John Adams, President

JOHN ADAMS took the chair as chief magistrate of the republic, in the spring of 1797, with a powerful, energetic, and disappointed political party in opposition. They lacked only two votes in the electoral college of giving the office to Adams's democratic rival, Thomas Jefferson, who became Vice-president. It was well for Jefferson's peace of mind and his public reputation that he was not elected President at that time, for he could not have satisfied the expectations of the ultra French faction which had gathered around him, and been true to his moral and patriotic convictions of duty to his country.

The French Directory, composed of five persons who had been installed executive rulers of France late in 1795, and who were supported by two legislative chambers known respectively as the Council of Ancients (the Senate) and Council of Five Hundred (the popular Assembly), were then feeling strong and proud, and were treating other governments with great insolence. The victories of the French armies, led by the rising young Napoleon Bonaparte, had given them Northern Italy. They were preparing for an invasion of Ireland with a fair prospect of success (for Irishmen were waiting to join the invaders against the English), and their corsairs were depredating with impunity upon American commerce. In the plenitude of their pride, when they heard that the people of the United States, refusing to bow to their dictation, had probably elected the opponent of their friend, Mr. Jefferson, they declared that until our government had redressed some alleged grievances of which they complained, no minister of our republic should be received by them.

James Monroe, a senator from Virginia, who had been sent to France as minister, in 1794, remained as such after the installation of the Directory. He had been received in a most theatrical manner, as he was properly regarded as the representative of the ultra sympathizers with the French revolutionists, in America. At a public reception in the French National Convention, he read an address written in the style of the missives issued by the American Democratic Societies, to which an enthusiastic member of the Convention replied in a grandiloquent manner, and closed his oration with the following words: "To-day, the sovereign people themselves, by the organ of their faithful representatives, receive you; and you see the tenderness, the effusion of soul, that accompanies this simple and touching ceremony; I am impatient to give you the fraternal embrace, which I am ordered to give in the name of the French people. Come and receive it in the name of the American people, and let this spectacle complete the annihilation of an impious coalition of tyrants." Then Monroe, according to precedent, stepped forward and received and returned the fraternal and national embrace and kiss of the representative of the French people.

Having opposed Jay's treaty at the French republican court, Monroe was recalled by his government in 1796, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina was appointed to fill his place. On Pinckney's arrival in France late in the year with the letter of recall and his own credentials as minister, the Directory refused to receive him. Not only so, but after treating him with great discourtesy, the Directory peremptorily ordered him to leave France. He withdrew to Holland in February, 1797, and there awaited further orders from home. When Mr. Adams took the Presidential chair, the United States were without a diplomatic agent in France.

Disappointed by the failure of the "French party" to elect Mr. Jefferson President of our republic, the insolent Directory, after hearing of the result in the electoral colleges, determined to punish a people who dared to thwart their plans. In May, 1797, they issued a decree which was tantamount to a declaration of war against the United States. It not only authorized the capture of American vessels under certain conditions, but declared that any American found on board of a hostile ship, though placed there without his consent, by impressment, should be hanged as a pirate. The poor American seaman was then continually exposed to impressment into the British service, and by this decree, if found there, he would be subjected to a pirate's fate, by the French! Strangely as it seems, Joel Barlow, an American Democrat who had actively sympathized with the French Jacobins, wrote concerning this savage decree to a relative in this country: "The government here is determined to fleece you to a sufficient degree to bring you to your feeling in the only nerve in which your sensibility lies, which is your pecuniary interest." At a Jacobin festival at Hamburgh, in 1793, Barlow had presented a song that was sung with great glee, written by Thelwall, an Englishman, to the air of God Save the King, the first stanza of which reads: