public's mind through the poetry and
prose of the age. Clearly, poets and novelists rea-
lized that the subject of illuminism was common coin
and used it without explanation or a sense that it
was disbelieved. For instance, Thomas Green

Fessenden found that

 

61Stauffer, pp. 315-320.

183

. . . democrates and Illuminees.
Are birds obscene, and of feather,
Should therefore all be class'ed together.

They all object to the propriety
Of law and order in society,

Think reason will supply restraint
And make mankind a set of saints.6

I

s

2
In American novels around the turn of the

century the concept of a secret society received its

widest exposure. In 1800, Sally Sayward Barrell

Keating published Julia and the Illuminated Baron

 

in which the Illuminati are portrayed not as political
schemers but as promoters of atheism and corrupters

of youth (especially women). Keating claimed to hate
"female politicians" and denied that she was writing

a political novel.63 More important, however, than
Keating's novel was the work of Charles Brockden
Brown. One literary historian has concluded that
Brown's villians "resemble the leaders of the secret
society of Illuminati, or at least they resemble

64

the popular idea of these leaders." The most inter-

esting of these villians was Carwin who first appeared

 

62Quoted in Merle Curti, Growth of American Thought

 

(3rd. edition) New York: Harpers, 1963) p. 185.

63Lillie D. Loshe, The Early American Novel (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1907), p. 52.

64Ibid., p. 41. This judgment is shared by Harry
Warfel, Charles Brocken Brown: American Gothic Novelist
(Gainesville, Florida: U. of Florida Press, 1949), p. 113;
David Lee Clark, Charles Brocken Brown: Pioneer Voice 9:
America (Durham, N.C.: Duke U. Press, 1952), p. 174.

 

 

 

 

 

 

184

in Wieland, 93 the Transformation (1798) as a mysterious

 

 

figure with roots in Spain and England and an amazing
talent for ventriloquism. Brown promised in Wieland

further revelations about Carwin if he should excite

any public interest. Eventually, Brown produced

Carwin the Biloguist which appeared in the Literary

 

Magazine in installments between 1803 and 1805. In
this story, that Brown never really finished, the
young Carwin comes under the influence of a rich
Irishman named Ludloe. Ludloe took Carwin from
America to Europe and gradaully reveled that Carwin
was being considered for membership in an inter-
national secret society. At Ludloe's expense, Carwin
received the leisure to study and think and was even
sent to Spain to learn the influence of superstition,
the means of consoling skeptics into certainly, and
how to "annihilate the scruples of a tender female."65
After his stay in Spain he returned to Ludloe and
learned more about the society. For example, Ludloe
taught that the evils that infest society Should be

blamed on "errors of opinion" and that "man is the

creature of circumstances . . . capable of endless

 

65Charles Brocken Brown, Wieland, RE the Trans-
formation, together with Memoirs of Carwin the Biloguist

(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926) p. 306.

 

 

 

 

185

improvement: that his progress had been stopped by
the artifical impediment of government: that by the
removal of this, the fondest dreams of the imagination
will be realized."66
Clearly, the figure of Ludloe and his teachings
were modeled after the Illuminati. Also, it seems
apparent that the secret society was an important
topic among Brown and his friends. William Dunlap,

for example, after reading the first draft of Carwin

the Biloquist wrote in his diary "read C. B. Brown's

 

beginning for the life of Carwin; as far as he has
gone he has done well; he has taken up the schemes
of the Illuminati." What this all proves is difficult
to say but this fact is evident - the idea of illu-
minism was not restricted entirely to a group of New
England clerics who used it to attack the French
Revolution. Brown may have used the concept of a
secret society to help sell his work or he may have
been truly intrigued by the idea of a society based
on super-rationalism but, in any event, he helped
spread the idea throughout the United States.

In conclusion, the sermons and orators of
Morse, Osgood, Tappan and the Dwights represent a

significant element in the general reaction against

 

661bid., pp. 310-311.

186

the French Revolution on the later half of the 1790's.
They illustrate, first, that the French Revolution
can not be isolated from the rest of the revolutionary
era. These men drew no sharp lines between the French
revolt and the general loosening of restraints on
man which took place independent of the events in
France. However, the French Revolution provided a
focus for the reaction and served as a symbol for the
general tendencies about which they were so anxious.
Second, these sermons Show that, at the deepest
level, the reaction was rooted in guilt and anxiety
that arose from a collective sense of having repudiated
the father. These men all insisted that representa-
tions of the father, in religion, in politics and
society had been rejected and reviled. They dwelled
on the French innovations which attacked the family
and those institutions which took their pattern
from the family. Thus, the regicide was an example,
concentrated and more horrible, of the deeper revolt
against the most traditional standard of authority
known to man. These New England clergymen were experi-
encing a sense of guilt as old as Adam, but not Adam's
guilt, they felt their own sense of remorse in
response to their own sins.
Third, a central part of the reaction was a

sense that Americans must act. The clergymen sought

187

to instill in the audience that heard or read their
sermons the feeling that, as a nation, we must put
aside wild notions of French liberty and accept

the traditional restraints of the past. This must
be done actively, they argued, by supporting elected
officials, shunning foreign influences and returning
to an orthrodox Christian religion. In most of the
sermons there was a fear of a flying apart or
fragmentation of society and the nation, and this
was one implication of the French Revolution. To
counter this fragmentation they dwelled on the
sinfulness of the previous decades and insisted

that pentence be paid by everyone in the form of
surrendering individual autonomy to a greater
national or religious purpose. In short, there

was a vague but highly potent fear of freedom -

freedom from which they sought escape.

CHAPTER V

MOMENTUM OF REACTION

We have grown so wise of late years as to reject
the maxims of Moses, Lycurgus and the patriarch --
we have by our Own constitutions of Govt and the
preposterous use made of the doctrines of equality,
stripped 919 men of their dignity and wise men of
their influence and long, long are we to feel the
mischievous effects of our modern policy.

Noah Webster to Benjamin Rush
Dec. 15, 1800

The French Revolution stirred up strong emotions
in America. Before 1793 Americans tended to see the
events in France as a great advance for all mankind,
but after 1793, equal, if not stronger emotions arose
to condemn the French and these emotions formed the
basis of a strong counter-revolutionary movement. Was
this movement solely a response to the French Revolu-
tion or was it a continuation of the conservative
drift in the late 1780's? There can be no real answer
to that question. The French rebellion intervened
between the rising conservative movement that led to
the Constitution in 1787 and the strong shift to the
right in the late 1790's. Perhaps one Should look at
the conservatism of 1796 to 1800 as a response to the

188

189

general revolutionary tenor of the age and not a single
revolution. Thus, revolutions and reactions both have
momentum and their courses were not fluid and constant
but halting and irregular producing a complex picture
of expanding and contracting freedom.

One thing is clear, however: the counter-
revolution of the late 1790's saw the French Revolution
as the object of its wrath and used the news from
France as a tool to shape a generally more conservative
frame of mind in America. To begin with, the response
to theFrench revolt tended to consolidate the notion
that America was unique and the repository of mankind's
hopes, while Europe was a hopelessly corrupt civiliza-
tion offering nothing of value for the future. This
produced a desire to bar outsiders if possible and
Americanize those who were allowed to enter. Closely
connected to this fear of outsiders was a growing desire
to preserve what many Americans saw as a distinctive
American community. The French Revolution had let
loose in the world ideas that cast doubt on all the
traditional absolutes of life. It had challenged the
idea of absolute authority in government, society,
religion, and, in the end, it seemed to threaten the
very idea of order. It became for Americans a monster
spreading its tendrils over the earth disrupting tra-

ditional patterns and mores. In response many Americans

190

sought ways to strengthen old forms of belief and
maintain traditional ways of living. Obviously the
fear of foreign influence and the desire to perserve
the American family are closely related. Both derive
their power from a growing fear that man had broken
too many restraints and that real anarchy was a
possibility unless controls and checks were placed
on man's desire for freedom.

The notion that a community should carefully
screen newcomers was hardly novel in American society.
The Puritans had rigid laws on the selection of those
who might settle in their communities. They believed
that the New World offered mankind a new chance to
build the perfect community and they saw that inclusion
into this noble experiment should be limited to the
worthy. The era of the French Revolution tended to
reinforce and reinvigorate this belief. From the
American point of View, the French revolt was further
proof that Europe was declining and that America should
isolate itself from the infection of the Old World's
terminal illness. The evidence of this belief, at
times, was amusing. The slightest indication of foreign
influence was enough to cause some Americans to see
grand plots and insidous design in the most innocent
things. The fear of strangers and of the new, however,

was profoundly important in the course of American

191

because it established, for the first time, in the new
nation's history, the precedent for future legislation
to suppress the protester and the person who refused
to conform to community standards.

One of the amusing incidents that illustrated
the desire to protect American shores from outsiders
was the so-called Tub Plot. In February, 1799 the
authorities at the port of Charleston, South Carolina
arrested five people off the ship Minerva after finding
papers hidden in the false bottoms of tubs. The five,
"two French men, two men of color and a woman" were
held in Fort Pinckney. The two blacks were put in
irons "in separate apartments" and one of the French
was rumored to be a Mr. Soloman "a member of the late
Convention of France." Soon all the leading Federalist
papers picked up the story and spread the alarm. There
was wild speculation about the aim of these five strangers.
Their mission was portrayed as part of the French plan
to excite the southern Slaves and there was a rumor
that the plan had included the burning of Charleston.
Most reports of the incident indicated that French
emigres already in the United States were part of the
plot. About three weeks after the story first appeared
the real facts became known. There was no plot, no

papers hidden in a tub, no agents of the Directory and

192

no plan for a black revolt. After their confinement
the five were released and sailed, happily no doubt,
for Guadelupe.l

Part of this strange incident was a desire by
those in the Federal government to support their claim
that America needed laws to protect itself against
foreign intrique.2 Whether the plot was a complete
hoax or not was unimportant. The significance rested
on the perceived nature of the plan, whether the
perception was based on fact or not. The existence
of two Frenchmen, two blacks and a woman entering the
country with secret documents coincided with deep fears
of Frenchmen, blacks and women. Perhaps nothing created
fear more easily than the mere hint of a black insur-
rection. Closely linked to this worry was the dread
of arson and fire generally. It is easy to make too
much out of this fear of fire and arson. At the level
of images and symbols, however, fire and flame served
in the early part of the 1790's as a basic image to
describe the spread of freedom throughtout the world
but by the end of the decade fire had become a central
fear. In addition to the Tub Plot, Philadelphia had

also been swept by the rumor of a French plan to burn

 

lCharles Warren, Odd Byways 12 American History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1942), pp. 117-126.

 

 

2Lisle A. Rose, Prologue E9 Democracy: The
Federalist 12 the South, 1789-1800 (Lexington, Ky.: U.
of Kentucky Press, 1968), pp. 211-12.

 

 

 

 

(Ii I’lll

193

down the city.3 Fire was, of course, a more alarming
thing in that day than in modern times but it was
interesting that some Americans saw fire as one weapon
the French might use against them.

Another example of the deep distrust Americans
came to feel for foreigners was provided by Stephen
Higginson, a descendent of Reverend Francis Higginson,
the Puritan minister. Higginson was an important figure
in Massachusetts politics; he had been elected to
Congress in 1783, and was a director of the Massachusetts
Bank. During the 1790's he was associated with Alexander
Hamilton and actively supported the Federalist cause
with his considerable wealth. In the summer of 1798
Higginson began to suspect that Frenchmen were plotting
to take over the United States. His suspicion settled
on a Mr. Lee whom Higginson saw as an agent of the
Directory sent to America to further the invasion plan.
As in the Tub Plot, secret documents were believed to
be part of the plan. After Lee became aware that
Higginson suspected him, he informed Higginson that

the government had all his papers and had cleared him.

 

3Stewart Mitchell, ed., New Letters of Abigail
Adams: 1788-1801 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947),
to her sister, May 10, 1798, pp. 170-72. Cited here-
after as New Letters.

 

194

Later Lee even called on Higginson but his explanations
were brushed aside.4
In itself, the suspicions of Stephen Higginson
were trivial but the motive force behind them was not.
He wanted a war against France to reunit the nation
and expel the French influence.
there can be no safety for us but in open and
deadly war with France; without this the feelings
and views of our people can not be extended to
the point necessary to repel the poison of their
principles already operating in our country, which
will operate our ruin if it be not expelled.
Higginson's desire for unity was a classic case.
He wanted to stop any foreign influence from polluting
America. To do this he placed great emphasis on a
strong leader. The divided and in decisive Congress
threatened the nation and what the country needed was
an imposing firm leader to direct their measures,
and to whip in the stragglers from party and duty.
It is weakness and folly . . . to talk of acting
independently of party, of judging for oneself etc.
. . . nothing but an open war can save us, and

more inverterate [sic] and deadly it shall be, the
better will be our chance for security in future.

 

4George Gibbs, Memoir g: the Administrations 9:
Washington and John Adams, edited from the Papers 9: Oliver
Wolcott, Secretary 9: the Treasury, vol. II (New York:
1846), Higginson to Oliver Wolcott Jr., June 29, 1798,
pp. 68-69. Cited hereafter as Gibbs.

 

 

 

 

 

5J. Franklin Jameson, ed., "Letters of Stephen
Higginson 1783-1804" in Annual Report 9£_the American
Historical Association for the Year 1896, vol. I (Washington:
1897), to Timothy Pickering, June 25, 1798, p. 813.

6Gibbs, Higginson to Oliver Wolcott Jr., July 11,
1798, p. 813.

 

 

 

195

The above passage illustrated the desire to surrender
one's autonomy to a strong leader and experience the
thrilling unity caused by war against a hated enemy.
This desire was at the core of Higginson's nearly
hysterical fear of newcomers.

While the Tub Plot and Stephen Higginson's
antics may appear to be oddities of American history
the Alien and Sedition Laws definitely were not. These
laws were the result of a complex series of events but,
in large part, they were the product of a deep desire
to limit the freedom of Americans and prevent the
infusion of foreign influences into American life.

The spirit of these laws was rooted in the anxiety
resulting from the nearly three decades of vast changes
in American life. Before the passage of these laws

in the summer of 1798 there had been a growing sense
that something had to be done about the criticism of
public figures and the increasing power of foreign
elements. William Cobbett, the Englishmen, spoke as

an American when he wrote "Surely we need a sedition
law to keep our own rogues from cutting our throats,

and an alien law to prevent the invasion by a host of

foreign rogues to assist them."7 Noah Webster, as early

 

7Gazette gf U.S., Nov. 23, 1798.

196

as 1795, pointed to the newspapers as a source of unrest.
He felt that the democratic societies had used the news-

papers to further their cause and that "well conducted

gazettes" should not print news about them.8 By 1798,

he had concluded that

It is obvious that the falsehoods and calummy
propogated by means of public papers have been
the direct and principal means of all civil
dissensions which distract this country and
have threatened it with civil war. This is a
well ascertained fact.

He felt that every time the papers had inflamed the
public mind against the measures of the government

the government had been proven right. This he found
was "decisive proof that there must be something wrong

. . . . . . "10
in principle in oppOSition.

 

Webster's belief that protest was wrong in
principle was at the heart of the spirit that led to
the Alien and Sedition Laws. The French Revolution
had played a large role in creating this abhorrance
toward dissent and protest. The legal attempts to

Silence criticism and protect public figures were

 

8Harry R. Warfel, ed., Letters 9£_Noah Webster
(New York: Library Publishers, 1953), Webster to
Samuel Williams, Mar. 24, 1795, p. 128. Cited here-
after as Letters.

9

 

Ibid., to The Public, May 1, 1796, pp. 134-5.

lOIbid.

t'ltflx.‘lll)l’ll.ll|ll [[11].ng ultllll‘l.|l' . \

(I, (5". ,II?JI,.|. [W 1

197

aimed at the Shadowy figure of the French Revolution
and all it had come to mean. The protest against
neutrality, the Jay Treaty and the whiskey tax in the
middle of the decade all were seen as direct products
of French influence. The influence of the French
revolt went even deeper than that. It was above all
else a challenge to authority of any kind. The
message it carried for Americans evoked an image of a
world without the peace and stability of unquestioned
authority. The laws against sedition and unruly aliens
were, more than anything else, an effort to regain a
world in which authority was respected and obeyed.

The attempts to enforce these laws Show that
their purpose went far beyond any attempt to gain
political advantage or protect the national security
of the United States. The Liberty Pole Cases in Dedham,
Massachusetts offer a good example of an instance in
which no real threat to security or illegal protest
was involved. In October, 1798 an itinerant preacher
named David Brown came to Dedham and aroused the people
with charges that the government was handling public
lands in a less than ethical way. This appeal to the
people frightened the Adam's administration and a
warrant was issued for Brown on a sedition charge.
Meanwhile, Brown's followers erected a liberty pole

in a section of Dedham called Clapboardtree Parish.

