America 761
most immediate impact, that if Britain and the coalition defeated the French Re-
public the American Republic would collapse also. “If kings combine to support
kings,” asked Hugh Brackenridge, novelist, Princeton graduate, and Western
Pennsylvania landowner, “why not republics to support republics?” “A breach be-
tween us and France,” said the Pittsburgh Gazette, “would infallibly bring the En-
glish again on our backs; and yet we have some wild beasts among our own coun-
trymen who are endeavoring to weaken that connection.”^19
Genet naturally encouraged such sentiments. Jefferson as the warmest friend of
France in the government was distressed that Genet went so far as to weaken his
own cause. It was from the French government, however, that Genet received his
first rebuke, on the basis of information that must have left America less than
three months after he stepped ashore in Charleston. In France he had been associ-
ated with Dumouriez and Brissot, who in the spring of 1793 were replaced in
power by the new party of the Mountain. On July 30 the French foreign minister,
under the newly forming Robespierrist Committee of Public Safety, in a sharp
reprimand to Genet, reminded him that he was accredited “to treat with the gov-
ernment and not with a portion of the people,” and that the American President and
Congress were the only legal authority in the United States, according to the con-
stitutional principles of the French Revolution itself.^20 In short, the most Jacobin of
all French governments agreed with the American Federalists, when they accused
Genet of appealing to the people over the head of the government. At the request
of the United States, Genet was recalled a few months later. Finding more admira-
tion among American democrats than among French ones, he remained in Amer-
ica, married the daughter of a New York Republican, and lived in the United
States for forty years.
During the months of Genet’s ministry new political clubs began to form, the
democratic or republican societies. While active Federalists had met in each other’s
living rooms, or the public rooms of the better hotels, people of a plainer sort now
began to meet in more modest quarters, in taverns or country stores. Over forty
such clubs are known to have existed, beginning in March 1793, chiefly in the
seaboard towns and along the frontier. According to Oliver Wolcott they were
composed of “the lowest order of mechanics, laborers and draymen”; and Timothy
Dwight, perhaps recalling a famous remark of Burke’s, thought that democracy,
like the devil, was entering into “a herd of swine.”^21 It is true that the societies had
numerous members of inferior station, but about half the membership was middle-
class, consisting of merchants, lawyers, larger landowners, and a good many doc-
tors. They somewhat resembled the Sons of Liberty of the 1760’s, or the radical
clubs that sprang up in England and Scotland in 1792, or similar groups in Hol-
land, or the provincial Jacobin clubs of France. They hardly resembled the Paris
Jacobin club, which, especially in 1793, was full of men active in the government.
Men in the American government of republican opinions, such as Madison and
Jefferson, did not belong to these clubs, which were of local, spontaneous, and
19 Link, 54–55.
20 F. J. Turner, ed., Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, in Annual Report of
the American Historical Association for 1903, II, 228–29.
21 Link, 94.