The Life of John Marshall (Volume 2 of 4). Beveridge Albert Jeremiah
cannot have success ultimately. The King, the mass of the substantial people of the whole country, the army, and the influential part of the clergy, form a firm phalanx which must prevail."5
So, in the beginning, all American newspapers, now more numerous, were exultant. "Liberty will have another feather in her cap… The ensuing winter [1789] will be the commencement of a Golden Age,"6 was the glowing prophecy of an enthusiastic Boston journal. Those two sentences of the New England editor accurately stated the expectation and belief of all America.
But in France itself one American had grave misgivings as to the outcome. "The materials for a revolution in this country are very indifferent. Everybody agrees that there is an utter prostration of morals; but this general position can never convey to an American mind the degree of depravity… A hundred thousand examples are required to show the extreme rottenness… The virtuous … stand forward from a background deeply and darkly shaded… From such crumbling matter … the great edifice of freedom is to be erected here [in France]… [There is] a perfect indifference to the violation of engagements… Inconstancy is mingled in the blood, marrow, and very essence of this people… Consistency is a phenomenon… The great mass of the common people have … no morals but their interest. These are the creatures who, led by drunken curates, are now in the high road à la liberté."7 Such was the report sent to Washington by Gouverneur Morris, the first American Minister to France under the Constitution.
Three months later Morris, writing officially, declares that "this country is … as near to anarchy as society can approach without dissolution."8 And yet, a year earlier, Lafayette had lamented the French public's indifference to much needed reforms; "The people … have been so dull that it has made me sick" was Lafayette's doleful account of popular enthusiasm for liberty in the France of 1788.9
Gouverneur Morris wrote Robert Morris that a French owner of a quarry demanded damages because so many bodies had been dumped into the quarry that they "choked it up so that he could not get men to work at it." These victims, declared the American Minister, had been "the best people," killed "without form of trial, and their bodies thrown like dead dogs into the first hole that offered."10 Gouverneur Morris's diary abounds in such entries as "[Sept. 2, 1792] the murder of the priests, … murder of prisoners… [Sept. 3] The murdering continues all day… [Sept. 4th]… And still the murders continue."11
John Marshall was now the attorney of Robert Morris; was closely connected with him in business transactions; and, as will appear, was soon to become his relative by the marriage of Marshall's brother to the daughter of the Philadelphia financier. Gouverneur Morris, while not related to Robert Morris, was "entirely devoted" to and closely associated with him in business; and both were in perfect agreement of opinions.12 Thus the reports of the scarlet and revolting phases of the French Revolution that came to the Virginia lawyer were carried through channels peculiarly personal and intimate.
They came, too, from an observer who was thoroughly aristocratic in temperament and conviction.13 Little of appreciation or understanding of the basic causes and high purposes of the French Revolution appears in Gouverneur Morris's accounts and comments, while he portrays the horrible in unrelieved ghastliness.14
Such, then, were the direct and first-hand accounts that Marshall received; and the impression made upon him was correspondingly dark, and as lasting as it was somber. Of this, Marshall himself leaves us in no doubt. Writing more than a decade later he gives his estimate of Gouverneur Morris and of his accounts of the French Revolution.
"The private correspondence of Mr. Morris with the president [and, of course, much more so with Robert Morris] exhibits a faithful picture, drawn by the hand of a master, of the shifting revolutionary scenes which with unparalleled rapidity succeeded each other in Paris. With the eye of an intelligent, and of an unimpassioned observer, he marked all passing events, and communicated them with fidelity. He did not mistake despotism for freedom, because it was sanguinary, because it was exercised by those who denominated themselves the people, or because it assumed the name of liberty. Sincerely wishing happiness and a really free government to France, he could not be blind to the obvious truth that the road to those blessings had been mistaken."15
Everybody in America echoed the shouts of the Parisian populace when the Bastille fell. Was it not the prison where kings thrust their subjects to perish of starvation and torture?16 Lafayette, "as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch," hastened to present Washington with "the main key of the fortress of despotism."17 Washington responded that he accepted the key of the Bastille as "a token of the victory gained by liberty."18 Thomas Paine wrote of his delight at having been chosen by Lafayette to "convey … the first ripe fruits of American principles, transplanted into Europe, to his master and patron."19 Mutual congratulations were carried back and forth by every ship.
Soon the mob in Paris took more sanguinary action and blood flowed more freely, but not in sufficient quantity to quench American enthusiasm for the cause of liberty in France. We had had plenty of mobs ourselves and much crimson experience. Had not mobs been the precursors of our own Revolution?
The next developments of the French uprising and the appearance of the Jacobin Clubs, however, alarmed some and gave pause to all of the cautious friends of freedom in America and other countries.
Edmund Burke hysterically sounded the alarm. On account of his championship of the cause of American Independence, Burke had enjoyed much credit with all Americans who had heard of him. "In the last age," exclaimed Burke in Parliament, February 9, 1790, "we were in danger of being entangled by the example of France in the net of a relentless despotism… Our present danger from the example of a people whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger of being led, through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy."20
Of the French declaration of human rights Burke declared: "They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man, in such a pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at school… They systematically destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people.21… On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings," exclaimed the great English liberal, "laws are to be supported only by their own terrours… In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."22
Burke's extravagant rhetoric, although reprinted in America, was little heeded. It would have been better if his pen had remained idle. For Burke's wild language, not yet justified by the orgy of blood in which French liberty was, later, to be baptized, caused a voice to speak to which America did listen, a page to be written that America did read. Thomas Paine, whose "Common Sense" had made his name better known to all people in the United States than that of any other man of his time except Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Henry, was then in France. This stormy petrel of revolution seems always to have been drawn by instinct to every part of the human ocean where hurricanes were brooding.23
Paine answered Burke with that ferocious indictment of monarchy entitled "The Rights of Man," in which he went as far to one extreme as the English political philosopher had gone to the other; for while Paine annihilated Burke's Brahminic
Jefferson to Madison, Aug. 28, 1789;
Gouverneur Morris to Washington, Paris, April 29, 1789;
Morris to Washington, July 31, 1789;
Lafayette to Washington, May 25, 1788;
G. Morris to R. Morris, Dec. 24, 1792; Morris, ii, 15.
Louis Otto to De Montmorin, March 10, 1792;
Morris associated with the nobility in France and accepted the aristocratic view. (
Marshall, ii, note xvi, p. 17.
Recent investigation establishes the fact that the inmates of the Bastille generally found themselves very well off indeed. The records of this celebrated prison show that even prisoners of mean station, when incarcerated for so grave a crime as conspiracy against the King's life, had, in addition to remarkably abundant meals, an astonishing amount of extra viands and refreshments including comfortable quantities of wine, brandy, and beer. Prisoners of higher station fared still more generously, of course. (Funck-Brentano:
Lafayette to Washington, March 17, 1790;
Washington to Lafayette, August 11, 1790;
Paine to Washington, May 1, 1790;
Burke in the House of Commons;
Paine had not yet lost his immense popularity in the United States. While, later, he came to be looked upon with horror by great numbers of people, he enjoyed the regard and admiration of nearly everybody in America at the time his