High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 623
delphia lawyer, Joseph Hopkinson, for example, to arouse his countrymen for war,
wrote Hail Columbia in 1798. It became the first national anthem. Hopkinson’s
ideas were expressed, not in the words of the song, which dwelt only on American
liberty and the greatness of General Washington, but in a pamphlet which he
wrote at about the same time.^29 The French, he here said, having in mind the wave
of Cisalpinization, were out to plunder the world. He then called for stricter laws
of naturalization, since Jacobinism in America was due to the inrush of riff- raff
from Europe, who came to America howling for Liberty and Equality—“fortune-
hunting foreigners... imported patriots from England, Ireland and Scotland...
gangs of discontented and factious emigrants.” If it remained a little unclear, in
Hopkinson’s view, whether the trouble was due to the dreadful French, or to
persons whose native language was English, it was perfectly evident that democ-
racy in America was foreign and unwanted, a mere poison diffused by a European
revolution.
In Brazil also, in 1798, a republican conspiracy was discovered in the city of
Bahia. Four free mulattoes were hanged and quartered. They had declared that
they favored, to quote the official sentence, “the imaginary advantages of a Demo-
cratic Republic, in which all should be equal.”^30 It was the island of Haiti, however,
the former French colony of Saint- Domingue, that saw, in the 1790’s, “the first
great shock between the ideals of white supremacy and race equality.”^31 And here,
in the latter part of the decade, before insurmountable internal and external forces
closed in upon him, Toussaint l’Ouverture seemed almost to be succeeding in
founding a free republic of a kind that some European republicans of 1798, though
hardly those of the United States, might accept as akin to their own.
A Comparative View of the New Republican Order
In the rest of this chapter some observations will be assembled, such as are made
elsewhere in the book in connection with particular countries, to show what was
common to the revolutionary- democratic movement as a whole, which, as Dumou-
riez said, seemed in 1798 to threaten “all political, civil and religious constitutions.”
The class or kind of people to whom the French Directory meant to appeal,
and the images and symbols by which it was believed that this appeal might be
made effective, are suggested in two grand public events staged in Paris in 1798.
In this interval of peace on the continent it was hoped to show what a victory of
republicanism would bring. It is in the triumphant Republic of 1798, as much as
in the harried Republic of 1794, that one should look for the climax of the
Enlightenment.
29 Joseph Hopkinson, What is our situation? and what our Prospects? A few pages for Americans.
(Philadelphia, 1798.) Reprinted in London as What is our situation? and What our prospects, or a Dem-
onstration of the Insidious views of Republican France. By an American. (London, 1799.)
30 A. Ruy, A primeira revoluçao social brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1942), 227. I am indebted to Mr.
and Mrs. Stanley J. Stein for assistance in Portuguese.
31 The phrase is T. Lothrop Stoddard’s, The French Revolution in San Domingo (Boston, 1914), vii.