History of the United States During Thomas Jefferson's Administrations (Complete 4 Volumes). Henry Adams
and plunder in the waste of public money, will never cease to bawl on the breaking up of their sanctuary." Of all these classes the clergy alone were mortal enemies. "Of the monarchical Federalists," he wrote to his attorney-general,10 "I have no expectations; they are incurables, to be taken care of in a mad-house if necessary, and on motives of charity." The monarchical Federalists, as he chose to call them, were the Essex Junto,—George Cabot, Theophilus Parsons, Fisher Ames, Timothy Pickering, Stephen Higginson, and their followers; but it was not with them or their opinions that Jefferson was angriest. "The 'Palladium'," he went on, "is understood to be the clerical paper, and from the clergy I expect no mercy. They crucified their Saviour, who preached that their kingdom was not of this world; and all who practise on that precept must expect the extreme of their wrath. The laws of the present day withhold their hands from blood, but lies and slander still remain to them."
This was strong language. When Jefferson cried that law alone withheld the hands of the New England clergy from taking his blood, his words were not wholly figures of speech. He had fought a similar battle in Virginia, and still felt its virulence. What was more to the purpose, every politician could see that his strategy was correct. The New England church was the chief obstacle to democratic success, and New-England society, as then constituted, was dangerous to the safety of the Union. Whether a reform could be best accomplished by external attack, or whether Massachusetts and Connecticut had best be left in peace to work out their own problems, was a matter of judgment only. If Jefferson thought he had the power to effect his object by political influence, he could hardly refuse to make the attempt, although he admitted that his chance of success in Connecticut was desperate. "I consider Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Mew Hampshire," he wrote to Pierpont Edwards, of Connecticut,11 "as coming about in the course of this year, . . . but the nature of your government being a subordination of the civil to the ecclesiastical power, I consider it as desperate for long years to come. Their steady habits exclude the advances of information, and they seem exactly where they were when they separated from the Saints of Oliver Cromwell; and there your clergy will always keep them if they can. You will follow the bark of Liberty only by the help of a tow-rope."
Expecting no mercy from the clergy, Jefferson took pains to show that they were to look for no mercy from him. At the moment he began the attempt to "completely consolidate the nation," he gave what amounted to a formal notice that with the clergy he would neither make peace nor accept truce. A few days after announcing in his Inaugural Address, "We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists," and appealing for harmony and affection in social intercourse, Jefferson wrote a letter to the famous Thomas Paine, then at Paris waiting for means of conveyance to America. A sloop-of-war, the "Maryland," was under orders for Havre to carry the ratification of the new treaty with France, and the Present made his first use of the navy to pay a public compliment to Paine.
"You expressed a wish," he wrote,12 "to get a passage to this country in a public vessel. Mr. Dawson is charged with orders to the captain of the 'Maryland' to receive and accommodate you with a passage back, if you can be ready to depart at such short warning. . . . I am in hopes you will find us returned generally 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 long live to continue your useful labors, and to reap their reward in the thankfulness of nations, is my sincere prayer. Accept assurances of my high esteem and affectionate attachment."
The sentiments in which Pain gloried "to have steadily labored," so far as they were recent, chiefly consisted in applause of the French Revolution, in libels on President Washington and his successor, and in assaults on the Christian religion. Whether he was right or wrong need not be discussed. Even though he were correct in them all, and was entitled to higher respect than any which Jefferson could show him, he was at that time regarded by respectable society, both Federalist and Republican, as a person to be avoided, a character to be feared. Among the New England churches the prejudice against him amounted to loathing, which epithets could hardly express. Had Jefferson written a letter to Bonaparte applauding his "useful labors" on the 18th Brumaire, and praying that he might live long to continue them, he would not have excited in the minds of the New England Calvinists so deep a sense of disgust as by thus seeming to identify himself with Paine. All this was known to him when he wrote the letter; he knew too that Paine would be likely to make no secret of such a compliment; and even if Paine held his tongue, the fact of his return in a national vessel must tell the story.
Jefferson's friends took a tone of apology about the letter to Paine, implying that he acted without reflection. They treated the letter as a formal civility, such as might without complaint have been extended to Gates or Conway or Charles Lee,13—a reminiscence of Revolutionary services which implied no personal feeling. Had Jefferson meant no more than this, he would have said only what he meant. He was not obliged to offer Paine a passage in a ship-of-war; or if he felt himself called upon to do so, he need not have written a letter; or if a letter must be written, he might have used very cordial language without risking the charge of applauding Paine's assaults on Christianity, and without seeming to invite him to continue such "useful labors" in America. No man could express more delicate shades of sympathy than Jefferson when he chose. He had smarted for years under the lashing caused by his Mazzei letter, and knew that a nest of hornets would rise about him the moment the "Maryland" should arrive; yet he wrote an assurance of his "high esteem and affectionate attachment" to Paine, with a "sincere prayer" that he might "long live to continue" his "useful labors." These expressions were either deceptive, or they proved the President's earnestness and courage. The letter to Paine was not, like the letter to Mazzei, a matter of apology or explanation. Jefferson never withdrew or qualified its language, or tried to soften its effect. "With respect to the letter," he wrote14 to Paine in 1805, "I never hesitated to avow and to justify it in conversation. In no other way do I trouble myself to contradict anything which is said." Believing that the clergy would have taken his blood if the law had not restrained them, he meant to destroy their church if he could; and he gave them fair notice of his intention.
Although the letter to Paine was never explained away, other expressions of the President seemed to contradict the spirit of this letter, and these the President took trouble to explain. What had he meant by his famous appeal in behalf of harmony and affection in social intercourse, "without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things"? What was to become of the still more famous declaration, "We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists"? Hardly had he uttered these words than he hastened to explain them to his friends. "It was a conviction," he wrote to Giles,15 "that these people did not differ from us in principle which induced me to define the principles which I deemed orthodox, and to urge a reunion on those principles; and I am induced to hope it has conciliated many. I do not speak of the desperadoes of the quondam faction in and out of Congress. These I consider as incurables, on whom all attentions would be lost, and therefore will not be wasted; but my wish is to keep their flock from returning to them." He intended to entice the flock with one hand and to belabor the shepherds with the other. In equally clear language he wrote to Governor McKean of Pennsylvania:16—
"My idea is that the mass of our countrymen, even of those who call themselves Federalist, are Republican. They differ from us but in a shade of more or less power to be given to the Executive or Legislative organ. . . . To restore that harmony which our predecessors so wickedly made it their object to break up, to render us again one people acting as one nation,—should be the object of every man really a patriot. I am satisfied it can be done, and I own that the day which should convince me to the contrary would be the bitterest of my life."
This motive, he said, had dictated his answer to the New Haven remonstrants,—a paper, he added, which "will furnish new texts for the monarchists; but from them I ask nothing: I wish nothing but their eternal hatred."