Philadelphia (Repplier)/Chapter 17
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THE French Revolution, which followed so swiftly upon our own, was watched in the United States with a breathless interest, in no wise lessened by the difficulty of obtaining news. Excitement, which is now alternately awakened and allayed by daily cablegrams, each contradicting the message of the previous morning, then burned with a steady intensity. The birth of the French Republic was hailed with joy, and its baptism in blood was passed over as lightly as such unpleasant details would permit. The gratitude which our country felt for the assistance France had given us in our sorest need, disposed the mass of people to forgive her the excesses which were committed across so many miles of ocean. Distance softens the direst horrors, and enables us to endure with tranquillity, evils too ghastly for a near acquaintance. The death of King Louis sent, indeed, a thrill of shame and sorrow through thousands of hearts that had not wholly forgotten his ancient friendship for the colonies, nor the times when his birthday was kept as a civic festival. But this temporary revulsion of feeling was, in turn, overcome by a sudden and keen enthusiasm when it was generally known that the young Republic, as brave as it was cruel, had declared war against England and Spain, and that Citizen Genet was on his way to the United States to demand succour and support.
The satisfaction, it must be admitted, was confined wholly to the people. The President and the Congress felt nothing but doubt, perplexity and chagrin. Genet landed at Charleston, and consumed four weeks in getting to Philadelphia. His journey was like a royal progress, impeded at every step by public and flattering ovations, well calculated to turn a stronger head. By the time he reached his destination, he was naturally convinced of his own supreme importance, and the reception given him by the city served to increase rather than to lessen this delusion. His coming was heralded by the French frigate, l'Ambuscade, which, on the second of May, sailed up the river, and anchored at the Market Street wharf, amid the wild acclamations of the crowd. She was a self-assertive frigate, leaving no one in doubt of her intentions. A liberty cap adorned her foremast, from which floated a pennon, inscribed, "Enemies of equality, reform or tremble!" Her mainmast bore a similar legend: "Freemen, we are your friends and brothers;" and her mizzenmast proclaimed to the world: "We are armed to defend the rights of men." She fired a salute of fifteen guns, and was answered rapturously from the shore, while the bells of Christ Church pealed out their shrill and joyous welcome, and the throngs along the river front shouted their hoarse delight.
Two weeks later, Genet arrived, and was met at Gray's Ferry by a vast concourse of townspeople who brought him triumphantly into the city, presented him with a glowing address, and prepared a grand banquet for him at Oeller's Tavern. Among his ardent friends and partisans were Citizens Dallas, Rittenhouse, Duponçeau, Charles Biddle, Thomas Mifflin and Thomas Jefferson; for it is to be observed that "citizen" was now considered the only title fit for a son of freedom. Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown became Citizen Smith and Citizen Brown, and felt themselves much altered and purified by the transformation.
At the tavern dinner, vast enthusiasm was displayed. Duponçeau read a French ode, which might have been better enjoyed if it had been more generally understood. The Marseillaise was sung with fervour, and Genet treated the company to a "truly patriotic and Republican song," which Mr. MacMaster quotes entire, but of which one verse will suffice to show the merits.
After this poetic outburst, the bonnet rouge was solemnly placed upon the head of every guest, beginning with the French minister, who was probably the only man to feel at ease during the ceremony.
In sharp contrast to all this popular excitation was the cold reception given by Washington to the unwelcome representative of the new Republic. Genet, who was already deeply angered by the proclamation of neutrality, felt himself outraged by the President's formal words and chilling demeanour, to say nothing of the medallion of Louis XVI. which he perceived upon the wall of the drawing-room, and which he resented as an "insult" to his nation. His demand for the two millions which the United States still owed to France was not unreasonable, for the money was sorely needed; but Hamilton reported the treasury to be empty,—its chronic state,—and declared that to anticipate the date fixed for the payment of the debt, which could only be done by an act of Congress, would be to violate the treaty of neutrality. As for the "fraternal compact" which the envoy hoped to establish between the two countries, nothing could have been less desired by the
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President, the Congress, the shipping merchants, whose trade with England was at stake, or the conservative citizens who mistrusted, not without reason, the methods and morals of our proposed ally.
