CHAP. IV. INSOLENCE OF THE FRENCH DIRECTORY. 1159 as minister, in 1794, remained as such after the installation of the Directory. He had been received in a most theatrical manner, as he was properly regarded as the representative of the ultra sympathizers with the French revolutionists, in America. At a public reception in the French National Convention, he read an address written in the style of the missives issued by the American Democratic Societies, to which an enthusiastic member of the Convention replied in a grandiloquent manner, and closed his oration with the following words: "To-day, the sovereign people themselves, by the organ of their faithful representatives, receive you; and you see the tenderness, the effusion of soul, that accompanies this simple and touching ceremony; I am impatient to give you the fraternal embrace, which I am ordered to give in the name of the French people. Come and receive it in the name of the American people, and let this spectacle complete the annihilation of an impious coalition of tyrants." Then Monroe, according to precedent, stepped forward and received and returned the fraternal and national embrace and kiss of the representative of the French people. Having opposed Jay's treaty at the French republican court, Monroe was recalled by his government in 1796, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina was appointed to fill his place. On Pinckney's arrival in France late in the year with the letter of recall and his own credentials as minister, the Directory refused to receive him. Not only so, but after treating him with great discourtesy, the Directory peremptorily ordered him to leave France. He withdrew to Holland in February, 1797, and there awaited further orders from home. When Mr. Adams took the Presidential chair, the United States were without a diplomatic agent in France. Disappointed by the failure of the "French party" to elect Mr. Jefferson President of our republic, the insolent Directory, after hearing of the result in the electoral colleges, determined to punish a people who dared to thwart their plans. In May, 1797, they issued a decree which was tantamount to a declaration of war against the United States. It not only authorized the capture of American vessels under certain conditions, but declared that any American found on board of a hostile ship, though placed there without his consent, by impressment, should be hanged as a pirate. The poor American seaman was then continually exposed to impressment into the British service, and by this decree, if found there, he would be subjected to a pirate's fate, by the French! Strangely as it seems, Joel Barlow, an American Democrat who had actively sympathized with the French Jacobins, wrote concerning this savage decree to a relative in this country: "The government here is determined to fleece you to a sufficient degree to bring you to your feeling in the only nerve in which your sensibility lies, which is your pecuniary interest." At a Jacobin festival at Hamburgh, in 1793, Barlow had presented a song that was sung with great glee, written by Thelwall, an Englishman, to the air of God Save the King, the first stanza of which reads: "God save the guillotine! Till England's king and queen Her power shall prove; Almost simultaneously with the issuing of the French decree, an extraordinary session of Congress, called by President Adams to consider the foreign relations of our government, met at Philadelphia. The conduct of the Directory had produced a great revulsion in public feeling in our country. The reaction strengthened the Executive arm and the administration party, and patriotic Democrats began to talk complacently of war with France, which then seemed inevitable. But a majority of the cabinet favored further attempts at negotiations; and the President, with the concurrence of the Senate, appointed John Marshall, a Federalist and afterward Chief Justice of the United States, and Elbridge Gerry, a Democrat and afterward Vice-President of the republic, envoys extraordinary to join Mr. Pinckney and attempt to settle all matters in dispute between the two governments, by diplomacy. After a session of little more than six weeks, Congress adjourned. They had provided for calling out eighty thousand militia, creating a small naval force, and acts for preventing privateering. In the meantime success had waited on French arms and French diplomacy almost everywhere. Bonaparte, who was making his victorious marches toward the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains, had compelled Austria to make peace with his government; and England, the most powerful of the enemies of France, seemed to be tottering to its fall, for the suspension of specie payment by the Bank of England had rudely shaken and weakened her financial power. It was at this flood-tide of the military and diplomatic conquests of France in October, 1797, that the American envoys reached that country and sought an audience with the French Directory. Their request was met by a haughty refusal, unless the envoys would agree to the humiliating terms of first paying into the exhausted French treasury a large sum of money in the form of a loan; by the purchase of Dutch bonds wrung from that nation by the French, and a bribe to the amount of $240,000 for the private use of the five members of the French CHAP. IV. PREPARATIONS FOR WAR WITH FRANCE. 