The Problems of the Secretary of State’s Polar Star
THE DRAMA IN FRANCE had not been totally absent from America’s temporary capital, Philadelphia, during 1792. By the time this critical year began, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had made it clear that he regarded the success of the French Revolution as crucial to the political purity of the United States. In mid-1791, the French Charge’ d’Affaires in Philadelphia told his foreign minister: “It is M. Jefferson who takes the greatest interest in the success of our great revolution. He has often told me that the work of our National Assembly will serve to regenerate not only France but also the United States, whose principles were beginning to become corrupted.”1
During these months, the Secretary of State was receiving a flow of reports from his protégé and former secretary, twenty-five-year-old William Short, who was serving as the American Charge’ d’Affaires in Paris. During Jefferson’s years in Paris, Short had accompanied him to salons and soirees where he met the moderate aristocrats who turned to Jefferson for advice as the revolution became a reality.
Besides Lafayette, one of the most prominent of these noblemen was the Duc de la Rochefoucauld. He had a beautiful wife, Rosalie, who was decades younger than her husband. Gradually, both she and Short realized they were passionately attracted to each other. In America, this might have produced ostracism and violence. But in France, there was nothing unusual about such an affair, except perhaps its blazing intensity.2
Throughout 1791 and 1792, Short’s eyewitness reports to Jefferson revealed the steady growth of violence in the French capital. At one point, he told Jefferson there was a “degree of fermentation” in the streets of Paris that threatened to create “a new revolution.” What would that revolution entail? King Louis XVI had already agreed to become a constitutional monarch like George III of Great Britain. The answer was soon obvious to observers in England and America: a “pure” republic—without a king.
How would this political destination be reached? Here was where Short’s dispatches from the scene reported things that Jefferson did not want to hear. The National Assembly, which was writing a constitution under the guidance of the Marquis de Lafayette and his faction, was aiming at a carefully balanced moderation. The King would retain considerable powers, which he would wield in conjunction with the assembly. The finished document, Jefferson had predicted, would be a “superb edifice.” Short warned the Secretarty of State that there were a lot of Parisians who were bent on challenging the constitutional moderation of Lafayette and his friends. The American Charge’ described these opponents as “a mob of their constituents” who were threatening “to hang them.”3
By 1792, there was now another player in the Parisian revolutionary game: the Paris Commune, which Jefferson called “the assembly of the people of Paris.” They were much more radical than the rest of France. President Washington seems to have been well aware of the Commune’s differences with the National Assembly. When Benjamin Franklin died in 1790, the Assembly had declared they would observe three days of mourning for the sage whose diplomatic skills had persuaded France to support the American struggle for independence. The Commune staged its own mourning ceremony featuring a long eulogy by one of their best orators, and sent the speech and other reports of their admiration to “the President and Congress,” as if the Commune were France’s government.
President Washington did not even open the Commune’s package. He sent it to Jefferson, who recommended it should be submitted to Congress for a reply. The President ignored this advice, which signaled his awareness that the House of Representatives under James Madison’s leadership was exhibiting tendencies that troubled him. He sent the Commune’s package to the Senate. This was in keeping with the Constitution, which gave the Senate a role in foreign policy. The senators ignored it.
Then came an event that revealed to everyone in and out of France what was really happening in Paris: on June 21, 1791, Louis XVI and his Queen and family attempted to escape their semi-imprisonment in the Tuileries Palace and flee to the protection of friendly foreign monarchs. Behind him, the King left a message, declaring he had been a prisoner, acting under duress since he was dragged from Versailles to Paris.
Alas, for the monarch and his moderate supporters in the National Assembly, he was recaptured at Varennes and returned to Paris through streets lined with tens of thousands of silent, glaring spectators. Signs declared that anyone who applauded the King would be beaten. William Short told Jefferson the story in late June, adding: “The Crisis is really tremendous and may have a disastrous issue.”
