Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 | Page 6

the bludgeon. It is true that molasses-and-water was the beverage
allowed by Congress in those simple times, and that charged to
stationery.
What terrible fellows our ancestors were for calling
names,--particularly the gentlemen of the press! If they had been
natives of the Island of Frozen Sounds, along the shore of which
Pantagruel and Panurge coasted, they would have stood up to their
chins in scurrilous epithets. The comical sketch of their rhetoric in
"Salmagundi" is literally true:--"Every day have these slangwhangers
made furious attacks on each other and upon their respective adherents,
discharging their heavy artillery, consisting of large sheets loaded with
scoundrel, villain, liar, rascal, numskull, nincompoop, dunderhead,
wiseacre, blockhead, jackass." As single words were not always
explosive enough to make a report equal to their feelings, they had
recourse to compounds;--"pert and prating popinjay," "hackneyed
gutscraper," "maggot of corruption," "toad on a dung-heap," "snivelling
sophisticating hound," are a few of the chain-shot which strike our eyes
in turning over the yellow faded files. They are all quiet now, those
eager, snarling editors of fifty years since, and mostly forgotten. Even
the ink which records their spiteful abuse is fading away;--
"Dunne no more the halter dreads, The torrent of his lies to cheek, No
gallows Cheetham's dreams invades, Nor lours o'er Holt's devoted
neck."
Emerson's saying, that involuntarily we read history as superior beings,
is never so true as when we read history before it has been worked up
for the public, in the raw material of letters, pamphlets, and newspapers.
Feverish paragraphs, which once excited the enthusiasm of one party

and the fiercest opposition of the other, lie before us as dead and as
unmeaning as an Egyptian mummy. The passion which once gave them
life is gone. The objects which the writers considered all-important we
perceive to have been of no real significance even in their day. We read
on with a good-natured pity, akin to the feeling which the gods of
Epicurus might be supposed to experience when they looked down
upon foolish mortals,--and when we shut the book, go out into our own
world to fret, fume, and wrangle over things equally transitory and
frivolous.
When it became evident that the Administration party ran the risk of
being beaten in the election of 1800, their trumpeters sounded the
wildest notes of alarm. "People! how long will you remain blind?
Awake! be up and doing! If Mr. Jefferson is elected, the equal
representation of the small States in the Senate will be destroyed, the
funding system swept away, the navy abolished, all commerce and
foreign trade prohibited, and the fruits of the soil left to rot on the
hands of the farmer. The taxes will all fall on the landed interest, all the
churches will be overturned, none but Frenchmen employed by
government, and the monstrous system of liberty and equality, with all
its horrid consequences, as experienced in France and St. Domingo,
will inevitably be introduced." Thus they shouted, and no doubt many
of the shouters sincerely believed it all. Nevertheless, and in spite of
these alarums, the Revolution of '99, as Mr. Jefferson liked to call it,
took place without bloodshed, and in 1801 that gentleman mounted the
throne.
After this struggle was over, the Federalists, some from conviction and
some from disgust at being beaten, gave up the country as lost. Worthy
New-Englanders, like Cabot, Fisher Ames, and Wolcott, had no longer
hope. They sank into the position of mere grumblers, with one leading
principle,--admiration of England, and a willingness to submit to any
insults which England in her haughtiness might please to inflict. "We
are sure," says the "Boston Democrat," "that George III. would find
more desperately devoted subjects in New England than in any part of
his dominions." The Democrats, of course, clung to their motto,
"Whatever is in France is right," and even accepted the arbitrary
measures of Bonaparte at home as a mere change of system, and abroad
as forced upon him by British pirates. It is curious to read the high

Federalist papers in the first days of their sorrow. In their contradictory
fault-finding sulkiness, they give some color of truth to Mr. Jefferson's
accusation, that the Federal leaders were seeking to establish a
monarchy,--a charge well known to be unfounded, as Washington said
at the time. "What is the use of celebrating the Fourth of July?" they
asked. "Freedom is a stale, narcotic topic. The Declaration of
Independence a useless, if not an odious libel upon a friendly nation
connected with us by the silken band of amity." Fenno, in his paper,
said the Declaration was "a placard of rebellion, a feeble production, in
which the spirit of rebellion prevailed over the love of order." Dennie,
in the "Portfolio," anticipating Mr. Choate, called it "an incoherent
accumulation