When intelligence of these events reached Washington he was greatly shocked, and the sad fate of his friend grieved him sorely. Every arrival from Europe brought tidings still more dreadful than the last. "We have had a week of unchecked murders," Morris wrote to Jefferson on the tenth of September, "in which some thousands have perished in this city. It began with two or three hundred of the clergy, who had been shut up because they would not take the oaths prescribed by the law, and which they said were contrary to their conscience. Thence _these executors of speedy justice_ went to the _Abbaye_, where the persons were confined who were at court on the tenth of August. These were despatched also, and afterward they visited the other prisons. All those who were confined either on the accusation or suspicion of crimes were destroyed."
Morris then detailed other horrors; yet Mr. Jefferson, looking upon the whole movement against monarchy and aristocracy as essentially right, and based upon the same principles as that of the American Revolution, persisted in regarding the Jacobins, who were the chief promoters of these bloody deeds, and who had laid violent hands on the constitution and its supporters, as "republican patriots." He was shocked, but was neither disappointed nor very sorrowful. He looked upon the whole affair as an indispensable struggle of freemen in the abolition of monarchy and all its prerogatives and injustice; and he deplored the death of the innocent who had fallen, but only as he should have done "had they fallen in battle." "The liberty of the whole earth," he said, "was depending on the issue of the contest; and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause," he continued; "but rather than that it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would have been better than it now is."
When fully assured of Lafayette's fate, Washington felt an ardent desire to befriend his family, consisting of his wife and young children. He knew that their situation, in the raging storm, must be dreadful at the best; and on the first information of their probable residence, at the close of January, 1793, he addressed the following letter to the marchioness:--
