We hear the vile incendiary Bache … was disseminating his political poison among the citizens of the Northern Liberties, and announced his intention of having a Jacobinian festival at the Falls of Schuylkill [River] on Saturday, where he intended to descant [discourse] upon the answer of the President to the address of the Youth of the City—You may therefore expect to see a long list of hellish toasts … on Monday [or Tuesday] next inserted in his shameless Aurora.
Tonight, in the Porcupine’s Gazette:
The adoption of the American [black] cockade will at once point out the friends of good order … and demonstrate to Bache and his cut throat abettors that the Fable of the LYON and the BULLS will not be verified in the conduct of the American people …
SIR, How the tumult originated yesterday afternoon that disturbed the peace of the city I now know … It was the French cockade … To … prevent future riots on the same account, it will not be amiss for the Mayor and Corporation, or some other authority, immediately to issue a proclamation, forbidding all men to wear the French cockade in Philadelphia …
A HINT
SATURDAY, MAY 12, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
The black cockade is the military cockade of this country. [I]t has been so settled by the Federal government. It is earnestly recommended to Republicans, the real friends of order, not to think of assuming any badge liable to misconstruction. This … might be attended with mischief.
The Gazette of the United States is constantly harping on the assertion that the editor of the Aurora is in French pay. We are tired of giving the lie to this falsehood.
In a paper published under the immediate direction and constant inspection of the English Agent in this city, a publication has been recently made concerning The United Irishmen. It is not at all surprising … [I]f nationality proceeds to the length of supporting tyranny … then is nationality the most execrable of all human propensities. Of the latter character is the [British] nationality which attacks the unfortunate and long oppressed Irish. Of that character are the … two [Porcupine] papers of this week by the organ of the English Government, William Cobbett, formerly a corporal in the English regiment of foot, still remaining a British subject and a professed royalist.
Today, Benny Bache and other leading Republicans373 attend the Annual Festival of the Republican Tammany Society at the Columbia Wigwam on the banks of the River Schuylkill. The society is a center for radical Republicanism, particularly among the newly arrived Irish.374 Benny’s Quaker friend Dr. George Logan of Stenton speaks:
[A]ssisted by the blood and treasure of that brave and generous people, the French, we became a free, independent republic …
The present gloomy appearance of our public affairs has no doubt been occasioned by the Citizens of the United States having too much neglected the representative principles of the federal government and looking up to one man for the salvation of our country …
The kingly power, after having been a scourge to Europe for ages, is now, by the light of the American and French revolutions, coming to an end. It is devoutly to be wished that the citizens of the United States may be upon their guard not to suffer even the appearance of kingly authority to return amongst us to blast the fair prospects of our revolution …375
Tonight, in the Gazette of the United States:
APPOINTMENTS—BY AUTHORITY
JOSEPH HOPKINSON, of Pennsylvania, Commissioner for holding a treaty with the Oneida Indians.
MONDAY, MAY 14. 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
The alarms and disorders which have taken place within these few days … will, if not speedily checked, end in blood … The partizans of war … [i]nstead of resorting to reason … have recourse to threat, and instead of endeavoring to convince, they endeavor to enforce … Are free men to be bullied into certain opinions? …
To evince their zeal, a number of young men [on May 7] addressed the president … If, after the address was presented, the black cockade recommended by Porcupine had been laid aside, all might have been well; but this was not done, and the consequences are now unfolding themselves. The Day which was to have been set aside to implore the Deity in behalf of our country and to prostrate ourselves before him in humility and meekness became a day of riot and disorder … Our city never was in such alarm as on the evening of the fast day—the causes must be obvious to every one.
If proceedings like these are not discountenanced, my fellow citizens, where will they end? … Already it is said … that opposition is maturing itself. If hostile corps thus rise up among us, who can say that he will be safe. The consequences are to be deprecated, and an immediate check ought to be given to proceedings which are pregnant with ruin and murder. Before it is too late, my fellow-citizens, interpose your counsel and your influence, for if we are to have war, heaven guard us against a civil war.
Tonight, in the Porcupine’s Gazette:
Many of the Young Men here have gotten themselves arms and are forming themselves into companies.
