“Why is the President afraid to tell?” demanded his Aurora editorial. The answer was obvious to Callender: Adams was keeping secret the dispatches from our envoys for the simple reason that they were favorable to France. The blame for the failure of the mission was squarely at the door of the Federalist President, whose bias toward England and antipathy toward France had endangered the United States. “People begin to see their madness in preferring John Adams and a French war,” wrote Callender, “to Thomas Jefferson and a French peace.” But he dismissed Adams as a mere cat’s paw of the true culprit, Alexander Hamilton, “the son of a camp follower, a confessed adulterer and an avowed monarchist.” If Hamilton chose to hide his financial venality behind a mask of adultery, the editor would remind the world of it at every opportunity. He sandwiched Hamilton’s profession of adultery nicely between a reminder of his bastardy and a slight exaggeration about his being what Jefferson liked to call “the Consolidator.”
When Adams issued his mealy-mouthed statement sorrowfully announcing the failure of the mission and the arming of merchantmen, probably drafted by the cautious Wolcott, Callender remembered his tip from Spittin’ Matt and pounced: Where was the rest of the tale? Why was the full report being smothered up, kept even from the responsible committee of the Senate?
The drumbeat in the Aurora to reveal the report was taken up in the next few days by the rest of the republican press, and echoed in the Congress Hall. Southern Senators who knew and respected Commissioner John Marshall demanded that his full dispatch be submitted to the Senate forthwith. Vice President Jefferson, the Aurora reported, was “petrified with astonishment” at Adams’s statement slyly derogating French policy and putting cannons on ships. His primary representative in the House, Albert Gallatin, passed Jefferson’s word to republicans in Congress to resist Adams’s proposal to arm merchant vessels and instead “to adjourn and consult with the people.” An aroused populace friendly to France, he said Jefferson believed, would resist the Federalist trend toward war.
As a result, anti-Federalist John Beckley in Pennsylvania was organizing town meetings against war. His format was copied in Massachusetts, and Whig printing presses were set up in Connecticut. The message went out to all democratic societies: Delay. Speak out against war. Needed now was time for sober reflection, not precipitate action.
“Publish the commissioners’ report!” boomed Matt Lyon in Congress Hall, taking his cue from Callender, whom he had directed to the issue of concealment. What information could not be ferreted out could be forced out. “Why can’t the people know? Could it be that what the President implies is not supported by the full report?” Republican members forgot their embarrassment with him and cheered.
Albert Gallatin, however, the republican leader in the House, did not join in the taunting of Adams and his Cabinet. He slumped in his chair looking worried. Born in the French-speaking portion of Switzerland, he was aware of the nativist undercurrent that made the Connecticut bully’s attack on Lyon dangerous to the new democracy. His own election to the Senate from Pennsylvania had been set aside because he had not met the length-of-residence requirement; that was why, even though his interest lay in the foreign affairs overseen by the Senate, Gallatin had made his political career in finance in the House. Porcupine had already charged him with being a French secret agent, and the word “sedition” was being used to describe his speeches in the House.
In Gallatin’s judgment, something was uncharacteristic about Adams’s behavior in this episode. Here was an Anglophile, a former Minister to Britain, and a man notable for his hot temper reacting in a relatively restrained fashion toward France’s belligerence on the high seas as well as its diplomatic frigidity. Although Jefferson viewed the arming of our merchant vessels by Adams as an unconscionable step toward war, Gallatin thought it was the least the President could do in light of the provocation of a seizure threat. The most forceful advocate of republicanism on the House floor detected the hand of Hamilton in all this careful calibration of mildness. He suspected a political trap. Gallatin was not eager to see the report of the envoys to Paris made public until he read it himself.
When the President’s proposal came to a vote, he noted worriedly that some well-informed Federalists joined the republicans in demanding publication of the dispatches. The resolution passed easily—too easily. Adams was forced to hand them over.
