Such fears may not be brushed aside as silly and chimerical, in view of the steady stream of information which came across the Atlantic, announcing the downfall of one nation after another as the result of French intrigue and the prowess of French arms.[279] Besides, there was probably not a solitary Federalist leader in the United States who did not believe that French ministers and agents were in secret league with influential representatives of the Democratic party.
The bullying treatment which the French Directory accorded the ministers and envoys of this nation added much to the heat as well as to the dark suspicions which characterized public feeling in America. A government which boldly assumed to treat with impudent indifference and coldness one accredited minister of the United States, while at the same time it lavished the most extravagant expressions of friendship upon another whose disappointed executive had reluctantly summoned him home,[280] was obviously pursuing a course so high-handed and insolent as to stir the last dormant impulse of national honor. But the hot flame of public indignation which burst forth in this country when it became known that its Minister Plenipotentiary, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, after months of painful embarrassment and hazard, marked by neglect, evasions, and threats of arrest, was returning home, defeated in purpose, was as nothing to the lava-like stream of infuriated anger which swept through the land when it became known how treacherously the three envoys of the national government, Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry, had been used.
By common consent the publication of the X.Y.Z. despatches, early in April, 1798, put the top sheaf upon a long series of intolerable actions which this nation had suffered at the hands of the government of France. Like a flash it was made clear that not mere whimsicality and offended hauteur were at the bottom of the unsatisfactory dealings which our ministers had had with the French: we had sent our ambassadors to negotiate with men who knew how to add bribery to threats. Though the government of France might seek to save its face on the pretext that the mysterious French emissaries had acted without proper warrant, yet back of the negotiators was Talleyrand, and back of Talleyrand the Directory. The revulsion of feeling in the United States was complete. All innocent delusions were shattered; all veils torn away. What the French government desired in its negotiations was not political sympathy, not commercial cooperation, not a fraternal alliance between two sister republics in order that the flame of liberty might not perish from the earth; what it desired was _money_—money for the pockets of the Directory and its tools, “for the purpose of making the customary distribution in diplomatic affairs,” money for the public treasury that the Directory might find itself in a position to give a “softening turn” to certain irritating statements of which President Adams had delivered himself in his message to the Fifth Congress.[281]