modern South
Carolina "sound and fury," gave public notice, that, if the treaty
entered into by "that damned arch traitor, John Jay, with the British
tyrant should be ratified, a petition will be presented to the next
General Assembly of Virginia praying that the said State may recede
from the Union, and be left under the government and protection of
one hundred thousand free and independent Virginians!" A meeting at
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, resolved, "that it was weary of the tardiness
of Congress in not going to war with England, and that they were _almost
ready_ to wish for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France
for a short space, in order to punish the miscreants who enervate and
disgrace the government." Mr. Jefferson's opinion of the treaty is well
known from his rhetorical letter to Rutledge, which, in two or three
lines, contains the adjectives, _unnecessary, impolitic, dangerous,
dishonorable, disadvantageous, humiliating, disgraceful, improper,
monarchical, impeachable_. The Mazzei letter, written not long after the
ratification, displays the same bitter feeling.

The Federalists had a powerful ally in William Cobbett, who signed
himself Peter Porcupine, adopting for his literary _alias_ a nickname
bestowed by his enemies. This remarkable writer, who, like Paine,
figured in the political conflicts of two nations, must have come into
the world bristling with pugnacity. A more thorough game-cock never
crowed in the pit. He had been a private in the English army, came
to the United States about 1790, and taught French to Americans, and
English to Frenchmen, (to Talleyrand among others,) until 1794, when
the dogmatic Dr. Priestley arrived here, fresh from the scene of his
persecutions. The Doctor losing no time in laying his case before the
American public, Cobbett answered his publication, ridiculing it and the
Doctor's political career in a pamphlet which became immediately popular
with the Federalists. From that time until his departure for England, in
1800, Cobbett's pen was never idle. His "Little Plain English in Favor
of Mr. Jay's Treaty" was altogether the best thing published on that
side of the question. Cobbett had more than one point of resemblance to
Paine, the object of his early invective, but later of his unqualified
admiration. These two men were the best English pamphleteers of their
day. In shrewdness, in practical sense, Cobbett was fully Paine's equal.
He was as coarse and as pithy