On the other hand, the mass of the people were eager to support France in her tremendous struggle, and to them Genet made an open appeal for sympathy. The populace, as he knew, had ruled Paris, and, through Paris, France. Why should not the same power be absolute in the United States? Moreover, he had the sanction of the National Gazette, the organ of the extreme Republicans, and the mouthpiece of Mr. Jefferson, which habitually censured Washington and the administration, and spoke with fervid scorn of "Mr. Hamilton's myrmidons," by which it meant all holders of bank-stock or government bonds. To the people accordingly—sacred depositaries of wisdom and understanding—the French minister turned for aid; and they responded with a cordial vehemence as pleasing as it was profitless. Revolutionary societies, in imitation of the Jacobin clubs, were founded in Philadelphia. Bands of Genatines, as they were called, paraded the streets, singing "Ça ira," when sober citizens were in bed, and swearing that the United States should be forced to fight Great Britain. "Ten thousand men," wrote John Adams, who was seriously alarmed at the crisis, "were in the streets of Philadelphia day after day, threatening to drag Washington out of his house, and effect a revolution in the government, or compel it to declare in favour of the French, and against England."
To give our Quaker town a still more lively resemblance to unshackled Paris, women and children took part in these feverish demonstrations. Young people of both sexes thronged the highways, all wearing tri-coloured cockades, and singing the Marseillaise, or that lurid chant,
without having any very clear conception, owing to the general ignorance of French, of just what the words implied. In Girard Street, then an open square, unadorned by the spacious old houses and quiet gardens which made it for years one of the most respectable of thoroughfares, a liberty pole was erected, surmounted by the bonnet rouge; and around it danced, hand in hand, boys of twelve and decent grey-haired men, all shrieking revolutionary songs, and all mad with the fierce excitement of the hour. Even the better class of citizens who favoured the cause of France were not restrained by taste or judgment from acts of coarse brutality. At a dinner presided over by Governor Mifflin, a roast pig was brought in to personate King Louis, and its head, severed from its body, was carried around the table, amid triumphant jeers, and cries of "Tyrant! Tyrant!" A Philadelphia tavern was suffered to display upon its sign-board a revolting picture of the bloody and mutilated corpse of Marie Antoinette. What wonder that Genet, reminded at every turn of Paris and its familiar delights, should have deemed his cause secure? What wonder that he grew bolder and bolder in his support of the French privateers, and more and more insolent in his tone towards the President and the administration? How could he suppose that this fever would fade away as swiftly and as unreasonably as it had come? A few more public dinners, a few more speeches, a few more songs and experiments with the bonnet rouge,—and even his friends wearied somewhat of the cause. Washington, who was at no time long-suffering where the dignity of his position was at stake, demanded and obtained the recall of a minister who had violated every principle of diplomacy. His successor, Citizen Fauchet, arrived in February, 1794; but by that time the Reign of Terror was nearing its end. Genet lingered in the United States until summer, and then the death of Robespierre convinced him that France was no longer a safe abode for too ardent Jacobins. He decided to remain where he could be sure of keeping his head upon his shoulders; and, selecting a home in New York, he made many friends, and won for himself two American wives before he died in 1834.
Even while the revolutionary craze was at its height, French émigrés, fleeing from the embraces of the guillotine, found a hospitable retreat in Philadelphia, bringing with them gayety and grace which lent their very poverty an air of distinction, and made it seem a different thing from the sordid narrowness, the troubled reticence of Anglo-Saxon penury. When, a few years later, Louis Philippe sought shelter in the same quiet haven, he lived in a single room over a barber's shop. Here he gave one night a little dinner to some very distinguished guests, and apologized with serene good-humour for seating half of his visitors on his bed. "I have myself been in much less comfortable places," he said cheerfully, "and without the consolation of agreeable company."
