The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
UNITY / PARTY POLITICS / BRITISH INFLUENCE
The British ministers
found some hopes on the state of our
finances. They have hoped more in their Hartford convention. Their
fears of republican France being now done away, they are directed to
republican America, and they are playing the same game for
disorganization here, which they played in your country. The Marats,
the Dantons and Robespierres of Massachusetts are in the same pay,
under the same orders, and making the same efforts to anarchise us,
that their prototypes in France did there.
I do not say that all who met at Hartford were under the same motives
of money, nor were those of France. Some of them are Outs, and Wish to
be Ins; some the mere dupes of the agitators, or of their own party
passions, while the Maratists alone are in the real secret; but they
have very different materials to work on. The yeomanry of the United
States are not the
canaille of Paris. We might safely give them leave to go
through the United States recruiting their ranks, and I am satisfied
they could not raise one single regiment (gambling merchants and
silk-stocking clerks excepted) who would support them in any effort to
separate from the Union. The cement of this Union is in the
heart-blood of every American. I do not believe there is on earth a
government established on so immovable a basis. Let them, in any
State, even in Massachusetts itself, raise the standard of separation,
and its citizens will rise in mass, and do justice themselves on their
own incendiaries.
Have then no fears for us, my friend. The
grounds of these exist only in English newspapers, edited or endowed
by the Castlereaghs or the Cannings, or some other such models of pure
and uncorrupted virtue. Their military heroes, by land and sea, may
sink our oyster boats, rob our hen roosts, burn our negro huts, and
run off. But a campaign or two more will relieve them from further
trouble or expense in defending their American possessions.
to Marquis de Lafayette, 14 February 1815
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