The Quasi-War, the XYZ Affair, and the rebellion in Ireland in 1798, backed by the French, combined to create a climate of public distrust in Irish and French immigrants. The Federalists took full advantage of the situation. What the Democratic-Republicans dubbed the “Reign of Terror” began.
Irish immigrants had been coming to Pennsylvania through Philadelphia for years before and after the American Revolution. Carey reported to John Chambers, his friend in Dublin that between 3,000 and 4,000 Irish had arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1791. Carey was in a good position to be aware of the growing number of immigrants. He was the driving force forming the Hibernian Society in 1790. As part of his duties, he met passengers arriving from Ireland, determining their numbers aboard ship. He and his brother James Carey estimated that approximately 27,000 immigrants from Ireland came to Philadelphia and its vicinity during the 1790s.[1]
At first, most were Ulster Presbyterians, but Roman Catholics immigrated to the United States in greater numbers as the decade wore on. They initially favored the Constitution and Hamilton’s economic policies. As politics became more radical in Ireland under the United Irishmen, the immigrants joined the Democratic-Republican Party. They opposed British oppression. The rebellion brewing in Ireland depended on the French. Mathew Carey and his fellow Democratic-Republicans, Tench Coxe, William Duane, of the Democratic-Republican newspaper the Aurora, and John Beckley, a leading Democratic-Republican in Pennsylvania, recruited growing numbers of Irish to the Jeffersonian camp. As a result, in the election of 1796, Irish voters in large cities went Democratic-Republican.[2]
“In my very lengthy journey through [Pennsylvania]…I have seen many, very many Irishmen, and with a very few exceptions, they are United Irishmen, Free Masons, and the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell.”[3]
Uriah Tracy
The Federalists, were alarmed by the election results. They needed to stem the rising tide of Democratic-Republicanism among the Irish and foreign-born. In 1797, they proposed a twenty-dollar tax on naturalization certificates, a move designed to limit the number of poorer immigrants, a prime source of recruits to the Democratic-Republican Party. Federalist Harrison Gray Otis led the charge. He was member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, who delivered his “Wild Irish” speech to Congress. He defended the naturalization tax arguing that “[the Naturalization Tax would keep] the mass of vicious and disorganizing characters who can not live peaceably at home, and who, after unfurling the standard of rebellion in their own countries, may come hither to revolutionize ours.”[4]
“[I do] not wish to invite hoards of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility, after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own government.”[5]
Harrison Gray Otis
Harrison Gray Otis (1765-1848) was a Boston Federalist, lawyer and businessman. He supported the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, defending them in a speech, assuming a nativist stance.
The Federalists had long denigrated Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon as being a lower-class Irishman and former indentured servant. Then, in February 1798, Roger Griswold, a representative from Connecticut, inferred that Lyon’s service during the Revolution had been less than exemplary. On the floor of the House, Lyon breached etiquette and spat tobacco juice on Griswold, who grabbed a pair of fireplace tongs assaulting Lyon.
This cartoon depicts Federalist Roger Griswold (1762-1812), fire tongs in hand, assaulting Democratic Republican Matthew Lyon (1749-1822). Moments before Lyon spat on Griswold in a breach of etiquette on the floor of the House of Representatives that earned him the nickname of the Spitting Lyon.
Despite Griswold’s protests, the House failed to expel the Vermont congressman. Federalists mounted an attack on the “Spitting Lyon” and his fellow Irishmen smearing them with accusations of treason.[6] When Lyon campaigned for re-election in 1798, he insisted these attacks were because Adams and the Federalists were planning a war with France. He also made some derogatory comments about Adams in a Vermont newspaper. The government tried Lyon under the Sedition Act. He spent four months in prison and paid a fine.
Sensing that he might also come under attack, Mathew Carey swore allegiance to the United States and formally became a citizen on February 20, 1798, a prudent move that would later exempt him from the scope of both the Naturalization Act and Alien Act.
