The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
CONSTITUTION / UNITED STATES / BILL OF RIGHTS
The denunciation of the democratic societies is one of the
extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the
faction of monocrats. It is wonderful indeed, that the President
should have permitted himself to be the organ of such an attack on the
freedom of discussion, the freedom of writing, printing and
publishing. It must be a matter of rare curiosity to get at the
modifications of these rights proposed by them, and to see what line
their ingenuity would draw between democratical societies, whose
avowed object is the nourishment of the republican principles of our
Constitution, and the society of the Cincinnati, a
self-created one, carving out for itself hereditary
distinctions, lowering over our Constitution eternally, meeting
together in all parts of the Union, periodically, with closed doors,
accumulating a capital in their separate treasury, corresponding
secretly and regularly, and of which society the very persons
denouncing the democrats are themselves the fathers, founders and high
officers. Their sight must be perfectly dazzled by the glittering of
crowns and coronets, not to see the extravagance of the proposition to
suppress the friends of general freedom, while those who wish to
confine that freedom to the few, are permitted to go on in their
principles and practices. I here put out of sight the persons whose
misbehavior has been taken advantage of to slander the friends of
popular rights; and I am happy to observe, that as far as the circle
of my observation and information extends, everybody has lost sight of
them, and views the abstract attempt on their natural and
constitutional rights in all its nakedness. I have never heard, or
heard of, a single expression or opinion which did not condemn it as
an inexcusable aggression. And with respect to the transactions
against the excise law, it appears to me that you are all swept away
in the torrent of governmental opinions, or that we do not know what
these transactions have been. We know of none which, according to the
definitions of the law, have been anything more than riotous. There
was indeed a meeting to consult about a separation. But to consult on
a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the
affirmative, still less to the acting on such a determination; but we
shall see, I suppose, what the court lawyers, and courtly judges, and
would-be ambassadors will make of it.
James Madison, 28 December 1794
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