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CHAPTER the object was to show that the want of a sea-letter was good ground of capture. What was most mortifying of 1797. all, several of the privateers by which the most important captures were made had been fitted out and were commanded by Americans, sharers in the enthusiasm of citizens Monroe and Barney for the French republic, and who, in their eagerness to punish and plunder the enemies of France, were constantly stimulating the Directory to new extravagances and new decrees. The French consuls at Malaga and Cadiz, who exercised the authority of courts of admiralty, and the special agents of the Directory in the West Indies, outdid even the domestic tribunals. Of the vessels thus condemned, the crews were placed in confinement, and treated with all the harshness of prisoners of war.

Mar. 25.

Upon the receipt of Pinckney's dispatches, a proclamation was immediately issued convening a special session of Congress. The outrages and insults of the French Directory were not without their effect upon public opinion. The Aurora, and the more zealous partisans of France, still labored to throw all the blame of the French captures, and of the insults to Pinckney and the American government, on Jay's treaty; but among the more moderate and rational part of the community enthusiastic partiality for France began to decline. It could not but have a certain effect upon the merchants that, almost simultaneously with the increase of French captures, commenced the issue, by the commissioners under Jay's treaty, of decrees of compensation for former British captures. The French and American flags intertwined, which, cut in tin, had ornamented for three years the coffee-rooms in New York where the merchants were accustomed to assemble, after having been the occasion of several quarrels, were now finally removed by a formal vote of the proprietors.

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This change of sentiment was perceptible, also, in CHAPTER the congressional election going on in Virginia, as well as in the state election of Massachusetts. Induced by 1797. increasing age and waning popularity, Samuel Adams declined a re-election as governor of that state, and Increase Sumner, the Federal candidate, was elected by a April. decided majority. The opposition vote was divided between Gill, the late lieutenant governor, and James Sullivan, the attorney general, a brother of the late General Sullivan, of New Hampshire, one of the few New England men of distinguished talents and social eminence who arranged themselves on the so-called Republican side.

Nor was the cause of the opposition much aided by the appearance in print just at this moment of Jeffer- May. son's famous letter to Mazzei, of which that gentleman had published an Italian translation in a newspaper at Florence, whence the Moniteur, the official paper of the French government, had given a version in French, as proof that the views of the Directory were shared by some of the most virtuous and enlightened citizens of America; affording ground to hope that the late vigorous proceedings of the French government would give rise to discussions leading to a triumph of "the party of good Republicans, the friends of France." This letter to Mazzei, the material parts of which there has been already occasion to quote, amounted, in fact, to a general endorsement, under Jefferson's own hand, of all the charges against Washington and his administration, lately urged in the Aurora, Argus, Chronicle, and other Democratic organs; and its publication brought to a final end the hitherto friendly, though of late somewhat ceremonious intercourse between Washington and Jefferson. Professions of friendship to his face, and secret aspersions bchind his back, were what Washington could not endure.

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CHAPTER It has even been reported and extensively believedthough when this report, at the end of some twenty-sev1797. en years, finally got into print, Jefferson, in a letter to Mr. Van Buren (June 29, 1824), most strenuously denied it that the publication of the letter to Mazzei drew out from Washington a very sharp robuke, and from Jefferson a humble and submissive apology; letters, so it was alleged, which disappeared mysteriously from among Washington's papers by the supposed agency of Tobias Lear, his private secretary, with whom Jefferson appears to have maintained a confidential intercourse, and to whom he gave a foreign diplomatic appointment shortly after his accession to the presidency. Even apart from Jefferson's positive denial, the evidence of the above story is wholly insufficient; yet Jefferson's attempt, in the letter in which that denial was made, to show that the letter to Mazzei contained no allusions to Washington; that the reference to "the Samsons in the field and the Solomons in the council, whose heads had been shorn by the harlot England," was meant for the Cincinnati generally; and that Washington must have perfectly understood that those phrases could not have any application to himself, must be pronounced an evident after-thought. Such was not Jefferson's opinion at the time of the publication; Aug. 3. for, in a cotemporaneous letter to Madison, he gave as reasons for his entire silence in public as to the Mazzei letter, that he could not deny it to be his, because, though badly translated, it was his in substance, while to avow it, so the letter continued, "would render proofs of the whole necessary, and draw me at length into a publication of all, even the secret transactions of the adminis tration while I was of it, and embroil me personally with every member of the executive, with the judiciary, and others still;" nor could it be avowed without bringing

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on, such is Jefferson's express statement, "a personal CHAPTER difference between General Washington and myself, which nothing before the publication of this letter had 1797. ever done. It would embroil me, also, with all those with whom his character is still popular, that is to say, nine tenths of the people of the United States." Had it been only the Cincinnati who were aimed at a subterfuge not then thought of it could hardly have been necessary for Jefferson to have labored so hard as he did to convince Madison that it could not justly be inferred from his silence that he was afraid to avow the general sentiments of the letter..

Just before the meeting of Congress, news arrived that May 10. the Directory had signified their disgust at the failure of Jefferson to be elected president by the issue, so soon as that information had been received, of a decree against March 2 American commerce, purporting to define the authority granted to the French cruisers by the decree of July 2, 1796. By this new decree the treaty with America was declared to be so far modified as to make American vessels and their cargoes liable to capture for any cause recognized as lawful ground of capture by the British treaty. By an additional and most extraordinary provision, any Americans found serving on board hostile armed vessels. were to be treated as pirates, even although they might plead compulsion in excuse. In other words, American citizens impressed by the British were made liable to be hanged by the French. Violent as the Democratic papers were, and justly enough too, against British impressment, they had not a word to say against this most extraordinary French offset to that practice. This decree, in its practical application, proved much more fatal to American commerce than might have been supposed from its terms being construed by the tribunals into a justi

CHAPTER fication of the capture of American vessels for not having X. a role d'equipage.

"This decree," so, some time after its issue, wrote Barlow to his brother-in-law Baldwin, "was meant to be little short of a declaration of war." The govern

ment here," such was the statement of this recreant American, "was determined to fleece you to a sufficient degree to bring you to your feeling in the only nerve in which your sensibility lay, which was your pecuniary interest."

Both

The idea, indeed, of a war with France was far from being agreeable to any body. Though, among the more reflecting part of the community, enthusiasm in her favor had greatly subsided, fear and dread had replaced it. France at this time was terrible alike to her friends and her enemies. The so-called patriotic or Republican party in Holland, having called in the French to help in overturning the old government, had become their submissive tools, compelled to register their edicts, and to find them money whenever called upon. Spain, since her alliance with France, was hardly more independent. Spain and Holland, as appeared from the papers laid before Congress along with Pinckney's dispatches, taking their cue from France, had already begun to complain of the provisions of the British treaty on the subject of contraband, and the seizure of enemy's goods in American vessels, as infractions of their rights under their treaties with the United States, of which the provisions on these subjects were similar to those of the treaty with France. In delaying to give up the posts on the Mississippi, and in postponing the joint survey of the Florida boundary, Spain was believed to act by the instigation of the French Directory, suspected of intending to obtain for themselves a cession of Louisiana and the Floridas, as they already had