A few days later, another report from Charge’ Short made this prophecy more specific: “You will easily conceive that the post of M de la Fayette is the most disagreeable and dangerous that can be imagined…. The people of Paris [the Commune] headed by some popular ambitious men declare loudly in favor [of] a republican government.” The Jacobins, members of a radical political club who had little or no use for a king, declared that Lafayette was behind the flight and he would pay for it “with his head.”4
Three months later, Secretary of State Jefferson received these reports and promptly informed the President of the King’s failed flight. Later, he wrote that he had never seen George Washington “so dejected by any event in my life.” All the President’s hopes for the French Revolution—and all his doubts—collapsed into deep gloom—and fear for the safety of Lafayette.5
Secretary of State Jefferson refused to accept the meaning of the King’s capture, even when Short spelled it out for him. The Secretary continued to talk and write about the Revolution as if the calendar had stopped turning in 1789. Three months later, on August 30, 1791, the day that Jefferson received Short’s dispatches about the King’s ruinous move, the Secretary of State wrote to a French friend in Paris, congratulating him on the news that the constitution was nearing completion. Two weeks later, when the King’s acceptance of the document was announced to the public, Short warned Jefferson that public confidence in the moderate charter—and the King—was close to zero.
Jefferson also ignored this all too accurate prophecy. Soon, James Madison, whose thinking on the French Revolution was now virtually dictated by Jefferson, was hailing the King’s acceptance as if he had never heard of the monarch’s flight and return to a Paris smoldering with hatred. “The French Revolution seems to have succeeded beyond the most sanguine hopes,” he told one correspondent.
It was growing apparent that for both Madison and Jefferson, the French Revolution was only real as an issue in American politics. They saw it could become crucial to the success of their new “Republican” Party. The reader will note that the name is in quotations. Many historians no longer use it. They prefer the name Jeffersonian Republican or Democratic-Republican. Henceforth, we will use the latter term.6
Not surprisingly, President Washington had less and less confidence in Jefferson’s judgment of the upheaval in Paris. He virtually said as much when he named Gouverneur Morris, a man Jefferson disliked, as America’s first minister to the new French government. The wealthy New Yorker had been in Paris when the Revolution began in 1789, and his skepticism about its outcome was soon well-known.
When Jefferson notified Morris of his appointment, the Secretary of State urged him to make frequent attempts to assure everyone of “the spirit of sincere friendship and attachment we bear to the French nation.” He should avoid opinions “that might please or offend any party.” Jefferson told Morris that the Revolution was immensely popular among “the great mass of our countrymen,” not too subtly warning him it would be a mistake to differ with this majority opinion.
Writing from London, Morris accepted the appointment as minister and told the Secretary of State he agreed completely with the wisdom of observing silence about the current government of France. “Changes are now so frequent, and events seem fast ripening to such an awful catastrophe, that no expressions on the subject, however moderate, would be received with indifference.” The letter demonstrated that Morris was no slouch at the diplomatic game. He promised obedience to the Secretary of State, and simultaneously told him he did not know what he was talking about.7
Meanwhile, the Senate was debating Morris’s appointment. Virginia Senator James Monroe, by now competing with James Madison for the role of Jefferson’s favorite political combatant, denounced the New Yorker. Monroe relied almost entirely on Jefferson’s adverserial vocabulary. Morris was a “monarchy man” whose chief interest in Europe was lining his own pockets. Other senators agreed with Monroe.
Gouverneur Morris had never learned to be a popular politician; he frequently told people they were wrong and proved it in cutting terms. Even the two senators from Massachusetts, both conservatives, disliked him, probably because Morris’s penchant for pretty women offended their puritan instincts. But the President’s prestige was at stake and enough supporters of Washington rallied to confirm Morris’s appointment as minister to France.
Another reason for Morris’s two-sided reply to the Secretary of State was a deeply personal letter that the President had written to him. Washington began by saying he had nominated Morris “with all my heart.” He then gave the new minister a pungent summary of the Senate debate on his appointment, and told him that he had better face the fact that he was often charged with “imprudence of conversation and conduct.” Especially troubling was a supposed “hauteur disgusting to those who happen to differ with you.” Washington hoped these warnings would inspire the circumspection Morris would need to represent America in Paris.