198

The pole was labeled a rallying point for insurrection
and civil war and Judge John Lowell ordered it cut off.
Before this could be done, a mob of Dedhamites entered
Clapboardtree Parish and destroyed the pole. In the
brawl which ensued a young invader of the parish was
captured and forced to pay twenty dollars for his
freedom.11

A Boston paper put the issue into focus by
reminding its readers that during the American Revolu-
tion the beleagued revolutionary government had
cherished such Liberty Poles and that the British
had cut them off as symbols of rebellion. It was
odd, the paper noted, that in 1775 the British were
tyrants for cutting the poles but in 1798 "the
American Federal Government did the same, but they
were not tyrants for doing it, because the Sedition

12 This was the

Law forbids our calling them so."
heart of the matter. In the years between 1775 and 1798
the revolutionary ardor had cooled, largely because

of the French Revolution, and the spirit of 1775 was

not to be tolerated.

 

1J'James M. Smith, Freedom's Fetters: 232.
Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties
(Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1956), pp. 257-60.
Cited hereafter as Freedom's Fetters.

12Independent Chronicle, Jan. 17, 1799.

 

 

 

 

199

There was, however, much more to the matter.
Why was the liberty pole so feared? The answer was
rooted in the nature of the gesture and the fear it
aroused. A Liberty Pole was clearly a phallic symbol.
A sexual image in the broadest sense which carried a
threatening message. The erection of such poles implied
that the people refused to repress or inhibit their
sense of individual independence and potency. In effect,
the pole served as a threat to the leaders of the
nation because it indicated the presence of the will
to life, independence and pleasure that they feared
not only in others but in themselves.

In response to the Dedham incident, Fisher
Ames wrote, "What are we to do? The devil of sedition
is immortal, and we, the saints, have an endless struggle

to maintain with him."13

Ames was absolutely right;
the spirit of sedition was immortal not only in the
Dedham protest but also in Ames himself. It was the
impulse to freedom that all men have, either in some
repressed or incompletely expressed form. Because
Ames "felt" the impulse in himself he was led to refer

to himself and his friends as "the Saints" in an

attempt to bolster the sense of his own personal

 

13Quoted in Freedom's Fretters, Ames to

Jeremiah Smith, Nov. 22, 1798, p. 261.

 

200

virtue. The long battle with the monster of sedition
was also a comforting thought - to battle one's own
weakness was to deny it.

In reality Fisher Ames' "devil" was the true
object of the Alien and Sedition Laws. This devil took
the form of Benjamin Franklin Bache, John Daly Burk,
Matthew Lyon and others but it was always the same -
an individual who insisted on his right to freedom
and autonomy. These insistent individuals were a
basic cause of the anti-revolutionary reaction for
they reminded everyone that freedom had meant a great
deal to them too. Erik Erickson wrote "historical
dialectics refuses to acknowledge the principle that
a great revolutionary's psyche may also harbor a great
reactionary; but psychological dialectics must assume
it to be possible, and even probable."l4 The converse
of this statement was true in the Federalist Period;
the great reactionaries of that time harbored in their
souls the impulses to revolution. Further, these
impulses, or the fear of them drove their reactionary
efforts with power and completeness.

It has been too easy to see the Alien and
Sedition Laws as a temporary aberration in response

to the actions of France in the XYZ Affair and the

 

l4Erik Erikson, Younngan Luther (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1958), p. 231.

 

 

201

quasi-war. In fact, the laws were an attempt to turn
back the tide of revolution both in America and France.
They were one response to a growing sense that some
"devil" was abroad in the land and that it could be
crushed if it could be silenced or sent back to where
it came from. To crush, silence or expel an external
danger was one thing but to scour it from one's own
mind was more difficult. Thus, "the Saints" found
their enemy to be immortal and the battle endless.
Beyond the legal attempts to destroy sedition
and foreign influence there were more informal pro-
ceedings against the revolutionary spirit. When the
Spirit reached sizable proportions the pressure and
responsibility of the newly won freedoms produced a
high level of anxiety and this created a keen need
to conform to standards and force this conformity on
others. Perhaps the best illustration of this tendency
was the constant mini-war over cockades. Early in
the 1790's the French tri—color cockade ruled as the
badge of commitment to the French Revolution. As
the reaction against the Revolution grew the anti-
French produced their own cockade. It was an austere
item usually composed of black ribbon with a white
snap or button. Both William Cobbett and Benjamin

Russell, editor of the Columbian Centinel, promoted

 

202

the black cockade and Russell indicated that wearing
such an item was a sign of one's submission to the
nation.

It has been repeatedly recomminded that

our citizens wear in their hats on the

Day of Independence the American cockade,

which is a rose composed of black ribbon

with a white button or fastening, this

symbol of their attachment to the Govern-

ment which cherishs [sic] and protects

them. The measure is innocent; but the

effect will be important. It will add

cement to the Union, which so generally

and so happily exists.
The key phrase in the passage was "symbol of their
attachment." It indicated that there was a need for
a display of allegiance to the government, but more
importantly it showed that there was a strong desire
for some gesture of uniformity. Symbolic actions were
important because they gave an outward Sign of your
fellow man's conformity to your own beliefs. In
periods of transition, especially transition as great
as implied in the French Revolution, such signs as
a common piece of wearing apparel offered some sense
of assurance that others shared your beliefs.

The issue of cockades provoked verbal and actual

violence seemingly far out of proportion to their

Significance. The Massachusetts Mercury urged everyone

 

 

15July 4, 1798.

203

to wear the black cockade in order to intimidate "those

lying dogs, the Jacobins, who have dared to assert that

we are a divided peOple."l6 In Roxbury, Massachusetts

a man wore a cockade of cow-dung in parody of the
black cockade but, subsequently a more violent parody
was written about him for wearing it.17 One writer
who signed himself "A Hater of Treason" suggested
that those who refused to wear the cockade be listed
in the press and

it is expected that every such miscreant will

be avoided by all Federalists as if infected

with the leprosy or plague, that they will

neither buy, sell, or have dealings whatever

with them; but will treat them with utmost

abhorrance as wretches unfit for society -

as Arnolds or Randolfs who would sell their

country for gold - bloody heroes who rip

its very Vitals.

Apparently even women got into the act. John

C. Wright, a congressman from Ohio, remembered the late
1790's as "the time when party spirit . . . ran so
high that even ladies wore different cockades as badges
of party attachment." He recalled that it was common
for such ladies to "meet at the church door and violently

pluck the badges from another's bosom."19

 

16July 10, 1798.

l7Columbian Centinel, July 14, 21, 1798.

 

18Massachusetts Mercury, July 13, 1798.

19U.S. Congress, House, Feb. 28, 1828, Congressional

 

 

Debates, 20th. Congress, lst Sess., p. 1447.

204

The battle over these cockades was a remarkable
Sign of things to come. One of the characteristics
of the post-French Revolution world has been the rise
of short symbolic expressions and actions as a common
feature of modern life. Gradually, reasoned discourse
has given way to the pamphlet; the pamphlet has given
way to the news story; the news story has given way
to the one minute television ad; the television ad
has given way to the lapel button and finally, the
bumper sticker. Opinion is now expressed in short
bursts of words on a protest sign or in a style of
dress. Perhaps peOple sense that the content of
opinions has declined in importance and the simple
expression of them has increased. No longer can a
person link his beliefs with some transcendent
justification so he is forced to gain support from
his fellow man. Thus, those brief symbolic expres-
sions serve the vital function of assuring people
they are not alone in their values.20 A man who sees
a bumper sticker identical to the one on his own car
does not necessarily agree (what is there to agree
with?) - no longer alienated and alone he feels better.

Apparently that has become very important.

 

20The ultimate example of this trend is the
bumper sticker "Honk if you know Jesus". Which implies
that religious belief is secondary to the desire to
know others agree with you.

205

The desire to force comformity went far beyond
cockades, however. Politically, the Federalists sought
not only to defeat their opponents but also to convert
or silence them completely. It often seemed that the
main goal was the banishment of dissent and immorality
from their sight. Abigail Adams wrote that "the
Present state of the world exhibits in the Revolution
of France one of the most astonishing spectacles ever
acted upon the stage to scourge the Nations of the
Earth." Confronted with this revolution, America must
be forced to avoid the alluring doctrines of the Gallic
uprising. The French had caused the United States to
sink "into a state of Langour, of Supineness, of
Effinanancy [sic] and Luxury" and her countrymen
must be given "severe and repeated scourging to arouse
us to a sense of Danger, and to compell us to rise
in defence of our Religion, our Liberties, and inde-
pendence." She was also upset by the division which
existed in Congress. Her hope was that the XYZ Affair
would force dissenting Congressmen to give up their
love of the French and support traditional American

values.21

 

21New Letters, to her sister, May 7, 1798,

pp. 168—69.

 

206

Noah Webster expressed much the same feeling
about Opposition. The anti-French candidates had
swept the 1798 elections in Connecticut, and there
had been an increase in voter turnout. This was not
the real source of his joy, however.

It is with pleasure I can say not a whisper of
opposition is heard in public in this State; and
in private the voice of objection and censure is
nearly silent. I rejoice also that every man of
reputable character in this state appears well
informed on the subject of the ultimate views of
France. People appear to have correct ideas of
the intentions of the French government and the
tendency of their principles to destroy all the
pillars of public peace and private safety. It
is further the unanimous determination of the
body of our citizens to put into office no man
who is not known to be firmly attached to the
religious, moral and political institutions

from which we have hither to derived our private
blessings and political prosperity. To be
suspected of disaffection will now throw §3y_
mag in this State into obscurity.

 

 

 

The passage above should act as a corrective
to the notion that American politics was, and is, solely
the realm of power and money. Clearly Webster's interest
in political victory has little to do with amoral power
and economic gain. However, it did have a lot to do
with the promotion of a broad moral creed and the
destruction of disaffected elements. He gave expression
to the often overlooked negative function of American

politics. The political process has served to excise

 

22Letters, Webster to Timothy Perkering, May
12, 1798, pp. 180-1.

207

disturbing factions and assure the anxious that such
groups are of no account and that there existed a vast
powerful center of common belief, into which all Americans
might merge. Webster's statement must be viewed as a
manifestation of his great need to destroy the pluralism
- and fragmentation that held sway in the first shaky
years of the republic. The desire to enforce conformity
would become a common feature in later eras of stress
and anxiety.

The attempt to create conformity was central
to the movement to consolidate the notion of America
as unique and Europe as corrupt. Today it is easy to
take the existence of the United States for granted,
but in 1798 such a feeling was not possible. The
United States was an experiment in republican govern-
ment in a world largely ruled by enemies of that experi-
ment. Being a weak nation in a world of giants added
to the anxiety which arose from the increased sense
of freedom the revolutionary years had created and
produced the desire to solidify the American identity
and to reject all contrary ideas. While the fear of
foreign influence was a negative reaction, many Americans
sought to confront their time with positive steps which,
together, constituted an attempt to preserve the American

family.

208

At times the devotion to a sense of family took
an ironic twist. The need to create a stable community
led to develOpments that were divisive if considered
in the context of the nation as a whole. The basic
illustration of this was the growth of localism in
New England. In response to republican experiments
in France many in New England came to believe there
was a basic difference between freedom in Europe and
freedom in New England. As early as 1793 Oliver
Wolcott, Sr. felt that "New England is the only truly
republican country on earth, and the final success of
the republican system depends upon their firmness,

"23 At the same time Noah webster

moderation and virtue.
felt that New England was "a phenomenon in civil and
political establishments" and that "young gentlemen"
should come from the other states and "from every
quarter of the globe" to New England and "acquire our
habits of thinking and living." He was convinced that
a "half dozen legislators or even scholars bred in New
England and dispersed through the different countries

of Europe every year would in half an age change the

political face of affairs in the Old World." By 1799

 

23Gibbs, vol. I, to Oliver Wolcott Jr., June

11, 1793, p. 101. Note that he refers to New England
as a country.

24§§£Eg£§, to Oliver Wolcott Jr., May 25, 1793,
pp. 110-110

209

Webster's faith in New England had increased to where
he believed that its political institutions actually
"had a most sensible effect in prolonging human life."
Webster attributed the longer life span to the fact
that the form of government in the New England states
offered "ample means of subsistence to the mass of
people" and because the religious institutions re-
strained the vices of the masses. Webster claimed
that he had documents to prove his assertations.25
A growing sense of superiority led New
Englanders to reject the newcomers from Europe and
the style of life in the South. One paper wrote
We are one people [New Englanders] more
unmixed in our blood, more constant and
unchanged in our original and discrimi-
nating principles, more faithful to our

first institutions, than is now existing
in the European world.

Such sentiment showed the clear connection between
localism and the French Revolution. The upheaval in
Europe and its influence in America had promoted a
tendency to return to the tried and true "first
institutions" of one's local heritage. Further, it
caused New Englanders to lash out at the South. They
charged that the southern states did not control their

foreign element, and if the United States failed it

 

25l§id., to Charles Holt, June 3, 1799, p. 199.

6Newhampshire and Vermont Journal, March 7, 1797.

 

210

would be "from the hands of southern strangers."
Northerners generally found foreigners in the South
"impatient of all restraint, mistaking uncontrolled
licentiousness for true liberty" and thus felt that
the foreign-born were easy targets for demagogues.
Finally New Englanders harkened back to the Old
Puritan policy of excluding foreigners from the
community and suggested that such a policy should
be reinstated.27
These expressions of local attachments and
fear of outsiders were part of an attempt to create
a stable environment in an essentially volatile
period. Between 1789 and 1793 Americans had become
entranced by the idea of revolution and liberty
spreading to all parts of the world. By 1800 the
reaction to the French Revolution had broken the
trance and produced a return to the older idea of
America as the true and only bastion of freedom. At
least in New England, thoughts of world-wide regenera-
tion by revolution were put aside and emphasis was
placed on the idea of limited freedom and construction
of restraints on the passions. Basic to protecting

these gains was the existence of stable and homogeneous

 

27Ibid.

211

communities and the exclusion of outsiders who did
not share the beliefs which existed in their new
home.

The South was not immune from these feelings.
The institution of slavery, however, gave localism
in the South a different appearance than it had in
the North. While both areas sought to create stable
communities they sought to construct them on different
foundations. In the North the idea of limited free-
dom and religious restraint on the passions served
as a controlling idea while in the South the need to
perserve white domination and black submission was the
force behind the growth of local consciousness. The
variation was a function of cultural differences between
the two areas and actually both localities were reacting
to the same fear. The emphasis in New England on
limited freedom was a reaction to the image of the
unlimited freedom they believed they saw illustrated
by the French Revolution. The situation was much the
same in the South when the French supported equality
for blacks. The situation in Santo Domingo served
as the focus for these anxieties.

It became apparent that the contagion of French
equalitarian thought had spread to the United States

when black revolts shook the South near the turn of the

212

century. The response was to tighten the traditional
community structure and eliminate all the idle talk

of freedom and equality for when the slave and free
black grasped desperately at freedom too, he was
acting out one of America's great expectations as

well as one of America's greatest fears.28 Writing

in response to the Gabriel revolt, a southern newspaper
saw it as a conspiracy originated by "some vile French
Jacobins" and promoted by "some of our own profligate
and abandoned democrats." But the real target was
neither Jacobinism nor domestic demOCracy

Liberty and equality have brought the evil
upon us. A doctrine which, however, intel-
ligible and admissible, in a land of free-
man, is not only unintelligible and inadmiss-
able, but dangerous and extremely wicked in
this country, where every white man is a
master, and every black man is a slave. This
doctrine, in this country, and in every coun-
try like this (as the horrors of St. Domingo
have already proven) cannot fail of producing
either a general insurrection, or a general
emancipation. It has been most impudently
propagated at many of our tables, while our
servants have been standing behind our
chairs. . . .29

Thus, the South, as a definable community, found

itself under attack by an idea much like a family that

 

28Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American
Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812 TBaltimore: Penguin
Books, 1969), p. 391.

29

 

 

Frederickburg Herald (Virginia), Sept. 23, 1800.

 

213

found some evil outsider attempting to infect a
neglected son with the notion of revolt against his
parents. One of the unique characteristics of the
South became the obsessive and continuing attempts
to protect this black son from these thoughts of
freedom. More than one hundred years later W. E. B.
DuBois gave evidence to the deep impression the French
Revolution had made on the South when he wrote these
words for one of his white characters

"Heah that John is livenin' things up at the
darky school," volunteered the postmaster,
after a pause.

"What now"? asked the Judge, sharply.

"Oh nothin' in particulah, - just his almighty
air and uppish ways. B'lieve I did heah
somethin' about his givin' talks on the
French Revolution, equality, and such like.
He's what I call a dangerous Nigger.

