The Life of John Marshall (Volume 2 of 4). Beveridge Albert Jeremiah
The "Independent Chronicle" of Boston asserted that Publicola was trying to build up a "system of Monarchy and Aristocracy … on the ruins both of the Reputation and Liberties of the People."35 Madison reported to Jefferson that because of John Adams's reputed authorship of these unpopular letters, the supporters of the Massachusetts statesman had become "perfectly insignificant in … number" and that "in Boston he is … distinguished for his unpopularity."36
In such fashion the controversy began in America over the French Revolution.
But whatever the misgivings of the conservative, whatever the alarm of the timid, the overwhelming majority of Americans were for the French Revolution and its doctrines;37 and men of the highest ability and station gave dignity to the voice of the people.
In most parts of the country politicians who sought election to public office conformed, as usual, to the popular view. It would appear that the prevailing sentiment was influential even with so strong a conservative and extreme a Nationalist as Madison, in bringing about his amazing reversal of views which occurred soon after the Constitution was adopted.38 But those who, like Marshall, were not shaken, were made firmer in their opinions by the very strength of the ideas thus making headway among the masses.
An incident of the French Revolution almost within sight of the American coast gave to the dogma of equality a new and intimate meaning in the eyes of those who had begun to look with disfavor upon the results of Gallic radical thought. Marshall and Jefferson best set forth the opposite impressions made by this dramatic event.
"Early and bitter fruits of that malignant philosophy," writes Marshall, "which … can coolly and deliberately pursue, through oceans of blood, abstract systems for the attainment of some fancied untried good, were gathered in the French West Indies… The revolutionists of France formed the mad and wicked project of spreading their doctrines of equality among persons [negroes and white people] between whom distinctions and prejudices exist to be subdued only by the grave. The rage excited by the pursuit of this visionary and baneful theory, after many threatening symptoms, burst forth on the 23d day of August 1791, with a fury alike destructive and general.
"In one night, a preconcerted insurrection of the blacks took place throughout the colony of St. Domingo; and the white inhabitants of the country, while sleeping in their beds, were involved in one indiscriminate massacre, from which neither age nor sex could afford an exemption. Only a few females, reserved for a fate more cruel than death, were intentionally spared; and not many were fortunate enough to escape into the fortified cities. The insurgents then assembled in vast numbers, and a bloody war commenced between them and the whites inhabiting the towns."39
After the African disciples of French liberty had overthrown white supremacy in St. Domingo, Jefferson wrote his daughter that he had been informed "that the Patriotic party [St. Domingo revolutionists] had taken possession of 600 aristocrats & monocrats, had sent 200 of them to France, & were sending 400 here… I wish," avowed Jefferson, in this intimate family letter, "we could distribute our 400 [white French exiles] among the Indians, who would teach them lessons of liberty & equality."40
Events in France marched swiftly from one bloody climax to another still more scarlet. All were faithfully reflected in the views of the people of the United States. John Marshall records for us "the fervour of democracy" as it then appeared in our infant Republic. He repeats that, at first, every American wished success to the French reformers. But the later steps of the movement "impaired this … unanimity of opinion… A few who had thought deeply on the science of government … believed that … the influence of the galleries over the legislature, and of mobs over the executive; … the tumultuous assemblages of the people and their licentious excesses … did not appear to be the symptoms of a healthy constitution, or of genuine freedom… They doubted, and they feared for the future."
Of the body of American public opinion, however, Marshall chronicles that: "In total opposition to this sentiment was that of the public. There seems to be something infectious in the example of a powerful and enlightened nation verging towards democracy, which imposes on the human mind, and leads human reason in fetters… Long settled opinions yield to the overwhelming weight of such dazzling authority. It wears the semblance of being the sense of mankind, breaking loose from the shackles which had been imposed by artifice, and asserting the freedom, and the dignity, of his nature."
American conservative writers, says Marshall, "were branded as the advocates of royalty, and of aristocracy. To question the duration of the present order of things [in France] was thought to evidence an attachment to unlimited monarchy, or a blind prejudice in favour of British institutions… The war in which the several potentates of Europe were engaged against France, although in almost every instance declared by that power, was pronounced to be a war for the extirpation of human liberty, and for the banishment of free government from the face of the earth. The preservation of the constitution of the United States was supposed to depend on its issue; and the coalition against France was treated as a coalition against America also."41
Marshall states, more clearly, perhaps, than any one else, American conservative opinion of the time: "The circumstances under which the abolition of royalty was declared, the massacres which preceded it, the scenes of turbulence and violence which were acted in every part of the nation, appeared to them [American conservatives] to present an awful and doubtful state of things… The idea that a republic was to be introduced and supported by force, was, to them, a paradox in politics."
