622 Chapter XXVI
But Bonaparte went to Egypt. The United Irish rose and were repressed, in what
Robert Stewart (the future Lord Castlereagh) called “a Jacobinical conspiracy
throughout the kingdom, pursuing its object chiefly with Popish instruments.”^25
The French, too late, landed a few hundred soldiers on the west coast under Gen-
eral Humbert, who was soon obliged to surrender. Lord Grenville thought that if
the French had arrived in force two months sooner the outcome would have been
very different.^26
Canada also had a brief shudder over Cisalpinization. Conspiracies involving
handfuls of Canadians and Vermonters (whose trade outlets were easier through
the St. Lawrence River than through the New England mountains) were rather
trifling in themselves, but they were enough to keep the British authorities in a
state of alarm, so much so that one of the conspirators, David McLane, had not
only been executed in 1797, but executed with all the ancient public solemnity, by
hanging, drawing, and quartering.^27 There is in the French Foreign Office Archives
an unidentifiable memorandum sent from America in February 1798. It declared
that many Canadians were restless, that they preferred an independent republic to
re- annexation to France, that an independent Canada would be useful in checking
the expansion of the United States, and that two American citizens (probably the
Allen brothers from Vermont) were willing to start a revolution, if provided by
France with a mere $2,000 with which to begin bribing the Canadian garrisons.
Apparently the French took no action on this proposal for a Canadian Republic.^28
In the United States, though the country was on the verge of war with France,
there was less internal interference by France in 1798 than in the preceding years.
George Rogers Clark, indeed, using his commission as a general in the French
army, made another attempt, as in 1793, to rally followers to invade and “revolu-
tionize” Louisiana; but he received no encouragement from Paris on this occasion,
and being blocked also by the American government, fled to St. Louis, then a
French village of about a thousand people under the Spanish crown. Between the
Alleghenies and the Mississippi there was a good deal of separatist and democratic
sentiment, and much hostility to the “aristocratic” East and to the British, but little
or no interest in Europe. A separate Western republic, had one ever come into ex-
istence, would have been less welcome to the French than to the British and the
English- speaking Canadians, who were at this time almost all Loyalists born in
the Thirteen Colonies, very much out of sympathy with the American union.
Democracy itself was the great political issue in the United States in 1798, as
it was in Europe; and in the United States, possibly even more than in England,
Holland, Germany, or Italy, conservatives believed that ideas of popular govern-
ment were brought in by foreign malcontents and subversives. The young Phila-
1957), 288; Jackson to James Robertson, Jan. 11, 1798, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson ( Washing-
ton, 1926), I, 42; R. Hayes, Ireland and Irishmen in the French Revolution (London, 1932), 4.
25 Castlereagh to Wickham, Dublin Castle, June 12, 1798, in Memoirs and Correspondence of Vis-
count Castlereagh, 12 vols. (London, 1848–1853), I, 219.
26 Grenville to Rufus King, Dropmore Papers, IV, 288.
27 On McLane see below, p. 752.
28 Translation of a memorandum written in English, entitled “Moyen d’une insurrection dans le
Canada,” sent to Paris with a despatch of Létombe, French consul at Philadelphia, in Archives des
Affaires Etrangères, Corr. Pol., Etats- Unis, Vol. 49.