752 Chapter XXXI
country west of the Alleghenies from the United States.^8 Meanwhile George
Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Illinois country, the hero of Kentucky republi-
cans, and the co- worker of Genet, concluded that the United States was controlled
by a British faction which he detested. He went to St. Louis, and there, among its
French population, hoped for a time, in 1798, that Louisiana would come under
the control of France.
At the same time there were mysterious contacts between Lower Canada and
Vermont. In 1796 the Vermonter, Ira Allen, was captured by the British at sea,
aboard a vessel, the Olive Branch, carrying 20,000 muskets bought in France, pre-
sumably for use in a Canadian revolution. Létombe, left as French consul at Phila-
delphia after Adet’s recall, received approaches from conspirators, including two
Americans who offered to revolutionize Canada and set up a republic there.^9
There were some Vermonters who, if given the option, would prefer to be joined
with an independent Canadian Republic rather than with the United States, since
the only easy mode of communication of Vermont with the outside world was by
the Richelieu and St. Lawrence rivers. In view of such plots the government of
Lower Canada passed a sedition act in 1797. Its most spectacular victim was David
McLane, who was in fact guilty of subversion, and who was hanged at Quebec in
1797.^10 It has already been remarked how the Abbé Barruel included McLane in
his list of “adepts” of the international revolution, and how the British edition of
his work, and hence the American, simply deleted his name, as if to suggest that
such things—except in France—should best be forgotten.
It would be wrong to suggest that any possibility of revolution existed in British
or in Latin America, Haiti excepted, before 1800. It is clear, however, that pockets
of discontent could be found, and that there were conspirators who hoped to imi-
tate or benefit from the French Revolution. Persons were executed for sedition
from Quebec and Quito to Bahia and Buenos Aires. In the United States no one
was executed under the Sedition Act of 1798, and in that respect the politics of the
United States exhibited a certain moderation. The hanging of numerous rebel
slaves was regarded as a police action, of no political consequence; just as the desire
8 Collot’s travels were published in 1826 in Paris in both French and English; both are rare, and
the present reference is to the edition in English, A Journey in North America, 247–51. See also D.
Echeverria, “General Collot’s Plan for a Reconnaissance of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, 1796,”
in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., IX (1952), 512–20. Also A. DeConde, Entangling Alliance:
Politics and Diplomacy under George Washington (Durham, N.C., 1958), 446–49.
9 The Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States 1791–97, edited by Frederick J.
Turner for the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1903, includes the dispatches of
Létombe only to the end of 1797; the series continued into 1798, and includes a memorandum of
February 1798 in which two American citizens are said to be ready to instigate a revolution in Canada
if supplied by the French with some $40,000. Archives des Affaires Etrangères, M. et D., Angleterre,
vol. 47, fols. 349–52.
10 See Garneau, II, 449; Kingsford, VII, 444–51. It appears that the body, after hanging, was
decapitated and “drawn” but not “quartered.” The head of a “traitor” was then held up to public view,
in the traditional manner. See also Timothy Pickering to Rufus King, June 20, 1797, in Life and Cor-
respondence of Rufus King, 6 vols. (New York, 1895–1900), II, 192, It does not occur to the Federalist
Secretary of State, Pickering, writing to his minister in London, to doubt that American citizens, of
whom he mentions McLane and two others, should be accused of “treason” to the British crown.