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"I told him the event of my negotiations with Mr. Madison. He immediately said that on consultation some objections to that nomination had been raised. . . and was going on with excuses which evidently embarrassed him, when we came to Fifth Street, where our roads separated. He never

after that said one word to me on the subject or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government." So it was Adams, not Jefferson, who abandoned the idea of "fusion." He had had his first cabinet meeting that morning!

A few days after the inauguration news came that the Federalist minister, C. C. Pinckney, whom Washington had sent to Paris to succeed Monroe, had been denied an audience by the Directory and refused even the permission to remain on the soil of France. Adams, while resenting the insult in a spirited message to Congress, was sincerely anxious to preserve peace with France. He nominated John Marshall, a Virginia Federalist, and Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, a recent convert to Republicanism, to join Pinckney in a commission to Paris to bring the French Directory to reason. The commissioners arrived in Paris in the early winter of 1797, but their treatment was even worse than Pinckney's had been. The wily Talleyrand, minister of foreign affairs, did not deign to receive or recognize them officially, but instead sent obscure agents, who told them that no negotiations could be

begun until an apology was made for the language of President Adams's message to Congress and a substantial sum of money paid to the directors. Marshall and Pinckney quitted France in high indignation, while Gerry was flattered into remaining as a persona grata to continue the negotiations. He was really a hostage in Talleyrand's hands. When the news of this fresh indignity reached America early in March, 1798, Adams sent a message to Congress which was virtually a call to arms. Marshall landed the next month, and was received like a Regulus returned from Carthage. He was acclaimed in the streets and fêted at banquets. The toast "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute" ran through the States as the slogan of America's defiance.

The Republicans tried to make the best of a poor case. Jefferson called the President's message "insane." The Federalists, he declared, were determined to have a war with France, else why their readiness to take the reported insults of a trio of irresponsible swindlers (Talleyrand's agents) as the act of the French Government. Did not Talleyrand's invitation to Gerry to stay in Paris show that he was desirous of reaching an understanding with the United States? The British were our real enemies. Even at that moment their depredations on our commerce, as the books of the merchants of Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore showed, were

far more serious than the Frenchmen's. Jay's "infamous" treaty was the root of all the trouble. And it was a futile sacrifice of honor, too. In the very first year after its promulgation, the Republican press claimed, the British had seized three hundred American ships and impressed one thousand American seamen. But the Republican case broke down completely when Adams ordered Secretary Pickering to send to Congress, and Congress voted to publish the correspondence of the commissioners with the French agents.

The "X Y Z" correspondence1 kindled the war spirit in America. Congress in a score of acts passed before midsummer of 1798 enlarged the army, built and purchased ships, created a navy department, strengthened the coast defenses, stationed squadrons in the West Indies, authorized our vessels to take French privateers and ships of war, and formally repealed the treaty of alliance of 1778. Washington was made commander of the army with the right to name his staff of major-generals. "On the Fourth of July," wrote Troup to Rufus King, "New York City resembled a camp rather than a commercial port." Loyal addresses poured in on the President. The theatres and concert-halls rang with the new patriotic songs, "Hail, Columbia," and

1 So called because Pickering substituted these letters for the names of Talleyrand's agents when he sent the correspondence to Congress.

"Adams and Liberty." For one brief hour John Adams was popular.

Then came a series of acts by the Federalist Congress in June and July, which were dictated by a mixture of panic and arrogance, acts not unlike those of the French Jacobins, whom the Federalists held in abhorrence. A Naturalization Act required aliens who had come to America since 1795 to reside here fourteen years before they could become citizens. Alien Acts gave the President the power to remove all "such aliens as he should judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States." A Sedition Act imposed the penalty of fine and imprisonment on all who should forcibly oppose the execution of the laws of the United States, or should publish a false or malicious writing against the government of the United States, the President, or Congress. The Naturalization Act, while harsh, was entirely within the constitutional powers of Congress. The Alien Acts, while causing some foreigners to leave the country, were not enforced in a single instance by President Adams. But the Sedition Act led to what John Randolph called "the American Reign of Terror." Men were indicted, fined, and imprisoned for such criticism of the executive as nowadays would be thought tame and comical: for saying that Adams was "hardly in the infancy of political blundering," or for expressing the pious wish, as a New Jersey Republican did,

that the wadding of a cannon fired in honor of John Adams might lodge in the seat of his breeches. The Republican editors and printers were persecuted with an almost ferocious zeal by the courts. A Federalist judge of the supreme court, Samuel Chase, was so savage in the prosecution of the trials that he was later impeached by a Republican House of Representatives.

Jefferson and his followers protested against the Alien and Sedition Acts as a clear violation of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and press, and which reserves to the States all powers not expressly delegated to the central government. The federal courts, they declared, had a right to take cognizance only of those criminal cases which were mentioned in the Constitution. The Constitution was a compact between the States which federal officials had no right to assume to interpret definitively. These ideas were embodied most clearly in a set of resolutions prepared by Jefferson for introduction into the legislature of North Carolina, but transferred to Kentucky, in December, 1798. The Kentucky Resolutions declared the Alien and Sedition Acts "void and of no force," and called upon the "co-States" to join with Kentucky in protest. When the Northern States replied unfavorably and the Southern States not at all, the Kentucky Legislature adopted a second set of resolutions from Jefferson's pen (Novem

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