In August, 1793, Philadelphia's enthusiasms and animosities, her joys and follies, were stifled into one common fear by the breaking out of the yellow fever. Amid the terrible scenes that ensued no one had leisure to cherish hysterical sentiment; no one remembered to say "Citizen Brown" or "Citess Robinson"; no one cared whether France was a republic, a monarchy, or an empire. There was an end to all capering about liberty poles, for Death was dancing grimly in the desolate streets, and he shared his merriment with none. Through the whole summer the disease had been raging in the West Indies, and vessels from the infected ports, being permitted to enter the city's docks without inspection or quarantine, brought the contagion swiftly to our doors. Its first stealthy advances awakened little notice. A few stevedores, a sailor or two, died, and no one knew what ailed them. More sickened, and suddenly, without further warning, without pause for mere suspicion or uncertainty, the terrified city realized that she was in the grasp of the pestilence. On the twenty-first of August, Dr. Benjamin Rush writes the first of a long and deeply interesting series of letters to his absent wife. A malignant fever, he says, has broken out on the river front. Already he has been called on to treat a dozen patients, and three of them are dead. Two days later, Elizabeth Drinker notes with characteristic brevity in her diary: "A fever prevails in ye City, particularly on Water St., between Race and Arch Sts., of ye malignant kind; numbers have died of it."
From this time until the coming of the first keen frosts of November, the story of Philadelphia is like the oft-repeated story of the Plague. The fever swept as a whirlwind through Water Street, leaving none but dead behind it, and spread with horrible speed into every quarter of the town. In the panic that ensued, there was a mad rush for the safety of the open fields and the adjacent towns. Seventeen thousand people fled within a month. The mayor, Matthew Clarkson, stood stoutly at his post, and, with the help of a committee chiefly composed of Quakers, organized measures of relief,—measures which were necessarily inadequate, though they alleviated the untold misery of the poor. People burned tar in the streets, and carried sprigs of wormwood,—pitiful, impotent little remedies, by which they hoped to stay the relentless hand of death. The corpses were buried quietly at night, as in plague-stricken London; and through the
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scattered suburbs of the city, men and women, unable to secure the services of undertakers, dug lonely graves in fields and woods, and laid their lost to rest. Elizabeth Drinker's diary is filled with horrors that affect us all the more powerfully because, Quaker-like, she allows herself no license in narrating them. In that vain frenzy of selfishness which stifles pity, those who were yet untainted thrust their sick and dying into the streets, or fled themselves from the squalid rooms where Death was busy with his work. Amid so much brutality, so much callous indifference to ties of kinship and affection, it is touching to read of the poor sailor, haggard and heartbroken, who stopped Dr. Rush in the street, and offered him twenty pounds—a sailor's fortune—if he would pay but a single visit to his infected wife.
Indeed, painful as are the details which Dr. Rush is necessarily forced to relate, his letters breathe such steadfastness of purpose, such fortitude, such unbroken, unostentatious heroism, that they invigorate rather than depress the reader. "I enjoy good health and uncommon tranquillity of mind," he writes in the beginning of this terrible season; and when, two months later, his health is shattered by repeated attacks of the fever, his tranquillity is still unmarred. Never once does the absent wife stoop to beg her husband to consider his own safety; never once does the physician remember with a selfish pang that every risk he runs jeopardizes the welfare of his family. The path of duty is so clearly and sharply defined that there is no room in either heart for the consideration of side issues.
In justice to human nature, however, it must be admitted that in this case duty received a splendid stimulus from professional pride and professional hostility. Dr. Rush discovered a remedy for the fever, which he firmly believed and asserted to be infallible, if taken in time. He bled his patients as freely as though he had been a sixteenth century practitioner, and he dosed them with jalap and mercury instead of the quinine usually prescribed. The majority of Philadelphia's doctors repudiated this treatment, and the battle that raged around the bedsides of the sick and dying lent zest to the physicians' perilous labours. They risked their lives hourly, but they had the honour of science as well as the good of humanity to sustain them.
