and discussion in America. The atrocities of the Reign of Terror brought fully home to the American public, to the conservative-minded particularly, the conviction that the Revolution had become diverted from its original principles and aims, and had descended to the plane of brutal despotism, reprehensible both in principle and practice above anything the eyes of men had ever beheld. 1 The leaders of the Revolution clearly were not the high-minded patriots and emancipators their admirers on this side of the ocean had adjudged them to be. The terms "assassin," "savage," "monster," "regicide," began to be employed as the only fit terms whereby to characterize the leading figures in an awful spectacle of butchery and rapine. 2
But not until the religious aspects of the French Revolution are considered, is the deep revulsion of feeling which took place in New England completely laid bare. This feature of the situation had been regarded with deep solicitude from the beginning; 3 and as time went on through the cloud of confusion raised by the dust and smoke of the political developments of the Revolution, it became increase
- 1 Webster, The Revolution in France considered in Respect to its Progress and Effects, New York, 1794. Webster's discriminating pamphlet is one of the most suggestive of all American contemporaneous documents. Cf. Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, p. 259.
- 2 For characteristic outbursts of this nature, cf, Adams, Life and Works, vol. ii, p. 160; Gibbs, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, vol. i, p. 90. Typical newspaper comment similar in vein may be found in the Western Star (Stockbridge, Mass.), March n, 1794, and the Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), April 13, 1793.
- 3 As early as 1790 John Adams had spoken of the French nation as a "republic of atheists." (Works, vol. ix, p. 563.) Other leaders responded to similar sentiments. (Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, p. 266.) Familiarity with French philosophical and religious opinions before the French Revolution had supplied a basis for this concern.
