Thus voluntarily to interfere in a correspondence between a foreign minister and the officers of state, might, under other circumstances, appear rather a bold intrusion; but, the citizen’s having communicated his papers to the people, at the same time, if not before, they reached the Secretary of State, happily precludes the necessity of an apology.
The notes on which I am about to remark, to which, collected together, I affixed the title of Diplomatic Blunderbuss, are intended chiefly to notify to the people of America, that the French rulers are angry with the Federal Government, and that, in consequence of this anger, they have ordered citizen Adet to suspend his functions as minister, till the Government shall alter its conduct, or, in the pedagogue style, mend its manners.
In the 44th page of the Blunderbuss, the citizen makes a recapitulation of the offences that have brought on us this dreadful chastisement, this political excommunication; and it will not appear a little surprising, that some of them have existed ever since the birth of the French Republic, notwithstanding the love and esteem this outlandish lady has ever expressed towards her sister America.
These offences, amounting to seven in number, are as follows:
1. The Federal Government put in question, whether it should execute the treaties, or receive the agents of the rebel and proscribed princes.
2. It made a proclamation of insidious neutrality.
3. By its chicaneries, it abandoned French privateers to its courts of justice.
4. It eluded the amicable mediation of the French Republic for breaking the chains of the American citizens in Algiers.
5. It allowed the French colonies to be declared in a state of blockade, and allowed the citizens of America to be interdicted the right of trading to them.
6. It eluded all the advances made by the French Republic for renewing the treaties of commerce upon a more favourable footing to both nations.
7. It anticipated Great Britain, by soliciting a treaty, in which treaty it prostituted its neutrality; it sacrificed France to her enemies, or rather, looking upon her as obliterated from the chart [map] of the world, it forgot the services she had rendered it, and threw aside the duty of gratitude, as if ingratitude was a governmental duty.
These are the heinous crimes of which the Federal Government stands charged by the sultans of France. Let us now, if they will permit us, examine these crimes, one by one, and see whether the President, and Messrs. Hamilton, Knox, Jay, Pickering and Walcot, really deserve to be guillotined, or not.
“1. The Federal Government put in question, whether it should execute the treaties, or receive the agents of the rebel and proscribed princes.”
The King of France was murdered on the 21st of January, 1793. Information of this event could not be received here much before the 18th of April, and it was on that day the President submitted to his council, the questions of which the above charge forms the substance.
The treaties here spoken of were made with Louis XVI., whose minister, at the time these questions were proposed for consideration, was resident at Philadelphia. The President knew, indeed, that the king was dead; but he, at the same time, knew that the treaties were binding on the United States in behalf of his lawful “heirs and successors,” and he certainly knew that Pétion, Danton, Roland, Clavière, Condorcet, Brissot, and the innumerable horde of bloody usurpers who have come after them, were not those “heirs and successors!” He also knew, that even the whole French nation could not, in the sense of the treaties, become the “heirs and successors” of Louis XVI., and, though treaties, made with a monarch, may remain in force with the nation under a new form of government, yet this is, as most assuredly it ought to be, entirely at the option of the other contracting party. The American government had, therefore, an indisputed right to refuse to execute, in behalf of the French nation, treaties made with their sovereign alone.
If we turn back a little, we shall find this very audacious and unprincipled Convention, whose minister was coming to Philadelphia, publicly deliberating, “whether the treaties, made with the tyrant Louis, were binding on the regenerated nation, or not.” This question was determined in the negative, and accordingly the treaty with Holland was immediately violated. And yet they will not permit the poor Government of America to debate about any such thing, nor even to talk of it in secret, though the result be in their own favour! Let it be remembered, too, that Genet came authorized to make new treaties, a pretty certain proof, that the Convention did not call in question the right of the Government to refuse to adhere to the old ones. It is a proof of more; it is a proof that they expected that it would make the refusal. Would to God their expectation had been realized!
I will not go so far as to say, that the Federal government was fully justified in its decision on this important subject; Ref 060 but I insist that its conduct evinced the utmost partiality for the new Republic. When Genet arrived here, it was far from being ascertained that the whole, or even a majority, of the French nation, approved of the murder of their sovereign, or had abandoned the cause of his successors. The Government of America had, but a few months before, beheld them raising their hands to heaven, and swearing to die, if necessary, in defence of their king. Their constitution, establishing an hereditary monarchy, had been voluntarily formed, and solemnly sanctioned by the whole nation, amidst festivals and Te Deums, and had been officially communicated to the world. Each member of the Assembly, as well as every individual Frenchman, had repeatedly sworn “to maintain this constitution with all his might.” Laws had been made, punishing with transportation all who refused to take the oath, and till then unheard-of cruelties had been exercised on the non-jurors. After all this, was it astonishing that the Federal government should, for a moment, hesitate to believe, that the nation was really become a Republic, and that this constitution, about which there had been so much noise, and rejoicing, and feasting, and singing, and swearing, should be so completely destroyed as to leave neither remnant nor rag visible?
The Government had the interests of America to attend to in this important decision, as well as those of France. A weighty debt was due from this country, not to the regenerated nation nor to its bloodthirsty tyrants, but to Louis XVI., his heirs and successors. A minister from the Republic once admitted, a claim of the interest of the debt could not be refused; and if the volatile and perjured nation had recalled the successor of their sovereign, would not that successor have demanded, and with justice, a second payment of such interest? This has not yet happened, but it does not follow that it might not have happened. In the common affairs of men, he who has been once convicted of perjury, is never after looked upon as credible; and the same rule is applicable to societies.
Republicanism is become, for what reason I know not, synonymous with freedom and happiness, and there are thousands among us who pretend to believe, notwithstanding the terrible example before their eyes, that men cannot be enslaved under a form of government that is called republican. Mr. Adams, in his Defence of the American Constitutions, vol. 1, p. 87, says:
“Our countrymen will never run delirious after a word or a name. The name Republic is given to things in their nature as different and contradictory as light and darkness, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, happiness and misery. There are free republics, and republics as tyrannical as an oriental despotism.—
How fully is the truth of these observations exemplified in the republics of America and France! But even this wise and deep-sighted civilian could not imagine that his countrymen would ever run delirious after a name; much less could he imagine, that he should live to see many of them extolling, as the paragon of republics, a system of tyranny that has all the appearance of being an instrument of the wrath of Heaven.
I shall dismiss this first charge against the Government, with observing, that the meanness equals the impudence of making it.
“2.