Dr. Rush's sentiments are never a matter for doubt. On the thirteenth of September he writes: "Yesterday was a day of triumph to mercury, jalap, and bleeding. I am satisfied that they saved in my hands nearly one hundred lives. . . . Scores are daily sacrificed to bark and wine." As the fever grew more deadly, the contest deepened and darkened. "The physicians murder by rule," he writes on September 21st. "Nor is this all; they have confederated against me in the most cruel manner, and are propagating calumnies against me in every part of the city. . . . Never before did I witness such a mass of ignorance and wickedness as our profession has exhibited in the course of the present calamity."
Life is not wholly a burden to any man who cherishes such hearty antagonism as this, and it is plain that wrath was a most excellent tonic to the good doctor, and helped him materially to face the daily perils that beset him. The city, he admits, was a mass of contagion. The tainted air was loaded with foul and nauseating odours. He himself was as deeply poisoned as Rappaccini's daughter, and believed that, like the maid, he was safe from all further infection. "I ascribe my freedom from fatigue and my sleepless nights wholly to the stimulus of the contagion in my system," he writes; "for I am so full of it that it has now become part of myself. It is not dangerous unless excited into action by heat, cold, fatigue, or high living."
This is the language of enthusiasm, and in this exalted frame of mind he battled to the end. When at last the cold weather checked the progress of the fever, it had counted nearly five thousand victims, a ghastly reckoning if we remember that the city, deserted by all who could escape, held less than thirty thousand inhabitants during the greater part of these terrible months. When the pestilence was at its height, two hundred victims were buried in a single day; and often the frightened housewife, opening her door cautiously in the early morning, would see upon her step the swollen corpse of some abandoned creature who had crawled thither to perish, alone and unpitied, in the night. Ten physicians and ten clergymen—two of them Roman Catholic priests—died in the fulfillment of their duties; and to the brave and tranquil charity of the Quakers many stricken wretches owed their lives.
The battle of the drugs, however, had not yet been fought to the close. It was renewed with much spirit and animosity when the yellow fever revisited Philadelphia, in a less virulent form, during several succeeding summers. Dr. Rush endured the attacks of his brother practitioners with what slender patience he could muster; but when, in 1797, William Cobbett ridiculed him unmercifully in Peter Porcupine's Gazette, and likened his treatment to that of Dr. Sangrado, he promptly sued the Englishman for libel, and was granted damages to the extent of five thousand dollars. It was an enormous sum for those days; but the physician was beloved by the community he had served, and the journalist was unpopular, both as a foreigner, and as a satirist who habitually and unwisely hurled his shafts at the idols of the populace. The verdict ruined him. His property was seized, and sold at a sacrifice. He returned to England, and from that day forth no man diverted himself at the expense of mercury and jalap. The pastime was held to be too costly.
With the approach of winter, the coming back of the frightened exiles, and the comforting assurance that the fever was at an end, Philadelphia felt herself encouraged to take up once more, though in a modified form, her interrupted sansculottism. She began by holding a modest meeting in the State House yard to protest against the seizure of American vessels by British cruisers, and to urge the government to extend to France every favour which "friendship can dictate, and justice can allow." This was the little end of the wedge, and was followed in a few weeks by a public parade, and a public dinner, at which Citizen Fauchet received the "fraternal embraces" of his American sympathizers, "amid the animated joy and acclamations of the whole company." The vestry of Christ Church was at the same time bidden to remove from the east front of the edifice an ancient medallion, containing a bas-relief of George II.; and though the order emanated only from that dubious authority, "the people," it was promptly and patiently obeyed.
