746 Chapter XXXI
Europe before 1789, after that year the direction was reversed. If, as Barruel said,
the “sect” had first shown itself in America, within two decades the United States
was in the worthy position of a kind of Israel, and the ecumenical church, as em-
bodied in the New Republican Order, had its center—complete with power, doc-
trines, and abuses—in Paris.
Like other countries, the United States felt the strong impact of the French
Revolution. As elsewhere, the development was twofold. On the one hand, there
was an acceleration of indigenous movements. On the other, there was an influ-
ence that was unquestionably foreign. The latter presented itself especially with the
war that began in Europe in 1792, and with the clash of armed ideologies that the
war brought with it. The warring powers in Europe, which for Americans meant
the governments of France and Great Britain, attempted to make use of the United
States for their own advantage. Different groups of Americans, for their own do-
mestic purposes, were likewise eager to exploit the power and prestige of either
England or France. Some Americans saw the future of the United States best se-
cured by a victory of the French Republic; others saw no hope for their own coun-
try except in a triumph by Great Britain. Political thought was also sharpened,
heated emotionally, and broadened to the all- embracing dimensions that the word
“ideology” suggests. American democracy, as expressed in the new Republican
party, was shaped in part by the revolution in Europe; and American conservatism,
as it came to be expressed by High Federalists, shared in some of the ideas of the
European counter- revolution, especially as transmitted in books imported from
England. The indigenous and the foreign became indistinguishable. In the way in
which internal dissension passed into favoritism for foreign powers, the United
States did not differ from the countries described in preceding chapters, from Ire-
land to Poland and from Scotland to Naples.
At the same time the case of the United States was very special. Despite the war
of words, the domestic conflicts were for most people not deeply bitter. Between
social classes there was less fear and hostility than in Europe, less deference, and
less contempt. “Aristocrats” in America had less to lose, and “democrats” less to
complain against. There was always, however buried and overgrown, a truth at the
bottom of the famous aphorism of Tocqueville, that the Americans had been born
equal, and so needed no revolution to become so. There was an underlying bent
toward equality in the customs of the people, of the kind that perplexed the Ven-
ezuelan revolutionary, Miranda, in 1784, when he was travelling in the United
States to seek aid for a revolution in Spanish America, and found it difficult to
arrange for his servant to eat alone. One notable of the New England “establish-
ment” was the clergyman Jedediah Morse, who in 1798 was an extreme Federalist.
He had recently received an honorary degree from Edinburgh University. In 1798
the established Presbyterians of Scotland would have thought him suspiciously
radical, since he not only wanted to do something for Negroes, but actively spon-
sored Sunday Schools, a popular religious press, frontier missionaries, and itinerant
preaching.
Most especially, the United States had already had its revolution. New forms
and new principles had been introduced into government, an older colonial aris-