substantially agreed with those given to the former en- CHAPTER voys. XIV. By the time these instructions were nearly ready, 1799. news arrived of the Revolution in France of the 30th Sept. 11. Prarial (June 18th), by which the whole Directory, except Barras, had been changed—a consequence of the severe reverses which the arms of the Republic had lately experienced. Accounts of these reverses, arriving from time to time in America, had increased the disinclination felt from the beginning by many of the active Federal leaders to any renewal of diplomatic intercourse with France; and they eagerly insisted upon the recent change as a reason for further delay. Who could tell if the new directors would hold themselves bound by the assurances of the old ones? Further revolutions were also foreseen. Such, of late, had been the rapid successes of the allies, the Arch-duke Charles triumphant on the Rhine, and the French quite driven out of Italy by the arms of Suwarrow, and Bonaparte absent and unsuccessful, perhaps already slain in the East, that even the Republic itself seemed in danger. Indeed, the restoration of the Bourbons began to be talked of as an event by no means improbable; Murray's recent dispatches were all in that strain; and the whole cabinet concurred in a letter to the president suggesting the suspension of the mission. Ellsworth also wrote to him to the same effect. Before coming to a final decision, the president resolved to proceed to Trenton. When he reached that place he found Davie already there. Ellsworth, whom the president had seen and talked with on the way, arrived a day or two after. Hamilton, accompanied by General Wilkinson, happened also to be present on affairs of the army. But Adams strongly suspected his real business to be, to overlook the deliberations of a cab CHAPTER inet, of which he afterward vehemently complained that XIV. it was more Hamilton's than his. Well knowing, from 1799. many conversations with its separate members, what the opinion of the cabinet would be, and the instructions being at last finally arranged, the president, as on the former occasion of the nomination of Murray, issued directions, without any special cabinet consultation, that the envoys should embark as speedily as possible in the frig. ate United States, then lying at Newport ready to receive them. This second slight put upon their opinions, and disregard of what they seem to have esteemed their right to be consulted, made a final and permanent breach between the president and three of his secretaries. Stoddard, the Secretary of the Navy, who had exhibited great energy and ability in that department, and Lee, the Attorney General, were by no means so strenuous in opposing the departure of the envoys, being inclined to defer to the president's judgment in that matter. The three offended secretaries complained, in addition, of what they seemed to consider an unjustifiable finesse, and which did, indeed, show a certain adroitness on the part of the presi dent in obtaining their concurrence in the instructions, without giving them an opportunity of protesting against the mission itself, which, in agreeing to the instructions, they might seem to have approved. But, though all confidence between them and the president was now at an end, they still continued to hold their places. They appear to have been influenced by the hope of availing themselves of their official position to secure a successor to Adams whose policy might more conform to theirs, and of acting, meanwhile, as far as might be, as a clog upon those measures which they did not approve; while Adams, on his part, hesitated to widen the already alarm XIV. ing breach in the Federal party by actually turning CHAPTER them out of office. Their position in Adams's cabinet bore, indeed, a certain resemblance to Jefferson's in that 1799. of Washington. The objections on the part of Pickering, Wolcott, and M'Henry, to a renewal of diplomatic relations with France-objections in which Hamilton and a large number of the more zealous Federalists concurred-were `ostensibly based upon doubts as to the sincerity of the French government; the impossibility of relying with confidence upon any stipulations made by Talleyrand ; and the idea that the honor of the country did not allow any further advances on our part, while the piratical French decrees against American commerce remained unrepealed. Washington himself was strongly disposed to this view, though, with his usual candor and caution, he declined to express a definitive opinion as to a matter the whole of which did not lie before him. But, while such were the objections openly urged, what, no doubt, had quite as much real weight, whether the parties so influenced were perfectly conscious of it or not, was the effect which the resumption of negotiations might have and would be likely to have on the domestic politics of the country. The manly resistance made by the Federalists to the insults and aggressions of France seemed to give them a hold upon the public mind such as they had never possessed before. The self-styled Republican party, having come forward as advocates of submission, had withered and wasted under the meridian blaze of an excited patriotism; and as a means of keeping up that feeling, and raising it to a still higher pitch, many of the more ardent Federalists were ready and anxious for open war; espe cially now that the declining fortune of the French re CHAPTER public made her much less formidable as an adversary XIV. than she had seemed to be a year or two before. 1799. Even apart from these considerations of policy, the late wrongs and insults of the French rankled deeply in ardent bosoms. Among a large part of the more intelligent and better-educated people and of such the Federal party was composed-that attachment for France which had sprung so suddenly into existence cotemporaneously with the French alliance, and which the early progress of the French Revolution had raised to a high pitch of enthusiasm, had begun to be replaced by a feeling compounded of old traditional prejudices against the French, and of that horror, dread, and detestation which the atrocities of the Revolution, the overbearing insolence of the Republic, and, in particular, the abolition of the Christian worship, had combined to excite. It began to be argued, and with a good deal of plausibility, that the French alliance had never been of any advantage to America; that, so far from having secured our independence, as the French and their partisans alleged, it had, in fact, by arousing in Great Britain a bitter spirit of national jealousy, operated to protract a contest which, but for the interference of France, would have been much sooner ended, and without leaving behind it such deep traces as it had of anger and hate. France, so it was argued, had originally espoused our cause, not from any love to us, but from desire to injure Great Britain. Indeed, proofs of her selfishness in this respect, derived from the French archives, had been brought over by Genet, and made public with the very view of proving that America owed no debt of gratitude to the fallen monarchy. New force was given by these documents to the old suspicions that, in the negotiation of the treaty of peace, France had played us false in the matter of the fisheries XIV. and the Western boundary. It was even endeavored to CHAPTER reflect back the recent insolence and bad faith of Talleyránd and the Directory upon Vergennes and Louis XVI., 1799. who seem (however some might have thought otherwise) always to have conducted toward the United States with candor and generosity. It was also endeavored to trace back that French influence, so conspicuous in the United States within the last few years, to a still earlier period; and the journals of the old confederation were quoted to show that the famous instructions to the American commissioners for negotiating peace, to submit themselves in all things to the direction of France, had been carried against New England by the votes of Virginia and the South. Subserviency to France, which it was thus attempted to fix upon Virginia even at that early day, lay at the bottom, so it was argued, of the whole opposition to the Federal government, and nothing would effectually serve to counteract and destroy it except war with the French republic; or, if the people could not be brought to that, a continuance in the existing position of com. mercial non-intercourse and resistance to aggressions. This position, as must be evident at a single glance, was a very different one from that occupied by Adams. and the Federal party at the commencement of his administration. It was going quite as far against France, and for very similar reasons too, as the opposition had been inclined to go against England; a complete abandonment, in fact, of that system of neutrality which Washington had proclaimed, and upon which Adams had insisted, as at once the right and the true policy of America. Because a portion of the Federalists had changed their views, was Adams obliged to change with them? Was he, as a party political expedient, to assume the terrible responsibility of plunging the nation |