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” reporting that 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 to foment the same sort of revolution in the United States, which was not true. The Federalists feared that the Democratic-Republicans, with the help of the French, wanted to overthrow the government.[1]
One month later, 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.[2]
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. [3] 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.
How Bache’s Successor Eluded Government Officials
Look for it Monday, November 18
[1]Edward C. Carter II, “A ‘Wild Irishman’ Under Every Federalist’s Bed: Naturalization in Philadelphia, 1789-1806,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, V. 94, N.3 (July, 1970) 335.
[2] Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 136-7.
[3] 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.