Mathew’s brother James had returned to Philadelphia and established the Daily Advertiser. Inevitably, his avidly Democratic-Republican views, and his involvement with the Evening Star, mouthpiece of the United Irishmen in Dublin, attracted the attention and venom of William Cobbett, the editor of the Federalist paper, Peter Porcupine’s Gazette. Before long, Cobbett began referring to both Mathew and James as the “O’Careys” whenever he disparaged the Irish.
James Carey became more prominent as a Democratic-Republican editor, and established his second newspaper in Philadelphia, Carey’s United States Recorder. He attacked Cobbett and defended the United Irishmen in the United States as “respectable” and “innocent in its intentions .”[7] 1798, Cobbett attacked the Carey brothers with increasing ferocity.[8]
In April, Mathew Carey wrote to Thomas Jefferson appealing for financial help to prevent Cobbett’s attacks from stopping his brother’s paper. The money was raised. The United States Recorder and the Aurora, other Federalist targets, continued publication as well.[9]
“It is easy to blunt the edge of slanderous appellations by adopting that in a good sense, which was intended in a bad one—it is thus that epithets applied with the most degrading intention, have been rendered the most honourable—therefore, with the most cordial detestation of tyranny and slavery, I subscribe myself, A JACOBIN”[10]
James Carey
In May, Mathew Carey made a hypocritical effort to pacify Cobbett. He varnished the truth claiming he had no control over his brother’s paper. He threatened to start a newspaper war. Cobbett was undeterred. In truth, Mathew Carey had provided funding for his brother’s paper. Mathew Carey then backed down, failing to carry out his threat.[11]
Mathew and James Carey’s Federalist enemies used a new tactic. The Bank of the United States, under Federalist control, was Mathew’s bank . It severely curtailed its practice of discounting Carey’s state bank and promissory notes from his customers and agents. The Bank had been cashing Carey’s notes from banks all over the United States. In exchange for providing the face value of commercial paper in specie or bank notes, they subtracted interest in return for advancing Carey the balance. He used this service weekly. To restrict Mathew’s ability to subsidize his brother’s anti-Federalist newspaper, the Bank of the United States only allowed him a single discount from March 15 to April 16.[12]
In May 1798, William Cobbett published an influential piece, “Detection of a Conspiracy formed by the United Irishmen, with the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France in Subverting the Government of the United States.” He reported the United Irishmen were about to rebel in Ireland with aid from the French. Later that month, his report proved to be true. Then Cobbett asserted that the United Irishmen in America, with 1,500 assassins, were forming a conspiracy. He alleged they wanted to start a revolution in the United States, which was not true. The Federalists feared the Democratic-Republicans, with the help of the French, were bent on overthrowing the government.[13]
“[Cobbett is] the most tremendous scourge that hell ever vomited forth to scourge a people.”[14]
Mathew Carey
In the summer of 1798, Congress passed four pieces of legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Congress was concerned the French were recruiting the Irish to start a new revolution in the United States. The Naturalization Law required aliens to be residents for fourteen years, instead of five, before they could be eligible for citizenship. The Alien Friends Act gave the president power to deport aliens regarded as “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” That was temporarily in effect for two years. As the Quasi-War raged on, the Act Respecting Alien Enemies authorized the president to deport aliens believed to be a threat, if they came from a country at war with the United States. The Sedition Act became the most notorious.
Shortly before Congress passed the Sedition Act on July 14, 1798, Benjamin Franklin Bache, the editor of the principal Democratic-Republican paper, the Aurora, came under attack by the Federalists. Bache was Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, a prominent citizen of Philadelphia and a friend of Mathew Carey’s.
Bache had long favored the French cause. In 1793, Edmond Charles Genet became the new French regime’s diplomat to the United States. Bache had defended him. Genet had brazenly recruited privateers to conduct operations from ports in the United States. He attempted to organize military campaigns in territories held in North America by Spain and Great Britain. Genet’s behavior appalled President Washington, who demanded his recall. In 1795, when Washington gave the text of the Jay Treaty to the Senate, he asked for secrecy. Democratic-Republican Senator Stevens Thomson Mason of Virginia ignored Washington. He gave Bache a copy. Bache reprinted key parts of the treaty in the Aurora. He then peddled copies in New York and New England.[15]
In June 1798 after the XYZ Affair, public opinion was decidedly anti-French. Bache published a letter from Talleyrand. In an ill-fated, poorly timed attempt to justify France’s position, Bache published the letter in the Aurora before the Secretary of State Timothy Pickering had presented it to President Adams.
