By his efforts,
and the aid of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Constitution
and the Union had been saved when "at its last gasp."
As the time of Jefferson's inauguration approached, rumours of
revolutionary action grew into a general alarm lest all the union-making
of twelve years should be annihilated and the Federation days be brought
back again. Jefferson's well-known antipathy to taxation and a national
debt caused a rumour that he planned repudiation of the national
obligation, perhaps an agrarian law, and even the distribution of all
property. The vested interests were as much alarmed as ever they were
in subsequent elections. "We have seen," cried one holder of national
certificates and a subscriber to the bank, "the French clergy stripped
in a night. One vote of Congress would put our federal debt into the
family tomb with the paper money of Revolutionary days." Among the
measures supposed to be contemplated by the victorious "mobocrats,"
as the Federalists called them, were the abolition of the United States
Senate, destruction of foreign commerce and public schools, the
abolition of internal taxes, the annihilation of the bank, and the
Europeanising of the country by French immigrants.
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