Benny Bache climbed out of a sickbed and returned to Philadelphia in a febrile fury. He at once confronted Callender with “You damn fool! Do you realize what a blunder you made?”
Callender, reading the dispatches that the Adams Administration had just released, nodded glumly. “Because Adams wanted to conceal them, I thought the French must have been friendly and forthcoming. I thought his commissioners did something that favored the British and provoked the French and put us at risk of war. I was mistaken.”
Using the trumpet of the Aurora, the crusading Scot had blown down the walls of Federalist concealment. President Adams had been forced by the public outcry and the vote in Congress to make a full release of the decoded correspondence from his emissaries to the Directory in Paris.
The result, however, did not reflect badly on Adams; on the contrary, the news in the report was a terrible embarrassment to all American friends of France. The embarrassment to the Federalists in the Reynolds affair was as nothing compared to the damage to the republicans in what would surely be known as the XYZ affair.
With Bache looking over his shoulder, coughing and fuming, Callender re-read the documents. Talleyrand, “the fox of Europe,” who had spent a year in America escaping the bloodthirsty Robespierre after the fall of the Bastille, was now back in power as the Directory’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Marshall’s report recounted how he had admitted the American envoys to his house but told them he was “too busy” to discuss official matters. The feelings of the Directory were wounded, he claimed, by certain phrases in Adams’s first address to the Congress. Until they were withdrawn, no progress could be made in improving relations between the two countries. Talleyrand also hinted he was looking forward to a douceur, a sweetener for himself. When the three eminent Americans replied it was not in their power to get the President of the United States to apologize for a speech, France’s Foreign Minister coldly informed them he would grant them no further interviews.
“There’s the part about X, Y and Z,” Bache’s finger jabbed at the papers. “Why did they make such a mystery about the names?”
“Marshall must have known it would add piquancy to the report,” said Callender, “if he used symbols to keep them anonymous. The French names would be harder to remember.”
Three unofficial emissaries from Talleyrand then approached the Americans. “Monsieur X” told them that the Foreign Minister would provide them an authoritative audience upon payment to him of a personal douceur of $250,000. Charles Pinckney induced X to put the demand for a bribe in writing. But that was only the entrance fee. X then ushered in a well-known confidant of Talleyrand designated by Marshall as “Monsieur Y,” who explained that a successful mission would require a loan to France from the United States of $6 million. When Elbridge Gerry pointed out that would infuriate the British, Y came up with a complex arrangement to buy Dutch bonds that would wind up in France’s coffers.
The Americans had replied that they were empowered to make a treaty but not a loan. In came “Monsieur Z” to try to split Gerry off from the other two Americans; Talleyrand remembered Gerry cordially, having met him in Boston when hiding from the Reign of Terror. Gerry was more susceptible to flattery and insisted they continue talking to the go-betweens, who kept saying, “It is expected you will offer money.” At that point, according to the report, Pinckney shouted, “It is no, no; not a sixpence!”
“Imagine putting something as colorful as that in an official report,” said Callender. Marshall was evidently a politician who knew the power of words.
“Now—right there—comes the part about the whore,” sa
id Bache, eyes tearing. He blew his nose into a kerchief.
An attractive feminine intermediary “well acquainted with Talleyrand” joined X, Y and Z to explain that the money was not a demand but merely a delicate suggestion. The Foreign Minister’s mistress then pointed out the strength of the pro-French party in America led by the well-regarded former Ministers to France, Jefferson and Monroe. She was the messenger Talleyrand sent to threaten, in a gentle voice, that failure to pay the bribe and make the loan would lead to more than diplomatic disaster. It could lead to active French support of the replacement of the Federalists with a friendlier American faction—the Jefferson republicans.
Bache groaned. “How many copies are they printing of this?”
“Matt Lyon tried to hold it down to fifteen hundred,” Callender, heart-sick, replied. “We had the votes in the House to limit it to that, but you know how the Federalists run the Senate. They ordered fifty thousand copies for free distribution and now everybody who can read will read it.” He thought of the hireling Federalist printer who constantly sniped at him and Bache. “Fenno will make a fortune.”