To the President, one fact outweighed all Gouverneur Morris’s flaws: Morris would tell him the truth, no matter how much he might be forced to dissemble with others. Washington too saw that the French Revolution was becoming an issue in American politics. The President wanted advice from someone he trusted. He liked the way Morris had dealt with the British in London, making it clear that the “honor and interest of his country” was the only thing that mattered to him.8
In early March of 1792, Jefferson informed his Anas that Washington had told him he had “begun to doubt very much of affairs in France.” The remark was made while they were discussing the letter they had received from King Louis XVI, announcing his approval of his nation’s new constitution. At the President’s request, the Secretary of State had written a carefully neutral response to it. Jefferson had reluctantly obeyed, blaming Washington’s tone on Gouverneur Morris “[who] has kept the president’s mind constantly poisoned with his forebodings.”9
Washington had sent copies of the King’s letter to the House of Representatives and the Senate. The President became more than a little annoyed when Congressman James Madison persuaded the House to send an independent reply to the French government, warmly congratulating them on completing a wonderful constitution. It was an almost embarrassing contrast to Washington’s cool, neutral response. Washington wondered aloud if he should tell Madison and his House allies that foreign policy was none of their business.
The Secretary of State took not a little pleasure in informing the President that the resolution to send their letter had passed the House with only two dissenting votes. It was evidence of how eagerly most Americans supported France’s revolution—something the President could only ignore at his political peril.
The Secretary of State had not a little to do with creating this attitude. Philip Freneau’s National Gazette printed nothing but gushing praise of France’s revolutionaries. Jefferson was so emotionally committed to their success, he did not seem to realize he was creating a dangerous division between a realistic view of the Revolution as a series of potentially tragic events in Paris and the idea of it as a political issue in America.
The Secretary of State was extremely pleased when the President took his advice and decided not to tangle with the House of Representatives for interfering in American foreign policy. Instead, he told Jefferson to revise his noncommittal letter—adding a mention that both the House and Senate had expressed their approval of the new French Constitution.10
As Jefferson’s failure to change Washington’s mind about Hamilton’s financial system become apparent to him, the Secretary of State grew more and more pessimistic about American politics and invested even more emotion in the French Revolution. In a letter to Lafayette, he praised his military as well as his political talents, and his use of the latter to exterminate “the monster aristocracy” and pull out “the teeth and fangs of its associate, monarchy.”
In America, Jefferson continued, an opposite tendency was becoming visible. “A sect” of wayward greedy political operators saw the Constitution as only a step to the nation’s true political destiny—“an English constitution” with a king at the nation’s helm. The American legislature had become a hive of “stock jobbers and king jobbers.” But the voice of the people was beginning to make itself heard. The next election was likely to rid Congress of most of the jobbers.11
Lafayette never received the Secretary of State’s letter. Jefferson had written it to ally him with the Democratic-Republican Party, on the assumption that he would wield a great deal of power under France’s new Constitution. By the time the letter reached Paris, the Marquis had heard the voice of the people howling for his blood, and had fled his homeland.
As William Short had predicted, the Marquis’s political fortunes had been in decline since Louis XVI’s failed flight. When a riotous mob on the Champ de Mars demanded the banishment of the King and the establishment of a republic, the National Assembly asked Lafayette and his guardsman to restore order. The mob opened fire, one bullet whizzing close to the Marquis. He ordered the Guard to fire over the rioters’ heads. When the citoyens still refused to disperse, Lafayette ordered the Guard to fire on them. At least twelve people were killed, the mob fled, and Lafayette’s popularity plummeted to zero.
In the National Assembly, attention turned to the frontiers, where anti-revolutionary émigrés had established a military presence. These naysayers were backed by King Frederick William of Prussia and Leopold II, the Emperor of Austria, Queen Marie Antoinette’s brother. In 1791, the two kings had issued a statement expressing concern for the safety of King Louis and the Queen. On April 20, 1792, the National Assembly declared war on both countries. Hotheads in the Assembly decided that these two “rotting despotisms” would be easy to defeat by appealing to the hunger for liberté in the souls of their oppressed subjects.12
The shift to overt hostilities added new intensity to the distrust and anger that was sweeping through Paris. Worse, the French army performed poorly in its attempt to seize the frontier cities. The untrained troops fled when the professional soldiers of the Austrian army advanced on them. The Jacobins condemned the French commanders, claiming that they were all attached to the “old order.” One failed brigadier general was massacred by an enraged mob in the city of Lille.13
In a last desperate attempt to maintain order, Lafayette asked the National Assembly to declare martial law. He was condemned in a raging speech by a leader of the Jacobin Political Club, Maximilian Robespierre, who accused him of plotting a coup d’etat. On August 10, the Jacobins and their supporters in the Paris Commune stormed the Tuileries Palace, massacred the six hundred Swiss Guards, the King’s only reliable protectors, and arrested Louis XVI. Lafayette was summoned to Paris for what would obviously be a show trial followed by the guillotine. On Aug 22, 1792, the Marquis and four aides fled France. Lafayette hoped to reach neutral Holland or England and there be joined by his wife and children. Eventually, they planned to seek refuge in America. On the French border, the Marquis was seized by Austrian soldiers and flung into the first of many vile prisons. The royalist émigrés had convinced the Austrians that Lafayette was as hateful as the Jacobins.14
In America, Secretary of State Jefferson was soon hearing the grim news from Paris via William Short. Jefferson had persuaded Washington to appoint Short minister to the Netherlands, but information continued to flow to the young Virginian from the seething French capital. Virtually every intelligent person in Europe waited anxiously to learn what was happening in Paris.
