“Our Telegraphe much news relates”

Yesterday I quoted the introductory lines of the verse for 1 Jan 1799 printed for the subscribers to the American Telegraphe in Newfield (later Bridgeport), Connecticut. In the voice of the newspaper carrier Polly, the wife or perhaps the stepdaughter of printer Lazarus Beach, that poem asked readers to “excuse what you cannot commend” in the rest of the broadside. But what might need excusing?

Those verses that followed were a poetic review of the year 1798, and they emphasized political controversies. For example:

Of Frenchmen’s “Diplomatic skill,”
Which many a Telegraphe did fill,—
Of X, Y, Z, and Talleyrand,
And ladies too, a chosen band,
Who undertook t’extort a fee,
From nations sovereign and free,
And after we had crouch’d and feed ’em,
To make us swallow Gallic freedom…

That’s a reference to the XYZ Affair (lampooned above), in which French officials had demanded bribes from American diplomats. With the facts gradually coming out, the nascent American political parties maneuvered for advantages and openings to blame the other side.

At home—of these United States,
Our Telegraphe much news relates:
How French-Americans are bang’d,
Yet Doctor L——n goes unhang’d.
How B——w a long letter wrote,
In right French stile and Gallic note:
For showing which, the Vermont L—n
The cold stone doublet has to try on.

“Doctor L——n” was Dr. George Logan, a Jeffersonian who had tried to effect peace between the U.S. of A. and France through informal contacts. Federalists denounced him as a traitor and passed a law making such unofficial diplomacy illegal.

“B——w” was the American diplomat Joel Barlow, who sent a long, one-sided letter from Paris to his brother-in-law Rep. Abraham Baldwin on 1 Mar 1798 about the friction between America and France. Rep. Matthew Lyon (the “Vermont L—n”) printed that letter and went to jail for that and other offenses under the Sedition Act. The American Telegraphe celebrated rather than condemned that attempt to limit the free press.

How Kentucke and the old Dominion,
(Akin by nature and opinion)
Are ’bout resolving, all at once,
To act the madman and the dunce.
But Carolina and Georgia too,
Are honest, Fed’ral, firm and true,
What then can poor Virginians do?
Why after they’ve cut all their flashes,
Repent in sackcloth, dust and ashes.

That refers to the conflict over the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, challenges to the central government drafted by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively.

There were also some ethnic insults aimed at the French:

Great Buonaparte with his war dogs,
Has gone to Egypt after frogs…

In sum, the bulk of this broadside was Federalist invective. The American Telegraphe was one of the few newspapers to adopt that name which didn’t support the Jeffersonian party. And even at New Year’s, the paper’s employees were spreading its politics. The carrier delivering the verse was therefore in the potentially difficult position of asking for generous contributions while insulting a portion of the public.

But it could have been worse. In The Revolution of American Conservatism, David Hackett Fischer classified the American Telegraphe as “moderately Federalist in 1798.” In The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, Donald H. Stewart called it “Independently Federalist.” Imagine what those verses would have sounded like if the paper had been strongly Federalist.

“No man…was so hated and despised as Matthew Lyon”

Federalist journalist William Cobbett’s 1798 poem “The Pig and the Lion,” quoted yesterday, didn’t compare William Frederick Pinchbeck’s trained pig to an actual lion. After all, wearing a wooden sword, spitting in people’s faces, and carrying a candle in one’s buttocks isn’t typical leonine behavior.

Rather, Cobbett was comparing the beast to Rep. Matthew Lyon (1749-1822, shown here) of Vermont, a radical Democratic-Republican who became the Federalists’ biggest rhetorical target that year.

Lyon was born in Ireland and came to Connecticut in 1764 as a teen-aged “redemptioner”—meaning he worked as an indentured servant on a farm for a while to pay for his passage. Lyon moved north to the “New Hampshire Grants” in 1774 and was an adjutant and a lieutenant under Col. Seth Warner.

In 1776 Gen. Horatio Gates ordered Lyon to be cashiered. Lyon later claimed that this was because he had failed, despite his best efforts, to prevent his men from mutinying, and that he retained respect locally, which appears to be true. Lyon’s political enemies said he had been condemned to wear a wooden sword as a sign of cowardice, but there doesn’t seem to be evidence for that.

In independent Vermont, Lyon founded the town of Fair Haven, built mills, and started a newspaper. He served in the legislature and in 1796 was elected to represent Vermont in the U.S. Congress. At that time American politicians were openly forming two parties, each blaming the other for factionalism, and the bounds of accepted political behavior were being worked out.

Lyon was from the radical wing of the Democratic-Republican Party. On 30 Jan 1798, he claimed on the House floor that Connecticut Federalists weren’t representing the interests or desires of their constituents. One of those Federalists, Rep. Roger Griswold (1762-1812), replied by asking Lyon if he’d fight for them with his wooden sword. Lyon spat in Griswold’s face. Hence Cobbett’s poetic allusions to a wooden sword and spitting in Christians’ faces.

On 15 February, Griswold ran up to Lyon’s desk and started beating him with a cane. Lyon stumbled to a fireplace and grabbed the tongs to defend himself. The two men grappled before other members pulled them apart. Eventually the House decided not to take action against either Lyon or Griswold since both had behaved badly and both claimed to have won. That episode might have something to do with Cobbett’s candle allusion, though that would be more of a stretch.

In his History of the People of the United States (1914), John Bach McMaster wrote: “No man in the whole Republican party, not Benjamin Franklin Bache, nor Albert Gallatin, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor James Thomas Callender, was so hated and despised as Matthew Lyon.” In October 1798 Lyon was convicted and jailed under the Sedition Act for lambasting President John Adams’s policies toward France, but his constituents overwhelmingly reelected him anyway. He got to cast a decisive vote for Thomas Jefferson during the disputed election of 1800.

The next year, Lyon moved to Kentucky, which he and later his son also represented in Congress. J. Fairfax McLaughlin’s 1900 biography of Lyon is available on Google Books, and there have been more recent studies as well.