Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 | Page 5

English
pamphleteers of their day. In shrewdness, in practical sense, Cobbett
was fully Paine's equal. He was as coarse and as pithy in expression,
but with more wit, a better education, more complete command of
language, and a greater variety of resources. Cobbett was a quicker and
a harder hitter than Paine. His personal courage gave him a great
advantage in his warfaring life. In 1796, in the hottest of the French and
English fight, the well-known Porcupine opened a shop in Philadelphia.
He filled his show-window with all the prints of English kings, nobles,
and generals he could collect, and "then," he says, "I took down the
shutters, and waited."
Party-feeling reached the boiling-point when Washington retired to
Mount Vernon. Mr. Adams, his successor, had none of that divinity
which hedged the Father of his Country to protect him. Under the
former administration, he had been, as Senator Grayson humorously
called him, "his superfluous Excellency," and out of the direct line of
fire. He could easily look down upon such melancholy squibs as
Freneau's "Daddy Vice" and "Duke of Braintree." But when raised
above every other head by his high office, he became a mark for the
most bitter personal attacks. Mr. Adams unfortunately thought too
much about himself to be the successful chief of a party. He allowed
his warm feelings to divert him from the main object and end of his
followers. He was jealous of Hamilton,--unwilling, in fact, to seem to
be governed by the opinion of any man, and half inclined to look for a

reëlection outside of his own party. Hamilton, the soul of the
Federalists, mistrusted and disliked Mr. Adams, and made the sad
mistake of publishing his mistrust and dislike. It must be confessed that
the gentlemen who directed the Administration party were no match as
tacticians for such file-leaders as Jefferson and Burr. Many of their pet
measures were ill-judged, to say the least. The provisional army
furnished a fertile theme for fierce declamation. The black cockade
became the badge of the supporters of government, so that in the streets
one could tell at a glance whether friend or foe was approaching. The
Alien and Sedition Laws caused much bitter feeling and did great
damage to the Federalists. To read these acts and the trials under them
now excites somewhat of the feeling with which we look upon some
strange and clumsy engine of torture in a mediaeval museum. How the
temper of this people and their endurance of legal inflictions have
changed since then! There was Matthew Lyon, a noted Democrat of
Irish origin, who had published a letter charging the President with
"ridiculous pomp, idle parade, and selfish avarice." He was found
guilty of sedition, and sentenced to four months' imprisonment and a
fine of one thousand dollars. There was Cooper, an Englishman, who
fared equally ill for saying or writing that the President did not possess
sufficient capacity to fulfil the duties of his office. What should we
think of the sanity of James Buchanan, should he prosecute and obtain
a conviction against some Black-Republican Luther Baldwin of 1859,
for wishing that the wad of a cannon, fired in his honor, might strike an
unmentionable part of his august person? What should we say, if
Horace Greeley were to be arrested on a warrant issued by the Supreme
Court of New York for a libel on Louis Napoleon, as was William
Cobbett by Judge McKean of Pennsylvania for a libel on the King of
Spain?
Fiercer and more bitter waxed party-discord, and both sides did ample
injustice to one another. Mr. Jefferson wrote, that men who had been
intimate all their lives would cross the street and look the other way,
lest they should be obliged to touch their hats. And Gouverneur Morris
gives us a capital idea of the state of feeling when he says that a
looker-on, who took no part in affairs, felt like a sober man at a dinner
when the rest of the company were drunk. Civil war was often talked of,
and the threat of secession, which has become the rhetorical staple of

the South, produced solely for exportation to the North, to be used there
in manufacturing pro-slavery votes out of the timidity of men of large
means and little courage or perspicacity, was then freely made by both
divisions of the Union. Had we been of French or Spanish descent,
there would have been barricades, _coup-d'états, pronunciamentos_;
but the English race know better how to treat the body-politic. They
never apply the knife except for the most desperate operations. But
where hard words were so plenty, blows could not fail. Duels were
frequent, cudgellings not uncommon,--although as yet the
Senate-Chamber had not been selected as the fittest scene for the use of