The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
An outbreak of Democratic fury bordering upon treason took place, when
Senator Mason of Virginia violated the oath of secrecy, and sent a
copy of Jay's treaty with England to the "Aurora." Meetings passed
condemnatory resolutions expressed in no mild language. Jay was "a
slave, a traitor, a coward, who had bartered his country's liberties for
British gold." Mobs burned Jay in effigy, and pelted Alexander Hamilton.
At a public meeting in Philadelphia, Mr. Blair threw the treaty to the
crowd, and advised them to kick it to hell. They carried it on a pole
in procession, and burned it before the English minister's house. A
Democratic society in Richmond, Virginia, full of the true modern South
Carolina "sound and fury," gave public notice, that, if the treaty
entered into by "that damned arch traitor, John Jay, with the British
tyrant should be ratified, a petition will be presented to the next
General Assembly of Virginia praying that the said State may recede
from the Union, and be left under the government and protection of
one hundred thousand free and independent Virginians!" A meeting at
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, resolved, "that it was weary of the tardiness
of Congress in not going to war with England, and that they were _almost
ready_ to wish for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France
for a short space, in order to punish the miscreants who enervate and
disgrace the government." Mr. Jefferson's opinion of the treaty is well
known from his rhetorical letter to Rutledge, which, in two or three
lines, contains the adjectives, _unnecessary, impolitic, dangerous,
dishonorable, disadvantageous, humiliating, disgraceful, improper,
monarchical, impeachable_. The Mazzei letter, written not long after the
ratification, displays the same bitter feeling.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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