On June 29, 1798, government agents hauled Bache before a federal district court charging him with seditious libel against President Adams and the entire executive branch of the United States government. Congress had not yet passed the Sedition Act into law.[16] The government accused Bache of treason and being an agent for France. He provided evidence supporting his defense. His opponents skillfully used his comments against him.
The court released Bache on bail. Adams signed the Sedition Act on July 14, 1798. As Bache awaited his trial in October, he died during Philadelphia’s second major yellow fever epidemic in 1798.
Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769-1798) edited the Democratic-Republican newspaper, the Aurora and was Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. Despite his standing in Philadelphia society, Bache attacked George Washington in the Aurora, and Bache and his wife were ostracized by most of Philadelphia’s leading citizens. Later, the government charged him with seditious libel. He died of yellow fever while awaiting his trial.
Once the epidemic had subsided in November 1798, his widow, Margaret Bache, continued to publish the Aurora. She appointed William Duane, Bache’s assistant and an associate of Carey’s, as the new editor. Duane was an incendiary writer who was born in 1760 near Lake Champlain. His parents were of Irish descent, and he accompanied his mother when she returned to Ireland in 1771 a few years after his father’s death. In Ireland, he apprenticed to the printing trade. After breaking off relations with his mother, he moved to London, then Calcutta, India. There he worked first for the East India Company then as a journalist. Next he founded the Calcutta World on borrowed funds. In 1791, he charged with libel. He was banished from India in 1795 after praising French revolutionaries and agreeing with grievances that soldiers lodged against the East India Company Army. He went to London where he edited a newspaper that promoted universal suffrage and the ideals of the French Revolution. He set sail for Philadelphia a year later when government authorities moved to silence his press. An observer described him as having “wild hair, [a] long beard and fierce expression,” and in the offices of the Aurora, he quickly established himself as a radical Democratic-Republican.[17]
Margaret Bache and Duane vigorously attacked John Adams and his administration.
The office of the Aurora was at 112 Market Street, a few doors away from Carey’s store at 118 Market. In the May 14, 1799 issue, Duane criticized soldiers who repressed Fries’ Rebellion in western Pennsylvania against a federal tax. At noon the following day, more than twenty-five men appeared at Duane’s offices. They demanded to know the source of his information. Duane refused to reveal it. With the Sedition Act in effect, these were serious charges.
They grabbed Duane by the collar and dragged him down a flight of stairs, pummeling him several times knocking him unconscious for refusing to reveal the writer of the article. Carey was shocked and horrified.
“William Duane…published some attacks on the [the soldiers] for oppression and misconduct which….were partly just….Peter Miercken…went to the office of the Aurora, dragged Duane downstairs, & insisted on having the name of the writer given up. Duane manfully refused – and Miercken knocked him down…How often this was repeated I…cannot tell—for I was so shocked & horrified that I retired.”[18]
Mathew Carey
Fenno criticized Duane in Philadelphia’s widely-read Federalist newspaper, the Gazette of the United States.
