An outbreak of Democratic fury bordering upon treason took place, when Senator Mason of Virginia violated the oath of secrecy, and sent a copy of Jay's treaty with England to the "Aurora." Meetings passed condemnatory resolutions expressed in no mild language. Jay was "a slave, a traitor, a coward, who had bartered his country's liberties for British gold." Mobs burned Jay in effigy, and pelted Alexander Hamilton. At a public meeting in Philadelphia, Mr. Blair threw the treaty to the crowd, and advised them to kick it to hell. They carried it on a pole in procession, and burned it before the English minister's house. A Democratic society in Richmond, Virginia, full of the true modern South Carolina "sound and fury," gave public notice, that, if the treaty entered into by "that damned arch traitor, John Jay, with the British tyrant should be ratified, a petition will be presented to the next General Assembly of Virginia praying that the said State may recede from the Union, and be left under the government and protection of one hundred thousand free and independent Virginians!" A meeting at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, resolved, "that it was weary of the tardiness of Congress in not going to war with England, and that they were almost ready to wish for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France for a short space, in order to punish the miscreants who enervate and disgrace the government." Mr. Jefferson's opinion of the treaty is well known from his rhetorical letter to Rutledge, which, in two or three lines, contains the adjectives, unnecessary, impolitic, dangerous, dishonorable, disadvantageous, humiliating, disgraceful, improper, monarchical, impeachable. The Mazzei letter, written not long after the ratification, displays the same bitter feeling.
The Federalists had a powerful ally in William Cobbett, who signed himself Peter Porcupine, adopting for his literary alias a nickname bestowed by his enemies. This remarkable writer, who, like Paine, figured in the political conflicts of two nations, must have come into the world bristling with pugnacity. A more thorough game-cock never crowed in the pit. He had been a private in the English army, came to the United States about 1790, and taught French to Americans, and English to Frenchmen, (to Talleyrand among others,) until 1794, when the dogmatic Dr. Priestley arrived here, fresh from the scene of his persecutions. The Doctor losing no time in laying his case before the American public, Cobbett answered his publication, ridiculing it and the Doctor's political career in a pamphlet which became immediately popular with the Federalists. From that time until his departure for England, in 1800, Cobbett's pen was never idle. His "Little Plain English in Favor of Mr. Jay's Treaty" was altogether the best thing published on that side of the question. Cobbett had more than one point of resemblance to Paine, the object of his early invective, but later of his unqualified admiration. These two men were the best English pamphleteers of their day. In shrewdness, in practical sense, Cobbett was fully Paine's equal. He was as coarse and as pithy in expression, but with more wit, a better education, more complete command of language, and a greater variety of resources. Cobbett was a quicker and a harder hitter than Paine. His personal courage gave him a great advantage in his warfaring life. In 1796, in the hottest of the French and English fight, the well-known Porcupine opened a shop in Philadelphia. He filled his show-window with all the prints of English kings, nobles, and generals he could collect, and "then," he says, "I took down the shutters, and waited."
Party-feeling reached the boiling-point when Washington retired to Mount Vernon. Mr. Adams, his successor, had none of that divinity which hedged the Father of his Country to protect him. Under the former administration, he had been, as Senator Grayson humorously called him, "his superfluous Excellency," and out of the direct line of fire. He could easily look down upon such melancholy squibs as Freneau's "Daddy Vice" and "Duke of Braintree." But when raised above every other head by his high office, he became a mark for the most bitter personal attacks. Mr. Adams unfortunately thought too much about himself to be the successful chief of a party. He allowed his warm feelings to divert him from the main object and end of his followers. He was jealous of Hamilton,unwilling, in fact, to seem to be governed by the opinion of any man, and half inclined to look for a reëlection outside of his own party. Hamilton, the soul of the Federalists, mistrusted and disliked Mr. Adams, and made the sad mistake of publishing his mistrust and dislike. It must be confessed that the gentlemen who directed the Administration party were no match as tacticians for such file-leaders as Jefferson and Burr. Many of their pet measures were ill-judged, to say the least. The provisional army furnished a fertile theme for fierce declamation. The black cockade became the badge of the supporters of government, so that in the streets one could tell at a glance whether friend or foe was approaching. The Alien and Sedition Laws caused much bitter feeling and did great damage to the Federalists. To read these acts and the trials under them now excites somewhat of the feeling with which we look upon some strange and clumsy engine of torture in a mediaeval museum. How the temper of this people and their endurance of legal inflictions have changed since then! There was Matthew Lyon, a noted Democrat of Irish origin, who had published a letter charging the President with "ridiculous pomp, idle parade, and selfish avarice." He was found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to four months' imprisonment and a fine of one thousand dollars. There was Cooper, an Englishman, who fared equally ill for saying or writing that the President did not possess sufficient capacity to fulfil the duties of his office. What should we think of the sanity of James Buchanan, should he prosecute and obtain a conviction against some Black-Republican Luther Baldwin of 1859, for wishing that the wad of a cannon, fired in his honor, might strike an unmentionable part of his august person? What should we say, if Horace Greeley were to be arrested on a warrant issued by the Supreme Court of New York for a libel on Louis Napoleon, as was William Cobbett by Judge McKean of Pennsylvania for a libel on the King of Spain?