Equally dire reports came from Gouverneur Morris. Describing the attack on the Tuileries Palace, Short had denounced “those mad and corrupted people in France who under the name of liberty have destroyed their own government.” Morris was less emotional than Short, and closer to the meaning of the massacre: “Another revolution has been affected (sic) in this city. It was bloody.”15
Morris went on to describe how the Jacobins were now in control and were outlawing other political clubs and associations, notably the Feuillants, who had favored the constitutional monarchy. Morris advised Jefferson to read with caution any French newspapers that came his way. They were being written not only “in the spirit of a party but under the eye of a party.” With the coolness of a man who knew he had Washington’s backing, Morris closed his letter by asking for “orders from the President respecting my line of conduct.”
Jefferson must have twitched with irritation at these words. Morris was all but saying that he did not trust any orders from the Secretary of State. Nonetheless, Jefferson conferred with Washington, and they agreed that Morris should remain at his post. Most of the other diplomats in Paris were leaving—a statement that the emerging republic was illegitimate. But Jefferson told Morris that the United States believed it should recognize any government that had been created by the will of the people. He must have been surprised—and pleased—when he received a letter from Morris, expressing the same opinion.16
The Jacobins now issued an Edict of Fraternity, which declared France’s support for other revolutionary movements throughout the world. To prove their friendly feelings for America, they conferred honorary citizenship on “Georges Washington, N. Madison, T. Paine, and Jean Hamilton.” (sic) Some people have puzzled over the omission of Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps it was a commentary on his association with the moderate Feuillants such as Lafayette during his time in Paris. They—and all their friends—were now scorned, derided, and soon would be on their way to the guillotine.
Washington and Hamilton did not reply to this grant of citizenship, but “N. Madison” wrote an oozingly flattering reply, hailing the “sublime truths and precious sentiments in the revolution of France.” T. Paine, who had been banished from England, was in France and accepted the honor by joining the National Assembly in time to participate in the unanimous vote to exterminate royalty in France. “Kings,” the deputies proclaimed, “are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical.”17
The stage was now set for what has become known as the September Massacres. The Secretary of State heard about them first in a letter from William Short. He reported “the arrestation, massacre or flight of all those who should be considered friends of the late constitution…The mob and demagogues of Paris have carried their fury in this line as far as it could go.” In a postscript, he told how the rioters were “menacing the assembly to immolate these victims without delay.” He predicted there would soon be “proceedings, under the cloak of liberty, égalité, and patriotism, as would disgrace any chambre ardente that has ever existed.” A chambre ardente was a sixteenth century court in which heretics had been tried and burned at the stake.
