The next political division in the country came over the treaty with England, negotiated by John Jay. The Republicans were quick to see the unpopularity of this document, which Washington had ratified in August, 1795. Practically every paper in the country teemed with letters or long series of essays denouncing or defending the instrument; chief of these was Hamilton's series of thirty-eight newspaper articles, signed "Camillus," which were printed in Noah Webster's Minerva. Some of these were written, it is said, by Rufus King and John
Jay But the strongest journalistic protagonist of Federalism was William Cobbett, afterward to be famous in England as writer and reformer,—a man of little education but undoubted genius. In 1794 he landed in New York, without friends; from there he went to Philadelphia, where—apropos of the arrival in this country of Dr. Joseph Priestley, who, on account of his criticism of church and state, had found England an uncomfortable place, and. had emigrated to America,—the democratic newspapers were making vicious attacks on England. Cobbett, who had had some slight experience in pamphleteering, attacked Priestley and the haters of England in such vicious form as to warm the hearts of the Federalists.
It has been pointed out by a biographer of Cobbett[1] that it was the repressive measures of Pitt in 1794, with frequent trials for sedition, that drove many Englishmen to America. Regarding Philadelphia as the most liberal and philosophic city in the United States, these men made their homes there, and at the same time helped to make that city and the entire commonwealth of Pennsylvania a hotbed of democracy.
- ↑ Smith, William Cobbett, i, 130.