[Duane is] not an American but a foreigner, and not merely a foreigner, but a United Irishman, and not merely a United Irishman, but a public convict and fugitive from justice.”[19]
John Fenno
The Federalists soon set their sights on prosecuting William Duane as an alien. He forcefully denounced the Alien Act and circulated a petition against it, collecting signatures in Philadelphia. As he tried to gather signatures outside St. Mary’s Catholic Church, he became involved in a scuffle with Federalists in the congregation. Dr. James Reynolds, a United Irishman in exile, drew a gun. No one was shot or wounded. Reynolds was thrown to the ground and kicked. Agents charged Duane, Reynolds and two other Irish immigrants with inciting a riot with seditious intent to destabilize the government. Thomas McKean, a Democratic Republican chief justice running for governor in Pennsylvania, came up with the money to bail out Duane and Reynolds. They were released later that day.[20]
Duane published articles in the Aurora, intimating that Great Britain had used intrigue to exert its influence on the United States. He referred to a letter of significance as proof the British were meddling in American affairs.[21]
Agents arrested Duane on July 30, 1799 charging him with seditious libel. He insisted that he had proof, and in fact, he did. Duane discovered a letter that John Adams himself had written a few years earlier grumbling the British influenced the appointment of Thomas Pinckney as the United States’ minister to Britain when Washington was president.[22]
Clearly, the letter would be an embarrassment to President Adams and his administration if Duane’s lawyer made it public during the trial. First, the court postponed the trial on a technicality. Later, Duane announced in the Aurora that his case was “withdrawn by order of the President.”[23]
The Federalists, resolving to secure a victory in the presidential election, audaciously tried to tamper with electoral votes. Their proposed bill used a “Grand Committee” selected from the House, Senate, and Supreme Court. They controlled all three. The “Grand Committee” would meet in secret choosing the electoral votes to count and those to change, determining the election’s outcome in their favor. Three Democratic-Republican senators slipped Duane a copy of the bill. Duane published it, condemning the bill as “an offspring of this spirit of faction secretly working.”[24]
Mortified, the Federalist senators redoubled their efforts to silence Duane. In a novel effort to circumvent a trial by jury, they conspired forming a “committee on privileges” to nail Duane for his comments as being in contempt of the Senate. Evading all due process, they ordered him to appear at a Senate hearing to respond to a pre-determined verdict, denying his lawyers the opportunity to represent him effectively.[25]
From then on, Duane deftly outmaneuvered the Federalist senators. He refused to re-appear before their committee and went underground. While in hiding, he continued his rant about persecution in the Aurora. By one means or another, he avoided prosecution.
“If to be ready, at any time that my slender efforts could in the least tend to the emancipation of Ireland from the horrid yoke of Britain, to embark in her cause, and to sacrifice my life for that country as readily as I should for this which gave me birth—then am I as very an United Irishman as any tyrant could abhor.”[26]
William Duane
During the summer of 1799, Secretary of State Pickering began to round up other Irish suspects thought to be involved with the United Irishmen in organizing a rebellion in the United States. One by one, the government tried Carey’s Irish associates before Federalist judges who used the Alien and Sedition Acts to suppress Democratic-Republican opposition.[27]
By October 1798, the rebellion in Ireland had failed, but controversy about the motives of the United Irishmen continued in the United States. Somehow, Mathew and James Carey had avoided prosecution.
Then in December, the Gazette of the United States, published an editorial. It claimed the United Irishmen in the United States were plotting a rebellion. It cited the suspected leaders of the organization: Dr. James Reynolds, William Duane, Matthew Lyon, John Daly Burk and James and Mathew Carey. It was a devastating accusation. Mathew Carey demanded the Gazette retract it. The paper did not comply. Instead it published statements by Mathew and James. Mathew admitted he had once attended a meeting, but denied that he was a member. With cheek, James denied ever attending a meeting. He stated that if he were asked to join, he would.[28] William Cobbett reprinted the Gazette’s dangerously incriminating charges in his paper. [29]
Carey’s finances were strained after he published two lavishly illustrated books, William Guthrie’s A New System of Modern Geography, and Oliver Goldsmith’s An History of the Earth and Animated Nature. He depended on loans from banks, and any implication that he was part of a radical party bent on the overthrow of the government would have destroyed him financially.[30] After his imprisonment in Ireland, Carey knew the improper use of his pen could destroy him professionally and personally. He adroitly avoided a trap that Cobbett had set for him, but only after hedging his bets. In January 1799, Carey ran an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette that read, “Books Selling Very Cheap. Mathew Carey, Proposing to quit the Book Selling business, offers his large and valuable collection of Books for sale.”