A few days later, Jefferson was reading Gouverneur Morris’s report on September’s tidal wave of blood. The Jacobins and their supporters murdered well over a thousand priests, royalists, judges, editors—anyone decreed an enemy of the state. Morris described the death of the Princess de Lamballe, a member of the Queen’s household, in graphic detail. “She was beheaded and disemboweled, the head and entrails paraded on pikes and the body dragged after them through the streets.” At the building known as the Temple, where the King and Queen were being held prisoner, Marie Antoinette was forced to look out the window at the gruesome spectacle.18
Another victim was Jefferson’s friend, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, and his son. They were in their carriage when a mob attacked them, dragged them into the street, and stabbed and clubbed them to death before the horrified eyes of the Duke’s wife, William Short’s by now beloved friend, Rosalie. It was not the sort of news that would reconcile Jefferson’s protégé to the revolution. In the National Assembly, an ecstatic Maximilian Robespierre called the mass murders proof that they were conducting “the most beautiful revolution that has ever honored humanity.” His journalist friend, Jean Paul Marat, agreed wholeheartedly. “Let the blood of traitors flow,” he said. “That is the only way to save the country.”19
The Secretary of State received Morris’s letter on January 10, 1793. He already knew about the September Massacres from American newspapers, many of which expressed disgust and outrage. Jefferson’s political spokesman, Philip Freneau, displayed a very different point of view. He was irked to see some newspapers censuring the French as “barbarous and inhuman.” What had they done? Killed “two or three thousand scoundrels to rescue the liberties of millions of honest men.” Freneau compared this to the villainy of the French royal family, “the vain wars of whom covered the earth with the blood of innocent individuals from one end of Europe to another.”20
Secretary of State Jefferson did not say a word of reproach to Freneau. Nor did James Madison. Meanwhile, Jefferson received another letter from Gouverneur Morris reporting that the National Assembly had put Louis XVI on trial for treason. With not a little irony, Morris wrote that it “would seem strange to a person less intimately acquainted than you are with the history of human affairs,” that “the mildest monarch who ever fill’d the French throne…a man whom none can charge with a criminal or crude act, should be prosecuted” as “one of the most nefarious tyrants that ever disgraced the annals of human nature.” Morris thought it was very likely that the King would be sentenced to death.
On the French border, a small battle took place in the Argonne Valley near the town of Valmy. The Prussian monarch, King Frederick William, had joined his Austrian counterpart in armed hostility to the Revolution. The French army repulsed the vaunted Prussian regulars, and they retreated back across the border. In Paris, the National Assembly had disbanded and become the National Convention—a term that signified a new revolution was about to be launched. The news of Valmy was hailed as a French Thermopylae. The next day the Convention voted to abandon the monarchy and declared a new era in history had begun. It was “Year One of French Liberty.”21
More French victories followed. Their revitalized armies drove the Austrians out of what is now Belgium. Other armies occupied many small German principalities to the east. Everywhere, the conquering revolutionaries told the local population that liberty was about to transform their lives. What the locals actually got was massive requisitions of cash and property to finance the penniless government in Paris. As one disillusioned resident of Mainz remarked, they would have felt less cruelly deceived if these apostles of liberty had told them from that start, “We have come to take everything.”22
In America, the French military victories were hailed by Philip Freneau and other admirers of the Revolution as proof that the upheaval was indeed what Secretary of State Jefferson called it: “The True God.” In December of 1792, “Civic Feasts” featuring fine wine, mountains of food, and innumerable toasts to France became frequent events in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.
For Thomas Jefferson, an even more exciting event was a conversation he had with President Washington on December 27. According to the Secretary’s Anas, the President told him that he had begun to think America should concentrate on improving its relationship with France. Neither the Spanish nor the British were trustworthy. Both continued to treat America with barely concealed hostility. Jefferson could hardly believe his ears. He noted almost smugly that this idea had been his “polar star” as secretary of state, long before France’s armies won any battles.23
A few days later, the combination of Washington’s change of heart and the French military victories—and the enthusiasm they generated in America—moved Jefferson to write a long, angry letter to William Short, in which he all but demolished the young man for his negative reports on the French Revolution. “The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain on account of the extreme warmth with which you censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France,” the Secretary of State told him. For his part, Jefferson considered the Jacobins “as the same with the Republican patriots of America.”
This was an astonishing statement, all by itself. The murderers of over one thousand people were morally equal to James Madison, James Monroe, and other followers of the Secretary of State? Even more amazing was what followed this sanctification. In the struggle to “expunge” the King, “many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as any body, and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I would have done if they had fallen in battle…. Time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying the very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was there ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?…Rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”24
Jefferson went on to claim that his extraordinary sentiments “are really those of 99 in an hundred of our citizens.” He cited the feasts and “rejoicings” over France’s military successes. Even more important, he told Short that he had recently learned the President felt the same way. His “reserve” had hitherto made it difficult to discover his opinion of the revolution. That was why Jefferson had forwarded all of Short’s letters to Washington, even though he was troubled by their abusive tone. The most recent letter had forced the President to “break silence and notice the extreme acrimony of your expressions.”
