2986. FEDERALISTS, Terrorism and treason.—
When General Washington was
withdrawn, these energumeni of royalism,
[the federal leaders], 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 Phäeton 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.
* * * But 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 rawhead and bloody-bones,
they were enabled by their stratagems of X. Y. Z. i
n which this historian [Judge Marshall]
was a leading mountebank. their tales
of tub-plots, ocean massacres, bloody buoys,
and pulpit lyings, and slanderings, and maniacal
ravings of their Gardiners, their Osgoods
and Parishes, to spread alarm into
all but the firmest breasts. Their AttorneyGeneral
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 [1818]
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 rally, will
be “Federal Union and Republican Government
”; and sure I am we may say that, we
are indebted for the preservation of this point
of ralliance, to that opposition of which so injurious
an idea is so artfully insinuated
and excited in this history
[
Marshall's Life of Washington].—
The Anas. Washington ed. ix, 97.
Ford ed., i, 166.
(1818)