DuBois gave some idea of how importantly
Americans, in all parts of the country, have viewed
education. They have seen schools and all other
aspects of education as vital forces in blocking the
spread of revolutionary ideas and in creating an
attachment to the established institutions. While
the use of schools as a tool of control was as old as

man, the revolutionary era 1776-1800 produced a new

sense that education must function to stablize the

 

30W. E. B. DuBois, "The Coming of John"‘in
Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1961),
p. 177.

 

 

 

h‘ul‘l..|||!l|u|l|||| |1IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIUIIIIIIJ| [I]!

214

American nation. Even before the French Revolution
broke out, Noah Webster wrote,

Our constitutions of civil government are not yet

firmly established; our national character is not

yet formed; and it is an object of vast magnitude

that systems of education should be adopted and

pursued which implant in the minds Of the American

youth the principles of virtue and of liberty

and inspire them with just and liberal attachment

to their country.3

When American saw the multiple terrors caused

by the French Revolution the desire to protect their
young was increased. The feeling was given greater
urgency because it was widely believed that the French
were making "a truly diabolical effort to corrupt the
minds of the Rising Generation, to make them imbibe,
with their very milk, as it were, the poison of atheism
and disaffection."32 The result was a movement to
protect young Americans from foreign ideas. Thus,
Webster admitted that his work in education had "the
express design of detaching the children of the United
States from their dependence on foreign countries for
books and ideas, and informing them early with a know-

ledge and love of their own republican government."33

 

31Noah Webster, "Education of Youth" in Frederick
Rudolf, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1965), p. 45. This
important essay by Webster first appeared in six install-
ments in the American Magazine (1787-88) and later in N.
Webster, A Collection of Essays ;|; L (Boston: 1790).

32Gazette of the U.S., June 4, 1800.

33§g££g£§, to the Public, July 19, 1796, p. 138.

 

 

 

 

215

Webster later sought to allay even greater fears
than those caused by foreign ideas. The revolutions
he had seen created an idea of individual self-sufficiency.
Man no longer accepted the dictates of traditional
morality and religion unless he saw fit to do so. This
lack of moral cohesion was, for Webster, one of the
disturbing products of the French Revolution. To
counteract this moral revolution he sought to use
education to create in the young a sense of subordination
to higher law. In a letter to David McClure, who had
asked Webster's advice on educational philosophy,
Webster wrote that "the Christian religion is the

most important and one of the first things in which

 

all children, under a free government, ought to be
instructed." Man, from Webster's point of view, could
not live in society guided only by the precepts of
human reason; the Christian religion must provide divine
law in order to restrain man's passions. Thus, "the
most efficient support of human laws is the full belief
that the subjects of such laws are accountable to higher
authority than human tribunals." The place to inculcate
this subordination to higher law was in the family and
the school
The foundation of all free government and of all
social order must be laid in families and in the

discipline of youth . . . [the young] must be
accustomed to subordination and subjected to the

216

authority and influence of good principles . . .
the pupil must believe himself to be accountable
for his actions tg4the Supreme Being as well as
human laws. . . .

The schools, however, served another function
in relation to the French Revolution. Through text-
books they taught nineteenth—century American school
children that the French revolt was not to be admired
and that it had little or no connection to the American
Revolution. In effect, these books painted a portrait
of the French Revolution using the violent disapproval
of the late 1790's as a model.

Textbooks almost totally ignored the causes
of the revolution in France and dwelled on the later
violent period. They constantly emphasized the role
of atheism and implied that it was a major cause of
the excesses and that it was the state religion for
many years. Many texts even warned that there was
still a danger of infidelity spreading from its home
in France to other countries.

The attitude toward the Revolution caused

France, as a nation, to be seen as a source and center

of sin. One 1814 geography text claimed that

 

34Letters, Oct. 25, 1836, p. 456.

217

Even during the horrors of the Revolution,

Paris continued to be the center of dissipa-

tion; and while in one part of the city, the

revolutionary axe was immolating its numerous

victims, in another, the theatres were

crowded and everygging wore the aspect of

joyous festivity.
Paris was almost always portrayed as a gay, superficial
and sinful city in opposition to drab but moral London.
The texts portrayed education in France as failing
to educate its lower classes, French higher education
was seen as leading to loose morals. The books
acknowledged the universal use of French but English
was seen as the superior language. Thus, the nineteenth-
century American was taught that France and her Revo-
lution were to be avoided.

By far, however, the most interesting aspect
of those schoolbooks was their handling of the com-
parison between the American Revolution and the French
Revolution. The texts could not avoid the fact that
the American Revolution had inspired the French but

this was always qualified by the insistence that the

spirit of freedom had been perverted in transit.

 

35Quoted in Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of
Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth-Cenutry
(Lincoln, Neb.: U. of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 134.
My discussion of the French Revolution as it appeared
in schoolbooks is based on Elson's exhaustive research
and conclusions.

 

 

 

 

218

Daniel Webster's Bunker Hill Monument Address in 1825
contained the best example of the idea that the French
changed the American Revolution into something terrible.
Webster's oration was widely reprinted in schoolbooks.
The great wheel of political revolution began
to move in America. Here its rotation was
guarded, regular and safe. Transferred to the
other continent, from unfortunate but natural
causes, it received an irregular and violent
impulse; it whirled along with fearful celerity;
til at length, like the charrot wheels in races
of antiquity, it took fire from the rapidity of
its own motion, and blazed onwardé spreading
conflagration and terror around.3
In general, the texts sought as Daniel Webster
had, to separate the two revolutions. In no instance
was France given credit for her aid during the
American Revolutionary War. But more important there
was no sense that the two revolutions were alike in
anyway. The texts never conceded that both shared
similar injustices as partial causes for the revolts,
nor that the two uprisings shared a similar intellec-
tual and political spirit. In short, the description
of the French Revolution and its amputation from the
American revolt "supports the idea that the American
Revolution was bloodless, conservative and unique

. "37
among revolutions.

 

36Quoted in Ibid., pp. 139-40.

37Ibid., p. 140.

219

The inclination to portray the American revo-
lutionary experience as different from the French was
also present outside the schools. Perhaps the most
important and revealing illustration of this tendency
was John Quincy Adams' promotion in America of a little
book he had discovered in Germany. The book was The

French and American”Revolutions Compared by Freidrich

 

Gentz, a one time student of Immanuel Kant, and a
friend of many leading intellectual lights of Europe
and later the secretary to the Congress of Vienna.
Adams read Gentz at the age of thirty-three while
he was the American Minister to Prussia, he translated
the long essay and arranged to have it published in
Philadelphia in 1800.38 In his preface to the American
edition Adams made clear his position on the issue.
He called Gentz "one of the most distinguished
political writers in Germany" and recommended the
essay

because it rescues that revolution [the

American] from the disgraceful imputation

of having proceeded from the same principles

as that of France. This error has no where

been more frequently repeated, no where of

more pernicious tendency than in America
itself.39

 

38Worthington C. Ford, The Writings of John Quincy
Adams, vol. II, (New York: MacMillan, 1913), JQA to
Friedrich Gentz, June 16, 1800, pp. 463-64.

39Friedrich Gentz, The French and American Revolu-
tions Compared, trans, by John Quincy Adams in Stefan
Possony, ed., Three Revolutions (Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1959), p. 3.

 

 

 

 

220

Adams also revealed that his attitude toward
the late events in France had not changed significantly
since his "Publicola Letters" earlier in the decade.
For him, the distinction between the revolutions was
essentially moral. In 1800, he was still fighting
moral confusion and defending absolutes in the form
of "the plain sense of mankind"

A modern philosopher may contend that the

sheriff, who executes a criminal, and the

highwayman, who murders a traveller, act

upon the same principles; the plain sense

of mankind will see the same difference

between them, that is here proved between

the American and French Revolutions. - 40

The difference between right and wrong.
The essay itself was predicated on this distinction

between right and wrong. The American Revolution was

rooted in principles "of which the right was evident,

 

partly upon such, as it was at least very questionable,
whether they were not right and from beginning to end
upon no one that was clearly and decidedly wrong. . . ."
The French Revolution, on the other hand, "was an
uninterrupted series of steps, the wrong of which

could not, upon rigorous principles, for a moment be
doubted." Gentz claimed that "the word 'rlght' would
have vanished from the French language . . ." if the

revolutionaries had not produced "an imaginary right

 

40Ibid., p. 4.

221

of the nation, to do Whatever they, or their represen-
tatives should please. . . ." This right of the people
Gentz dismissed as "a chimerical principle." The idea
that absolute principles had given way to some "right
of the nation" caused the French to carry out their
revolt with "absolute and total indefiniteness" that
led to the point where every opinion carried the same

weight.41

Gentz was, in effect, putting into words
the deepest fears Americans had about revolution -
that there would never again be any absolutes, any
unity to life or any authority in the world on which
one could rely.

If the French Revolution had destroyed all
these things then was not the American Revolution at
least an accomplice in the crime? No, Gentz argued,
because the American revolt was essentially "defensive"
while the French was "offensive." He found this
distinction "essential and decisive." The British
had constantly forced the issue on the Americans who
opposed the mother country only in exact relation to
the attack made upon them. Gentz characterized the
American Revolution as "a model of moderation in

defence" against the tyranny of George III and parlia-

ment. The French, on the other hand, had "displayed

 

4lIbid., pp. 35, 48-9, 81.

222

an unparalleled example of violence and inexorable fury

in attack." While the American revolt measured its

responses to the nature of the British crimes, the

French Revolution "became more and more violent and

terrible, the more cause it had to grow milder.“ Gentz,

in this regard used an argument about Louis XVI that

was common in America. He asserted that if Louis had

been more intolerant the Revolution would have retreated

in the face of his strength. Instead the French

snapped "the last thread by which they still held

together with a lawful existence" and in a frenzy

"murdered justice herself, in the person of the most

conscientious and upright monarch who had ever adorned

a throne."42
The publication of Gentz's book in America

was a significant event. It illustrated the growing

movement to separate the American Revolution from the

unacceptable vision of Revolution in the Old World.

The desire on Adams' part to moderate the portrait

of the American revolt was based on his perception of

the violent stage of the European Revolution. In

America, the French Revolution had tended to revitalize

the revolutionary spirit of 1776 and that revitalization

threatened the stabilization attained by the Constitution

 

421bid., pp. 63, 52.

223

and the passage of time. Feeling a desire to protect
this stabilization, conservatives like Adams found
it necessary to sever the apparent ties between the
American and French Revolution. On the surface this
may appear as a matter of political expediency - the
Jeffersonians were closely connected, in public mind,
with the French and to discredit the French was to
discredit Jefferson. The movement to moderate the
American Revolution, however, also had very basic
psychological motives. By 1800, the memory of 1776
was beginning to fade slightly, but it still caused
an evocation of wonderful disorder and a sense of
freedom. The revolt in France had rekindled these
feelings but it also evoked, at the same time, a
greater need to repress and limit the spirit of
freedom. The French Revolution could be repudiated
as insane terror or the product of an insidous con-
spiracy, but to repress the American Revolution was
more difficult. Americans still felt immense pride
in their own revolt and thus the only choice was to
change 1776 from a violent overthrow of a king to a
moderate defensive action against a tyrant.

In effect, conservatives were confronted with
an educational task. In order to repress revolution
in themselves and in society, they set out to repudiate

the French uprising and to moderate the vision of the

224

American Revolution. It is common wisdom to see that
education during the early years of the republic "was
shoved into the background, as it has always been in

periods of crisis."43

The opposite was probably true.
The crisis of rapidly expanding freedom and dissolving
restraints provoked men to great educational efforts.
By these efforts they helped shape two myths - one
was the myth of the French Revolution, the other was
the myth of the American struggle for independence.
These mythological constructions were necessary
for the growth and future stability of the American
family. A revolutionary tradition would have run
counter to a sense of unity and common purpose. In
the aftermath of the actual event, revolution could
have become a state of mind which accepted fluidity,
change and pluralism. The presence of this philosophy
invoked a counter state of mind aimed at cohesion
and homeostasis. The counter-revolutionary mentality
took as its model the family in the broadest sense
and tried to force society to re-accept the restrictions
and patterns of family existence. Both American and

French revolts had eclipsed the national fathers and

damaged the sense of family. In response to this

 

43Raymond E. Callahan, Introduction to Education
(New York: Knopf, 1960), p. 121.

 

 

225

feeling Americans sought surrogate fathers and, as if
called by fate, George Washington appeared to play
the role as the Father of His Country.

He was ideally suited for the job. His role
as military chief during the war of independence gave
him the reputation as a leader of men. Later, when
he assumed the Presidency, the nation was in turmoil
with state pitted against state, and section against
section, the new office of President seemed to promise
stability and authority to the nation. The history
of his two administrations was the story of a father
attempting to stand above a gaggle of quarreling sons
and a divided population. The neutrality crisis, the
Jay Treaty and the Whiskey Rebellion were only illus-
trations of the basic problems he faced, in this sense
there was really only one issue - the spirit of revo-
lution. Washington filled the role of the father that
the age of revolt had tried to obliterate and, in
that role, he gave the new nation a sense of cohesion
and perhaps most importantly, a feeling of security
in a time of great anxiety. Royal Tyler, for example,
felt that "WASHINGTON like the fabled god of the Ocean,
raised his majestic head amidst the political storm,

and stilled the madness of the people,"44

 

44Royal Tyler, Oration on the Death of George
Washington, Feb. 22, 1800 in Marius Peladeau, the Prose
of Royal Tyler (Rutland, Ver.: Vermont Historical

Society, 1972), p. 275.

 

 

226

The essence of Washington's special place in
American History came in his Farwell Address in 1796.
The document, which Tyler called "a precious relic"45
distilled into one short speech Washington's desires
for his country and clearly these desires also reflected
the needs of the people who read the address in their
newspapers. The old general spoke like an elderly
father giving his last bit of advice to his sons.
Significantly, he expressed the hope that his remarks
might help insure "the permanency of our felicity as
a People."46 This hope was the point of the address
and everything that followed was calculated to help
the consolidation and cohesion of the infant republic.
For example, he urged his audience to cherish "the
Unity of Government which constitutes you one people."
Even sectional differences should not weaken the

attachment to the central government. The important

thing was

 

45Ibid. Tyler's term "relic" was well chosen.
The Farewell Address has had an immense influence on
American policy, both foreign and domestic.

46John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writingsgf
George Washington, vol. XXXV, (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Printing Office, 1940), p. 218.

 

 

227

The name of American, which belongs to you, in
your national capacity, must always exalt the
just pride of Patriotism, more than any
appellation derived from local discriminations.
With slight shades of difference, you have the
same Religeon [sic], Manners, Habits and polit-
ical Principles. You have in a common cause
fought and triumphed together. The independence
and liberty you possess are the work of joint
councils and joint effortss of common dangers,
sufferings and successes.

With this image of a united nation as the focus
of his speech, Washington set out to expose possible
threats to unity. First, he warned against the influence
of aliens who sought to spread disaffection in the
western part of the country. Second, he warned against
the influence of faction in a republican system. To
Washington, factions might, on occasion, "answer popular
ends", but in the long run they "become potent engines,
by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will
be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and
to usurp for themselves the reins of Government;
destroying afterwards the very engines which have
lifted them to unjust domination." Third, Washington
warned against "the spirit of innovation." He main-
tained "that experience is the surest standard" and
that a strong government, free from inhibiting altera-

tions, was necessary for the security of liberty.

Fourth, religion and morality, he wrote, are vital

 

47Ibid., pp. 219-20.

228

to the existence of the nation and its "political
prosperity." In order to insure this general morality
Washington advised that "institutions for the general
diffusion of knowledge" be promoted so that "public
opinion should be enlightened." Fifth, he made his
famous warning against undue affection for one foreign
nation over another. In a time of instability, such
favoritism might led to war - something the new,
relatively weak America could ill afford. In addition,
attachment to a foreign nation might led to too much
influence for the favored country. Thus, "the Great
Rule" was to limit political ties with foreign powers
as much as possible while promoting commercial
relations.

Thus did Washington lay down the rules of
orderly family life. The first twenty years of
national existence had produced turmoil, anarchy
and insecurity. Washington's political life and
finally, his Farewell Address were the major factors
Opposing the disorder of the revolutionary age.

After his death in 1799 this role become even
clearer. The outpouring of genuine grief and high
flown rhetoric at his death and later during the hundred

birthday celebration illustrated the important place

 

48Ibid., pp. 221-34.

229

Washington occupied in the lives of many Americans.

