Think not, reader, whatever advantages we are about to derive from the treaty with Great Britain, that I wish to see such a marked partiality shown for that nation, as has hitherto appeared for the French; such meannesses may be overlooked in those despicable states that are content to roll as the satellites of others, in a Batavia or Geneva, but in us it never can. No; let us forget that it is owing to Great Britain that this country is not now an uninhabited desert; that the land we possess was purchased from the aborigines with the money of an Englishman; Ref 034 that his hands traced the streets on which we walk. Let us forget from whom we are descended, and persuade our children that we are the sons of the gods, or the accidental offspring of the elements; Ref 035 let us forget the scalping knives of the French, to which we were thirty years exposed; but let us never forget that we are not Frenchmen.
A LITTLE PLAIN ENGLISH,
Addressed to the People of the United States, on the Treaty, and on the Conduct of the President relative thereto, in answer to “the Letters of Franklin.”
Note by the Editors.—In our selections from the “Bone to Gnaw,” the reader has seen that its author’s object was, to deter the people of America from seeking an alliance with France. In this pamphlet it was his object to reconcile them to the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with England, which was conditionally ratified on the 24th June, 1795, by the President Washington. The Federalists were in favour of a treaty with England, and the Antifederalists wanted a treaty with France: Washington was of the former party; but his Secretary of State (Jefferson) was of the latter party. The French, through their Minister, Genet, had made a proposal that France and America should join against England, and that America should cease all commercial transactions with her. In accordance with this, Jefferson made a report on commerce to Congress in the fall of 1793, recommending the “burdening with duties, or excluding, such foreign manufactures as we take in the greatest quantity; for such duties, having the effect of indirect encouragement to domestic manufactures of the same kind, may induce the manufacturer to come himself into these States.” He was thus, as far as his office would allow him, thwarting the views of the President, but he was answered by a member of Congress, who showed the folly of such a system, and who showed, too, Jefferson’s inconsistency, by quoting his Notes on Virginia, which contain this passage: “While we have land to labour, then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied, at a work-bench, or twirling the distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operation of manufactures, let our workshops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles.”—Notes on V. Query XIX. The report was evidently aimed at England; and, to make this clear, Madison, Jefferson’s bosom friend, in January 1794, moved a string of resolutions, proposing to follow it up, by imposing a higher scale of duties on leather, hard-ware, cottons, wool, and other articles, which were those then imported from England. The resolutions were negatived; but they were more than suspected to be Jefferson’s, and, in the intercepted dispatch from the French Minister, Fauchrt, alluded to in the preface to this work as bringing to light the treachery of Randolph, he says that they were Jefferson’s. The dispute between the English and French parties had now (1794) become, not warm, but hot; the depredations of English privateers and cruisers on the vessels of Americans, were made the stalking-horse of the friends of France; and, on the 27th March, 1794, Mr. Dayton moved a resolution, that “all debts due from citizens of the United States, to the subjects of the king of Great Britain should be sequestered.” It was carried by the Lower House, but rejected by the Senate; and now, Jefferson, finding himself in a cabinet to which he was so much opposed, and against which he was even working, retired to his estate in Virginia; but, before doing so, he recommended Randolph to Washington as his successor (see Jefferson’s Life, vol. 4, p. 506). Washington attempted to stem the tide, by desiring his new Secretary to lay before Congress a report of the depredations committed by England, France, Spain and Holland, on American commerce, and, though it appeared that France had committed the greatest, still the French party moved onward; the President was abused as a traitor to his country, and a Mr. Clarke moved a resolution in the Lower House for suspending all commerce with England. While the resolution was debating, Washington, by advice of the Senate, sent Jay (Chief Justice) off to England to negotiate this famous treaty. The Lower House passed Clarke’s resolution, but the Senate rejected it; the storm thickened—but enough of this has been seen in the “Bone to Gnaw.” When the treaty arrived in America, the friends of France fell upon it and its makers, and we now see that Jefferson, in retirement, launched his execrations on it in letters to his correspondents: in one he thus invokes Madison’s pen to put down the writers on the English side—“for God’s sake take up your pen, and give a fundamental reply to Curtius and Camillus” (Life and Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 322); and, in a letter to Rutledge, he says, “I join you in thinking the Treaty an execrable thing. I trust the popular branch of our legislature will disapprove of it, and thus rid us of this infamous act, which is really nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country” (Life &c. vol. 3, p. 323). The following pamphlet, then, is an answer to one supposed to be written by Mr. Dallas, Secretary of the State of Pennsylvania, but published under the assumed name of Franklin. It is a defence of the treaty, of Mr. Jay, and of the President. It is one of the best in the works of “Porcupine,” and, therefore, as well as that it shows the objects that the writer had in view, we place it in these selections, observing, that it was an account of writings in this manner and at so critical a juncture, that Mr. Windham, some years after (Debate 5th Aug. 1803), said in the House of Commons, in answer to an attack on Mr. Cobbett by Mr. Sheridan: “Before I had the pleasure to know him personally, I admired the conduct which he pursued through a most trying crisis in America; where, by his own unaided exertions, he rendered his country services that entitle him to a statue of gold.”
A treaty of amity, commerce, and navigation, with Great Britain, is a thing which has been so long and so ardently desired on your part, and so often solicited by your government, that one cannot help being astonished that even the democratic, or French, faction should have the temerity to raise a cry against it, now it is brought so near a conclusion. It is true this perverse faction is extremely contemptible, as to the property they possess, and the real weight they have in the community; and their dissatisfaction, which is sure to accompany every measure of the Federal Government, is a pretty certain sign of the general approbation of those who may be properly called the people: but it must be acknowledged at the same time, that they have for partisans almost the whole of that description of persons, who, among us royalists, are generally designated by the name of mob.
The letters of Franklin are a string of philippics against Great Britain and the executive of the United States. They do not form a regular series, in which the subject is treated in continuation: the first seems to be the overflowings of passion bordering on insanity, and each succeeding one the fruit of a relapse. To follow the author step by step through such a jumble, would be to produce the same kind of disgust in you as I myself have experienced; I shall therefore deviate