United States or Estonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


In a letter to a friend, he said, "It is seldom easy to speak with absolute certainty in such cases, but from all I could observe, or have been able to learn, I believe the number would be stated high at a hundred persons." Of a meeting convened at evening to receive Mr. Genet, Hamilton said, "From forty to one hundred persons give you the extremes of the number present."

Among the twelve enumerated great grievances of which Genet complained, was, that at his first interview with the president, the latter did not speak to him, specially, but of the friendship of the United States toward France; that he did not, with partisan enthusiasm, announce a single sentiment on the French Revolution, "while all the towns from Charleston to Philadelphia had made the air resound with their most ardent wishes for the French republic."

In all these transformations we distinctly recognize the same free and powerful poetical spirit, to which we may safely apply the Homeric lines on Proteus: All' aetoi protista leon genet' aeugeneios Pineto d' aegron aedor, kai dendreon uphipertaelon. Odyss. lib. iv

From Charleston, where he landed, to Philadelphia, Genet was received with the warmest enthusiasm by all who sympathized with France, and by that larger number among Americans who are always ready to hurrah for anything or anybody that has caught the popular fancy. Madison watched his progress with great interest, and apparently with some misgivings.

The joint commission bore no fruit, and the troubles in the West increased. Fostered by Genet, they came near bringing on war and detaching the western settlements from the Union, so that it was clearly necessary to take more vigorous measures.

But the government was unmoved. The prisoners were not released, nor the vessels restored; whereupon Genet ventured to declare that he "would appeal from the president to the people." His only excuse for this rash assertion was his utter ignorance of the character of the president and people whose actions, in concerns so momentous, he assumed to control or defy.

Genet, over ten years before the Lewis and Clark expedition, contemplated the use of an American force against British Canada. Miranda proposed to use the same recruiting-ground for his movements on Spanish South America, and even Hamilton consented to the scheme, if he could be commander of the expedition.

It was during the controversy with M. Genet, the French minister, as to his right to refit a captured English merchantman as a privateer at an American port, and then send her out for a cruise.

"I have it in charge to observe," said Jefferson to Genet in a letter on the thirty-first of December, "that your functions as the minister of a foreign nation here are confined to the transactions of the affairs of your nation with the executive of the United States; that the communications which are to pass between the executive and legislative branches can not be a subject for your interference; and that the president must be left to judge for himself what matters his duty, or the public good, may require him to propose to the deliberations of Congress.

At this period an event with which I had nothing to do placed me in a still more critical situation. My brother, M. Genet, began his diplomatic career successfully. At eighteen he was attached to the embassy to Vienna; at twenty he was appointed chief secretary of Legation in England, on occasion of the peace of 1783.