Volume III Part 23 (1/2)
”Of the sense which the President has always entertained of your merits, and of his friendly disposition towards you, you are too well a.s.sured to require any declaration of it from me. That I forward his wishes in seeking your safety is what I well know, and this will form an additional obligation on me to perform what I should otherwise consider as a duty.
”You are, in my opinion, at present menaced by no kind of danger.
To liberate you, will be an object of my endeavours, and as soon as possible. But you must, until that event shall be accomplished, bear your situation with patience and fort.i.tude. You will likewise have the justice to recollect, that I am placed here upon a difficult theatre*
many important objects to attend to, with few to consult It becomes me in pursuit of those to regulate my conduct in respect to each, as to the manner and the time, as will, in my judgment, be best calculated to accomplish the whole.
”With great esteem and respect consider me personally your friend,
”James Monroe.”
The part in Mr. Monroe's letter, in which he speaks of the President, (Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton,) is put in soft language. Mr. Monroe knew what Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton had said formerly, and he was willing to keep that in view.
But the fact is, not only that Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton had given no orders to Mr.
Monroe, as the letter [of Whiteside] stated, but he did not so much as say to him, enquire if Mr. Paine be dead or alive, in prison or out, or see if there be any a.s.sistance we can give him.
This I presume alludes to the embarra.s.sments which the strange conduct of Gouverneur Morris had occasioned, and which, I well know, had created suspicions of the sincerity of Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton.--_Author_. voi. m--ij
While these matters were pa.s.sing, the liberations from the prisons were numerous; from twenty to forty in the course of almost every twenty-four hours. The continuance of my imprisonment after a new Minister had arrived immediately from America, which was now more than two months, was a matter so obviously strange, that I found the character of the American government spoken of in very unqualified terms of reproach; not only by those who still remained in prison, but by those who were liberated, and by persons who had access to the prison from without.
Under these circ.u.mstances I wrote again to Mr. Monroe, and found occasion, among other things, to say: ”It will not add to the popularity of Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton to have it believed in America, as it is believed here, that he connives at my imprisonment.”
The case, so far as it respected Mr. Monroe, was, that having to get over the difficulties, which the strange conduct of Gouverneur Morris had thrown in the way of a successor, and having no authority from the American government to speak officially upon any thing relating to me, he found himself obliged to proceed by unofficial means with individual members; for though Robespierre was overthrown, the Robespierrian members of the Committee of Public Safety still remained in considerable force, and had they found out that Mr. Monroe had no official authority upon the case, they would have paid little or no regard to his reclamation of me. In the mean time my health was suffering exceedingly, the dreary prospect of winter was coming on, and imprisonment was still a thing of danger. After the Robespierrian members of the Committee were removed by the expiration of their time of serving, Mr. Monroe reclaimed me, and I was liberated the 4th of November. Mr. Monroe arrived in Paris the beginning of August before. All that period of my imprisonment, at least, I owe not to Robespierre, but to his colleague in projects, George Was.h.i.+ngton. Immediately upon my liberation, Mr. Monroe invited me to his house, where I remained more than a year and a half; and I speak of his aid and friends.h.i.+p, as an open-hearted man will always do in such a case, with respect and grat.i.tude.
Soon after my liberation, the Convention pa.s.sed an unanimous vote, to invite me to return to my seat among them. The times were still unsettled and dangerous, as well from without as within, for the coalition was unbroken, and the const.i.tution not settled. I chose, however, to accept the invitation: for as I undertake nothing but what I believe to be right, I abandon nothing that I undertake; and I was willing also to shew, that, as I was not of a cast of mind to be deterred by prospects or retrospects of danger, so neither were my principles to be weakened by misfortune or perverted by disgust.
Being now once more abroad in the world, I began to find that I was not the only one who had conceived an unfavourable opinion of Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton; it was evident that his character was on the decline as well among Americans as among foreigners of different nations. From being the chief of the government, he had made himself the chief of a party; and his integrity was questioned, for his politics had a doubtful appearance. The mission of Mr. Jay to London, notwithstanding there was an American Minister there already, had then taken place, and was beginning to be talked of. It appeared to others, as it did to me, to be enveloped in mystery, which every day served either to increase or to explain into matter of suspicion.
