run very high in the United States, a dissolution of the Union has either suggested itself as a remedy for the evil, or has been resorted to as a means of intimidating their adversaries into compliance. When the fervour of admiration for revolutionary France was at its height, some of the politicians of New England, finding their views of policy counteracted, became the open advocates for a separation, in which the Potomac was to be the dividing line. A few years afterwards, when the policy supported by New England prevailed, we find a politician of Virginia contemplating a separation. In the late war with Great Britain, one of the objects of the leaders of the Hartford Convention is supposed to have been either to attempt or to threaten a secession from the confederacy; and more recently, South Carolina, in its determined opposition to the tariff, has openly spoken of withdrawing from the Union.

In the two last cases, the causes of complaint, though bearing no comparison with the evils of disunion, are sufficiently manifest; but in the others, it cannot now be distinctly seen what were the mighty grievances which could have reconciled any enlightened friend of his country to a dissolution of the Union, beyond mere party disappointment, and the prevalence of one system of policy over another in some points, which, now that they are diminished by the distance of nearly forty years, are scarcely discernible to ordinary eyes.

Those who accustomed themselves to speculate on the dangers which threatened the permanency of our government, have generally reckoned disunion as at once the most serious and the most probable. They regarded it as the most serious, for they already had actual experience of the mischiefs of a less compact confederacy. Under the looser bonds of the old confederation they had seen the states engaged in one unceasing contest of commercial rivalry, and in endeavours to extend their own trade or revenue at the expense of their neighbours. They would naturally imagine that these causes of irritation, if suffered to fester, would soon produce war, according to all human experience, and that war must necessarily be attended or followed by high taxes, public debts, strong

executives-to say nothing of the adverse vicissitudes of war, of the chances of conquest, often as fatal to the liberty of the victors as of the vanquished, of its certain waste of life and property, and finally a loss of independence. They thought a separation too more probable, if from no other cause, from the supposed inclinations of the western country, which was believed to have no preponderating common interest with the Atlantic states, and which would therefore separate as soon as it found itself sufficiently strong to stand alone. But time, which may confirm most of these speculations, has falsified the last. Of all the great divisions of the Union, the western portion is the only one which has never yet dealt out the threat of separation;* and we may now say with confidence, when juster views of local interests are entertained, that there is no one which is more attached to the Union, or has more reason to desire its continuance. Two of our envoys to France, Messrs. Pinckney and Marshall, arrived in June, and the warmth and cordiality with which they were received, plainly manifested the determination of the people to support the administration. They were every where welcomed with the most flattering honours and distinctions. Mr. Jefferson writes to Mr. Madison on the 21st of June: "Marshall was received here with the utmost eclat. The Secretary of State and many carriages, with all the city cavalry, went to Frankford to meet him, and on his arrival here in the evening, the bells rung till late in the night, and immense crowds were collected to see and make part of the show, which was circuitously paraded through the streets before he was set down at the city tavern." Mr. Jefferson attributes these extraordinary attentions to the purpose of securing him to the views of the federal party, that he might say nothing which would oppose the game they had been playing. He mentions a fact which shews the excitable state of the public mind. "Doctor Logan of Philadelphia, about a fortnight ago sailed for Hamburgh. Though for a twelvemonth past he had been in

*The temporary disaffection in the west, arising from anxiety about the navigation of the Mississippi, was before there was any western

state.

tending to go to Europe as soon as he could get money enough to carry him there, yet when he had accomplished this, and fixed a time for going, he very unwisely made a mystery of it; so that his disappearance without notice excited conversation. This was seized by the war-hawks, and given out as a secret mission from the Jacobins here to solicit an army from France, instruct them as to their landing, &c. This extravagance produced a real panic among the citizens; and happening just when Bache published Talleyrand's letter, Harper on the 18th, gravely announced to the House of Representatives, that there existed a traitorous correspondence between the Jacobins here and the French Directory; that he had got hold of some threads and clues of it, and would soon be able to develope the whole. This increased the alarm." As Mr. Jefferson was implicated by the newspapers in this supposed plot, he was induced by it to prolong his stay in Philadelphia.

