The Life of John Marshall.
Volume 2.
by Albert J. Beveridge.
CHAPTER I
INFLUENCE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ON AMERICA
Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it now is. (Jefferson.)
That malignant philosophy which can coolly and deliberately pursue, through oceans of blood, abstract systems for the attainment of some fancied untried good. (Marshall.)
The only genuine liberty consists in a mean equally distant from the despotism of an individual and a million. ("Publicola": J. Q.
Adams, 1792.)
The decision of the French King, Louis XVI, on the advice of his Ministers, to weaken Great Britain by aiding the Americans in their War for Independence, while it accomplished its purpose, was fatal to himself and to the Monarchy of France. As a result, Great Britain lost America, but Louis lost his head. Had not the Bourbon Government sent troops, fleets, munitions, and money to the support of the failing and desperate American fortunes, it is probable that Washington would not have prevailed; and the fires of the French holocaust which flamed throughout the world surely would not have been lit so soon.
The success of the American patriots in their armed resistance to the rule of George III, although brought about by the aid of the French Crown, was, nevertheless, the shining and dramatic example which Frenchmen imitated in beginning that vast and elemental upheaval called the French Revolution.[1] Thus the unnatural alliance in 1778 between French Autocracy and American Liberty was one of the great and decisive events of human history.
In the same year, 1789, that the American Republic began its career under the forms of a National Government, the curtain rose in France on that tremendous drama which will forever engage the interest of mankind.
And just as the American Revolution vitally influenced French opinion, so the French Revolution profoundly affected American thought; and, definitely, helped to shape those contending forces in American life that are still waging their conflict.
While the economic issue, so sharp in the adoption of the Const.i.tution, became still keener, as will appear, after the National Government was established, it was given a higher temper in the forge of the French Revolution. American history, especially of the period now under consideration, can be read correctly only by the lights that shine from that t.i.tanic smithy; can be understood only by considering the effect upon the people, the thinkers, and the statesmen of America, of the deeds done and words spoken in France during those inspiring if monstrous years.
The naturally conservative or radical temperaments of men in America were hardened by every episode of the French convulsion. The events in France, at this time, operated upon men like Hamilton on the one hand, and Jefferson on the other hand, in a fashion as deep and lasting as it was antagonistic and antipodal; and the intellectual and moral phenomena, manifested in picturesque guise among the people in America, impressed those who already were, and those who were to become, the leaders of American opinion, as much as the events of the Gallic cataclysm itself.
George Washington at the summit of his fame, and John Marshall just beginning his ascent, were alike confirmed in that non-popular tendency of thought and feeling which both avowed in the dark years between our War for Independence and the adoption of our Const.i.tution.[2] In reviewing all the situations, not otherwise to be fully understood, that arose from the time Washington became President until Marshall took his seat as Chief Justice, we must have always before our eyes the extraordinary scenes and consider the delirious emotions which the French Revolution produced in America. It must be constantly borne in mind that Americans of the period now under discussion did not and could not look upon it with present-day knowledge, perspective, or calmness.
What is here set down is, therefore, an attempt to portray the effects of that volcanic eruption of human forces upon the minds and hearts of those who witnessed, from across the ocean, its flames mounting to the heavens and its lava pouring over the whole earth.
Unless this portrayal is given, a blank must be left in a recital of the development of American radical and conservative sentiment and of the formation of the first of American political parties. Certainly for the purposes of the present work, an outline, at least, of the effect of the French Revolution on American thought and feeling is indispensable. Just as the careers of Marshall and Jefferson are inseparably intertwined, and as neither can be fully understood without considering the other, so the American by-products of the French Revolution must be examined if we would comprehend either of these great protagonists of hostile theories of democratic government.
At first everybody in America heartily approved the French reform movement. Marshall describes for us this unanimous approbation. "A great revolution had commenced in that country," he writes, "the first stage of which was completed by limiting the powers of the monarch, and by the establishment of a popular a.s.sembly. In no part of the globe was this revolution hailed with more joy than in America. The influence it would have on the affairs of the world was not then distinctly foreseen; and the philanthropist, without becoming a political partisan, rejoiced in the event. On this subject, therefore, but one sentiment existed."[3]
Jefferson had written from Paris, a short time before leaving for America: "A complete revolution in this [French] government, has been effected merely by the force of public opinion; ... and this revolution has not cost a single life."[4] So little did his glowing mind then understand the forces which he had helped set in motion. A little later he advises Madison of the danger threatening the reformed French Government, but adds, rea.s.suringly, that though "the lees ... of the patriotic party [the French radical party] of wicked principles & desperate fortunes" led by Mirabeau who "is the chief ... may produce a temporary confusion ... they cannot have success ultimately. The King, the ma.s.s of the substantial people of the whole country, the army, and the influential part of the clergy, form a firm phalanx which must prevail."[5]
So, in the beginning, all American newspapers, now more numerous, were exultant. "Liberty will have another feather in her cap.... The ensuing winter [1789] will be the commencement of a Golden Age,"[6] was the glowing prophecy of an enthusiastic Boston journal. Those two sentences of the New England editor accurately stated the expectation and belief of all America.