In early summer the city amused itself with a grand demonstration in honour of the French Republic. A statue of liberty was erected at Twelfth and Market Streets; and, on an altar at its base, young girls strewed offerings of flowers, while an oration in French was pronounced, and fraternal embraces were exchanged. The crowd, delighted with the spectacle, sang the Marseillaise, danced the Carmagnole, made a bonfire of the English flag, and rapturously applauded the sentiment, "May tyrants never be withheld from the guillotine's closest embraces."
It seemed like a repetition of the mad folly which a year before had supported Citizen Genet's insolent assumption of authority, but there was this difference between the two situations. Then the rabid Republicans really hoped to force the administration into an alliance with France; now they knew that all such hopes were futile. They were at liberty to be as picturesquely and sentimentally Gallic as they pleased; but while they were wearing tri-coloured cockades, and singing the Marseillaise in our once decorous Quaker streets, Chief Justice Jay was in England, negotiating a treaty in the interests of long-neglected commerce. It is true that this treaty was exceedingly hateful to the populace, which swore that the chief justice had sold his country to Great Britain, and which manifested its displeasure by burning his effigy at Kensington, breaking the windows of the English consul and of Mr. William Bingham, and bitterly maligning the government. It is true that at a town meeting which was attended by Stephen Girard and a number of prominent men, a resolution was adopted, stating briefly and angrily that "the citizens of Philadelphia do not approve of the treaty between Lord Grenville and Mr. Jay." Yet Washington's serenity was undisturbed. Perhaps he did not care whether the citizens of Philadelphia approved or disapproved. He had braved their displeasure before this, and they had vilified him—as he wrote to Mr. Jefferson—"in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a defaulter, or a common pick-pocket." Perhaps he was upheld by the knowledge that the merchants and shippers of the city were eager for their interrupted trade. The treaty was ratified on the eleventh of August, and the President listened
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Jefferson's Chair
unmoved to the echoes of the hostility it aroused.
And indeed it was high time that the authority of the administration should be asserted and maintained. The Scotch-Irish whiskey distillers of Pennsylvania had for years ignored or opposed the excise law, as a form of taxation of which they personally disapproved, and which they, in consequence, resolutely declined to pay. Advice, expostulation, reasoning, had all been tried in vain. They responded by tarring and feathering the collectors, and by threatening to burn Pittsburg, then a village of only twelve hundred inhabitants. A "second Sodom," the pious insurgents called this straggling township, and declared themselves ready to play the rôle of an avenging Providence, and destroy it. It was not until the patience of the government had been exhausted, and an army of fifteen thousand men had been sent into Pennsylvania, prepared to argue the matter "in platoons," that the distillers were convinced of their error, and realized that it was no longer their privilege to obey or reject at discretion the laws of the United States.
In Philadelphia, the same spirit of what was then termed liberty vented itself in reckless declamation, and in a lively sympathy for France, as the country which had assuredly presented to the world the most expansive theory of freedom. So exceedingly French had we become that Citizen Adet, who had in turn replaced Citizen Fauchet, requested the suppression of the town directory, because the English minister's name had been printed in it before his own, and the public supported him in this mild demand, with which the publishers stoutly declined to comply. Cobbett, who undertook to fight the battle of Great Britain in Peter Porcupine's Gazette, was the object of a deeper hostility than often falls to the lot of any one man, a relentless hostility which seemed to give him genuine satisfaction until it proved his ruin. Even the repeated seizures of American vessels by French privateers, though it sorely damped our enthusiasm, could not altogether subdue it; and Dr. George Logan, an ardent Republican and anti-Federalist, conceived the brilliant idea of going to France as a self-appointed "ambassador of the people," to obtain a redress of this grievance.