It subsequently appeared that Dr. Logan conceived the project, after the failure of our envoys in the object of their mission, of becoming the mediator between France and the United States. Deprecating a rupture between them, and believing it would be detrimental to the cause of the republican party, to which he was attached, he hoped that representations to that effect would incline the public authorities in France to a pacific course. His romantic scheme soon became generally known, was ascribed by the federal journals to Mr. Jefferson as its adviser, and was represented as an attempt to take sides with France against the United States. Mr. Jefferson avers that he had no agency whatever in this self-created mission, but that he had furnished Dr. Logan, at his request, with a certificate of his citizenship, character, and circumstances, by way of passport.

The name of Logan was one of evil omen to Mr. Jefferson at this time, for besides the agency imputed to him in the preceding transaction, he had been, a few months before, charged by Mr. Luther Martin, a lawyer of eminence in Maryland, with having fabricated the speech which he had published in his Notes as that of Logan, the Indian chief. And as that speech

charged Colonel Cresap with acts of cruelty to the Indians, and Mr. Martin was the relative of Cresap, he considered himself warranted, in vindicating the character of his relative, to assail that of Mr. Jefferson, for candour and honesty. Mr. Jefferson took occasion, some time after, in a new edition to his "Notes on Virginia," to notice this charge of Mr. Martin, and he has there satisfactorily proved Logan's claim to the authorship of the speech made to Lord Dunmore, as he had reported it, and of course falsified the charge against himself.

On the 21st of June, the president sent a message to both Houses of Congress, in which he notices the arrival of General Marshall, and the despatches he had received from Mr. Gerry, who alone of the envoys had not received his congé. He stated that as fresh instructions had been sent to this gentleman, the negotiation might now be considered to be at an end; and concluded with this declaration, "I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honoured, as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation," which one party regarded as a spirited assertion of national self-respect, and the other as a piece of rhodomontade, which might be as mischievous as it was undignified.

One of the unpleasant consequences of the feverish state of the public mind, and of the relation in which Mr. Jefferson stood to the democratic party, was, that all his actions were closely watched, and made objects of suspicion and animadversion in the newspapers. He had not long returned to Monticello after the termination of the longest and most contentious session of Congress ever witnessed, before he was informed by his friend, General Smith of Baltimore, of an article in a Philadelphia paper, which stated that the day after the president's last message on the subject of French affairs, Bache, the editor of a violent political journal, Dr. Leib, one of the same school, and a Dr. Reynolds, an Irish emigrant, were closeted with him. He thus speaks of the article to General Smith: "If the receipt of visits in my public room, the door continuing free to every one who should call at the same time, may be called closeting, then it is

true that I was closeted with every person who visited me; in no other sense is it true as to any person. I sometimes received visits from Mr. Bache and Dr. Leib. I received them always with pleasure, because they are men of abilities, and of principles the most friendly to liberty, and our present form of government. Mr. Bache has another claim on my respect, as being the grandson of Dr. Franklin, the greatest man and ornament of the age and country in which he lived. Whether I was visited by Mr. Bache or Dr. Leib, the day after the communication referred to, I do not remember. I know that all my motions at Philadelphia, here, and every where are watched and recorded." As to Dr. Reynolds Mr. Jefferson denies the fact, and says he never saw him but once, which was before the communication alluded to.

His views of the policy of the nation, as to its foreign relations, he thus states:-"The letter-writer says I am for peace, but it is only with France.' He has told half the truth. He would have told the whole, if he had added England. I am for peace with both countries. I know that both of them have given, and are daily giving, sufficient cause of war; that, in defiance of the laws of nations, they are every day trampling on the rights of the neutral powers, whenever they can thereby do the least injury, either to the other. But as I view a peace between France and England the ensuing winter to be certain, 1 have thought it would have been better for us to have continued to bear from France, through the present summer, what we have been bearing both from her and England these four years, and still continue to bear from England, and to have required indemnification in the hour of peace, when, I verily believe, it would have been yielded by both."... "It is true, then, that as with England we might of right have chosen either war or peace, and have chosen peace, and prudently, in my opinion, so with France, we might also, of right, have chosen either peace or war, and we have chosen war." He then excuses himself for not repelling these attacks through the newspapers, in conformity with a resolution he had made in early life, and since religiously observed. "Were I," he remarks, "to underVOL. II.-6