TUESDAY, MAY 15, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
On Saturday, the Tammany Society met … A long talk was … delivered by DR.[GEORGE] LOGAN. After dinner the following [16] toasts were drank: … 5. The chief of one of the Councils Thomas Jefferson … Two guns and three cheers … 10. The freedom of talk—May he who aims at interrupting it be branded by the tribes as a traitor, monster, and tyrant.— Three guns and six cheers. 11. The memory of our great and good father Dr. Franklin.—May the children of Pennsylvania cherish at every hazard the great legacy of freedom which he bequeathed.—Two guns. 12. The warriors of 76—May those only who fought from choice & not necessity, for liberty as well as independence, be entitled to the honors and rewards of the sixteen tribes.—Three guns and six cheers …
Tonight, in the Porcupine’s Gazette, William Cobbett writes:
From various causes, these United States have become the resting place of ninety-nine hundredths of the factious villains which Great Britain and Ireland have vomited from their shores. They are all schooled in sedition, are adept at their trade, and they most certainly bear as cordial a hatred to this government as they did to their own … [A] paragraph … appeared a few days ago in the paper of that well-known scoundrel, the grand son of old Franklin. This wretch attempts to impose on the public a belief that, in every thing I say against the UNITED IRISHMEN, I aim at the whole Irish nation … [H]e lies from the bottom of his heart.
Wear the [black] American cockade … It is not sufficient that a man view unconcerned the progress of vice; if he makes no attempt to impede it, he gives it countenance … And is this not analogous to the Aurora confederation … [C]an any man who has eyes and ears plead ignorance of the wishes and designs of that hydra of iniquity? No … Wear the American cockade …
WEDNESDAY. MAY 16, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
[In] the constitution alleged to be that of the United Irishmen, I find … That ALL men are created equal … But let me ask, in what respect do the circumstances of Ireland in 1798 differ from those of America in 1776?
Mr. Adams … proclaimed a fast and, but a few days before that fast, he attended the play house [to hear the Federalist song]. He first endeavors to ingratiate himself with the powers of darkness by going to the play house and then with the source of light by going to church.
Today, in the U. S. House of Representatives, the Annals of Congress report:
PROVISIONAL ARMY …
Mr. GALLATIN [Republican, Pennsylvania] said … The committee was told the other day that, by virtue of this bill, a number of volunteer corps would be raised who would associate themselves for the purpose of learning the military art … To consist of whom? Of those persons who, from their situation in life, are able to arm, clothe and equip themselves at their own expense. It was therefore giving an exclusive privilege to a certain class of men (young merchants, lawyers, and others) who are possessed of more wealth than t
heir poorer neighbors to form a Military Association. And for what purpose? … [T]o do military duty in any manner that the President may think proper … The President is also to accept whom and reject whom he pleases …
[I]t would be impossible to form a standing army more dangerous than this … Upon the whole, Mr. G.[allatin] said, it appeared to him … a plan to arm one description of men exclusively of others and give them to the President of the United States to be used as he pleased, and what security had they that they would not be used for dangerous purposes?376
Mr. DAYTON [Federalist, New Jersey] … then replied to the member from Pennsylvania (Mr. GALLATIN) who had called these volunteer corps a most formidable force to be put into the hands of the President … [T]o whom, he asked, would they be truly formidable? To the invaders of our country—to the turbulent and seditious—to insurgents—to the daring infractors of the laws … [T]hese volunteers would be the first … to suppress seditious and disaffected persons, insurgents, or any daring infractors of the law …377
Mr. GALLATIN [Republican, Pennsylvania, answered] … we have seen differences of political opinion but no symptom of any infraction of the laws … Why then is the House told, not only today, but on former occasions, of seditious and disaffected persons—of dangers threatened to this country from insurrections? …378
Mr. HARPER [Federalist, South Carolina] said he should not employ a great deal of time in answering what had fallen from the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. GALLATIN) … Certain gentlemen are alarmed to see this corps of generous youth and represent them as a force not to be trusted. Why? Because it will prove dangerous to liberty. To the liberty of insurgents and the seditious …379
Mr. GALLATIN [Republican, Pennsylvania] … The gentleman from South Carolina had said there were disorganizers and seditious persons … and yet he has not shown where these disorganizers and perturbators exist … A gentleman rises from his seat and tells the committee he saw five or six men in the streets of this city with French cockades … that some one had reported that it was said that somebody had heard that one of them had said he would join the French if they landed here; the gentleman immediately concluded that there is a deep conspiracy in the country …380
Mr. ALLEN [Federalist, Connecticut] … What the committee had heard from the Gentlemen from Pennsylvania, of this being a plan to arm the rich against the poor, was said to raise a popular clamour against it … While the people … are addressing the Government with offers of their lives and fortunes in support of our measures against France, the gentleman from Pennsylvania wishes to take no measures for our security. There is something very extraordinary in this. But the young men of our country possess a different spirit; they are resolved to unite in their country’s cause; and they will be able effectually to prevent insurrections and insults from taking place in large cities which are the most subject to them …381
Tonight, in the Porcupine’s Gazette:
The imps of the infernal Paris monster … are endeavoring to persuade the young men that the black is not the American cockade but the British … [I]s it not now worn by all the officers, land and sea, and by the PRESIDENT himself?