In the orations and eulogies that engulfed the country
speakers strained to find the image that captured
Washington's true meaning. Taken together these images
clearly show that Washington filled the role of stern
father in a time of uncertainty and anxiety. The
following were only a few of the phrases used to
describe Washington, "the first of men" (Jedidiah

Morse 1800), "the Sun" (Isaac Bates 1832), "their
pilot in storm" (Robert Collier 1832), "Our Political
Father" (George Minot 1800), "Father of his People",
"Controlling Genuis", and "the political magnet in

the center of discord" (Thomas Paine A.M. 1800).49
Such images were the order of the day. Washington
had done for the American people something that many

future presidents would be called upon to do. He

excused them from the task of acting as free men and

 

9Sources for the attitude toward Washington after
his death are nearly infinite. Two good ones are Memory
of Washington: A Sketch gf Life l l l National Testimonials
é: Respect l l l A Collection 9: Eulogies and Orations
(NeWport, R.I.: 1800) and Handbook 9: the George Washington
Appreciation Course for the Two Hundredth Anniversay
Celebration Q: the Birth gf George Washington (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. G. Washington Bicentennial Commission, 1932).
The citations from Morse (p. 14), Minot (p. 122) and
Paine (p. 108, 109, 114) are from Memory . . . and the'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bates (1832, pp. 13—14) and Colliers 1832, p. 125) are
from the Handbook. ; . .

 

230

gave the nation a center of gravity by forcing con-
flicting groups to subdue their passions for the common
good.

Particularly in the months after Washington's
death the country continued to define the old General's
true meaning. His memory was invoked in order to
curb division and disorder.

Shall it be said, that the works of his hands
whom we this day almost adore; that the hope
which he held out to the nations of the earth
shall be frustrated by our divisions? To
the honor of our country, not a man but answers,
No: All when rightly informed, wave their par-
ticular prejudices in support of the great
pillar of our national union.
Thus, even in the grave, Washington continued to serve
his country as a source of unity.

All this may seem to have little to do with
the French Revolution. Symbolically, the French Revo-
lution was the antithesis of Washington. The revolu-
tion in Europe had produced, world wide, a sense of
impending new freedoms and the belief that old restric-
tions were melting away. Washington stood in opposition
to this feeling, he was living proof that freedom must

have limits and society must have authority. Fisher

Ames, the Massachusetts Federalist, asked his audience

 

50George R. Minot, Eulogy 93 George Washington ; L l
(Boston: 1800), Printed in Memory l l l, p. 138.

 

231

to remember the days when the American people were
firm advocates of the Gallic revolt. He remembered
that
Jacobinism had become here, as in France,
rather a sect than a party; inspiring a
fanaticism that was equally intolerant
and contagious. The delusion was general
enough to be thought the voice of the
people, therefore claiming authority with-
out proof; and jealous enough to exact
acquiescence without a murmur of contradic-
tion. . . . the citizens had alienated heir
affections to their foreign corrupter.

When this attraction to French liberty pushed
the United States nearer and nearer to a war with
England, it was, Ames contended, Washington who issued
the Neutrality Proclamation and "arrested the passions
of his countrymen." Ames believed that "this act of
firmness, at the hazard of his reputation and peace,
entitles him to the name of the first of Patriots"
because it allowed Americans "to recover their virtue
and good sense . . . the crisis was passed, and
America was saved." Washington turned Americans from
the violence and licentiousness of French liberty to
true "American liberty" which "calms and restrains
the licentious passions like an angel that says to

the winds and troubled seas, be still."52

 

 

 

 

51Fisher Ames, An Oration 93 the Sublime Virtues
of General George Washington l l l Feb. 8, 1800. Printed
IE Memory l l l, p. 190.

52

Ibid., pp. 189-90.

232

The elevation of Washington to the role of
national father was a significant part of a highly diffuse
reaction against the spirit of freedom. The French
Revolution had reignited the revolutionary fires of 1776
but starting about 1793 the forces of reaction had
begun a counterattack. The counteroffensive against
revolution led to a fear of outsiders and a desire to
Americanize the various elements of the new nation.

The Alien and Sedition Laws were the legislative symbol
of a broad-based attempt to insure conformity and
submission to authority. The reaction also promoted
the formation of distinctive local mentalities which
stood in contrast to the international spirit of the
French Revolution. There was an attempt to use educa-
tion as a means to discredit the French revolt and to
portray the American Revolution as a unique, conserva-
tive event, unconnected with happenings in France.
Lastly, George Washington and the office of the President
were used to give stability and cohesion to the new
nation. The responsibilities of freedom had produced

a high level of anxiety and Washington served as one
device whereby Americans could rid themselves of their
new liberty. They could be members of a whole family
again; they could feel the warm security of a more
stable American community. Confronted with freedom

they sought escape.

CHAPTER VI

ADAMS, JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Have I not been employed in mischief all my days?
Did not the American Revolution produce the French
Revolution? And did not the French Revolution
produce all the calamities and desolations to the
human race and the whole globe ever since?

John Adams to Benjamin Rush,
August 28, 1811

The figures John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
have been missing from the account thus far. Their
response to the French Revolution was so important
and representive they deserve a separate chapter.

Their lives were hectic and so full of changes
that it would be easy to dismiss the French Revolution
as only a detail in their lives. In 1789 Adams began
his term as Vice President under Washington while
Jefferson returned from his post as minister to France
to assume the duties of Secretary of State. Jefferson
had a brief rest from public life after retirement in
December of 1793. He enjoyed life at Montecello while
Adams served as Vice President until 1796 when he and
Jefferson fought for the office vacated by Washington.
There was little interchange between the two aging

233

234

revolutionaries in the period 1796 to 1800. Jefferson,
as Vice President, was involved in the development
of a party strong enough to challenge the Federalist
control of the central government, while Adams was
serving a stormy term as President. Bitterness during
these four years was generated by the XYZ Affair, the
quasi-war with France, the Alien and Sedition Laws
and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. In 1801
Jefferson took over from Adams and the latter received
his chance at peace and rest while Jefferson was thrown
into the storms of politics and international crisis.
By 1809 both men were out of office and mellowed more
than a little by age and experience. With the aid of
Benjamin Rush, the differences of the 1790's were
put aside and the two ex-presidents began a long and
fruitful correspondence. The flow of letters was
ended by an historical miracle — on July 4, 1826,
fifty years after the Declaration of Independence,
Jefferson died at noon, Adams several hours later.
During these years (1789-1826) the French
Revolution was mentioned in their letters and writings
with some frequency. Even after 1812, they returned
to the subject and tried to sort our their differences.
It would be easy to subordinate their continuing debate
on the events in France to the domestic political

situation. An attempt, however, to portray Jefferson

235

and Adams as solely political animals would be in-
accurate. They were both philosophers more than
politicians and certainly they were subject to psy-
chological tensions which transcended politics. The
French Revolution gave both men an opportunity to
define their feelings about their own revolutionary
experience and what the American Revolution should
mean for the future of the new nation. In the process
of forming these definitions Adams and Jefferson
pulled back from the spirit of 1776 and sought a
solid basis for the continued existence and "progress"
of the United States.

There were marked similarities and differences
in the way the two men dealt with the Revolution.
Adams, almost from the beginning of the French revolt,
saw it as a threat to stable authority in politics,
society and religious belief. What he said about the
French Revolutionary activity strongly indicated that
he believed revolution must progress from a solid
base of continuing authority either political or
philosophical or both. Jefferson, on the other hand,
vacillated between two visions. In the early years
of the Revolution (1788-89) he maintained only mild
hopes for the French and often expressed his opinion
that sufficient continuing authority and restraint

did not exist in France for the making of a revolution

236

modeled after the American example. Later, in the
period 1791 to the middle 1790's, Jefferson became
enamored with the vision of world revolution. His
writings became more high-flown and emotional - he
was seized for a moment by the image of expanding
freedom. By 1800, however, the more cautious Jeffer-
son re-emerged and his imagery changed to include
visions of order, stability and a unique American
family. In the end, neither man was capable of
squarely confronting the logical implications of the
revolutionary age. The idea of a world ruled by the
concept of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency
was unacceptable to both of them and they retreated
to various beliefs that seemed to promise stability
and order.

As the French Revolution started Adams and
Jefferson expressed modest hopes for an increase of
liberty in France. In 1787 Adams wrote Lafayette
and listed his hopes for the French, he wanted "a
little more liberality in religion, in commerce, in
letters, and in politics. . . ." Such gains, he
felt, "would not only augment the felicity of France

but be a good example to the rest of Europe."1 While

 

lTo Lafayette, Jan. 12, 1787 quoted in Edward

Handler, America and Europe la the Political Thought gf
John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1964),

pp. 117-118. Cited hereafter as Handler.

 

 

 

237

he had these hopes he also feared that the nature of
the French people would inhibit any possible advances
of freedom. Adams had come to feel that the United
States had successfully revolted because America had
no mobs. The germ of Adam's fear of the French
Revolution was contained in the comparison he made
between the common people of America and Europe

What would have become of American liberty,

if there had not been more faith, honor and

justice in the minds of their common citi-

zens, than are found in the common people

of Europe.
Adams saw the hOpe of France neither in revolution
nor in any sweeping changes but rather in gradual
means and "by improvements in general education,
and by informing the public mind."3

Jefferson shared much the same attitude in

the earliest stages of the Revolution. He, like
Adams, had only modest hopes. In March of 1789 he
wrote that "this nation [France] will in the course
of the present year, have as full a portion of liberty

dealt out to them, as the nation can bear at present,

considering how uninformed the mass of their people

 

2Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works 9:
John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1853), vol. VIII,
pp. 454-55. Cited hereafter as Adams Works.

 

 

 

3Adams Works, IX, p. 297.

 

238

is."4 Jefferson could not find in the French the

seriousness or restraint necessary for a revolution
I pronounce that a good punster would disarm
the whole nation were they ever so seriously
determined to revolt. Indeed . . . they are
gone when a measure so capable of doing good
as the calling of the Notables is treated
with so much ridicule; we conclude the nation
desparate and in chargty pray that heaven may
send them good kings.

While Jefferson seemed to share with Adams a
pessimistic attitude about the French he, at least,
was sensitive to the poverty and pain of the common
people in France. He concluded from his own obser-
vations that "the people are ground to powder by the
vices of the form of government" and that out of the
twenty million people in France, nineteen million are
"more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance
of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched
individual in the whole United States."6 Adams, on

the other hand, never expressed a similar sympathy

for the plight of French peasants and lower classes.

 

4Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed., The Writings gt Thomas
Jefferson (Washington D.C.: 1904), vol. VII, to Col.
Humphreys, March 18, 1789, p. 321. Cited hereafter

as Writings.
5Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas

Jefferson (New York: Putnams, 1894): vol. IV to_Mrs.
John Adams, Feb. 22, 1787, pp. 370-71.

 

 

 

 

6Writings, VII, to Mrs. Trist, Aug. 18, 1785,
p. 81.

239

At times, Adams seemed to feel that European despotic
governments were as good as European people deserved
and the contrast between America and Europe, for him,
emerged as one of elect and damned.7
Inthe years after 1789 and Jefferson's return
from Europe, Adams turned violently against the revolu-
tion. Jefferson, however, gradually lost his reserva-
tions and became perhaps the biggest drummer in the
large band of Americans who shouted their approval
of the events in France. There was such a clear break
between them at this point that Adams wrote Jefferson
twenty-three years later that "the first time that
you and I differed in opinion on any material question,
was after your arrival from Europe, and that point
was the French Revolution."8
To begin with, Adams began to see the French
Revolution as a revolt against all authority. He
could not approve a radical revolution in a nation
without the built-in restraints of a humbling
religion. This reluctance was reflected in his

famous statement to Richard Price - "I own to you,

I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million

 

7Handler, p. 81.

8Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams 1 Jefferson
Letters, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: U. of N. Carolina Press,
1959), vol. II, July 13, 1813, pp. 354-55. Cited
hereafter as Cappon. .

 

240

atheists."9 Later in his Discourses 9n Davila he

 

crystallized all his fears into one, he warned that
the implications of the French revolt were "that
government of nations may fall into the hands of men
who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that
men are but fire flies, that this all_is without

father."10

In this haunting statement Adams gave
expression to a fear that was central to the counter-
revolutionary mind. He was not promoting a Portestant
"father", nor a Catholic "father"; the fear was of
complete fatherlessness or the sense of being alone
and disconnected in the universe. Adams almost

always took the stance of the objective observer and
his fear that men might become "but fire flies" took
the form of a warning to his readers but, in reality,
it was also dreadful to Adams himself.

Motivated by this fear, Adams sought to define
the ways in which man could retain the father and keep
structure and stability in society. At times he argued
for the dominance of the wisest

I know by experience that in revolutions the
most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses fre-

quently obtain more influence than men of
sense and judgment, and the weakest men may

 

9Adams Works, IX, Apr. 19, 1790, p. 564.
10

 

Ibid., V1, p. 281.

241

carry foolish measures in opposition to wise ones

proposed by the ablest11 France is in great dan-

ger from this quarter.
At other times he maintained that "religion and virtue
[were] the only foundations not only of republicanism
and of all free governments, but of social felicity
under all governments and in all the combinations of
human society."12 Both the primacy of the wisest and
the emphasis on religion as control were rooted in the
same desire to place above man some transcendent notion
that would counter the idea that "this all is without
father."

Adams advocated measures for the maintainance
of stability largely because he had a vision of the
world without order. He warned the French that govern-
ment was created to control the passions and interests
and that without government life would be dominated
by the violent and selfish side of man. The following

is a clear statement of the fear of chaos and love

of order in Adams' mind.

 

lllbld., IX, to Alexander Jardine, June 1,
1790, p. 568.
12

p. 636.

Ibid., IX, to Benjamin Rush, Aug. 28, 1811,

242

If all decorum, discipline, and subordination
are to be destroyed and universal Pyrrhonism,
anarchy, and insecurity of property are to be
introduced, nations will soon wish their books
in ashes, seek for darkness and ignorance,
superstition and fanaticism. . . .13
Jefferson, upon his return to the United States,
exhibited none of the fears that haunted Adams. In-
stead of becoming alarmed at the lack of restraint
in France, Jefferson was shocked by the counter-
revolutionary strides that were being made in America.
He came to see the French and American Revolutions
as interdependent. In 1791 he expressed some anxiety
over the flight of the king, but wrote
I still hope the French Revolution will issue
happily. I feel that the permanence of our
own leans in some degree on that; and that a
failure there would be a powerful argument
to prove there must be a failure here.14
By 1792, his tone had changed to include more violent
images. For example he wrote Lafayette, "While you
are exterminating the monster Aristocracy, and pulling
out the teeth and fangs of its associate, Monarchy,
a contrary tendency is discovered in some here."15

In effect, Jefferson had been chilled by the

advances of post—revolutionary conservatism in the

 

l31bid., VI, pp. 274-75.

l4Writings, VIII, to Edward Rutledge, Aug. 25,
1791, p. 234.

lsIbid., vol. VIII, p. 380.

243

United States. He tended to see it as a plot to
reinstitute monarchy and turn back the advances of
liberty made in 1776.16 Yet, he was also gripped
by sentiments that transcended domestic political
considerations. The French Revolution instilled in
him the vision of world revolution - the idea that
the spirit of the American Revolution could live not
only in France but over the entire earth. He felt
that the rage for liberty in France will "kindle the
wrath of the people of Europe . . . and bring at
length, kings, nobles, and priests to the scaffolds
which they have been so long deluging with human
blood."17 In a 1793 letter to William Short, Jeffer-
son clearly expressed his deep commitment to world
revolution. He felt the elimination of the king "was
of absolute necessity" and continued
The liberty of the whole earth was depending on
the issue of the contest and was ever such a
prize won with so little innocent blood? My
own affections have been deeply wounded by some
of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than
it should have failed, I would have seen half
the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam

and Eve left in every country, and left free,
it would be better than it now is.

 

16See the famous letter to Phillip Mazzei (Apr.

24, 1796) in Writings, IX, pp. 335-37.
l7lbld., IX, to Tench Cox, May 1, 1794, pp. 284-
85.

lBIbid., IX, Jan. 3, 1793, p. 10.

244

This statement represented the height of
Jefferson's revolutionary ardor. Unlike so many
Americans Jefferson did not become alarmed when France
began to invade other countries. M. d'Ivernois from
Geneva wrote Jefferson and suggested that the Univer-
sity of Geneva move to Virginia to escape the French
Army. Jefferson advised that d'Ivernois take a
long range View. The present age, he wrote, was one
of large scale experiments in freedom and that it
was unfortunate "that the efforts of mankind to recover
the freedom of which they have been so long deprived,
will be accompanied with violence, with errors, and
even crimes. But while we weep over the means, we
must pray for the ends."19 Thus, Jefferson by 1793
had largely abandoned his earlier fears and was for
a moment, at least, a true friend of the French
Revolution.

