ABSTRACT
The astrological signs were certainly adverse to Paine when Thomas Jefferson left France and Gouverneur Morris was sent over by the President on a special mission. The appointment was so unpopular in America that Washington warned Morris to watch his step, and so unfortunate in Paine’s opinion that he frankly expressed his misgivings to the gentleman himself. Morris was an extremely class-conscious member of the landed gentry, “an exotic in a republic,” said his friend Alexander Hamilton. He was an accomplished man of the world, able, cool, cynical, shrewd, and courageous, skilled in finance and finesse; and judging by his own record of intrigue, Machiavelli could have given him few points. He took to the life of the French court like a cow to clover; his diary is an entertaining and illuminating paradox, his sympathies all with the privileged class, his facts all against them. It is an unrelieved record of the grossness, cupidity, imbecility, indecency, and incest of European royalty and aristocracy. Ultra-democrats would undoubtedly find in its pages a complete vindication of Paine’s exuberant zeal for the destruction of that order which, with all its faults, Morris loved. “There is but one sovereign in Europe—the Empress of Russia— who is not in the scale of talents considerably below par.” Nevertheless he has no sympathy with the revolt against such rulers, and piously observes anent a proposed French regency: “Of course they must go on with the miserable creature which God has given them. His wisdom will doubtless produce good by ways to us inscrutable, and on that we must repose,” He was not backward in supplementing the divine wisdom, which must have become more inscrutable to him as time went on.
