766 Chapter XXXI
Adams was elected, but only by 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68. Jefferson
became vice- president, but the Federalists remained in power, especially since
Adams retained Washington’s cabinet, which was composed of a group of strong
Hamiltonians. In January 1797 the Paris Moniteur somehow obtained and pub-
lished a copy of Jefferson’s “Mazzei letter,” written some months before at the
height of the agitation over the Jay treaty. It caused an uproar on becoming
known in America, but it was of course read in Paris also. The Frenchman could
read, in his paper for 6 Pluviôse of the Year V, on the authority of the new Ameri-
can vice- president, that, though the American people remained soundly republi-
can, the government was controlled by un parti anglican- monarchico- aristocratique.
The editor remarked that the French Directory, by breaking relations with a gov-
ernment so perversely submissive to the English, would serve the cause of repub-
licanism in the United States. It was now possible for the French, in their rela-
tions with the United States (as later for Americans in their relations to other
countries) to feel that they could be hostile to its government while remaining
friendly to its people.
In the following months, having imposed peace on Austria, the French hoped
to do the same with England, and went to work on their plans for invasion. Amer-
ican Republicans, including Jefferson and the still unknown Andrew Jackson,
looked forward with satisfaction to a French landing in England. “Nothing,” wrote
Jefferson, “can establish firmly the republican principles of our government but an
establishment of them in England. France will be the apostle for this.”^33 For other
Americans such an event would signify the collapse of civilization.
The French began to attack American shipping, which since the Jay treaty was
far more useful to Great Britain than to France. An American commission went to
France to attempt a settlement. Someone in the French government, probably Tal-
leyrand or Barras, made to these Americans a proposal that had almost been ac-
cepted by the British; they could have peace, for a price, the price being payment
in cash for certain “rescriptions” of the Batavian Republic of uncertain value. The
Americans refused the bribe; and Adams, under Federalist pressure to discredit the
French and their American sympathizers, published the documents on this epi-
sode, the “XYZ papers,” in April 1798. Had the Federalists known that Pitt, in his
need for peace, had almost accepted a similar proposal, made to him through the
respectable mediation of a Boston merchant then in France, Thomas Melville, they
would surely have been disconcerted;^34 but this secret was well kept, and the Feder-
alists complacently seized on the XYZ papers as proof of the incorrigible corrup-
tion of the French Directory, which, officially, had had nothing to do with the
matter. Jefferson and the Republicans, having somewhat idealized the French any-
way, reacted with shock and dismay to these unfortunate revelations; and since
clashes at sea continued between American merchant ships and French privateers
in an undeclared quasi- war, a great many people found their admiration of the
French suddenly cooling. Others, as in all such ideological conflicts, remained un-
33 A. Lipscomb and A. Bergh, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, 1903), IX, 412.
On Jackson see above, p. 595.
34 Dropmore Papers, III, 356–69; above, p. 516.