When the expanding French Revolution began
to touch America it put Jefferson in a difficult‘
position. Caught between his commitment to world
revolution and his allegiance to American national
sovereignty, Jefferson faced a most difficult situa-
tion. Genet, of course, was the focus of the problem.
At first, Jefferson warmly welcomed him and took part

in the general spirit of revolutionary brotherhood

 

199—ii" IX, Feb. 6' 1795, pp. 299-3000

245

that Genet helped create in the United States. As
Genét became more intemperate in his opposition to the
Neutrality Proclamation (which Jefferson had approved)
the basic conflict between expanding revolution and
national interest came to a head. Confronted with
this dilemma Jefferson turned his back on Genet. In
the place of warm revolutionary regard, Jefferson
began to refer to "the intermeddling by a foreigner"
and to claim that "his object was evidently contrary
to his professions, to force us into war."20 The
Genet incident was important in Jefferson's ultimate
response to the French revolt; the antics of the French
minister illustrated to Jefferson that warm relations
with sister revolutionary republics would be difficult.
More than that, Genet served to inhibit the budding
internationalist tnedency in Jefferson's thought -

in the years after 1793 the idea of distinct national
differences in regards to revolutionary capability
re-emerged in Jefferson's mind. For several years
Jefferson's strong anti—European bias had taken a
backseat to his hopes for increased freedom around

the world, but, after Genet, the view of a corrupt

Europe capable of only gradual reform began to return.

 

20Ibid., IX, to James Madison, Aug. 25, 1793,

p. 211.

246

The change did not take place over night.
While the Federalists were condemning the democratic
societies as French-inspired and the offspring of
Genet, Jefferson stoutly defended them. He also saw
the attack on the clubs as part of the general counter-
revolutionary movement. The assault on the societies
was, he felt, "one of the extraordinary acts of bold-
ness of which we have seen so manyfrom the faction
of monocrats." Jefferson was also alarmed that
Washington permitted himself to be the organ of such
an attack on the freedom of discussion, the freedom
of writing, printing and publishing."21

Jefferson was caught in an intellectual and
emotional bind. The impulse to freedom was of great
importance to him, while at the same time order and
authority beckoned as necessary for the maintenance
of the nation he had done so much to create. Between
1793 and 1796 Jefferson withdrew from the political
arena and enjoyed the agrarian peace at Monticello.
In 1795 he wrote Adams that "tranquility becomes
daily more and more the object of my life, and of
this I certainly find more in my present pursuits

than in those of any other part of my life."22

 

21Ibid., IX to James Madison, Dec. 28, 1794,

pp. 293—94.

 

22Cappon, I, Feb. 6, 1795, p. 257.

247

Something beyond the external tensions and aggravations
of political life made Jefferson seek out the solitude
of Monticello. Caught between a deep commitment to
his revolutionary experience and a European revolution
about which he had grave doubts, Jefferson sought
to dissolve the problem by retreating from it.
While the balance between freedom and authority

was precarious for Jefferson, Adams came down firmly
on the side of control and order. During the Neutrality
Crisis Adams saw more of the violent public reaction
against neutrality and was frightened by it. In 1813,
Adams wrote Jefferson

You certainly never felt the terrorism excited

by Genet, in 1793, when ten thousand people in

the streets of Philadelphia, day after day,

threatened to drag Washington out of his

house, and effect a revolution in the government,

or compel it to declare war in favor of the

French Revolution, and against England.23
To some extent, this statement was inflated by the
rhetoric of old age, but it indicated real fear of
the popular protest incited by the difference between
popular opinion and the government's position on
neutrality.

After the departure of Genet, Adams continued

as one of the leading critics of the French Revolution.

He sought to do two things: continue and expand his

 

23Cappon, II, June 30, 1813, pp. 246-47.

248

critique of the Revolution and insulate the United
States from its influence. To those who had hopes
that the French would regenerate Europe he answered
"it has regenerated poor Geneva and poor Holland,
and like to have regenerated America."24 To those
who sought to portray the excesses of the Revolution
as the violent death spasms of expiring despotism (a
common argument in the United States) he responded

Ay! cast all upon despotism and super-

stitution. Are the cruelities of savages

owing to despotism and superstition? Allow

the truth that all men are ferocious mon-

sters when their passions are unrestrainted.

Prepare bridles for them.25

In general, he continued his earlier criticism

of the French but this time with the violence of the
Terror to back up his fears. The situation in the
later 1790's was different in that the French Revo-
lution had made a marked impression on the United
States. In response to this Adams attempted to
limit or eradicate its influence. The effort took
place on many different levels but, in all cases

Adams urged his fellow citizens toward subordination,

passivity and order.

 

24Quoted Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the

Prophets at Progress (New York: Grosset and Dunlap,
1964), p. 215. Cited hereafter as Prophets.

25Ibid., p. 198.

 

249

In the face of French innovations Adams pleaded
for a deeper respect for the past and tradition. In
1794 Adams responded to Jefferson's belief that each
generation will no longer depend "on the paper trac-
tions of another." Adams contended that "the Social
Compact and the Laws must be reduced to Writing.
Obedience to them becomes a national Habit . . ."
broken only by costly revolutions.26 In 1798, he
offered the youngmen of Philadelphia a predication

that, after the most industrious and impartial
researches, the longest liver of you all will
find no principles, institutions or systems of
education more fit, in general, to be trans-
mitted to your posterity, than those you have
received from your ancestors.

In addition to a respect for the past Adams'
encouraged a general movement toward conformity and
exclusion of foreign elements from the United States.
The split in American opinion over the French Revo-
lution both in Congress and among the people worried
Adams. So in 1798 when Congress, and the people
formed a united front against France, Adams encouraged
the signs of unity.

At the return of harmony in Congress, the
heart of every true friend of American exults;
the people who in great numbers before,

alarmingly separated in affection and confi-
dence from their own government, and rendered

 

26922222; I, May 11, 1794, p. 255.

27Adams Works, IX, p. 188.

 

250

jealous of the first characters of their own
election, convinced of the snares spread for
their country by foreign intrigue are now
crowding to the standard and consecrating
their fortunes and lives for its defence.

So signed a providence for the detection of
fraud, and the coalition of a people divided
and consequently sinking into inevitable
destruction, is perhaps a novelty in the
annals of nations.

The idea of foreign influence was repugnant
to Adams. In his retirement he tried to deny any
responsibility for the Alien and Sedition Laws but
clearly he did nothing to stop their passage and
enjoyed the protection from criticism they gave his
administration. He felt that republics would always
have groups with different opinions and that these
divisions were "generally harmless, often salutory
and seldom very hurtful." The trouble arose when
foreign nations interferred "and by their arts and
agents excite and ferment" simple differences of
opinion into factions and parties. Adams insisted
that such interference should be stopped or it would
"cause our total destruction as a republican govern-
ment and independent power."29

Most important of all Adams made a continuing

effort to promote God and the family as powers superior

to man and to which man owned obedience and respect.

 

28Ibid., IX, p. 197.

29Ibid., IX, pp. 186-87.

251

He expressed this idea most clearly in his National
Past Day Proclamations in 1798 and 1799.

As the safety and prosperity of nations
ultimately and essentially depend on the
protection and blessing of Almighty God;
and the national acknowledgement of the
truth is not only an indispensable duty,
which the people owe to him, but a duty
whose national influence is favorable to
the promotion of that morality and piety,
without which social happiness cannot
exist, nor the blessings of free govern-
ment be enjoyed . . . [1798]

No truth is so clearly taught . . . than
that a deep sense and due acknowledgement
of the governing providence of a Supreme
Being, and of the accountableness of men
to Him as the searcher of hearts and the
righteous distributor of rewards and pun-
ishments, are conducive equally to the
happiness and rectitude of individuals,
and to the well being of communities.
[1799]

The idea of the family as a source of stability
also played a part in Adam's attempt to insulate America
from the French Revolution. In an address to the young-
men of New York, Adams showed that he had been influenced
by the French legislation that attacked the family. He
told these youths that

the respect you acknowlege to your parents, is
one of the best of symptoms. The ties of father
son, and brother, the scared bonds of marriage,
without which those connections would be no
longer dear and venerable, call on you and all
your youth to beware of contaminating your

country with the foul abominations of the French
Revolution.

 

3Ol§lg., IX, p. 169 [1798]; p. 172 [1799].

311bid., IX, p. 199.

252

Adams also employed education as a means to
protect America from the dangerous ideas coming from
Europe. As President, he refused to issue passports
for a group of French scientists who wanted to pass
through the United States to do scientific work in
Spanish territory. He reasoned, "we have had too
many French philOSOphers already, I really begin to
think . . . that learned academies not under the
immediate inspection and control of government, have
disorganized the world, and are incompatible with
social order."32 Later in a Fast Day Proclamation he
asked God to "smile on our colleges, academies, schools,
and seminaries of learning, and make them nurseries
of sound science, morals and religion."33 Thus, he
was willing to use education as part of the battle
against French revolutionary ideas. Education for
social order joined respect for the past, conformity,
and exclusion of the foreign, and God and family as
the tools Adams hoped to use against the disorganizing
tendencies from abroad.

While Adams was President, Jefferson fought

him politically, on almost every issue - especially

the Alien and Sedition Laws. For most Federalists,

 

32Ibid., VIII, to Timothy Pickering, Sept. 4,

1797, p. 596.

33Ibid., IX, p. 173.

253

Jefferson represented all they feared in the French
Revolution. He was denounced as an atheist, an

"intellectual voluptuary,‘ the Goddess of Reason was
reputed to be the sole deity at Monticello. More than
anything Jefferson represented opposition and faction.
To the absolutist mind of 1800 if two individuals
contested for the same office one was right, the
other wrong. The individual who was wrong was thus
a threat, not only politically, but morally, philo-
sophically and psychologically. Nothing put this
point in clearer perspective than a Federalist cam-
paign slogan

GOD - AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT:

or impiously declare for
JEFFERSON - AND NO GOD34
The victory of Jefferson in 1800 produced more

irony than any historian can deal with. Jefferson,
for some the symbol of disunity, won because the
Federalist could not unite. Hamilton, unable to
tolerate Adams, worked against him and tried to secure
the presidency for Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the

Vice Presidential candidate. The slander and bitter-

ness which passed between Federalists almost equaled

 

34John C. Miller, The Federalist Era (New
York: Harpers 1960), p. 265.

 

254

that directed at Jefferson. The ultimate irony was
Jefferson himself. As he took office he proved that,
in the preceding ten years, he had become more like
John Adams than anyone could have guessed from the
campaign. During the 1790's Jefferson had changed
from a prophet of world revolution and a baiter of
monocrates to a man bent on union, peace and
stability.

The best evidence of Jefferson's transformation
was his First Inaugural Address. He acknowledged the
bitterness of the election but quickly assumed that
"all will, of course, arrange themselves under the
will of law, and unite in common efforts for the common
good." Significantly, the first issue to appear in
the address was "the throes and convulsions of the
acient world." The bitterness of the last ten years
had disappeared and Jefferson became the apostle of
unity.

During the throes and convulsions of the acient
world, during the spasms of infuriated men,
seeking through blood and slaughter his long
lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the
agitations of the billows should reach even
this distant and peaceful shore; that this
should divide opinion as to measures of safety.
But every difference of opinion is not a
difference of principle. We have called by

different names brethren of the same principle. 35
We are all republicans — we are all federalists.

 

35Writings, III, p. 319.

255

Thus, Jefferson tacitly capitulated to the
idea that unity and peace were more valuable than
harsh, perhaps violent, settlement of basic issues.
The revolutionary era had left both Adams and
Jefferson anxious about the ultimate outcome of so
much debate, hostility and violence. Man's instinc-
tive need for calm, for security and certainty had
done its work first on Adams and ultimately on
Jefferson. They desired only to get on with America's
own business "kindly separated by nature and a wide
ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of
the globe. . . ."36

Jefferson was not the only individual who
sought to separate America from the havoc of European
revolution. Sam Adams, who had led the riotous
Boston celebrations of French sucesses in 1793 had
changed dramatically by 1802. In 1801 he wrote and
offered his congratulations to Jefferson for his
victory over the Federalists. Adams expressed the
hope that the Republican victory would restore har-
mony "after so severe and long a storm." In Europe
he saw that the "sentiments of mankind" were changing
and he asked that "Heaven grant the principles of

liberty and virtue, truth and justice, may prevade

 

36Ibid. III, p. 320.

 

256

the whole earth."37 While this statement by Adams

tends to indicate a survival of the internationalist
sentiment of 1793 there exists further evidence that
Adams sought to protect America from, at least, the
religious influences of the revolutionary period.
Writing in 1802, Adams urged Thomas Paine not to
return to the United States. Adams was appalled by
what he called Paine's "defence of infidelity." In
Adam's mind "the people of New England . . . are fast
returning to their first love. Will you excite among
them the spirit of angry controversy at a time when
they are hastening to amity and peace"? In the end,
Adams sought to dissuade Paine from returning to the
United States because "neither religion or liberty
can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and

amidst the noise and violence of faction."38

Thus,
Sam Adams like his relative John and Jefferson, old
revolutionaries all, had grown tired of tumult and
sought the quiet of order and stability.

As the years passed, and Jefferson left office,
he and John Adams gradually put aside their bitterness

and again the wonderful letters began to pass between

Virginia and Massachusetts. With more than a little

 

37William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services

 

pf Samuel Adams, vol. III, Apr. 24, 1801, p. 371.
38

 

Ibid., III, Nov. 30, 1802, pp. 372-73.

257

nostalgia they rehashed old issues and remembered
old friends. Jefferson made it clear that he had
been wrong about the French Revolution and that Adams
had been right. In the early 1790's both had made
predictions about the future of the French to Richard
Price and in 1816 Jefferson admitted "your prophecies
to Dr. Price proved truer than mine . . . but altho
your prophecy has proven true so far, I hope it does
not preclude a better final result." The old belief
in European inadequacies returned and for Jefferson
the world was again split in two between a virtuous
America and a Europe in need of education and morals
before they could receive their liberty, he felt

that

before the establishment of the American States,
nothing was known to history but the man of the
old world, crowded within limits either small or
overcharged, and steeped in the vices which that
situation generates. A government adapted to

such men would be one thing; but a very different
one, that for the man of these states. . . .

Every one, by his property, or by his satisfactory
situation, is interested in the support of law

and order. And such men may safely and advantage-
ously reserve to themselves a wholesome control
over their public affairs, and a degree of free-
dom, which in the hands of the canaille of the
cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted

to the demolition and destruction of everything
public and private. The history of the last
twenty-five years of France, and of the last forty
years in America, nay of its last two hundred years

proves the truth of both parts of this observation.39

 

39Cappon, II, Jan. 11, 1816, p. 460.

258

Jefferson, however, did not give up hope for
Europe. He claimed that science and "the American
example" had planted ideas and "kindled feelings of
right in the people." The mobs of the city had
prevented the sucess of the French Revolution but
"Science is progressive" and perhaps Europe might
yet be free - "This . . . we have no right to meddle
with."

Adams was not as hOpeful as Jefferson. He
recalled the millennial hopes of the early 1790's and
asked Jefferson "Where are now in 1813 the perfection
and perfectability of human nature? . . . Where is the
amelioration of society? Where the augmentations of
human comforts? Where the diminutions of human
pains and miseries"?4O For Adams, the French had
tried the impossible; a "free constitution" for
France was beyond their capabilities. He said that
three hundred years might be necessary to secure
"so great a blessing, but I doubt whether it will
be accomplished in three thousand. . . . I thought
so in 1785. . . . I thought so in all the inter-

mediate time, and I think so in 1812."41

 

4olbigg. II. July 15, 1813, p. 358.

41Haraszti, pp. 221-22.

259

They had come a long way together. The
ordinary life pales alongside the twisting eventful
existence of Jefferson and Adams. In the fifty years
after the Declaration of Independence they sought,
like all Americans, to adjust to the revolutionary
era. History went whizzing by and one had to hurry
to keep up. The French Revolution offered a chance
to define the meaning of their own revolutionary
experience. Was the American Revolution exportable?
Was it the product of a unique American character?
What did freedom mean? In the end they both answered
no to the first question. Jefferson, for a brief
moment was caught up in the millennialism provoked
by the French revolt. Adams never strayed from his
belief that only America could have an American Revo-
lution. In the end a deep belief in the virtue and
special circumstances of the American people served
as the idea that separated the United States from the
rest of the world. Clearly, however, the meaning
of freedom proved the most difficult question. The
horrors of the French Revolution led both men to seek
higher authority for the control of men. Adams
found it in the Supreme Being, the family, and a
strong leader as balance to pOpular passions.
Jefferson found the source of national allegiance

in agrarian happiness and the desire to protect the

260

material advances in America. In both cases, some
overriding value was created to preserve the status
quo.

The creation of these checks on the passions
and the revolutionary tradition left one irreducible
contradiction. Had not America thrown over a similar
set of absolute values in her revolution? Thus, all
future absolutes lost some of their power because of
the acts of 1776. In their own revolution the Americans
had destroyed, for a moment, the idea of order as an
absolute. In the ruins of that old system of order
they created a new system, with new absolutes, but
the memory of the revolt did not die. The French
Revolution began at a time when Americans were trying
to obliterate this memory, for a while it appeared
that the French had revitalized the revolutionary
spirit but finally, as Jefferson and Adams illustrate,
the idea of a revolutionary society proved untenable

and order was restored.

CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us
To guilt ye let us needless go,

Then leave repentance fierce to wring us:
A moment's guilt, an age of woe!

Goethe, Wilhelm Meister (1829)

 

A nation, like a person, has both an emotional
and a political-economic life. Historians of the
American experience have largely overlooked the realm
of emotions, feelings and desires and have emphasized
the political and economic aspects of American life.
The tendency to over-value the political has been
rooted in a conception of man as rational, progressive
and mentally healthy. The history written about the
Federalist period clearly illustrates the dominance
of politics and this View of man. The Federalist era
was an age of great political events and the important
works on the period portray these phenomena as the
product of men operating rationally in pursuit of
consciously preconceived goals. The American reaction
to the French Revolution offers a corrective to this
View. In most cases, historians have seen the French

261

262

Revolution as a vital factor in the birth of the party
system and as an element in the political rhetoric

of the age. Clearly, the news from France produced
deep emotional responses that transcended politics
and have had a profound influence on life in the
United States. The French Revolution came to symbo-
lize the rebelliousness of man against traditional
restraints. In response, Americans of all political
persuasions began to seek order, peace and dependency
because they had an unconscious, instinctual need to
do so.

To talk of unconscious instinctual needs as
primary runs counter to the way most historians deal
with human experience. In developing terms to describe
specific periods historians have neglected social,
intellectual and psychological changes that dominated
a period. Instead the American past has been periodized
using almost exclusively political or economic con—
cepts. The Critical Period, the Federalist Period,
the New Republic, the Progressive Period and the New
Deal Era are all widely used to denote certain time
spans in American history. Also, historians have
used the name of political figures, such as Jefferson,
Jackson and the Roosevelts to denote eras in the American
past. Furthermore, the growth of democratic political

institutions rules as the theme that ties these periods

263

together. Democracy, as a topic in the writing of
American history, has been such an overriding concern
that one might conclude that American history has
been little more than the gradual, glorious triumph
of majority rule.

To a great extent this emphasis on the political
has been rooted in the liberal tradition. The emphasis
on the externals of life such as political and economic
behavior was an ideological consequence of liberalism
which has sought to maintain the distinction between
man's mind and his actions. While liberalism's ten-
dency to deal only with external actions has let to
religious toleration and some freedom of thought, it
has also unduly restricted the scope of scholarly
research. Too often researchers miss the essence of
a person or an event because they neglect to dive
deeper than the public or external facts. The tendency
to neglect motivation seems to have led to a reliance
on the outcome or effects of any event. More importantly,
however, historians have come to accept at face value
the public reasons and rationalizations historical
figures have given for their actions. Furthermore,
American society as a whole also exhibits this tendency

to over value externals and the result is a one

dimensional public language, a language oriented to

264

the description of external aspects of behavior,
weak in overtones."1

One good example of this bias in favor of ex—
ternals has been the work done by historians on the
Federalist Period. In one way or another politics
and also economics have ruled as the central issues
in the major works on this period. For instance,
a great deal of energy has been expended trying to
clarify the nature of the Federalist Party. Overwhelm-
ingly this effort has focused on political matters and
excluded the emotional nature of Federalism. John
S. Bassett, in 1906, set the tone for the future when
he portrayed the Federalists as a party that gave
strength and leadership to the republic in its time
of trouble but who had outlived its usefulness by
1800 when they were washed aside by the rising
democratic tide led by Jefferson.2 In recent years
historians have disagreed with Bassett but have not

shifted from the basic emphasis - the political nature

 

1Margaret Mead, Keep Your Powder Dry (New York:
William Murrow, 1942), p. 89. The idea of liberalism's
attitude toward motivation and human behavior is dis-
cussed in, Paul Roazen, Freud: Political and Social
Thought (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 57-59.

2John S. Bassett, The Federalist System: 1789-
1801 (New York: Cooper Square, 1906, 1968), pp. 295-
296.

 

 

 

 

 

265

of Federalism. For example, Lisle Rose in a study

of Southern Federalists concluded that they "only
slightly less than their Republican opponents, nurtured
the seed of a slowly ripening democratic temperament

in the American South during the 1790's."3 In other
words, she came to a different conclusion but maintained
the same focus.

The discussion of the Federalists has been over-
shadowed by the mass of work done on the general growth
of parties in this period. In the twentieth century,
historians have moved away from the notion that parties
grew out of the conflict over the ratification of the
Constitution.4 The dominant view today holds that the
two parties sprang up in response to the French Revolu-
tion, related domestic issues, and Hamilton's financial
policies. R. R. Palmer, for example, concluded that
the debate over the Jay Treaty caused the infant demo-
cratic movement to consolidate into the Republican

party and forced the Federalist faction to close ranks

 

3Lisle A. Rose, Prologue ta Democragy: Tag
Federalists la the South, 1789-1800 (Lexington, Ky.:
U. of Kentucky Press, 1968): p. xvii. There have been
other defenses of the Federalists. Clinton Rossiter,
Conservatism la America: The Thankless Persuasion,
(2 nd. edition), (New York: Vintage Books, 1962) pp.
107-118; and Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition la
America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955),
pp. 79-80.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4An example of the view that parties arose out of
the conflict over the Constitution is Charles Beard,
Economic Origins a: Jeffersonian Democracy (New York:
MacMillan, 1927).

 

 

 

I‘ll!!! r]

266

into a party to defend the treaty. William N. Chambers

concluded that the general furor about the French

Revolution "completed the great transition from Federa-

list faction to Federalist party." J. R. Pole found

that the French Revolution "made more dramatic and

intense" the basic political cleavages that existed

over domestic issues. The late Richard Hofstadter

added his voice to those who found only political

meaning in the French Revolution when he wrote that

the Revolution and ensuing war "intensified all the

differences that separated Federalists from Jeffersonians:

differences over what the character of the new society

should be, over economic policies, over interpretation

of the Constitution, over foreign policy, clashing

section issues, and republican ideology."5
None of the historians quoted above was able

to explain why the French Revolution had such a massive

influence on domestic affairs in the United States.

 

5R. R. Palmer, Aga a: Democratic Revolution,
vol. II, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press, 1964),
p. 533, cited hereafter as Palmer; William N. Chambers,
Political Parties la a New Nation: The American
Experience (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1963), p. 43,
cited hereafter as Chambers; J. R. Pole, Foundations
of American Independence, 1763-1815 (Indianapolis,
IHd.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972). p. 204; Richard Hofstadter,
The Idea pf a Party System (Berkely, Cal.: U. of
CaIifornia Press, 1972), p. xi.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

267

Nor did any attempt to explain why Americans, in their
view, responded in solely political terms to an event
with considerable emotional dimensions. The overriding
concern with political development precluded any con-
sideration of psychological questions about the American
response to the events in Europe. One might answer

that Hofstadter and the others were writing about
politics and not the emotional state of mind of the
American people. Clearly, politics was their major
concern but their neglect of irrational, unconcscious
feelings distorts their conclusions even on political
matters. Moreover, historians, as noted earlier, often
expand conclusions about American politics to the

point where they tend to encompass all the dimensions

of a certain period. Thus, 1789-1801 is known as the
Federalist Period simply because that party dominated
politically. Futhermore, to neglect the emotions
creates the impression that major actors in the develop-
ment of parties acted calmly and rationally in response
to an emotionally charged, ambiguous situation.

The point is if one looks away from political
life for a moment a different picture of the so-called
Federalist Period emerges. At least two earlier
historians found new perspectives by avoiding a totally
political View. Merle Curti in The Growth pf American

Thought (1943) suggested that Jefferson's election in

268

1800 was not a total victory for democracy. He found
that the influence of a conservative reaction or
counter-attack against the American Enlightment and
revolutionary enthusiasm was of equal or greater
impact that Jefferson's political victory. Curti
believed that conservatives in the late 1790's

launched, in his terms both a "positive" and negative"
attack against revolutionary thinking. On the positive
side a case was made for institutionalism, aristocracy,
restriction of suffrage and revealed religion. On the
negative side conservatives struck out at the French
Revolution and evidences of Jacobinism in the United
States. The result of this attack was that the in-
tellectual and religious life of the new nation was
left firmly in the hands of conservatives.6 In 1958,
Marshall Smelser put forth the suggestion that the
Federalist Period was "an Age of Passion." He refused
to accept the idea that the major figures of the period
operated according to rationality and logic. On the

contrary, Smelser argued that

the Federalist period of American history can
thus be presented as a span of twelve years in

 

6Merle Curti, Growth 9: American Thought,
(3rd. edition), (New York: Harper and Row, 1943,
1963), pp. 178-179.

 

269

which every great public decision, every

national political act was somehow governed

by fierce passions, by hatred, fear and anger.

The passion and hatred Smelser wrote about

focused, to a great degree, on the French Revolution
and its repercussions in America. In the concrete
world of politics and money the French revolt appeared
as only a foreign event that heightened domestic
clevages. In the irrational, highly symbolic world
of passions and emotions the French Revolution tended
to represent for Americans the American Revolution,
the Enlightenment and the shift from traditional
authority patterns to a world with more individual
autonomy. Most importantly, it came to symbolize the
individual rebellion against the restraints of culture
or civilization. Americans were both repelled and
attracted by the spirit of rebellion. But finally the
continuing psychological pressure of expanding freedom
produced tensions and anxieties that caused a clear
reaction against revolutionary enthusiasm. The reaction
produced, as Curti has shown, a situation in which
conservatives were able to establish strong institutions
and traditions that stood in opposition to the growth

of individual freedom. Thus, the Federalist period

 

7Marshall Smelser, "The Federalist Period as
an Age of Passion," American Quarterly, X (1958) p. 419.

 

270

can be seen as an age in which Americans pulled back
from the psychological, social and intellectual im-
plications of newly won freedoms and established
stability and control over the individual as important
American values.

One of the problems with this view is the nature
of the American Revolution. If the American revolt was
not a radical repudiation of traditional authority then
it becomes difficult to see the necessity of a reaction
in the 1790's. Certainly the American Revolution was
different than the French or Russian because there
was the issue of colonial status involved. But one can
not avoid the fact that Americans violently overthrew
a monarchical form of rule and replaced it with a
system that spread authority among the people. This
fact was important, psychologically, since it created
a situation in which the development of guilt and
anxiety was possible. Indeed, the American Revolution
was very similar to the situation Freud hypothesized

in Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents -

 

 

 

a revolt of the sons against the father (external
authority) and development of guilt and anxiety in the

aftermath.8

 

8In a recent article Winthrop Jordan, using
Freud's work, explored the idea that the American Revo-
lution was the product of unconscious motivation. By
using Thomas Paine's pamphlet, Common Sense, as a focus
Jordan concluded that "Paine's pamphlet helped meet

 

271

The key to revolutionary and counter-revolu-
tionary psychology is the ambivalence individuals
feel toward their fathers and by the process of identi-
fication all external authority figures. Individuals
both hate and fear and love and respect their fathers
and this primordial ambivalence is important in the
workings of history. The hatred of father figures
often provoked attacks on them and revolutions are
one important historical form of this attack. The love
and respect for fathers in all forms has been important
in the creation of remorse or guilt in response to
the acts of agression against the father. Freud
hypothesized that
remorse was the result of primordial ambivalence
of feelings towards the father. His sons hated
him, but they loved him, too. After their hatred
had been satisfied by their act of agression,
their love came to the fore in their remorse for
the deed. It set up the super-ego by identifica-
tion with the father; it gave that agency the
father's power, as though as a punishment for
the deed of agression they had carried out against

him, and it created the restrictions which were
intended to prevent a repetitionof the deed.

 

the need of Americans - a need of which they were not
fully aware - to deny their king as their soverign
father." See Winthrop D. Jordan, "Familial Politics:

Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776," Journal
a: American History, LX (1973), p. 301.

 

9Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents,
trans. by James Strachey, (New York: Norton, 1961),
p. 79.

 

272

While Freud emphasized hatred and love as the
twin poles of the attitude toward authority figures,
one need not follow his hypothesis blindly. The key
element of his View which helps explain the historical
facts so well is the cyclical process of the attack
on authority followed by remorse, guilt and the ascendency
of the super-ego. Perhaps the terms freedom and depen-
dency might serve as substitutes for hatred and fear.
In be context of American revolutionary history the
revolt against George III was caused by a collective
need for freedom from the tyrant but in the ensuing
years the need for dependency and the protection of
someone stronger grew and served as the motivation
for the repudiation of the earlier act of rebellion.

The French Revolution played a vital role in
the shift of American attitudes about authority. Prior
to 1789 the movement toward dependency had clearly
begun but there were still strong currents seeking
even greater freedoms especially in the areas of
religion and race, but not altogether absent from
other aspects of American life. When the news of the
French revolt began to arrive in America it was greeted
with almost total approval. The spirit of freedom
arising from America's own revolt served as the basis
for this approval. Newspapers and individuals were

quick to see the French Revolution as the continuation

 

273

of the American revolt. While most Americans were
caught up in the enthusiasm for the French the spirit
of reaction was not completely silent. John Adams
and his son, along with Governeur Morris and a few
others kept alive the anti—revolutionary impulse that
had blossomed between 1783 and 1789. As the French
pushed their revolution toward more radical measures
and the European revolution seemed to visit America
in the form of Genet, the democratic societies, mob
action against the Whiskey tax and public criticism
of Jay's Treaty. Americans, in large numbers, began
to retreat from the vision of individual autonomy and
the destruction of traditional authority.

Thus, the French Revolution served America
as a symbol for all forms of human revolt. Americans,
therefore, did not have to completely repudiate their
own revolution, they could project the guilt they
felt on to the French and, to some extent, Europe
generally. Between 1793 and 1801 there was a pronounced
turn toward the right in America. Much of this reaction
was openly declared to be in response to theFrench
Revolution and its influence in the United States.
Consciously, the French Revolution may have instigated
the reaction but unconsciously the growing conservatism
of the late 1790's was generated by anxiety and guilt

stemming from America's own involvement in the revolutionary

274

age. The anxiety and guilt was increased by the
awareness of America's early approval of the French
Revolution.

In its general form the reaction of the late
nineties was an escape from freedom. This concept,
popularized by Erich Fromm, may seem too much like
World War II armchair psychology and hand wringing
about the rise of the Nazis, but it goes too far
toward explaining human behavior to be totally re-
jected. The Federalists and, to some extent, all
Americans sought ways to avoid the implications of the
new freedom created by the continuing attack on authority.
In essence, Fromm's idea that anxiety and guilt over the
new freedom triggered a human need to reestablish the
old forms of dependence links up neatly with Freud's
concept of a revolt of the sons against the father
as a fundamental aspect of human life. Fromm is more
convincing and complete in his description of the
methods people might use to escape the new liberty
and resulting anxiety produced by the act of revolu-
tion.

Between 1793 and 1801 Americans clearly sought
to create secondary bonds to replace the primary bonds
they felt they had broken over the last twenty years
and which they saw as under attack in France. In many

areas of American life this process of creating new

275

dependencies and controls was evident. In politics,
for example, the creation and growth of the presidency
and the popularity of Washington was clearly motivated
by the desire to form an authority-dependency pattern
or bond similar to that which had existed under the
monarchy. In religion, the revitalization of religious
belief had many causes, but clearly one of them was
the human need to reaffirm one's dependency to a greater
power and allow that greater power (God) to take the
responsibility for events. It was remarkable how
similar the revival of religious belief was to a re-
vival of fatalism. It was more comfortable to give
over one's life to God or Fate and let one or the
other be responsible for what happened. In addition,
people such as Noah Webster sought to make education
a tool in the fight against freedom. Learning and
reflection might have become a source of human libera-
tion, but in the minds of men like Webster schools
and education should be dedicated to inhibiting youth
and teaching certain socially approved values. Such
values often took the form of inclucating some higher
authority (God, the state, or the nation) as superior
to individual needs and inclinations.

Race relations, and especially the attitude

toward slavery, provides a clear look at the movement

276

to reestablish old authority relationships. The
American Revolution, and the Enlightenment generally,
had produced the beginnings of a movement that saw
blacks not as some inferior type of men but rather

a race unjustly enslaved by the erroneous and
superstitous thinking of whites.10 When the French
Revolution attempted to act on this new belief and
began the process of freeing the blacks the reaction
was violent. Near the end of the eighteenth century
there was a marked attempt to rebuff the movement

to free the blacks and to maintain the old pattern of
white domination. R. R. Palmer in his Tag Aga pf

Democratic Revolution, convinced that there was no

 

real rightist reaction against the French Revolution
in the United States, explained away the terrorism
visited upon rebellious blacks. He did this in a most
significant way:

In the United States no one was executed under
the Sedition Act of 1798, and in that respect
the politics of the United States exhibited a
certain moderation. The hanging of numerous
rebel slaves was regarded as a police action,

of no political consequences; just as the desire
of slaves for liberty, having nothing to do
with American politics, was not even to be
dignified by the epithet of Jacobinism.ll

 

10Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American
Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550—1812 (Baltimore,
Maryland: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 309-310.

llPalmer, p. 518.