But in France itself one American had grave misgivings as to the outcome. "The materials for a revolution in this country are very indifferent. Everybody agrees that there is an utter prostration of morals; but this general position can never convey to an American mind the degree of depravity.... A hundred thousand examples are required to show the extreme rottenness.... The virtuous ... stand forward from a background deeply and darkly shaded.... From such crumbling matter ...
the great edifice of freedom is to be erected here [in France]....
[There is] a perfect indifference to the violation of engagements....
Inconstancy is mingled in the blood, marrow, and very essence of this people.... Consistency is a phenomenon.... The great ma.s.s of the common people have ... no morals but their interest. These are the creatures who, led by drunken curates, are now in the high road _a la liberte_."[7] Such was the report sent to Washington by Gouverneur Morris, the first American Minister to France under the Const.i.tution.
Three months later Morris, writing officially, declares that "this country is ... as near to anarchy as society can approach without dissolution."[8] And yet, a year earlier, Lafayette had lamented the French public"s indifference to much needed reforms; "The people ...
have been so dull that it has made me sick" was Lafayette"s doleful account of popular enthusiasm for liberty in the France of 1788.[9]
Gouverneur Morris wrote Robert Morris that a French owner of a quarry demanded damages because so many bodies had been dumped into the quarry that they "choked it up so that he could not get men to work at it."
These victims, declared the American Minister, had been "the best people," killed "without form of trial, and their bodies thrown like dead dogs into the first hole that offered."[10] Gouverneur Morris"s diary abounds in such entries as "[Sept. 2, 1792] the murder of the priests, ... murder of prisoners,... [Sept. 3] The murdering continues all day.... [Sept. 4th].... And still the murders continue."[11]
John Marshall was now the attorney of Robert Morris; was closely connected with him in business transactions; and, as will appear, was soon to become his relative by the marriage of Marshall"s brother to the daughter of the Philadelphia financier. Gouverneur Morris, while not related to Robert Morris, was "entirely devoted" to and closely a.s.sociated with him in business; and both were in perfect agreement of opinions.[12] Thus the reports of the scarlet and revolting phases of the French Revolution that came to the Virginia lawyer were carried through channels peculiarly personal and intimate.
They came, too, from an observer who was thoroughly aristocratic in temperament and conviction.[13] Little of appreciation or understanding of the basic causes and high purposes of the French Revolution appears in Gouverneur Morris"s accounts and comments, while he portrays the horrible in unrelieved ghastliness.[14]
Such, then, were the direct and first-hand accounts that Marshall received; and the impression made upon him was correspondingly dark, and as lasting as it was somber. Of this, Marshall himself leaves us in no doubt. Writing more than a decade later he gives his estimate of Gouverneur Morris and of his accounts of the French Revolution.
"The private correspondence of Mr. Morris with the president [and, of course, much more so with Robert Morris] exhibits a faithful picture, drawn by the hand of a master, of the shifting revolutionary scenes which with unparalleled rapidity succeeded each other in Paris. With the eye of an intelligent, and of an unimpa.s.sioned observer, he marked all pa.s.sing events, and communicated them with fidelity. He did not mistake despotism for freedom, because it was sanguinary, because it was exercised by those who denominated themselves the people, or because it a.s.sumed the name of liberty. Sincerely wishing happiness and a really free government to France, he could not be blind to the obvious truth that the road to those blessings had been mistaken."[15]
Everybody in America echoed the shouts of the Parisian populace when the Bastille fell. Was it not the prison where kings thrust their subjects to perish of starvation and torture?[16] Lafayette, "as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch," hastened to present Washington with "the main key of the fortress of despotism."[17] Washington responded that he accepted the key of the Bastille as "a token of the victory gained by liberty."[18] Thomas Paine wrote of his delight at having been chosen by Lafayette to "convey ... the first ripe fruits of American principles, transplanted into Europe, to his master and patron."[19] Mutual congratulations were carried back and forth by every ship.
Soon the mob in Paris took more sanguinary action and blood flowed more freely, but not in sufficient quant.i.ty to quench American enthusiasm for the cause of liberty in France. We had had plenty of mobs ourselves and much crimson experience. Had not mobs been the precursors of our own Revolution?
