A History of the American People

issued a Revolutionary decree declaring, War with all kings and peace with all peoples.' Edmond Charles Genet, an excitable enrage, as the Paris extremists were labeled, arrived to implement it so far as America was concerned. When Britain and France went to war soon afterwards Washington hastily declared America's neutrality. But that was not Genet's idea or, at first, Jefferson's. Genet arrived in Philadelphia with a clap of broadsides from the Revolutionary frigate L'Ambuscade, a dwarfish, dumpy man with dark red hair, coarse features, and a huge mouth from which issued forth a constant stream of passionate oratory in seven languages. Without even waiting to present his credentials he summoned the Americans toerect the Temple
of Liberty on the ruins of palaces and thrones.' The mistake was characteristically French, to
assume they are always the first to think of anything new. Genet forgot that America had already
erected its own temple of liberty and had no palaces and thrones left to ruin.
Of course there were extremists in America-transatlantic Jacobins. Oliver Wolcott, Hamilton's
Assistant Secretary at the Treasury and a federalist pillar, sneered at our Jacobins' whosuppose
the liberties of America depend upon the right of cutting throats in France.' Such people made up
the patriotic French Society, one of over thirty such organizations which sprang up. Freneau's
newspaper office at 209 Market Street, Philadelphia, almost under Washington's indignant nose,
was a kind of headquarters to all of them, and to Genet's posturings. The French envoy set about
recruiting men to join the French armed forces and to man privateers to prey on British
commerce. He boasted to his Paris superiors: I excite the Canadians to break the British yoke. I arm the Kentukois and propose a navel expedition which will facilitate their descent upon New Orleans.' Annoyed by Washington's indifference to his cause, soon turning into active hostility, he threatened toappeal from the President to the People.'
Jefferson, who had at first welcomed the French monkey,' now turned from him in embarrassment, found himself with a migraine-a recurrent complaint of Jefferson's in moments of crisis and perplexity-and took to his bed. Washington, outraged by Genet's threats, found his Secretary of State, instead of administering an instant rebuke to the envoy of France and demanding his recall, unavailable and engaged in what looked like malingering. He wrote to Jefferson in fury:Is the minister of the French Republic to set the Acts of this Government at
defiance, with impunity, and then threaten the executive with an appeal to the people? What
must the world think of such conduct, and of the government of the United States for submitting
to it?' Jefferson found himself obliged to offer his resignation, just before a Cabinet meeting
which decided that Genet must be recalled and during which the President exploded in fury at a
satire in Freneau's newspaper entitled The funeral of George Washington' and depictinga
tyrannical executive laid low on the guillotine.' Washington 'ByGodded' them all, said he would
rather be in his grave' than President, and accused the opposition-eying Jefferson-ofan
impudent desire to insult him.'
As it happened, Genet never left. The purging of the Girondins and the triumph of the
Mountain' in Paris suddenly put him in danger of the guillotine himself and he begged to be allowed to stay. Washington gave him grudging permission and he promptly married the daughter of George Clinton, became a model citizen in upstate New York, and lived to read the first volume of George Bancroft's monumental History of the United States in -1834. Jefferson was replaced by Randolph, originally supposed to be a supporter of the deposed Secretary of State, now increasingly (according to him) a mere creature of the President:the poorest
chameleon I ever saw, having no color of his own and reflecting that nearest to him. When he is
with me, he is a Whig. When with Hamilton, he is a Tory. When with the President he is what he
thinks will please him.' But Randolph did not last long. An intercepted French diplomatic