 

 

277

In the statement by Palmer one can see clearly
the difference between a political and an emotional
view of history. Palmer wanted to disprove the notion
that America had a reaction of sizable proportions
to the age of revolution. With his almost totally
political point of view he was able to do this by
banishing as unimportant events that were not directly
political but had a direct bearing on the "state of
mind" generally in the United States. The relation-
ship of black and white populations was of profound
importance to the future of the nation, yet Palmer
dismissed the repression of black rebellions because
they had "nothing to do with American politics."

The treatment Palmer gave the race question and
its relation to the French Revolution is indictive of
the distortion an emphasis on political matters can
create. The same distortion occurs in the analysis
of political developments. Many historians in the
last twenty years have marveled at the formation of
political parties in the Federalist era. Palmer found
it paradoxical that the ideological differences aroused
in the United States by the French Revolution contri-
buted to the creation of national parties which were
a great aid in furthering the cause of union, consti-

tutionalism "and survival of the republic."12 Chambers

 

12Palmer, p. 522.

 

278

believed that the coming of political parties "uncovered
viable democratic ways to conduct the conflict of
politics and manage government within national unity."13
If one admitted that Americans in 1795 were seriously
disturbed by what seemed to be the uncontrolled in-
fluence of secret clubs, mobs burning a treaty and
challenging a government proclamation, then the
political parties that developed out of this pluralism
and violence were more than viable means of conducting
the nations business. They can be considered the
devices whereby the tensions and anxieties of true
public participation, issue by issue, in government
can be reduced if not eliminated. Between 1792 and
1795 Americans saw the implications of individual
freedom illustrated by the influence of democratic
societies and spontaneous criticism of the Jay Treaty
and Neutrality Proclamation. These things coupled with
Genet's antics and the rising radicalism in France

(the regicide especially) created an emotional situation
that called for some suppression of individual autonomy;
political parties were part of the answer. Parties

were not only a democratic means of preserving the
union, they were a way to suppress the pluralistic and
sometimes violent expressions of the people. In turn,

political parties gave a person a larger unit of

 

l3Chambers, p. 14.

279

organization in which to submerge himself and a stable
ideology to follow in the confusing flux of history.

To conclude, in this dissertation I have
attempted to look at history from a less than traditional
VieWpoint. Strongly influenced by Freud and others,

I have tried to find the emotional, psychological
dimension of the American response to the French
Revolution. Without the convenient but misleading
labels of party affiliation and economic interest,

I had to deal with evidence in new ways. If one
believes that man has been driven to act in history

by desires that he was not conscious of and that
"states of mind" often are vague and fuzzy then the
writing of history becomes a markedly different
enterprise than it has been in the past. First,
chronology becomes less important. In the unconscious
mind events often are alligned by importance rather
than by dates. Also, events blend into one another

as often the French and American Revolutions seemed

to do. Another example of this blending of events

took place between 1793 and 1795 when, psychologically,
the public criticism of neutrality, the Jay Treaty,
Genet's antics, the Whiskey Rebellion and events in
France melted into a single impression in the minds

of many Americans. Next, symbols take on an importance,

at least, equal to concrete reality. Americans in

280

1793 saw symbolic meaning in most everything from the
yellow fever epidemics to the victory of Jefferson

in 1800. Such symbols had great significance and
strongly influenced behavior. Furthermore, evidence,
beyond symbols, has to be treated differently. In
the realm of psychological reality a man such as
JefferSon who said or wrote so many contradictory
things was not paradoxical, he was the product of
several psychological forces, some of them in opposi-
tions. Moreover, any attempt to describe psychological
reality forces an historian to give up the view of
man as healthy and rational. Man, in a collective
sense, may indeed be neurotic; a creature victimized
by nature and forced by the essence of his being to
rebel, repent and rebel again.

Finally, the emphasis on psychological, social
and intellectural factors opens the way for a fuller
investigation of the impact foreign events have had
on America. In the context of diplomatic, economic
and political history the French Revolution has
remained only a footnote to the course of events in
the United States. But viewed from a psychological
perspective one can begin to see that foreign events
have a direct, discernible influence on American life.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., contended that "civilization

 

281

in America has risen out of the interaction of three
factors: the original introduction of Western European
customs and institutions, the impact of the New World
on the transplanted ways, and the continuing influence

of the Old World."14

He felt, correctly I think,
that historians have given ample consideration to the
first factor, "somewhat less to the second and very

little to the third." Hopefully, this work might serve

as a small step toward correcting that imbalance.

 

14Arthur M. Schlesinger, Paths ta the Present
(New York: MacMillan, 1949): p. 169.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

282

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Primary Sources
A. Newspapers

American Mercury (Hartford), 1787-1799.

 

Aurora (Philadelphia), 1794—1801.

u F'W

Bee (New London, Conn.), 1797-1801. i

Columbian Centinel (Boston), 1791—1796.

 

 

Connecticut Courant (Hartford), 1794-1801.

 

Dunlaps American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), 1791-1795.
Greenleaf's New York Journal (New York), 1794-1800.

Independent Chronicle (Boston), 1789-1800.

 

Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), 1787—1799.

 

Massachusetts Mercury (Boston), 1795-1798.

 

National Gazette (Philadelphia), 1791.

 

Newark Gazette, 1797-1801.

 

New York Arqus, 1795-1800.

 

New York Journal, 1787-1793.

 

Pittsburg Gazette, 1793-1801.

 

Porcupine's Gazette (Philadelphia), 1797-1799.

 

Virginia Chronicle (Norfolk), 1792—1794.

 

B. Collected Works, Diaries and Memoirs

Adams, Charles F., ed. Letters 9: John Adams, Addressed
to His Wife. 2 vols., Boston: Little Brown,

1841.

 

 

 

283

284

, ed. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams. 12

vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874

 

:1'8'7‘7'.
Ames, Seth, ed. Works of Fisher Ames, with a Selection

From His Speeches and Correspondence. 2 vols.
Boston. Little Brown, 1854.

 

 

 

Amory, Thomas C. Life at James Sullivan. 2 vols.
Boston: Phillips Sampson, 1859.

 

Barlow, Joel. The Political Writings of Joel Barlow.
New York. Mott and Lyon, 1796.

 

 

Burke, Edmund and Paine, Thomas. Reflections on the
French Revolution and the Rights of Man.
Garden City, New York: Dolphin Books, 1961.

 

 

Butterfield, Lyman Henry, ed. Adams Family Correspondence.
4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1963.

 

, ed. Diary and Autobiography a: John Adams.
4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1962.

 

 

Cappon, Lester J., ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters.
2 vols. Chapel Hill, N.C.: U. of North Carolina
Press, 1959.

 

Cross, Barbara M., ed. The Autobiography of Lyman
Beecher. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press,
1961.

 

Davis, David Brion, ed. The Fear of Conspiragy: Images
of Un- American Subversion from the Revolution
ta the Present.

 

 

 

DeWarville, J. P. Brissot. New Travels la the United
States angmerica Preformed la 1788. London:
1792.

 

 

 

Dwight, Timothy. Travels la New England and New York.
4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1969.

 

Fitzpatrick, John C., ed. The Writings a: George
Washington. 39 vols. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1941.

 

 

Ford, Emily E. F. and Skeel, Emily E. F., editors.
Notes on the Life of Noah Webster. 2 vols.

New York, 1912.

 

 

285

Ford, Worthington C., ed. The Writings of John Quiney
Adams. 7 vols. New York: MacMIIlan, 1913.

 

 

Gentz, Friedrich, "The French and American Revolutions
Compared" in Possony, Stefan, ed. Three
Revolutions. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959.

 

Gibbs, George. Memoir of the Administrations of Washington

 

 

and John Adams.—_ . 2 vols. New Yofk: 1846.

 

Graydon, Alexander. Memoirs pf His Own Time. a a a
Philadelphia: 1846.

 

Griswold, Rufus W. The Republican Court, pp American
Society la the Days pf Washington. New York:
P. Appleton, 1856.

 

 

Hamilton, Stanislaus Murray, ed. The Writings 9: James
Monroe. 9 vols. New York: 1903.

 

Haraszti, Zolton. John Adams and Prephets ef Progress.
New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964.

 

Henry, William Wirt, ed. Patrick Henry, Life, Corres-
pondence and Speeches. New York: Scribners,
1891.

 

 

King, Charles R., ed. Life and Correspondence at Rufus
King. 6 vols. New York: DeCapo Press, 1971.

 

Koch, Adrienne, ed. The American Enlightenment: The
Shaping 9: the American Experiment and a Free
Society. New York: George Braziller, 1965.

 

 

Lipscomb, Andrew A., ed. The Writinge 9: Thomas
Jefferson. (Library Edition). Washington
D.C.: 1905.

 

 

Maclay, William. The Journal at William Maclay, New
York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927.

 

 

McColley, Robert, ed. Federalists, Republicans and
Foreign Entanglements 1789-1815. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969.

 

 

Mann, Mary Lee, ed. a Yankee Jeffersonian: Selections
from the Diagy and Letters ef William Lee.
Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1958.

 

 

 

 

286

Mitchell, Stewart, ed. New Letters 9: Abigail Adams:
1788-1801. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.

 

 

 

Minnigerode, Meade. Jefferson Friend 9: France 1793:
The Career Edmond Charles Genet, Minister
Plenipotentiary from the French Republic of
the United States, ae revealed py'Private__
Papers 1763-1834. New York: Putnams, 1928.

 

 

 

 

Morrison, Samuel Eliot. Life and Letters 9: Harrison
Gray Otis, Federalist 1765-1848. 2 vols.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913.

 

 

 

Morris, Anne Cary. The Diary and Letters pf Gouverneur
Morris. 2 vols. New York: Scribners, 1888.

 

 

Morris, Richard B., ed. Alexander Hamilton and the
Founding 2: the Nation. New York: Harpers,
1969.

 

 

Parsons, Theophilus, ed. Memoir pf Theophilus Parsons.
Boston: Tickner and Fields, 1859.

 

Robison, John. Proofs 9: Conspiracy. ; l l Edinburgh:
1797.

 

Rudolph, Frederick, ed. Essays ea Education la the
Early Republic. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press,
1965.

 

 

Runes, Dagobert D., ed. The Selected Writings 9:
Benjamin Rush. New York: Philosophical Library,
1947.

 

 

Rutland, Robert A., ed. The Papers at George Mason.
10 vols. Chapel, N.C.: U. of North Carolina
Press, 1970.

 

 

Scudder, H. E., ed. Recollections 9: Samuel Breck with
Pages from His Notebook. Philadelphia: Porter
and Coates, 1877.

 

 

 

Syrett, Harold C., ed. The Papers ef Alexander Hamilton.
12 vols. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1965.

 

 

Todd, Charles Burr, ed. Life and Letters efi Joel Barlow.
New York: Putnams, 1886.

 

 

Warfel, Harry, ed. Letters at Noah Webster. New York:
Library Publishers, 1953.

 

287

Warren, Charles. Jacobin and Junto, er Early American
Politics ae Viewed la the Diary pf gr. Nathaniel
Ames. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1931.

 

 

 

 

Webster, Noah. A Collection ef Essays and Fugitive
Writings. Boston: 1790.

 

 

 

. A Collection ef Papers ea Political, Literary
and Moral Subjects. New York: Webster and
Clark, 1843.

 

Wells, V. William, ed. The Life and Public Services

9: Samuel Adams. a l a 3 vols. Boston: Little
Brown, 1865.

C. Sermons, Orations and Literature

 

Abbott, Abiel. A Memorial 9: Divine Benefits a l a 29th.
ef November, 1798. a a ; Haverhill, Mass.:
1798.

Allen, Joseph Jr. AA Oration ; l a July A, 1795.
Worchester, Mass.: 1795.

Anon. The Decree ef the Sun; er, France Regenerated.
A Poem, la Three Cantos. Boston: 1793.

 

 

. The Trial 9: Louis XVI. Late Kipg of France:
py the National Convention. PhIladelpHIa: 1793.

 

 

 

Austin, David. The Dance at Herodias. a l ; East
Windsor, Conn.: 1799.

 

 

. The Millenial Door. New Haven: 1800.

 

 

 

. The National "Barley Cake." a l a Washington
D.C.: 1802.

Barlow, Joel. The Conspriacy efi Kings. ; l a London:
1792.

Bentley, William. A Sermon l a a Sept. lg, 1790. Boston:
1790.

. An Address . . . Dec. 27, 1798. Salem: 1798.

288

Bishop, Abraham. The Triumph of Truth, History and
Visions a: Clio. Boston: 1791.

 

 

. Connecticut Republicanism. AA Oration. ; l _
New Haven: 1800.

. Proofs 9: Conspiracy; a l l Hartford: 1802.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Arthur Mervyn or Memoirs of
the Year 1793. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1962.

 

. Wieland, or the Transformation, together
with Memoirs of Carwin the Biloguist. Edited
by Fred Lewis Patlee. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1926.

Chemin. The Morality of the San- Culottes of Every Age,
Sex, Country and Condition; or The Republican
Gospel. Philadelphia: 1794—

 

 

Cobbett, William. A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats.
London: 1797.

 

. The Bloody Buoy Thrown Out. a a a Philadelphia:
1796.

. French Arrogance, or the Cat Let Out of the
Bag. ; a a Philadelphia: 1798.

 

 

. Observations on the Emigration of Dr. Joseph
Priestley. l a . —Philadelphia: 1794.

 

Daggitt, David. Sun-Beams May Be Extracted from
Cucumber. a a a New Haven: 1799.

 

 

 

. Three Letters pg Abraham Bishep, Hartford: 1800.

 

Dickinson, Samuel F. An Oration July 4,1797. l l a
Northampton, Mass.: 1797.

 

Dwight, Theodore. Aa Oration ; a a July 4, 1792.
Hartford: 1792.

. AA Oration . . . July 4, 1798.

 

Dwight, Timothy. Virtuous Rulers 2 National Blessing.

Lewis,

289

Hartford: 1791. - ‘ " '

 

 

. The Duty pf Americans 2E the Present Crisis A .
Fourth pf July, 1798. New Haven: 1798.

 

 

 

. The Nature, and Danger pf Infidel Philosophy. 1.; A
New Haven: 1798.

 

. A Discourse on Some Events of the Last Century.
New -Haven: 1801.

 

 

 

 

 

. A Discourse in Two Parts, Delivered July 23,
2,

 

181 on the Public Fast. Boston: 1813.
Zechariah. An Oration ; 1 1 July A, 1799. New

Haven: 1799?

Memory of Washington: A Sketch of His Life and Character;

Minot, George R. Eulogy on George Washington

Morse,

and the National Testimonials of Respect. Also,
A Collection pf Eulogies and Orations. Newport,
R.I.: 1800.

 

Boston January g,_l800. Boston: 1800

 

Jedidiah. The Present Situation of Other Nations

 

of World, Contrasted with Our Own? A Sermon . . .

Fabruary A9, 1795. L L A Boston: 1795.

 

. A Sermon . . . May 9, 1798. . . . Boston: 1798.

 

 

1 Boston:

. A Sermon, Exhibiting the Present Dangers,
And Consequent Duties of the Citizens of the
United States, April 25,1799. Charlestown: 1799.

 

 

Ogden, John Cosens. A Short History of the Late Ecclesias-

Osgood,

 

 

 

tical Oppressions in New England, py.§ Citizen.
Richmond: 1799.

 

 

David. A Sermon L L L November 20,1794. Boston:
1795.

. Some Facts Evicive of the Atheistical, Anarchical,
and in other Respects Immoral Principles of the
French Republicans 1 L A 9th of Ma ay, 1798— Boston:
1798.

 

 

290

Paine, Thomas, A.M. Eulogy on the Life of General

George Washington L L L 2nd January, 1800.
Boston: 1800.

 

Palmer, Elihu. AA Inquiry Relative Eg_the Moral and
Political Improvement 9£_the Human Species. AA
Oration. L L L New York: 1797.

 

 

Pattee, Fred Lewis, ed. The Poems 9: Philip Freneau:
Poet 9: the American Revolution. 2 vols.
Princeton, N.J.: University Library, 1903.

 

 

Peladeau, Marius, ed. The Verse 9: Royal Tyler.
Charlottesville, Virginia: U. of Virginia
Press, 1968.

 

 

. The Prose 9: Royal Tyler. Rutland, Vermont:
The Vermont Historical Society, 1972.

