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Star, and later the New York Timepiece; Joseph Gales moved from the Sheffield
Register to a paper in North Carolina; and Thomas Cooper, formerly of the Man-
chester Herald, wrote pamphlets for which he was convicted under the Sedition
Act in 1800. There was in truth, as the Federalists said, a certain foreign influence
conveyed through American newspapers, both in their clamorous emphasis on war
and revolution in Europe, and in the personal backgrounds of some of the editors.
Even the native- born firebrand, Benjamin Franklin Bache, irrepressible editor of
the Republican Aurora, had spent, as the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, eight
years of his boyhood in Paris and Geneva.
More purely American was the Fourth of July oration, a new genre already well
developed, and most American of all, the long and meaty sermon. The surprising
thing about many Fourth of July orations was the way in which many of them
subordinated the American Revolution to the French. In 1793 someone printed
and bound together two such orations, one delivered by Elihu Palmer at Philadel-
phia and one by Hugh Brackenridge in western Pennsylvania, along with extracts
from one of Robespierre’s speeches, containing sentiments that would appeal to
American democrats, such as that government caused more evil than “anarchy”
did, and that the farmer should have the same vote as the grain merchant.^36 And
according to a patriotic oration at Boston, a year after Robespierre’s death, the
struggles of Americans in their revolution, compared to those of the French, “were
but as the first achievement of Hercules in his cradle to the wonderful labors that
were reserved for his manhood.”^37
The clergy included, until 1795 or later, a good many who spoke sympathetically
of the French Revolution from the pulpit. It was usual to attribute the signs of ir-
religion in France to the impostures of Roman Catholicism, and the violence of
the Terror to the horrors of the Old Regime and the arrogance of European aris-
tocrats. As Chandler Robbins said at Plymouth, quoting Solomon, oppression
makes men mad. In the fall of the old system in France, Samuel Stillman saw “the
judgment of God.” Even the president of Yale, Ezra Stiles, hailed the execution of
Louis XVI as a sign that European monarchs would soon be “tamed.” The clergy-
man and geographer, Jedidiah Morse, as late as 1795, declared that the “irregulari-
ties” in France, including the atheism, were temporary and should be excused.^38
A change came about in 1795. For the clergy, and those who followed their
lead, the publication of Paine’s widely read Age of Reason, and the development of
Elihu Palmer into a deistic lecturer who reached popular audiences, caused great
consternation. It was realized that Christianity itself and not merely Roman Ca-
36 Political Miscellany (New York, 1793).
37 George Blake, An Oration Pronounced July 4, 1795, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of
Boston (Boston, 1795), 27. The historian David Ramsay delivered a similar oration, praising France, at
Charleston, S.C., on July 4, 1794.
38 Chandler Robbins in the Address cited in n. 28 above; S. Stillman, Thoughts on the French Revo-
lution (Boston, 1795), 12–14; Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3 vols. (New York, 1901), III, 428; J. Morse,
Present Situation of Other Nations of the World Contrasted with our Own (Boston, 1794), quoting from
his Thanksgiving Day sermon of 1794. I am indebted for this information on the clergy to my former
student, Mr. Gary B. Nash, who reports finding only one case of opposition to the French Revolution
among American clergy before 1794, and that this one case is the only one cited by various historians
who think that the American clergy soon turned against the French revolutionaries.