ly brisk. Forty dollars was the regular
market price for an ordinary Indian's scalp. But as much
as a thousand was offered for Simon Girty's in the hope
of getting that inconvenient British scout put quickly
out of the way. Nearer home Jefferson and his band of
demagogues had other arguments as well. The Federal North
would suffer most by war, while the Republican South
might use war as a means of repudiating all the debts
she owed to Englishmen. This would have been a very
different thing from the insolvency of the Continental
Congress during the Revolution. It was dire want, not
financial infamy, that made the Revolutionary paper money
'not worth a Continental.' But it would have been sheer
theft for the Jeffersonian South to have made its honest
obligations 'rotten as a Pennsylvanian bond.'

The wild French-Revolutionary rage that swept through
the South now fanned the flame and made the sparks fly
over into Canada. In April 1793 a fiery Red Republican,
named Genet, landed at Charleston as French minister to
the United States and made a triumphal progress to
Philadelphia. Nobody bothered about the fundamental
differences between the French and American revolutions.
France and England were going to war and that was enough.
Genet was one of those 'impossibles' whom revolutions
throw into ridiculous power. When he began his campaign
the Republican South was at his feet. Planters and
legislators donned caps of liberty and danced themselves
so crazy over the rights of abstract man that they had
no enthusiasm left for such concrete instances as Loyalists,
Englishmen, and their own plantation slaves. Then Genet
made his next step in the new diplomacy by fitting out
French privateers in American harbours and seizing British
vessels in American waters. This brought Washington down
on him at once. Then he lost his head completely, abused
everybody, including Jefferson, and retired from public
life as an American citizen, being afraid to go home.

Genet's absurd career was short, but very meteoric while
it lasted, and full of anti-British mischief-making. His
agents were everywhere; and his successor, Adet, carried
on the underground agitation with equal zeal and more
astuteness. Vermont offered an excellent base of operations.
Finding that its British proclivities had not produced
the Chambly canal for its trade with the St Lawrence, it
had become more violently anti-British than ever before
and even proposed taking C