 

Playfair, William. The History of Jacobinism L

With 22 Appendix by Peter—Porcupine. 5 vols.
Philadelphia: 1796.

 

 

Robbins, Chandler. An Address . . . on the 24th Day

9; January 1753. ;,; L Boston? 1793.

 

Smith, John C. An Oration . . . 4th July, 1798.

Litchfield: (n.d.).

 

Stillman, Samuel. Thoughts 95 the French Revolution.
A Sermon. . . . Boston: 1795.

 

 

Strong, Nathan. A Sermon, preached 93 the State Fast,
April g, 1798. Hartford: 1798.

 

Sullivan, James (Citoyen de Novion). The Altar 9: Baal
Thrown Down; or the French Nation Defended
Against the Palpit Slander 9: David Osgood, A.M.:
A Sermon. Philadelphia: 1795.

 

 

 

 

 

. AA Impartial Review 9: the Causes and
Principles 9: the French Revolution. Boston:

 

 

 

1798.

Tappan, David. A Sermon, L L L April AA, 1793. Boston:
1794.
. A Sermon _ L L February 5, 1794. Boston:

291

. Christian Thankfulness Explained and Enforced,

 

 

A Sermon L L L February Lg, 1795. L L L Boston:
1795.

Taylor, John. A Sermon, L L L November 22} 1798.
Greenfield: (n.d.).

Thomas, Isaiah. Isaiah Thomas's Catalogue. Worcester,
Mass.: 1798.

Thomson, R. 39 the Swinish Multitude, being A Choice
Collection gfi Patriotic Songs. New York: 1795.

 

 

 

United Fraternity (Dartmouth College). The French
Revolution: Including a Story Founded in Fact,
Leontiue and Matilda: Drama. Newbedford,
Mass.: 1793.

 

 

 

 

lyl

 

Wortman, Tunis. An Oration . . . Twelfth of May,

1796. New York: 1796.

 

II. Secondary Sources
A. Books

Adelson, Judah. "The Vermont Press and the French
Revolution, 1789-1799." Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, New York University, 1961.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins 9: the
American Revolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press,
1967.

 

 

Banner, James M. Jr. lg the Hartford Convention: The
Federalists and the Origins 9: Party Politics
£2 Massachusetts, 1789-1815. New York: Knopf,
1970.

 

 

 

 

 

Barker, Charles A. American Convictions: Cycles gfi
Public Thought, 1600-1850. Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1970.

 

 

 

Baritz, Loren. City 93 the Hill: A History g£ Ideas
and Myths £2 America. New York: Wiley and
Sons, 1964.

 

Bassett, John Spencer. The Federalist System 1789-1801.
New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1906, 1968.

 

292

Bernhard, Winifred E. A. Fisher Ames: Federalist and
Statesman 1758-1808. Chapel Hill: U. of N.
Carolina Press, 1965.

 

 

 

Bowers, Claude G. Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle
for Democracy L2_America. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1925.

 

 

 

Brown, Esther E. The French Revolution and the American
Man Q; Letters. Columbia, Missouri: U. of
Missouri Studies, 1951.

Buel, Richard Jr. Securing the Revolution: Ideolo
£2 American Politics 1789—1815. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell U. Press, 1972.

 

Burns, Edward McNall. The American Idea g£_Mission:
Concepts 9: Nation Pugpose and Identity. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers U. Press, 1957.

 

 

Callahan, Raymond E. AA Introduction 29 Education 12
American Society. New York: Knopf, 1960.

 

 

 

Chambers, William Nisket. Political Parties 22 3
New Nation: The American Experience, 1776-1809.
New York: Oxford U. Press, 1963.

 

 

 

Charles, Joseph. The Origins gfi the American Party
System. New York: Harpers, 1956, 1961.

 

 

Childs, Frances S. French Refugee Life $2 the United
States 1790-1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1940.

 

 

 

 

Clark, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer
Voice pg America. Durham, N.C.: Duke U. Press,
1952.

Clark, Mary Elizabeth. Peter Porcupine in America:

 

The Career gfi William Cobbett 1792-1800.
Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1939.

 

 

 

Cunningham, Noble, Jr. The Jeffersonian Republicans:
The Formation g£ Party Organization 1789-1801.
Chapel Hill, N.C.: U. of N. Carolina Press,
1957.

 

 

 

lill‘l’l ’

 

293

Curti, Merle. The Growth 9: American Thought. (3rd.
ed.) New York: Harpers, 1963.

 

 

. The Roots gfi American Loyality. New York:
Columbia U. Press, 1946.

 

 

. Social Ideas of American Educators (revised

ed.). Patterson, N.J.: Littlefield and Adams,
1965.

 

 

Davis, W. W. H. The Fries Rebellion 1798-1799.
Doylestown, Pa.: 1899.

 

 

Destler, Chester McArthur. Joshua Coit: American
Federalist. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
U. Press, 1962.

 

 

Dunbar, Louise Burnham. A Study g£_"Monarchical"
Tendencies i2_the United States from 1776—
1801. New York: 1923.

 

 

 

Echeverria, Durand. Mirage LA the West: A History
9: the French Image g£_American Sociegy Lg
1815. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press,
1957.

 

 

 

Edwards, Newton and Richey, Herman J. The School
in American Social Order. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1947.

 

 

Elson, Ruth Miller. Guardians 9: Tradition: American
Schoolbooks 9: the Nineteenth Century. Lincoln,
Neb.: U. of Nebraska Press, 1964.

 

 

 

 

Fay, Bernard. The Revolutionary Spirit £2 France and
America. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927.

 

 

Fischer, David Hackett. The Revolution of American
Conservative: The Federalist Pany Lg Egg’gfi
Jeffersonian Democracy. New York: Harper and
Row, 1965.

 

 

 

 

Foster, Charles I. AA Errand g: Mercy: The Evangelical
United Front 1790-1837. Chapel Hill, N.C.:
U. of N. Carolina Press, 1960.

 

 

Goodman, Paul, ed. The Federalists Versus the Jeffersonian
Republicans. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1967.

 

 

294

Halle, Louis J. Dream and Reality: Aspects 2:
American Foreign Policy. New York: Harpers,
1958.

Handler, Edward. America and Europe $2 the Political
Thought of John Adams. Cambridge: Harvard

U. Press, 1964.

 

 

Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition 13 America: AA
Interpretation of American Political Thought
Since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1955.

 

 

 

 

 

Hazen, Charles D. Contemporary American Opinion pg
the French Revolution. Baltimore: John Hopkins
Press, 1897.

 

Heimart, Alan. Religion and the American Mind from
the Great Awakeningpp_the Revolution. Cambridge:
Harvard U. Press, 1966.

 

 

 

Hofstdter, Richard. Paranoid Style 1p American
Politics and Other Essays. New York: Random
House, 1967.

 

. The Idea pg a Party System: The Rise 9:
Legitimate Opppsition LA the United States,
1780-1840. Berkeley, Cal.: U. of California

Press, 1972.

 

 

 

Howard, Leon. The Connecticut Wits. Chicago: U. of
Chicago Press, 1943.

 

Howe, John R. The Changing Political Thought 9: John
Adams. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press,
1966.

 

Jones, Howard Mumford. A Strange New World, American
Culture: The Formative Years. New York:
Viking Press, 1968.

 

. American and French Culture 1750-1848.
Chapel Hill, N.C.: U. of N. Carolina Press,
1927.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitude
Toward the Negro 1550-1812. Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1969. -

 

295

Kaplan, Lawrence S. Jefferson and France: AA Essay pp
Politics and Political Ideas. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale U. Press, 1967.

 

 

Koch, Adrienne. Power, Morals and the Founding Fathers.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1961.

 

Koch, E. Adolf. Religion 9: the American Enlightenment.
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968.

 

Krout, John Allen and Fox, Dixon Ryan. The Completion
9: Independence 1790-1830. Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1944, 1971.

 

 

Kurtz, Stephen G. The Presidency pg John Adams: The
Collapse g: Federalism 1795-1800. Philadelphia:
U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1957.

 

 

 

Lever, Ann B. "Vox POpuli, Vox Dei: New England and
the French Revolution 1787-1801." Unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation. University of North Carolina,
1972.

Link, Eugene Perry. Democratic-Republican Societies,
1790-1800. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1972.

 

 

Lora, Ronald. Conservative Minds Lp America. Chicago:
Rand McNally, 1971.

 

Loshe, Lillie Deming. The Early American Novel. New
York: Columbia U. Press, 1907.

 

Love, W. Deloss Jr. The Fast and Thanksgivinngays
£2 New England. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1895.

 

 

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and the Rights 9: Man.
Boston: Little Brown, 1951.

 

. Jefferson and the Ordeal 9: Liberty. Boston:
Little Brown, 1962.

 

Miller, John C. Sam Adams: Pioneer £3 Propaganda.
Boston: Little Brown, 1936.

 

. Crisis Lg Freedom: The Alien and Sedition
Acts. Little Brown, 1952.

 

 

The Federalist Era 1789-1801. New York:
Harper, 1960.

 

 

 

ll'll‘

296

Morais, Herbert. Deism £2 Eighteenth Century America.
New York: Drissell and Drissell, 1934.

 

Morgan, Edmund S. Life 9: Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale U. Press, 1962.

 

 

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Harrison Gray Otis 1765-1848:
The Urbane Federalist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1969.

 

 

Morris, Richard B. The Emerging Nations and the American
Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

 

 

Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism: A History
9: Newspapers LA the United States Through
250 Years 1690-1940. New York: MacMillan,
1941.

 

 

 

 

Nichols, Roy F. The Invention g: the American Political
Parties. New York: MacMillan, 1967.

 

 

Palmer, R. R. Egg Agg 9: the Democratic Revolutions:
A Political History 9: Europe and America, 1760-
i800. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.
Press, 1964.

 

 

 

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents i2 American
Thought. 3 vols. New York: Harvest Books,
1954.

 

Perkins, Dexter. A History 9: the Monroe Doctrine.
Boston: Little Brown, 1941, 1963.

 

Pole, J. R. Foundations 9: American Independence
1763-1815. Indianapolis: Bobbs—Merrill, 1972.

 

 

 

Purcell, Richard J. Connecticut £2 Transition: 1775-
1818. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan U. Press,
1918, 1963.

 

 

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History 9: the American Drama:
From the Beginning pg the Civil War. New York:
Harpers, 1923.

 

 

 

Rose, Lisle A. Prologue pg Democracy: The Federalists
£2 The South, 1789-1800. Lexington, KY.: U.
of Kentucky Press, 1968.

 

 

 

 

Rossiter, Clinton. Conservatism 12 America: The
Thankless Persuasion. (2nd. ed.). New York:
Random House, 1962.

 

 

297

Sears, Louis Martin. George Washington and the French
Revolution. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1960.

 

 

Smith, James Morton. Freedoms Fetters, The Alien and
Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1956.

 

 

 

Silverman, Kenneth. Timothy Dwight. New York: Twayne,
1969.

 

Somkin, Fred. The Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire
in the Idea 9: American Freedom, 1815-1860.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1967.

 

 

 

 

 

Stauffer, Vernon. New England and the Bavarian
Illuminati. New York: Columbia U. Press,
1918.

 

 

Stoddard, T. Lathrop. The French Revolution in Santo
Domingo. Westport, Conn.: Negro U. Press, 1971.

 

 

Strout, Cushing. The American Image 9: the Old World.
New York: Knopf, 1963.

 

 

Tolles, Frederick B. George Logan pg Philadelphia.
New York: Oxford U. Press, 1953.

 

Tuveson, Ernest R. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of

America's Millenial Role. Chicago: U.—5f
Chicago Press, 1968.

 

 

Handbook of the George Washington Appreciation Course
f5? the Two Hundredth Anniversay Celebration
of the Birth of George Washington. Washington,
ETC: U.S. George Washington Bicentennial
Commission, 1932.

 

 

 

Victor, Orville J. History 9: American Conspiracies. L L L
New York: James D. Torrey, 1863.

 

Warfel, Harry R. Charles Brockden Brown: American
Gothic Novelist. Gainesville, Florida: U.
of Florida Press, 1949.

 

 

. Noah Webster: Schoolmaster pg America.
New York: MacMillan, 1936.

 

 

298

Warren, Charles. Odd Bypays in American History.
Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1942.

 

White, Elizabeth Brett. American Opinion g£ France
from Lafayette pg Poincare. New York: Knopf,
1927.

 

 

 

Winsor, Justin. The Memorial History gf Boston.
Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883.

 

Wood, Gordon S. The Creation gfi the American Republic.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.

 

 

Woodress, James. A_Yankee's Odyssey: The Life g£
Joel Barlow. Philadelphia, 1958.

 

 

 

B. Articles

Adelson, Judah. "The Vermont Democratic-Republican
Societies and the French Revolution." Vermont
History, 32 (Jan. 1964), 3-23.

Appleby, Joyce. "America as a Model for Radical French
Reformers of 1789." William and Mary Quarterly,
xxviii (Apr. 1971), 267-286.

 

Davies, Wallace E. "The Society of Cininnati in New
England 1783-1800." William and Marnyuarterly,

 

DeConde, Alexander. "Washington's Farewell, the French
Alliance, and the Election 1796." Miss. Valley
Historical Review XLIII (March 1957), 641-658.

 

 

Delmage, Rutherford E. "The American Idea of Progress,
1750-1800." Proceedings g£ the American
Philosophical Society, XCI (1947), 307-314.

 

 

 

Douglas, Elisha P. "Fisher Ames, Spokesman for New
England Federalism." Proceedings g: the American
Philosophical Sociepy, CIII (Oct. 1959), 693-
715.

 

 

Durden, Clyde A. "Joel Barlow in the French Revolution."
William and Marnyuarterly, VIII (July 1957),
327-354.

 

299

Fischer, David Hackett. "The Myth of the Essex Junto."
William and Mary Quarterly, XXI (Apr. 1964),
191—235.

Howard, Leon. "The Late Eighteenth Century: An Age
of Contradictions." Transitions in American
Literary History. Edited by Harry Hayden Clark.
Durham, N.C.: Duke U. Press, 1953.

 

 

Howe, John R. Jr. "Republican Thought and the Political
Violence of the 1790's." American Quarterly,
XIX (Summer 1967), 147-165.

 

Jameson, J. Franklin. "Letters of Stephen Higginson
1783-1804." in Annual Report g£_American Historical
Association for the Year 1896, vol. I, Washington:
1897.

 

 

 

Kaplan, Lawrence, ed. Revolution: A Comparative Study.

New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

 

 

Mathews, Donald. "The Second Great Awakening as an
Organizing Process 1780-1830: An Hypothesis."
American Quarterly, XXI (Spt. 1969), 23-43.

 

Miller, William. "The Democratic Societies and the
Whiskey Insurrection." The Pennsylvania Magazine
of History and Biography, LXII (July 1958),
3'2'4—359.

 

 

 

Nash, Gary B. "The American Clergy and the French
Revolution." William and Mary Quarterly, XXII
(July 1965), 392-412.

 

Smelser, Marshall. "The Federalist Period as an Age
of Passion." American Quarterly, X (Winter
1958), 391-419.

 

 

. "The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and Menace
of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity." Review
g: Politics, XIII (1951), 457-482.

. "The Jacobin Phrenzy: The Menace of Monarchy,
Plutocracy and Anglophobia, 1789-1798." Review
g£ Politics, XXI (1959) 239-258.

Smith, Page. "Anxiety and Despair in American History."
William and Mary_Quarterly, XXXVIII (July 1969),
416-424.

 

llll‘lll‘

1' I I'll |. '1

300

C. History and Psychology

The following list in only a selection of items
that were helpful in my attempt to use psychology to
understand history. A good bibliography on spycho-
history can be found in the Mazlish volume listed below.

Brown, Norman 0. Life Against Death, the PsyChoanalytical
Meaning 9; History. New York: Vintage Books,
1959.

. Love's Body. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

Erikson, Erik H. Younngan Luther: A_Study ig PsyCho-
analysis and History. New York: W. W. Norton,
1958.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans.
by James Strachey. New York: Bantam, 1959.

. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. by
James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961.

. Group Psychology and the Analysis g; the
Ego. Trans. by James Strachey. New York:
Bantam, 1960. '

Fromm, Erich. Escape From Freedom. New York: Avon,
1965.

 

Mazlish, Bruce, ed. Psychoanalysis and History. New
York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1971.

Neuman, Franz. The Democratic and Authoritarian State:
Essays in Poiitical and Legal Theory. Glencoe,
111.: The Free Press, 1957.

 

 

 

 

Roazen, Paul. Freud: Political and Social Thought.
New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

 

 

Schaar, John.’ Escape from Authority. New York: Basic
Books, 1961.

 

Wolman, Benjamin, ed. The Psychoanalytic Interpretation
g: History. New York: Harpers, 1971.

"Il!llllllflll‘llllfS