An engagement between an American and French ship during the 'Quasi-War'
In Lower Manhattan, near the ports, a mob was shouting “Down with King Washington!” and singing the French national anthem.
In the National Gazette, associated with the faction that would become the Democrats, the popular Veritas letter directed to Washington warned him against opposing French demands.
"The first magistrate of a country, whether he be called a king or a president, seldom knows the real state of the nation,” the missive threatened. “The spirit of 1776 is again roused; and soon…the enemies of American as well as French liberty, be taught that American whigs of 1776, will not suffer French patriots of 1792, to be vilified with impunity.”
Some cartoons depicted Washington being led to the guillotine. “A Funeral Dirge for George Washington,” put the image into words and drove Washington to declare that “he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world."
Meanwhile in France, Jacques Pierre Brissot—the original firebrand of the Jacobin Club —was still in control of French foreign policy and envisioned that “France has been called to lead a gigantic revolution and worldwide uprising to liberate the oppressed peoples of the world.”
“All Europe will be Gallicized, Communized, and Jacobinized."
“We are ready for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France,” the leader of the Mingo Creek Democratic Society would declare during the Whiskey Rebellion.1
During the Whiskey Rebellion, George Washington described the violence as “the first formidable fruit of the Democratic Societies; brought forth I believe too prematurely for their own views, which may contribute to the annihilation of them.”
“These societies were instituted by the artful & designing members (many of their body I have no doubt mean well, but know little of the real plan),” he wrote, denouncing them as having “been instituted by their father, Genet,” and behind them, “under popular and fascinating guises, the most diabolical attempts to destroy the best fabric of human government.”
The Democratic Societies were meant to radicalize Americans and to promote national and international leftist revolutions. As their influence spread, America became divided between two parties and between two missions: a national and a global one.
As historian Charles Downer Hazen noted, “The Democratic clubs…also played an important part in introducing French levelling principles in revolutionary vernacular. It was through them that the word ‘democrat’ was ushered into our politics.
Learn more about how the Democratic Party was born as part of a conspiracy by French leftist foreign agents to subvert America and discover our forgotten war with France in Chapter 3 of Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers' Fight Against the Left
