This was strong language. When Jefferson cried that law alone withheld the hands of the New England clergy from taking his blood, his words were not wholly figures of speech. He had fought a similar battle in Virginia, and still felt its virulence. What was more to the purpose, every politician could see that his strategy was correct. The New England church was the chief obstacle to democratic success, and New England society, as then constituted, was dangerous to the safety of the Union. Whether a reform could be best accomplished by external attack, or whether Massachusetts and Connecticut had best be left in peace to work out their own problems, was a matter of judgment only. If Jefferson thought he had the power to effect his object by political influence, he could hardly refuse to make the attempt, although he admitted that his chance of success in Connecticut was desperate. “I consider Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire,” he wrote to Pierpoint Edwards, of Connecticut,[74] “as coming about in the course of this year, ... but the nature of your government being a subordination of the civil to the ecclesiastical power, I consider it as desperate for long years to come. Their steady habits exclude the advances of information, and they seem exactly where they were when they separated from the Saints of Oliver Cromwell; and there your clergy will always keep them if they can. You will follow the bark of Liberty only by the help of a tow-rope.” Expecting no mercy from the clergy, Jefferson took pains to show that they were to look for no mercy from him. At the moment he began the attempt to “completely consolidate the nation,” he gave what amounted to a formal notice that with the clergy he would neither make peace nor accept truce. A few days after announcing in his Inaugural Address, “We are all Republicans--we are all Federalists,” and appealing for harmony and affection in social intercourse, Jefferson wrote a letter to the famous Thomas Paine, then at Paris waiting for means of conveyance to America. A sloop-of-war, the “Maryland,” was under orders for Havre to carry the ratification of the new treaty with France, and the President made his first use of the navy to pay a public compliment to Paine. “You expressed a wish,” he wrote,[75] “to get a passage to this country in a public vessel. Mr. Dawson is charged with orders to the captain of the ‘Maryland’ to receive and accommodate you with a passage back, if you can be ready to depart at such short warning.... I am in hopes you will find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. In these it will be your glory steadily to have labored, and with as much effect as any man living. That you may long live to continue your useful labors, and to reap their reward in the thankfulness of nations, is my sincere prayer. Accept assurances of my high esteem and affectionate attachment.”