he to me. A civil war is about to ravage our unhappy country. Four men, by their talents, their influence, and their energy, may save it.”
Save it from what? Not from a civil war; it was, it seems, too late to do that; for it was all over. A civil war was to take place; that was a settled point, though the commotion was scarcely known; but four men, with the help of citizen Fauchet’s dollars, might save the country. That is, bring it out of that civil war refined and regenerated, and unclogged with the Federal government, or, at least, with those men who thwarted the views of citizen Fauchet and his nation.
Of all the expressions to be found in the Babylonish vocabulary of the French Revolution, there is not one the value of which is so precisely fixed as that before us—to save the country. When their first Assembly, the fathers of all the miseries of their country, violating the powers with which they were invested, reduced their king to an automation, laid their crooked fingers on the property of sixty or seventy thousand innocent persons, drove the faithful pastors from their flocks, and replaced them by a herd of vile apostates, they had the impudence to declare that they had saved their country! When their worthy successors hurled this degraded monarch from his throne; and, after a series of injustices, insults, and cruelties, as unmerited as unheard of, put an end to his sufferings on a scaffold, they, too, had saved their country! They have saved it, alas! again and again! Every signal act of their folly and tyranny, every one of their massacres, has ended with a declaration of their having saved their country. Even when they exchanged the Christian religion, the words of eternal life, for the impious and illiterate systems of a Paine and a Volney; when they declared the God of Heaven to be an impostor, and forbade his worship on pain of death; even then they pretended they had saved their country!——If Mr. Randolph meant to save his country in this way, he is welcome for me to the exclusive possession of the honour due to his zeal. He might surely venture to make overtures to citizen Fauchet for operating a salvation of this kind, without the least fear of a rebuff. But, stopping short of French salvation, he might wish to save it from the excise; from the Treasurer’s plans of finance; from a treaty with England; and, above all, from that “strengthening the Government, which had so visible a propensity to aristocracy.” Besides, when a man comes to ask for a bribe, he must have some excuse; for, base as he may be, and lost to shame, and well as he may be convinced that the person whom he addresses is as base as himself; yet there is something about the human form, though disfigured with a tricoloured cockade, which reminds the wretch that he has a soul.
As a convincing proof that the overtures mentioned by citizen Fauchet ought to be understood as made to obtain money for supporting, in some way or other, the insurrection in the West, and that the whole letter inevitably conveys this meaning, we need no other proof than that furnished by Mr. Randolph himself. It will certainly be supposed that he, above all others, would read this essay on bribery and corruption with an anxious and scrutinizing eye. We may fairly presume that he conned it over with more attention than ever school-boy did his lesson, or monk his breviary; and that, from the moment he was in his penitential weeds, he repeated the some-thousand-dollar sentence as often as a devotee Catholic repeats her Ave-Maria. Yet, notwithstanding all this; notwithstanding the interest he had in finding some other meaning for it; notwithstanding even his talent at warping, and twisting, and turning everything that falls in his way, we find him, on the 19th of August, writing to the President thus:
“For I here most solemnly deny, that any overture ever came from me which was to produce money to me [and not to flour-merchants], or any others for me; and that in any manner, directly or indirectly, was a shilling ever received by me; nor was it ever contemplated by me that one shilling should be applied by Mr. Fauchet to any purpose relative to the insurrection.”
He understood, then, the letter to mean, that money was to be received by him, and that it was to be applied to some purpose relative to the insurrection. This was the charge that he at first thought the letter contained against him. And when did he begin to think otherwise?—After he had been to see citizen Fauchet at Rhode-Island, and not a moment before. It was after this edifying tête-à-tête with his old father Joseph, that he began to recollect all about the flour-merchants and Mr. Hammond’s Congress; and so, with his memory thus refreshed, he comes back, and tells us in his Vindication:
“Mr. Fauchet’s letter, indeed, made me suppose that No. 6 possibly alluded to some actual or proffered loan or expenditure, for the nourishment of the insurrection; and, therefore, I thought it necessary to deny, in my letter of the 19th of August, that one shilling was contemplated by me to be applied by Mr. Fauchet relative to the insurrection.”
Citizen Fauchet’s memory, too, was, it seems, furbished up by this tête-à-tête; for he tells us, in his certificate, that
“now, calling to mind all the circumstances to which the questions of Mr. Randolph call my attention, I have an intimate conviction that I was mistaken in the propositions which I supposed to have been made to me.”
So here is a pretty story for you: Mr. Randolph forgets all about the flour-merchants, till he talks to citizen Fauchet; and citizen Fauchet forgets all about them, till he talks to Mr. Randolph! Their memories, like a flint and steel, could bring forth no light but by friction with each other. If this do not prove a close connection, I do not know what does. Even “their minds,” as the poet says, “in wedlock’s bands were joined.”
There is another singularity worth notice here. Citizen Fauchet’s intercepted letter was written on the 31st of October 1794; and at that time (though it was just after the overtures were made), he did not recollect a word about the flour-men, nor about the machinations of the English: but, on the 27th of September 1795, that is to say, ten months and twenty-seven days afterwards, he has an intimate conviction of the whole matter; and tells as good a tough story about it, as one can in conscience expect from a being that kneels down at the shrine of a jackass. Mr. Randolph, also, recollected nothing about it on the 19th of August; but, in some thirty days after, it all came as pat into his head, as if it had but that moment happened.—Rhode-Island must be like the cave of the Dervise, where every one that entered saw, written in large characters, all the actions of his past life. If so, no wonder our adventurers made such haste to quit it.
I cannot dismiss this subject, without begging the reader once more to call to mind the sarcasms that citizen Fauchet pours out on the changeable men, who seconded the views of the Government with the most scandalous ostentation, who uttered resolutions and harangues without end, and who made excursions to collect troops, “as soon as it was decided that the French Republic purchased no men to do their duty.” Mr. Randolph lays hold of this word duty, too, as a drowning man would of a straw, and to just as much purpose; for if by this word citizen Fauchet meant the real duty of these haranguers, they were here in the performance of it. Their duty, their allegiance to the United States, required them to speak forcibly to the people, to second the declarations of the general Government, and, if ordered, to make excursions to collect troops; and yet he tells us, or rather he tells the French government, that they did all this, “as soon as it was decided that the French Republic purchased no men to do their duty.” Hence it is a clear case, that what he conceived to be their duty, and what he would have paid them to perform, if he had had money, was exactly the contrary of all this; and exactly the contrary of this would have been an opposition to the general Government, its probable defeat and consequent destruction.
After all, to fix the blackest guilt on the conspirators, it is not necessary to prove what their precise intentions were. It is sufficient that we have the clearest evidence, that in consideration of some thousands of dollars, they would have enabled a foreign nation to decide on civil war or on peace for this country. After having, then, satisfied ourselves with respect to who they are, this is the crime we have to lay to their charge. All their asseverations, all their windings and subterfuges are vain: they will never wash away the stain as long as words shall retain their meaning, and as long as virtue shall hold her seat in our hearts, and reason in our minds.
I have already trespassed on the reader’s