The final words on the document, which took two months to cross the Continent and the Atlantic, were Marshall’s and Pinckney’s: “There exists no hope of our being officially received by this government, or that the objects of our mission will be in any way accomplished.” They were on their way home. Talleyrand, the venal diplomat who represented France, a former ally, had treated the representatives of the United States with contempt and had thereby humiliated every American.
Callender hung his head. “What do you want to say in tomorrow’s Aurora? I’ll write whatever you want.”
“Is there anything in this whole damned mess of messages we can use?”
“Marshall reports here that Talleyrand complained that the Adams government had manipulated the press in America to be against France. That’s true enough—republican newspapers are outnumbered three to one.”
“We can’t use anything Talleyrand says, James,” Bache said, biting off his words. “He’s the villain in this, don’t you see? He’s done more to ruin us than anybody. That damn French fox may even achieve the impossible—he may make John Adams a popular president.”
Callender looked more closely at one of the documents. “Here’s Marshall’s answer about the press. ‘Among those principles deemed sacred in America,’ he says, ‘there is not one more deeply impressed on the public mind than liberty of the press. That this liberty is often carried to excess, that it has sometimes degenerated into licentiousness, is seen and lamented; but the remedy has not yet been discovered.’ Let’s hope they don’t discover it now. Should we print this?”
“No. And by ‘licentious’ he meant you. Say it was wrong for Adams to publish the documents because negotiations are still going on—Elbridge Gerry is still over there, maybe a hostage.” Bache grasped for another avenue of escape: “Maybe people will forget what you had us saying all last week. Write that it’s all a Federalist scheme to start a war with France.”
“Talleyrand is the villain,” Callender added, “and the Directory might not have known what he was doing. Everybody knows he and Hamilton are close and both are monarchists. This is a Hamilton plot to push Adams into supporting the British.”
“Yes, and you can imagine what Porcupine will do to us on all that. We look like fools, Callender, and God knows what you’ve done to the republican cause. Write for tomorrow, and I’ll pay you what they gave me to pay you, and then I don’t want to see you again.”
Callender could not blame him. He had made a terrible mistake. Matt Lyon’s misjudgment had led him there, but the fault was his in not recognizing the possibility that he might be mistaken. Why had Adams wanted to suppress the dispatches if they would do harm to the republican cause? Callender wanted to think it was a trick that had fooled him, but another possibility presented itself: what if Adams was genuinely concerned about a war fever raging through the body politick, at a time when America was without the means to wage war? What if this petty popinjay, the tool of the Hamiltonians, had put the interest of the people ahead of the need to crush his political opponents?
On occasion, a bad man did a good thing, and a weak man took a strong stand; motives sometimes conflicted, leading to inconsistencies. Callender had trained himself to think consistently and that is what had led him over the cliff on this. The pity was that the combination of a minority voice in the House, that of Lyon, magnified by the voice of the opposition press, that of Callender, had the power to lead an entire political movement over the cliff. That was what dismayed him even more than being dismissed for good reason from a position he had so long dreamed of and so briefly enjoyed.
He thought, too, of his four children and his wife, who had grown accustomed to eating regularly and dressing respectably. The security of regular employment was gone now. He reminded himself that sustaining his ailing wife and making a better life for his four boys was his first responsibility, coming before replacing this administration or changing the world. Newsmongering had its satisfactions, even its savage thrills, but the writing life made it hard for a family man to plant two feet firmly on the ground. Perhaps he could prevail on someone like Madison to get him a position teaching history. He also knew himself to be a fairly capable carpenter. Was it too late, at age forty, to begin again? He had the sinking feeling that it was. “You probably will see me again, Benny. We’ll meet one day in jail.”
