The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 9 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and PrivateJefferson, Thomas
History
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 9 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
upon him, deceived him into a confidence that he was on the pinnacle of
popularity, when the gulf was yawning at his feet, which was to swallow
up him and his deceivers. For when General Washington was withdrawn,
these _energumeni_ of royalism, kept in check hitherto by the dread
of his honesty, his firmness, his patriotism, and the authority of his
name, now mounted on the car of State and free from control, like Phaeton
on that of the sun, drove headlong and wild, looking neither to right
nor left, nor regarding anything but the objects they were driving at;
until, displaying these fully, the eyes of the nation were opened, and
a general disbandment of them from the public councils took place.
Mr. Adams, I am sure, has been long since convinced of the treacheries
with which he was surrounded during his administration. He has since
thoroughly seen, that his constituents were devoted to republican
government, and whether his judgment is re-settled on its ancient basis,
or not, he is conformed as a good citizen to the will of the majority,
and would now, I am persuaded, maintain its republican structure with
the zeal and fidelity belonging to his character. For even an enemy
has said, "he is always an honest man, and often a great one." But in
the fervor of the fury and follies of those who made him their stalking
horse, no man who did not witness it can form an idea of their unbridled
madness, and the terrorism with which they surrounded themselves. The
horrors of the French revolution, then raging, aided them mainly, and
using that as a raw head and bloody bones, they were enabled by their
stratagems of X. Y. Z. in which * * * * * was a leading mountebank, their
tales of tub-plots, ocean massacres, bloody buoys, and pulpit lyings
and slanderings, and maniacal ravings of their Gardeners, their Osgoods
and parishes, to spread alarm into all but the firmest breasts. Their
Attorney General had the impudence to say to a republican member, that
deportation must be resorted to, of which, said he, "you republicans
have set the example;" thus daring to identify us with the murderous
Jacobins of France. These transactions, now recollected but as dreams
of the night, were then sad realities; and nothing rescued us from
their liberticide effect, but the unyielding opposition of those firm
spirits who sternly maintained their post in defiance of terror, until
their fellow citizens could be aroused to their own danger, and rally
and rescue the standard of the constitution. This has been happily done.
Federalism and monarchism have languished from that moment, until their
treasonable combinations with the enemies of their country during the
late war, their plots of dismembering the Union, and their Hartford
convention, have consigned them to the tomb of the dead; and I fondly
hope, "we may now truly say, we are all republicans, all federalists,"
and that the motto of the standard to which our country will forever
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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