1161 Directory! This proposition came semi-officially from Talleyrand, one of the most expert and unscrupulous political trimmers that ever lived. It was accompanied by a covert threat, that if the proposition was not complied with, the envoys might be ordered to leave France in twenty-four hours, and the coasts of the United States be ravaged by French frigates sent from St. Domingo. The envoys refused compliance, and the occasion gave Pinckney the opportunity to utter in substance the noble words: "Millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute." Finding their mission to be useless, the envoys asked for their passports. They were given to the two Federal envoys under circumstances which amounted to their virtual expulsion from the country, while Gerry was induced to remain. He, too, was soon treated with so much insolence and contempt by Talleyrand and his associates, that he returned home in disgust to meet the indignation of his countrymen for consenting to remain. Gerry had held interviews with Talleyrand without the knowledge of his associates, and it was believed that his representation of the strength of the "French party" in the United States encouraged that minister to pursue the course he did. Meanwhile the Directory had issued another decree, which effectually annihilated American commerce in European waters. This act, the indecent treatment of the envoys and the continued depredations of the French cruisers, aroused a vehement war-spirit in the United States. President Adams, in his first annual message to Congress (November 23, 1797), recommended preparations for war. Some of the more radical of the opposition leaders advised the payment of the money demanded, rather than risk a war with France-better to purchase peace by paying tribute than to contend for the right and for national independence! But the great body of the nation acted patriotically. In March, 1798, the President, in a special message, asked Congress to provide means for war. The request was promptly complied with. A provisional army of twenty thousand regular soldiers was voted, and provision was made for the employment of volunteers as well as militia; and then were made those provisions for a national navy already alluded to. The office of Secretary of the Navy was created, and Benjamin Stodert of the District of Columbia was the first to enter the cabinet as the head of the Navy Department, which he did at the close of April, 1798. Party-spirit disappeared in the National Legislature to a great degree, and the popular excitement against the opposition leaders in Congress became so intense, that some of the most obnoxious of them from Virginia sought personal safety in flight, under the pretence of needed attention to their private affairs. The younger republicans wore black cockades upon their hats, in imitation of the patriots of the Revolution. The stirring songs Hail Columbia and Adams and Liberty, the former written by Joseph Hopkinson and the latter by Robert Treat Paine, were now first published, and were sung all over the land with unbounded applause. Washington approved the war-measures of the government, and in July he was appointed by the President commander-in-chief of all the forces raised and to be raised, with the commission of lieutenant-general. That commission was borne to Mount Vernon by the Secretary of War (Mr. McHenry) in person. When he arrived, Washington was in the fields not far from the mansion where his people were gathering his grain-harvest. The Secretary, without doffing his thin traveling cloak (for the day was cool), went out to meet him and presented the document to Washington in the open field. The Beloved Patriot, then sixty-six years of age, obeyed the CHAP. IV. THE FRENCH DIRECTORY HUMBLED. 1163 call of his countrymen with alacrity. "You may command me without reserve," he wrote to the President, qualifying his remark with an expressed desire that he should not be called into active service until the public need should demand it, and requesting the appointment of his friend Alexander Hamilton, then forty-one years of age, as acting general-in-chief. For this purpose, Hamilton was commissioned the first major-general. Washington held a conference with all the general officers of the army at Philadelphia, in November (1798), when arrangements were made for a complete organization of the regular forces on a war-footing. But from the beginning he believed that the gathering clouds, portending a fearful tempest, would pass away and leave his country unscathed by the lightning and the hail of war. Events soon justified Washington's faith. Circumstances speedily allayed the fear of England, to whom the Americans looked as a possible friend in the event of a war with France. The victorious Bonaparte, who had threatened England with invasion, had gone off to Egypt with a fleet and army with the avowed object of conquering that country, invading Palestine, taking possession of Jerusalem, restoring the Jews to their ancient heritage, and rebuilding the Temple. This was only a cover to his ambitious designs for accomplishing his personal advancement. But his fleet was utterly vanquished by Nelson in the battle of the Nile; and another French fleet, that hovered off the coast of Ireland to encourage an insurrection there, was scattered by English ships-of-war under Admiral Warren. These and minor victories by the English humbled the pride of the Directory; and when there appeared omens of other disasters to their cause in Europe, and they heard of the prevailing war-spirit in the United States and the appointment of Washington to the command of a provisional army, the Directory paused in their mad career. The wily Talleyrand, ever ready to change his political coat, caused information to reach the United States government that the Directory were ready to receive advances from the former for entering into negotiations. Without consulting his cabinet or the national dignity, President Adams nominated William Vance Murray, then the representative of the United States at the Hague, as minister plenipotentiary to France. Congress and the people were amazed, and the Senate determined not to confirm the nomination. No direct communication had been received from the Directory, and this advance after unatoned insults, seemed like cowardly cringing before a half-relenting tyrant. The President stoutly persisted for awhile, when he consented to the appointment of three envoys extraordinary, of which Mr. Murray should be one, to settle all disputes between the two governments. For this purpose Oliver Ellsworth and William R. Davie were |