showed Blount's influence very strongly, and was markedly in advance of
most of the similar papers of the time, including the _Kentucky
Gazette_; for it took a firm stand in favor of the National Government,
and against every form of disorder, of separatism, or of mob law. As
with all of the American papers of the day, even in the backwoods, there
was much interest taken in European news, and a prominent position was
given to long letters, or extracts from seaboard papers, containing
accounts of the operations of the English fleets and the French armies,
or of the attitude of the European governments. Like most Americans, the
editorial writers of the paper originally sympathized strongly with the
French Revolution; but the news of the beheading of Marie Antoinette,
and the recital of the atrocities committed in Paris, worked a reaction
among those who loved order, and the _Knoxville Gazette_ ranged itself
with them, taking for the time being strong grounds against the French,
and even incidentally alluding to the Indians as being more
blood-thirsty than any man "not a Jacobin." [Footnote: _Knoxville
Gazette_, March 27, 1794.] The people largely shared these sentiments.
In 1793 at the Fourth of July celebration at Jonesborough there was a
public dinner and ball, as there was also at Knoxville; Federal troops
were paraded and toasts were drunk to the President, to the Judges of
the Supreme Court, to Blount, to General Wayne, to the friendly
Chickasaw Indians, to Sevier, to the ladies of the Southwestern
Territory, to the American arms, and, finally, "to the true liberties of
France and a speedy and just punishment of the murderers of Louis XVI."
The word "Jacobin" was used as a term of reproach for some time.

The "Gazette" Sound in its Politics.

The paper was at first decidedly Federalist in sentiment. No sympathy
was expressed with Genet or with the efforts undertaken by the Western
allies of the French Minister to organize a force for the conquest of
Louisiana; and the Tennessee settlers generally took the side of law and
order in the earlier disturbances in which the Federal Government was
concerned. At the Fourth of July celebration in Knoxville, in 1795, one
of the toasts was "The four western counties of Pennsylvania; may they
repent their folly and sin no more"; the Tennesseeans sympathizing as
little with the Pennsylvania whiskey revolutionists as four years later
they sympathized with the Kentuckians and V