June 16, 1798
PHILADELPHIA
Peter Porcupine, as William Cobbett was now universally known, did not believe it was proper to do business with politicians, but considered a fair exchange of talent for information to be entirely within propriety for opinionmongers. So it was that he developed an arrangement a few years before with Robert Goodloe Harper, a pugnacious lawyer and businessman elected to the Congress from the Up Country of South Carolina.
They were the same age, thirty-eight, avid readers of political pam phlets and attracted to public controversy. Although Harper came to Philadelphia inclined toward republicanism and France, he was educable. Cobbett saw in him a man of character and business acumen, if lacking in the skill of the quill, and knew that Harper saw in him an avenue to a wide public. Thus, Cobbett was to aid the budding politician in the preparation of speeches and papers, and Harper was to provide the journalist good report on the inner workings of the Federalists in Congress.
Their collaboration had begun three years before with a powerful tract published under Harper’s name on the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. As Cobbett saw it, this was the first great foreign-policy debate to illuminate the growing split in the American politick. It separated the Federalists behind Hamilton who supported the treaty as averting war with Britain from the mobocrats behind Jefferson who denounced the treaty as subservient to British mercantile interests. The newcomer to Congress, Harper, astounded his colleagues and his rural constituents with a closely reasoned, plainly expressed document in strong support of the controversial treaty.
Thanks to the furor over the XYZ affair, that simmering controversy had reached a boiling point. Americans of all factions and regions were furious at the arrogant French treatment of their nation. Southerners especially were fearful of invasion; rumors swept the plantations of slave uprisings to support the arrival of French troops. Porcupine’s Gazette warned of the kind of nation in store for property owners if the bloody-minded French radicals took over: “We do not wish to divide our property with idlers, nor daily to tremble at the guillotine.”
Harper met Cobbett at the Porcupine print shop, and together they walked to the Federalist dinner and rally for John Marshall at Oeller’s Hotel. This event far outdid the anti-Federalist dinner welcoming home James Monroe the year before. Six miles outside the city, at Frankfort, Adams’s Secretary of State and a large party of dignitaries met the coach carrying Marshall down from New York, their greeting heralded by an artillery salute from a Pennsylvania regiment. An exuberant crowd was
waiting in front of the hotel, and people waved banners from the nearby rooftops.
Cobbett was grateful for the invitation that Harper had wangled for him; the 120 invited guests included all the Adams Cabinet members and the justices of the Supreme Court. But Peter Porcupine was the only representative of the press. “These are not the shouts of a giddy populace,” the journalist told the politician, looking up at the demonstrators hanging out of windows, “responsive to the flattering cant of a hypocritical demagogue. In your toast, Robert, you will want to say that this is an expression of gratitude toward a man—at hazard to his very life—who displayed fortitude in defending the honor of his country against the devious Talleyrand.” Offhandedly, he added, “He came to see me two years ago, you know, when he was here, hiding from the revolutionaries.”
“Talleyrand did?” The rotund Harper was impressed, as Cobbett hoped he would be.
“Yes, this modern Judas and I were seated by the same fireside. I had called him an apostate, a hypocrite, and expected that he wanted to expostulate with me at such severe treatment. Imagine my astonishment when he complimented me on my wit and learning, and asked if I had received my education at Oxford! As you know, I never went to any school—well, up to then, I kept my countenance pretty well at his flattery, but this abominable stretch would have forced a laugh from a Quaker in the midst of a meeting.” “What did Talleyrand want?”
“He wanted to pay me twenty dollars a month for English lessons. I had written my French-English grammar and was charging six dollars a month at the time, so his offer was obviously a bribe to get me to stop my hectoring of his nation.”
“And you told him—?”
“That I was no trout and consequently could not be caught by tickling.” Cobbett laughed heartily, then sobered: “He was a spy when he was here, for the Directory men who soon welcomed him home with open arms. And there are now hundreds of French spies flying about the country in every direction. They know exactly those in sympathy with the reds who are to be counted on in case of war.”
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