Thus it was, he declares, that "the French revolution will be found to have had great influence on the strength of parties, and on the subsequent political transactions of the United States."42
As the French storm increased, its winds blew ever stronger over the responsive waters of American opinion. Jefferson, that accurate barometer of public weather, thus registers the popular feeling: "The sensations it [the French Revolution] has produced here, and the indications of them in the public papers, have shown that the form our own government was to take depended much more on the events of France than anybody had before imagined."43 Thus both Marshall and Jefferson bear testimony as to the determining effect produced in America by the violent change of systems in France.
William Short, whom Jefferson had taken to France as his secretary, when he was the American Minister to France, and who, when Jefferson returned to the United States, remained as chargé d'affaires,44 had written both officially and privately of what was going on in France and of the increasing dominance of the Jacobin Clubs.45 Perhaps no more trustworthy statement exists of the prevailing American view of the French cataclysm than that given in Jefferson's fatherly letter to his protégé: —
"The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain," wrote Jefferson, "on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France.46… Many guilty persons [aristocrats] fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent:… It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree…
"The liberty of the whole earth," continued Jefferson, "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 & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is," declared Jefferson; and "my sentiments … are really those of 99 in an hundred of our citizens," was that careful political observer's estimate of American public opinion. "Your temper of mind," Jefferson cautions Short, "would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen.
"There
Madison to Jefferson, July 13, 1791;
A verse of a song by French Revolutionary enthusiasts at a Boston "Civic Festival in commemoration of the Successes of their French brethren in their glorious enterprise for the Establishment of Equal Liberty," as a newspaper describes the meeting, expresses in reserved and moderate fashion the popular feeling: —
At this celebration an ox with gilded horns, one bearing the French flag and the other the American; carts of bread and two or three hogsheads of rum; and other devices of fancy and provisions for good cheer were the material evidence of the radical spirit. (See
It is certain that Madison could not possibly have continued in public life if he had remained a conservative and a Nationalist. (See next chapter.)
Marshall, ii, 239.
Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, May 26, 1793;
Marshall, ii, 249-51.
Marshall, ii, 251-52.
Jefferson to T. M. Randolph, Jan. 7, 1793;
Mass. Hist. Collections (7th Series), i, 138.
Typical excerpts from Short's reports to Jefferson are: July 20, 1792: "Those mad & corrupted people in France who under the name of liberty have destroyed their own government [French Constitution of 1791] & disgusted all … men of honesty & property… All the rights of humanity … are daily violated with impunity … universal anarchy prevails… There is no succour … against mobs & factions which have assumed despotic power."
July 31: "The factions which have lately determined the system … for violating all the bonds of civil society … have disgusted all, except the
August 15: "The Swiss guards have been massacred by the people & … streets literally are red with blood."
October 12: "Their [French] successes abroad are unquestionably evils for humanity. The spirit which they will propagate is so destructive of all order … so subversive of all ideas of justice – the system they aim at so absolutely visionary & impracticable – that their efforts can end in nothing but despotism after having bewildered the unfortunate people, whom they render free in their way, in violence & crimes, & wearied them with sacrifices of blood, which alone they consider worthy of the furies whom they worship under the names of
August 24: "I shḍ not be at all surprized to hear of the present leaders being hung by the people. Such has been the moral of this revolution from the beginning. The people have gone farther than their leaders… We may expect … to hear of such proceedings, under the cloak of liberty,
These are examples of the statements to which Jefferson's letter, quoted in the text following, was the reply. Short's most valuable letters are from The Hague, to which he had been transferred. They are all the more important, as coming from a young radical whom events in France had changed into a conservative. And Jefferson's letter is conclusive of American popular sentiment, which he seldom opposed.
Almost at the same time Thomas Paine was writing to Jefferson from Paris of "the Jacobins who act without either prudence or morality." (Paine to Jefferson, April 20, 1793;