America 771
efforts was reprinted in London 1799: What is our situation? and What our prospects,
or a demonstration of the insidious views of Republican France, By an American. In the
next year, on a more honest and dignified level, John Quincy Adams, American
minister to Berlin, reading Friedrich Gentz’s new Historisches Journal, came upon
his comparison of the French and American revolutions. Gentz, a professional
counter- revolutionary polemicist, declared that the American Revolution had
been a good thing because it was only a conservative protest against innovation,
the French Revolution a bad thing because it had attempted systematic change.
This was what John Quincy Adams wanted to hear; he translated it and published
it in America in 1800, no doubt hoping to assist in the re- election of his father
against the Jacobin Jefferson. It was reprinted in America in 1955 as a study in
revolution.^42
Meanwhile Jedidiah Morse had stirred up a furor of his own. As late as 1795 he
had sympathized with the French Revolution, but he learned from his correspon-
dents in Edinburgh, in 1797, that Professor Robison was preparing a book show-
ing the real causes of that upheaval, and he managed to obtain a pre- publication
copy of Robison’s work in Philadelphia. In 1798, just at the height of the XYZ
excitement, Morse delivered two “fast day” sermons. He solemnly announced that
the world was in the grip of a secret revolutionary conspiracy, engineered by the
Order of the Illuminati—that Genet’s clubs of five years before had been surface
manifestations of this underground plot, and that the Republicans in America,
recently so much in evidence, were the dupes or accomplices of this same perni-
cious organization, which labored everywhere, at all times, patiently, implacably,
and behind the scenes, to overthrow all government and all religion. The publica-
tion of Robison’s and Barruel’s books served to confirm these allegations. An enor-
mous outcry arose in the press. The Republicans were indignant. There were many
skeptics, even among the New England clergy. For the Federalists such disclosures
were welcome if not altogether believable; some odor of disreputability might be
expected to cling to the democrats; and in any case, following the usual psychology
of such affairs, to wish to doubt or examine the charges might in itself be grounds
for suspicion. On the whole, the scare soon blew over. The hostilities that it re-
flected were more lasting and more real.^43
Such was the state of the country during the presidency of John Adams—
divided by interminable contention, bewildered by accusation and counter-
accusation, flooded by propaganda, with its citizens appealing to foreigners in their
disputes with each other, beset by laws against sedition and by their partisan en-
forcement, threatened by counter- resolutions putting the states above the federal
government, carrying on actual hostilities with France at sea, and with important
42 First edition, F. von Gentz, Origin and principles of the American Revolution, compared with the
origin and principles of the French Revolution (Philadelphia, 1800). Reprinted in paperback by Henry
Regnery, with an introduction by Russell Kirk (Chicago, 1955). Gentz’s work also, at this time, far
from reflecting the dominant sentiment in neutral Prussia, was of British inspiration. “In short, the
Historisches Journal for 1800 took the tone of an English propaganda sheet. Nothing betrayed its Prus-
sian origin except its language, its author and its place of publication.” P. R. Sweet, Friedrich von
Gentz: Defender of the Old Order (Madison, 1941), 49.
43 V. Staufier, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York, 1918.)