Fiercer and more bitter waxed party-discord, and both sides did ample injustice to one another. Mr. Jefferson wrote, that men who had been intimate all their lives would cross the street and look the other way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats. And Gouverneur Morris gives us a capital idea of the state of feeling when he says that a looker-on, who took no part in affairs, felt like a sober man at a dinner when the rest of the company were drunk. Civil war was often talked of, and the threat of secession, which has become the rhetorical staple of the South, produced solely for exportation to the North, to be used there in manufacturing pro-slavery votes out of the timidity of men of large means and little courage or perspicacity, was then freely made by both divisions of the Union. Had we been of French or Spanish descent, there would have been barricades, coup-d'états, pronunciamentos; but the English race know better how to treat the body-politic. They never apply the knife except for the most desperate operations. But where hard words were so plenty, blows could not fail. Duels were frequent, cudgellings not uncommon,although as yet the Senate-Chamber had not been selected as the fittest scene for the use of the bludgeon. It is true that molasses-and-water was the beverage allowed by Congress in those simple times, and that charged to stationery.
What terrible fellows our ancestors were for calling names,particularly the gentlemen of the press! If they had been natives of the Island of Frozen Sounds, along the shore of which Pantagruel and Panurge coasted, they would have stood up to their chins in scurrilous epithets. The comical sketch of their rhetoric in "Salmagundi" is literally true:"Every day have these slangwhangers made furious attacks on each other and upon their respective adherents, discharging their heavy artillery, consisting of large sheets loaded with scoundrel, villain, liar, rascal, numskull, nincompoop, dunderhead, wiseacre, blockhead, jackass." As single words were not always explosive enough to make a report equal to their feelings, they had recourse to compounds;"pert and prating popinjay," "hackneyed gutscraper," "maggot of corruption," "toad on a dung-heap," "snivelling sophisticating hound," are a few of the chain-shot which strike our eyes in turning over the yellow faded files. They are all quiet now, those eager, snarling editors of fifty years since, and mostly forgotten. Even the ink which records their spiteful abuse is fading away;
What terrible fellows our ancestors were for calling names,particularly the gentlemen of the press! If they had been natives of the Island of Frozen Sounds, along the shore of which Pantagruel and Panurge coasted, they would have stood up to their chins in scurrilous epithets. The comical sketch of their rhetoric in "Salmagundi" is literally true:"Every day have these slangwhangers made furious attacks on each other and upon their respective adherents, discharging their heavy artillery, consisting of large sheets loaded with scoundrel, villain, liar, rascal, numskull, nincompoop, dunderhead, wiseacre, blockhead, jackass." As single words were not always explosive enough to make a report equal to their feelings, they had recourse to compounds;"pert and prating popinjay," "hackneyed gutscraper," "maggot of corruption," "toad on a dung-heap," "snivelling sophisticating hound," are a few of the chain-shot which strike our eyes in turning over the yellow faded files. They are all quiet now, those eager, snarling editors of fifty years since, and mostly forgotten. Even the ink which records their spiteful abuse is fading away;
"Dunne no more the halter dreads,
The torrent of his lies to check,
No gallows Cheetham's dreams invades,
Nor lours o'er Holt's devoted neck."
Emerson's saying, that involuntarily we read history as superior beings, is never so true as when we read history before it has been worked up for the public, in the raw material of letters, pamphlets, and newspapers. Feverish paragraphs, which once excited the enthusiasm of one party and the fiercest opposition of the other, lie before us as dead and as unmeaning as an Egyptian mummy. The passion which once gave them life is gone. The objects which the writers considered all-important we perceive to have been of no real significance even in their day. We read on with a good-natured pity, akin to the feeling which the gods of Epicurus might be supposed to experience when they looked down upon foolish mortals,and when we shut the book, go out into our own world to fret, fume, and wrangle over things equally transitory and frivolous.