The next developments of the French uprising and the appearance of the Jacobin Clubs, however, alarmed some and gave pause to all of the cautious friends of freedom in America and other countries.
Edmund Burke hysterically sounded the alarm. On account of his championship of the cause of American Independence, Burke had enjoyed much credit with all Americans who had heard of him. "In the last age,"
exclaimed Burke in Parliament, February 9, 1790, "we were in danger of being entangled by the example of France in the net of a relentless despotism.... Our present danger from the example of a people whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger of being led, through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, b.l.o.o.d.y, and tyrannical democracy."[20]
Of the French declaration of human rights Burke declared: "They made and recorded a sort of _inst.i.tute_ and _digest_ of anarchy, called the rights of man, in such a pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at school.... They systematically destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people.[21]... On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings," exclaimed the great English liberal, "laws are to be supported only by their own terrours.... In the groves of _their_ academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."[22]
Burke"s extravagant rhetoric, although reprinted in America, was little heeded. It would have been better if his pen had remained idle. For Burke"s wild language, not yet justified by the orgy of blood in which French liberty was, later, to be baptized, caused a voice to speak to which America did listen, a page to be written that America did read.
Thomas Paine, whose "Common Sense" had made his name better known to all people in the United States than that of any other man of his time except Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Henry, was then in France.
This stormy petrel of revolution seems always to have been drawn by instinct to every part of the human ocean where hurricanes were brooding.[23]
Paine answered Burke with that ferocious indictment of monarchy ent.i.tled "The Rights of Man," in which he went as far to one extreme as the English political philosopher had gone to the other; for while Paine annihilated Burke"s Brahminic laudation of rank, t.i.tle, and custom, he also penned a doctrine of paralysis to all government. As was the case with his "Common Sense," Paine"s "Rights of Man" abounded in attractive epigrams and striking sentences which quickly caught the popular ear and were easily retained by the shallowest memory.
"The cause of the French people is that of ... the whole world,"
declared Paine in the preface of his flaming essay;[24] and then, the sparks beginning to fly from his pen, he wrote: "Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government.... It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished.... The instant formal government is abolished," said he, "society begins to act; ... and common interest produces common security." And again: "The more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government.... It is but few general laws that civilised life requires."
Holding up our own struggle for liberty as an ill.u.s.tration, Paine declared: "The American Revolution ... laid open the imposition of governments"; and, using our newly formed and untried National Government as an example, he a.s.serted with grotesque inaccuracy: "In America ... all the parts are brought into cordial unison. There the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged.... Their taxes are few, because their government is just."[25]
Proceeding thence to his a.s.sault upon all other established governments, especially that of England, the great iconoclast exclaimed: "It is impossible that such governments as have hitherto [1790] existed in the world, could have commenced by any other means than a violation of every principle sacred and moral."
Striking at the foundations of all permanent authority, Paine declared that "Every age and generation must be ... free to act for itself _in all cases_.... The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies." The people of yesterday have "no right ... to bind or to control ... the people of the present day ... _in any shape whatever_.... Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require."[26]
So wrote the incomparable pamphleteer of radicalism.
Paine"s essay, issued in two parts, was a torch successively applied to the inflammable emotions of the American ma.s.ses. Most newspapers printed in each issue short and appealing excerpts from it. For example, the following sentence from Paine"s "Rights of Man" was reproduced in the "Columbian Centinel" of Boston on June 6, 1792: "Can we possibly suppose that if government had originated in right principles and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, that the world could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition it is?" Such quotations from Paine appeared in all radical and in some conservative American publications; and they were repeated from mouth to mouth until even the backwoodsmen knew of them--and believed them.
"Our people ... love what you write and read it with delight" ran the message which Jefferson sent across the ocean to Paine. "The printers,"
continued Jefferson, "season every newspaper with extracts from your last, as they did before from your first part of the _Rights of Man_.
They have both served here to separate the wheat from the chaff....
Would you believe it possible that in this country there should be high & important characters[27] who need your lessons in republicanism & who do not heed them. It is but too true that we have a sect preaching up & pouting after an English const.i.tution of king, lords, & commons, & whose heads are itching for crowns, coronets & mitres....
"Go on then," Jefferson urged Paine, "in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword, ... and be a.s.sured that it has not a more sincere votary nor you a more ardent well-wisher than ... Tho^s.
Jefferson."[28]
And the wheat was being separated from the chaff, as Jefferson declared.
Shocked not more by the increasing violence in France than by the principles which Paine announced, men of moderate mind and conservative temperament in America came to have misgivings about the French Revolution, and began to speak out against its doings and its doctrines.