SPITTING RECORD, BE IT REMEMBERED. THAT … ONE MATTHEW LYON, an Irishman and a furious Democrat … did, in Congress Hall, while the House was in actual session, spit the nauseous slime from his jaws into the face of Roger Griswold, a member from Connecticut …
THURSDAY, MAY 17, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
Citizens of America, you are called upon to unite and for what? In support of a man who openly avows his predilection for monarchical government and who has openly declared that it was not from discontent with the British government that he espoused the cause of your country—That there is cause for alarm no one can deny; but that this cause is domestic and not foreign is too palpable to be questioned … [W]hile you are [busied] in preparing for an imagined enemy, the real enemy is assaulting the citadel of your dearest privileges … and ere long you will be convinced to your sorrow that it was for independence and not for liberty that the present President of the United States contended.
Tonight, in the Porcupine’s Gazette, Peter Porcupine writes:
I informed my readers that there was a section in the provisional army bill, authorizing the President to accept the services of volunteers corps … Gallatin said there was no occasion for the volunteer corps, as there was “no fear of war.” … He was told that he feared the existence of volunteer corps, because he well knew from experience their efficacy “in SUPPRESSING INSURRECTIONS.”
FRIDAY, MAY 18, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
The French had assisted us very materially in our own revolutionary war, even before they openly joined us, with not only loans of money but with gratuitous donations to a large amount. Was it not natural when they, in their turn, were struggling under the burdens of a revolution, that they should look to us for some aid at least in the way of a loan?
War measures … Today, the U.S. House of Representatives approves, 51 to 40, the bill for a new provisional army of ten thousand volunteers.382 The U.S. Senate resumes a second reading of the bill concerning aliens.383
Republicans are abandoning Congress.384 Today, Republican House leader Al Gallatin writes his brother-in-law:
I remain almost alone to bear the irksome burthen of opposition against a dozen or two speakers, several of whom [are] exceedingly deficient in talents but supplying their room by blackguardism and impudence … I consider it my sacred duty to remain firm to the post assigned to me by my constituents, however ungrateful the task.385
Thomas Jefferson explains:
The Federalists’ usurpations and violations of the Constitution at that period and their majority in both Houses of Congress were so great, so decided, and so daring that, after combatting their aggressions inch by inch without being able in the least to check their career, the Republican leaders thought it would be best for them to give up their useless efforts there, go home, get into their respective legislatures, embody whatever of resistance they could be formed into, and, if ineffectual, to perish there as in the last ditch. All therefore retired, leaving Mr. Gallatin alone in the House of Representatives, and myself in the Senate, where I then presided as Vice President … No one who was not a witness to the scene of that gloomy period can form any idea of the afflicting persecutions and personal indignities we had to brook.386
SUNDAY, MAY 20. 1798
Today, James Madison writes Thomas Jefferson:
The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents. I should not have supposed it possible that such a one could have been engendered in either House & still persuade myself that it cannot be fathered by both … These addresses to the feelings of the people from their enemies may have more effect in opening their eyes than all the arguments addressed to their understandings by their friends. The President also seems to be co-operating for the same purpose. Every answer he gives to his addressers unmasks more and more his principles & views. His language to the young men at Ph[iladelphia] is the most abominable & degrading that could fall from the lips of the first magistrate of an independent people … It throws some light on his meaning when he remarked to me “that there was not a single principle the same in the American & French Revolutions;” … The abolition of Royalty was, it seems, not one of his Revolutionary principles …387
Today, President Adams’ nephew, William Shaw, writes his aunt, Abigail Adams:
I believe the grand cause of all our present difficulties may be traced to this source—too many hordes of Foreigners to America. I believe the English government will not allow any alien to be capable of receiving any office what ever. We shall not, I am afraid, continue long independent as citizens and as a nation, unless we speedily enact some-such law. Let us no longer pray that America may become an asylum to all nations, but let us encourage our own men & cultivate our simple manners.388
&
nbsp; The President will shortly make William Shaw his private secretary.
MONDAY, MAY 21, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
The United States ship the Ganges, capt. Dale, of 20 guns (nine pounders), having completed her preparations for sea, is now lying at anchor in the cove with a full complement of men. The Cutter General Greene is also completely armed and manned.
American Aurora Page 17