When it became evident that the Administration party ran the risk of being beaten in the election of 1800, their trumpeters sounded the wildest notes of alarm. "People! how long will you remain blind? Awake! be up and doing! If Mr. Jefferson is elected, the equal representation of the small States in the Senate will be destroyed, the funding system swept away, the navy abolished, all commerce and foreign trade prohibited, and the fruits of the soil left to rot on the hands of the farmer. The taxes will all fall on the landed interest, all the churches will be overturned, none but Frenchmen employed by government, and the monstrous system of liberty and equality, with all its horrid consequences, as experienced in France and St. Domingo, will inevitably be introduced." Thus they shouted, and no doubt many of the shouters sincerely believed it all. Nevertheless, and in spite of these alarums, the Revolution of '99, as Mr. Jefferson liked to call it, took place without bloodshed, and in 1801 that gentleman mounted the throne.
After this struggle was over, the Federalists, some from conviction and some from disgust at being beaten, gave up the country as lost. Worthy New-Englanders, like Cabot, Fisher Ames, and Wolcott, had no longer hope. They sank into the position of mere grumblers, with one leading principle,admiration of England, and a willingness to submit to any insults which England in her haughtiness might please to inflict. "We are sure," says the "Boston Democrat," "that George III. would find more desperately devoted subjects in New England than in any part of his dominions." The Democrats, of course, clung to their motto, "Whatever is in France is right," and even accepted the arbitrary measures of Bonaparte at home as a mere change of system, and abroad as forced upon him by British pirates. It is curious to read the high Federalist papers in the first days of their sorrow. In their contradictory fault-finding sulkiness, they give some color of truth to Mr. Jefferson's accusation, that the Federal leaders were seeking to establish a monarchy,a charge well known to be unfounded, as Washington said at the time. "What is the use of celebrating the Fourth of July?" they asked. "Freedom is a stale, narcotic topic. The Declaration of Independence a useless, if not an odious libel upon a friendly nation connected with us by the silken band of amity." Fenno, in his paper, said the Declaration was "a placard of rebellion, a feeble production, in which the spirit of rebellion prevailed over the love of order." Dennie, in the "Portfolio," anticipating Mr. Choate, called it "an incoherent accumulation of indigestible and impracticable political dogmas, dangerous to the peace of the world, and seditious in its local tendency, and, as a composition, equally at variance with the laws of construction and the laws of regular government." The Federalist opinion of the principles of the Administration party was avowed with equal frankness in their papers. "A democracy is the most absurd constitution, productive of anarchy and mischief, which must always happen when the government of a nation depends upon the caprice of the ignorant, harebrained vulgar. All the miseries of men for a long series of years grew out of that infamous mode of polity, a democracy; which is to be reckoned to be only the corruption and degeneracy of a republic, and not to be ranked among the legitimate forms of government. If it be not a legitimate government, we owe it no allegiance. He is a blind man who does not see this truth; he is a base man who will not assert it. Democratic power is tyranny, in the principle, the beginning, the progress, and the end. It is on its trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy." These and other foolish excerpts were kept before their readers by the "Aurora" and "Boston Chronicle," leading Democratic organs, and served to sweeten their triumph and to seal the fate of the unlucky Federalists.
The difference between the tone of these extracts and that of our present journalists, when they touch upon the abstract principles of government, may indicate to us the firm hold which the Democratic theory has taken of our people. As that conquering party marched onward, the opposition was forced to follow after, and to encamp upon the ground their powerful enemy left behind him. To-day when we see gentlemen who consider themselves Conservatives in the ranks of the Democrats, we may suppose that the tour of the political circle is nearly completed.
A momentary lull had followed the storm of the election, when Mr. Jefferson boldly threw down another "bone for the Federalists to gnaw." He wrote to Thomas Paine, inviting him to America, and offering him a passage home in a national vessel. "You will, in general, find us," he added, "returned to sentiments worthy of former times; in these it will be your glory to have steadily labored, and with as much effect as any man living. That you may live long, to continue your useful labors and reap the reward in the thankfulness of nations, is my sincere prayer. Accept the assurance of my high esteem and affectionate attachment." Mr. Jefferson went even farther. He openly announced his intention of giving Paine an office, if there were one in his gift suitable for him. Now, although Paine had been absent for many years, he had not been forgotten by the Americans. The echo of the noise he made in England reached our shores; and English echoes were more attentively listened to then even than at present. His "Rights of Man" had been much read in this country. Indeed, it was asserted, and upon pretty good authority, that Jefferson himself, when Secretary of State, had advised and encouraged the publication of an American edition as an antidote to the "Davila" of Mr. Adams. Even the "Age of Reason" had obtained an immense circulation from the great reputation of the author. It reminded the Rev. Mr. Goodrich, and other Orthodox New-Englanders, of Milton's description of Death,