In the year 1790, or about that time, Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton, as President, had sent Gouverneur Morris to London, as his secret agent to have some communication with the British Ministry. To cover the agency of Morris it was given out, I know not by whom, that he went as an agent from Robert Morris to borrow money in Europe, and the report was permitted to pa.s.s uncontradicted. The event of Morris's negociation was, that Mr.
Hammond was sent Minister from England to America, Pinckney from America to England, and himself Minister to France. If, while Morris was Minister in France, he was not a emissary of the British Ministry and the coalesced powers, he gave strong reasons to suspect him of it. No one who saw his conduct, and heard his conversation, could doubt his being in their interest; and had he not got off the time he did, after his recall, he would have been in arrestation. Some letters of his had fallen into the hands of the Committee of Public Safety, and enquiry was making after him.
A great bustle had been made by Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton about the conduct of Genet in America, while that of his own Minister, Morris, in France, was infinitely more reproachable. If Genet was imprudent or rash, he was not treacherous; but Morris was all three. He was the enemy of the French revolution, in every stage of it. But notwithstanding this conduct on the part of Morris, and the known profligacy of his character, Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton in a letter he wrote to him at the time of recalling him on the complaint and request of the Committee of Public Safety, a.s.sures him, that though he had complied with that request, he still retained the same esteem and friends.h.i.+p for him as before. This letter Morris was foolish enough to tell of; and, as his own char-acter and conduct were notorious, the telling of it could have but one effect, which was that of implicating the character of the writer.(1) Morris still loiters in Europe, chiefly in England; and Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton is still in correspondence with him. Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton ought, therefore, to expect, especially since his conduct in the affairs of Jay's treaty, that France must consider Morris and Was.h.i.+ngton as men of the same description. The chief difference, however, between the two is, (for in politics there is none,) that the one is profligate enough to profess an indifference about _moral_ principles, and the other is prudent enough to conceal the want of them.
1 Was.h.i.+ngton wrote to Morris, June 19,1794, ”my confidence in and friends.h.i.+p for you remain undiminished.” It was not ”foolish” but sagacious to show this one sentence, without which Morris might not have escaped out of France. The letter reveals Was.h.i.+ngton's mental decline. He says ”until then [Fauchet's demand for recall of Morris, early 1794] I had supposed you stood well with the powers that were.”
Lafayette had pleaded for Morris's removal, and two French Ministers before Fauchet, Ternant and Genet, had expressed their Government's dissatisfaction with him. See Ford's Writings of Was.h.i.+ngton, vii., p. 453; also Editor's Introduction to XXI.--_Editor._
About three months after I was at liberty, the official note of Jay to Grenville on the subject of the capture of American vessels by the British cruisers, appeared in the American papers that arrived at Paris.
Every thing was of a-piece. Every thing was mean. The same kind of character went to all circ.u.mstances public or private. Disgusted at this national degradation, as well as at the particular conduct of Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton to me, I wrote to him (Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton) on the 22d of February (1795) under cover to the then Secretary of State, (Mr. Randolph,) and entrusted the letter to Mr. Le-tombe, who was appointed French consul to Philadelphia, and was on the point of taking his departure. When I supposed Mr. Letombe had sailed, I mentioned the letter to Mr. Monroe, and as I was then in his house, I shewed it to him. He expressed a wish that I would recall it, which he supposed might be done, as he had learnt that Mr. Letombe had not then sailed. I agreed to do so, and it was returned by Mr. Letombe under cover to Mr. Monroe.
The letter, however, will now reach Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton publicly in the course of this work.
About the month of September following, I had a severe relapse which gave occasion to the report of my death. I had felt it coming on a considerable time before, which occasioned me to hasten the work I had then in hand, the _Second part of the Age of Reason_. When I had finished that work, I bestowed another letter on Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton, which I sent under cover to Mr. Benj. Franklin Bache of Philadelphia. The letter is as follows:
”Paris, September 20th, 1795.
”Sir,