His mission, which was generally understood though not openly acknowledged, aroused profound excitement in Philadelphia. Friends and followers sang his praises loudly; conservative people asked themselves what would be the result if private citizens should often undertake to settle their country's difficulties, without the authority of the administration; and hostile Federal newspapers made the most of the situation by pretending to believe he had gone to obtain the help of a foreign power, and that his object was the destruction of our government, and the establishment of an American Reign of Terror. "Can any sensible man hesitate to suspect," piped the Philadelphia Gazette, "that Dr. Logan's infernal design can be anything less than the introduction of a French army, to teach us the value of true and essential liberty by reorganizing our government through the blessed operation of the bayonet and the guillotine? Let every American now gird on his sword. The demagogue has gone to the Directory for purposes of destruction to your lives, property, liberty, and holy religion."
It was all deeply interesting, though the concluding chapters seem a little tame. Dr. Logan returned home without an army at his heels, and without having softened the hearts of the Directory. He was coldly received by Mr. Adams who did not approve of self-appointed envoys. The official representatives of the United States met, however, with no greater success; and the aggressive attitude maintained by France made our unreciprocated admiration a trifle ridiculous, even in our own eyes. "Hail Columbia!" written by Hopkinson, and first sung in Philadelphia on the twenty-fifth of April, 1798, took the public fancy by storm, and gradually supplanted the Marseillaise, although denounced by the extreme Republicans as an "Anglo-monarchical" anthem. Amid so many cares, interests, and anxieties of our own, it became impossible to fix our attention permanently upon the triumphant career of a foreign nation, especially upon a foreign nation which seized our ships, and paid no attention to our continued remonstrances. Philadelphia was on the eve of a great change which was to materially alter her history and her character. She had long been the most important city of the colonies, and of the United States. She had been the centre and the heart of our national life. She had been the lawgiver, both of Pennsylvania and of the Republic. She had been proud, gay, quarrelsome, and wantonly extravagant. She had well-nigh forgotten the lessons of her Founder. Now her honours were about to be wrested from her, one by one. In 1799 the state Legislature was removed to Harrisburg, and Philadelphia, after a reign of one hundred and seventeen years, was no longer the capital of her province. In 1800 the Federal government was carried to Washington, and with it went political supremacy, and that social distinction which was then its closest ally, and which can never be wholly divorced from the centre of political power.
The nation, too, was in a state of transition and restless anxiety. Adams had succeeded to the presidency, and in December, 1799, Washington died. He was buried at Mount Vernon; but Philadelphia, excited and sorrowful, decreed him funeral honours, dragged his empty bier through her streets, and listened at night to a monody, delivered at her theatre to the accompaniment of solemn dirges. The stage was decorated with a huge catafalque, bearing the hero's portrait encircled by an oak wreath. Above was an eagle weeping tears of blood, and, underneath, an inscription explaining with needless lucidity that these were the nation's tears.
The diary of Elizabeth Drinker contains two long entries, the unwonted details of which clearly show that even tranquil Quaker households were deeply interested in these mournful commemorations, in which—as Friends—they could not conscientiously take part, but which they were just as eager as other people to see. On the twenty-fifth of December, she writes: "There are to be great doings to-morrow by way of respect to George Washington; a funeral procession, and an oration or eulogium to be delivered by Henry Lee, a member of Congress from Virginia. The members of Congress are to wear deep mourning; the citizens generally are to wear crape around their arms for six months. Congress-hall is in mourning, and even the Play-house. There has been, and is like to be, much said and done on the occasion. I was sorry to hear of his death, and so are many others who make no show. Those forms, to be sure, are out of our way; but many will join in ye form that cared little about him."
On the twenty-seventh of December, she writes again: "The funeral procession in honour of ye late Commander-in-chief of the Armies of the United States, Lieut. Gen. Washington, yesterday took place. They assembled at the State-house, and went from thence in grand procession to ye Dutch church in Fourth Street, called Zion church, where Major Gen. Henry Lee delivered an oration to four thousand persons, or near that number, who were, 'tis said, within the church. Ye concourse of people in ye streets and at ye windows was very numerous. Nancy and Molly were at their sister Sally's, to gratify their curiosity.
So all is over with G. Washington."