He countered Cobbett’s attack with a satirical poem publishing A Plumb Pudding for…Peter Porcupine, on January 16, 1799. He distributed it over his nation-wide network, and circulated 6,000 broadsides with portions of the poem entitled “a slice of the plumb pudding.” Cobbett responded by delivering slices of venison in jelly sandwiched between two plates to Carey’s shop at 118 Market Street. Carey sent the venison back to Cobbett in the hands of a burly Irishman, instructing him to drop the plates in front of Cobbett, with intent to break them.[31]
On March 2, Carey attacked again, this time with The Porcupiniad: A Hudibrastic Poem. He quoted Cobbett turning his invective phrases into cleverly crafted verse. In April, Carey continued the campaign with two more cantos. Using satire, Carey gained public support, effectively silencing Cobbett.[32]
The Society of United Irishmen in the United States was founded in 1797, and its members were sworn to secrecy. Their oath called for the “attainment of Liberty and Equality of Mankind, In Whatever Nation” the members resided. Early historians point to his involvement, and Carey was associated with many suspected members. He was prominent in the Irish community, active with immigrants, and the Gazette’s charges were probably correct.[33]
CAREY THE NATIONALIST | Carey and the Election of 1800
[1] Edward Carter, “A ‘Wild Irishman’ Under Every Federalist’s Bed: Naturalization in Philadelphia, 1789-1806,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, V. 133 N. 2 (June, 1989) 331, 343.
[2] Carter , “ ‘Wild Irishman’,” 333.
[3] Uriah Tracey to Oliver Wolcott, August 7, 1800, in Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, ed. George Gibbs (1846; New York, 1971) v. 2, 399, quoted in David Wilson United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) 1.
[4] Carter “ ‘Wild Irishman’,” 334.
[5] Annals of Congress, 5th Cong. V. 7. 430 quoted in Carter “ ‘Wild Irishman’,” 334.
[6] Edward Carter II, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, Nationalist, 1760-1814 Bryn Mawr College PhD. Dissertation, 1962. 253-254.
[7] Wilson, United Irishmen, 50.
[8] Carter, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, 251-252.
[9] Carter, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, 255.
[10] James Carey in the Constitutional Diary, December 17, 1799, quoted in Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, 7-8.
[11] Carter, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, 253.
[12] Carter “The Birth of A Political Economist: Mathew Carey and the Re-charter Fight of 1810-1811” Pennsylvania History, V. 3, N. 3 (July, 1966) 277.
[13] Carter “Wild Irishman”, 335.
[14] Wilson, United Irishmen, 52.
[15] Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 136-7.
[16]Raffi E. Andonian, “The Adamant Patriot: Benjamin Franklin Bache as Leader of the Opposition Press, www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digital/pahistory researched November 3, 2013; Matthew Q. Dawson, Partisanship and America’s Second Party, 1796-1800: “Stop the Wheels of Government” (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000) ff. 128.
[17] Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, 41.
[18] Mathew Carey, Miscellanies I, ms. (c. 1834) Library Company of Philadelphia, 83.
[19] Wilson, United Irishmen, 55
[20] James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 278-2. Wilson, United Irishmen, 53.
[21] James Morton Smith, Freedoms Fetters, 282-3.
[22] James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 284-290; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic 1788-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 704; The letter was written by Adams to Tench Coxe in May of 1792.
[23]James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 287; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 704. The announcement appeared in the Aurora, October 3, 1800.
[24] Duane’s comments from the Aurora, January 27, 1800, quoted in James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 289; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 704.
[25]James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 289-299; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 704-5.
[26] Wilson, United Irishman, United States, 41.
[27] Edward C. Carter II, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, Nationalist 1760-1814, Bryn Mawr College PhD. Dissertation, 1962, 258, Walter Berns, “Freedom of the Press and the Alien and Sedition Laws: A Reappraisal,“ The Supreme Court Review (1970) 111.
[28] Carter, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, 258-9.
[29] Green, “Mathew Carey, Publisher and Patriot,” (Philadelphia: The Library Company, 1985) 26.
[30] Green, “Mathew Carey, Publisher and Patriot,” 17.
[31] Mathew Carey, Autobiography (Brooklyn: Research Classics, 1942) 34.
[32] Carey, Autobiography, 32-9.
[33] Carter, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, 277 ff 23; 262-3. Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, 11.