Washington also supposedly said he had been informed that Short’s conversations “with our allies” had been as offensive as his letters. The President wanted Jefferson to remind Short that he was “the representative of [his] country and should realize his French listeners might conclude that all or most Americans had similar negative opinions.” The President urged Jefferson to remind Short that “France was the sheet anchor of this country.” Her friendship should be regarded as “a first object” of an American diplomat.
Diligent research by this and other historians has failed to find President Washington saying these things. In fact, Short is not even mentioned in the notes on Jefferson’s conversation with the President that survive in his Anas. By this time, it had become apparent to Washington that France was not in any way, shape, or form a sheet anchor to the American ship of state. Most of the government’s revenues were coming from duties on imports from Great Britain. France simply lacked the economy that could replicate the volume and variety of Britain’s commerce. It seems more than likely that Secretary of State Jefferson was concocting a rather cruel form of intimidation to make sure William Short said nothing else negative about the French Revolution.
William Short never responded to this letter. He also did not change his mind about the French Revolution. Many years later, he remarked on this fundamental disagreement between him and his mentor. “Mr. J’s greatest illusions in politics have proceeded from a most amiable error… too favorable an opinion of the animal called man…who, in mass form, [is] in my opinion, only a many headed monster. Mr. J, on the contrary, judging him [man] from himself, conceived that his sense of moral rectitude would suffice to induce him to keep a straight path, & that he had need of little restraint.” As a kind of footnote, Short added, “it was most difficult to make him change an opinion.”25
In Paris, the National Convention had been debating the fate of Louis XVI. By a margin of seventy-five in a legislative body of more than eight hundred, the vote was for death. On January 21, 1793, Louis was awakened in the predawn darkness to receive holy communion from the royal chaplain. He dressed simply and gave his valet his wedding ring to pass on to the Queen. When an escort from the Commune arrived, the King asked if he could have his hair cut now, rather than on the scaffold, like a common criminal. The committee said no.
Next came a two-hour ride in the executioner’s cart along Paris streets shrouded in clammy fog. Windows along the route were closed and often shuttered. The immense crowd lining the route was silent, as if they could not quite believe what they were seeing.
The King arrived at the scaffold at ten o’clock. He was helped up the steep steps and submitted to the standard haircut by the executioner. Turning, he spoke to the twenty thousand citizens crammed into the square. “I die innocent of all the crimes with which I have been charged,” he cried. “I pardon those who have brought about my death and I pray that the blood you are about to shed will never be required of France.”
A roll of drums ended his attempt to say more. Louis was strapped to a plank and pushed forward until his head was in a kind of brace. The executioner pulled a cord and the twelve inch blade hissed down to separate the royal head from its body. The head toppled into a basket; the executioner pulled it out and held it up, dripping blood, for the people to bear witness that France was now a republic.
Schoolboys cheered and rushed to dip their fingers in the royal blood. One tasted it and said it was “well-salted.” The executioner sold snippets of hair and fragments of the king’s clothes. People strolled away, arm in arm, laughing. No one was even faintly aware that beheading the king would launch a European war of incredible ferocity that would bring tragedy into millions of French lives for the next twenty terrible years.26
In America, Thomas Jefferson and his followers received the news with something close to exultation. Philip Freneau set the tone with a mocking announcement in the National Gazette: “Louis Capet has lost his caput.” He went on to say that from his use of a pun, one might suppose he “thought lightly” of the King’s fate. “I certainly do,” he agreed. “It affects me no more than the execution of another malefactor.” He went on to declare the killing “a great act of justice.” Anyone who was shocked by it should be regarded with suspicion “of a strong remaining attachment to royalty.”27
Jefferson was in complete agreement with his spokesman’s sentiments. Although he had once said Louis was a good man, and even an honest man, he now declared that kings should be “amenable to punishment like other criminals.” Unsurprisingly, James Madison chimed in, announcing that if the King were a traitor, he should be “punished as well as another man.” The Congressman dismissed as “spurious” newspaper stories that argued for the King’s innocence. Instead, he continued to praise the Revolution in Paris as “wonderful in its progress and stupendous in its consequences.”28
Neither the Secretary of State nor his chief follower were aware that the French Revolution was about to arrive on their doorsteps with consequences that were disastrous for them and their new political party.