Union. Descended from English stock, imbued with common religious
and political traditions, and bound together by the ties of a
common ecclesiastical polity, the people of this section had, as
Jefferson expressed it, "a sort of family pride." Here all the
forces of education, property, religion, and respectability were
united in the maintenance of the established order against the
assaults of democracy. New England Federalism was not so much a
body of political doctrine as a state of mind. Abhorrence of the
forces liberated by the French Revolution was the dominating
emotion. To the Federalist leaders democracy seemed an aberration
of the human mind, which was bound everywhere to produce
infidelity, looseness of morals, and political chaos. In the
words of their Jeremiah, Fisher Ames, "Democracy is a troubled
spirit, fated never to rest, and whose dreams, if it sleeps,
present only visions of hell." So thinking and feeling, they had
witnessed the triumph of Jefferson with genuine alarm, for
Jefferson they held to be no better than a Jacobin, bent upon
subverting the social order and saturated with all the heterodox
notions of Voltaire and Thomas Paine.

The appointment of the aged Samuel Bishop as Collector of New
Haven was evidence enough to the Federalist mind, which fed upon
suspicion, that Jefferson intended to reward his son, Abraham
Bishop, for political services. The younger Bishop was a stench
in their nostrils, for at a recent celebration of the Republican
victory he had shocked the good people of Connecticut by
characterizing Jefferson as "the illustrious chief who, once
insulted, now presides over the Union," and comparing him with
the Saviour of the world, "who, once insulted, now presides over
the universe." And this had not been his first transgression: he