Thomas Jefferson had been recalled from France, where he acted as ambassador of the United States, to take part in the administration under the new Constitution, and brought with him a strong prepossession in favour of the French revolutionists. Nothing could be more natural than that the citizens of the United States, who had so lately and so gloriously achieved their own independence, should sympathise warmly in the struggle of that very nation which had aided them in the time of their difficulty to throw off the despotism under which they was suffering, and the early and better impulse to which had been a spark caught from the American flame of liberty. While the anti-federalists, resisting, as they believed, all dangerous aggressions on their own dearly-bought independence, cordially espoused the French cause; the federalists saw in the outrage and ferocity of the French republicans indications which filled them with the utmost jealousy and alarm, lest the same spirit should break forth upon their shores, and sweep away those wise foundations of order which had been so carefully laid. With these opposite sentiments towards France were united, as a matter of course, equally opposed feelings towards England. The federalists regarding their country as allied to Great Britain by similarity of language, religion, and literature, were ready even to doubt, with the example of France before them, whether a republican form of government could be relied upon, and to draw still more closely the bonds of union between themselves and the mother-country. They charged the anti-federalists with blind devotion to the French cause, and their leaders, with Jefferson at the head, with being deeply tinctured with the sentiments of the French school of philosophy, and with the design of introducing the same infidel and jacobinical notions into America, as had led to the sanguinary and revolting scenes in France.[67]