His queen soon shared a like fate. The English troops
sent to Flanders were called to fight the French, for the rulers of
France had declared war against Great Britain, Spain and Holland
in February.
Thomas Jefferson who entered Washington's cabinet in 1789, had just
returned from France, where he had witnessed the uprising of the people
against their oppressors. Regarding the movement as kindred to the late
uprising of his own countrymen against Great Britain, it enlisted his
warmest sympathies, and he expected to find the bosoms of the people of
the United States glowing with feelings like his own. He was sadly
disappointed. Washington was wisely conservative. His wisdom saw that
the cruelty of the anarchists of Paris was not patriotism, but the worst
sort of despotism. The society of New York, in which some of the leaven
of Toryism yet lingered, chilled Jefferson. He became suspicious of all
around him, for he regarded the indifference of the people to the
struggles of the French, their old allies, as an evil omen. Though the
Tories of New York were cool toward the French republic from far
different motives than Washington, yet the same cause was attributed
to both.
Jefferson had scarcely taken his seat as Secretary of State in
Washington's first cabinet before he declared that some of his
colleagues held decidedly monarchical views; and the belief became fixed
in his mind that there was a party in the United States continually at
work, secretly and sometimes openly, for the overthrow of American
republicanism.
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