It might have been expected that a Democratic sheet as violent and aggressive as the _Independent Chronicle_ would range itself squarely against the alarmists, and seek, if not by argument at least by unlicensed vituperation, to distract the public interest. But as a matter of fact, the _Chronicle_ elected to adopt a very different attitude.[742] Morse and his associates in the special cause which he and they were pleading should be treated with contemptuous indifference. The _bête noire_ of the editors of the _Chronicle_ was “political preaching.” This new agitation over Illuminism, for which the clergy were chiefly responsible, was but one other proof of their incorrigible impertinence in turning aside from their legitimate functions. In displaying “his over-heated zeal ... in silly tales about the ‘illuminati’,”[743] Morse was but holding true to type.[744]
At Hartford, next to Boston the main center of the Illuminati agitation in New England, two papers, the _American Mercury_ and the _Connecticut Courant_, assisted materially in giving publicity to the controversy. The former at first gave some evidence of a disposition to treat Morse’s presentation of the case with respect. Extracts from the latter’s fast day sermon of May 9, 1798, were given to this journal’s readers;[745] and the annual poem which at the beginning of the new year (1799) it furnished to its patrons, testified to the widespread interest that the general public in Connecticut had come to have in the subject of the Illuminati.[746] It was not long after this, however, that Elisha Babcock, editor of the _Mercury_, found reason to become rabidly hostile to Morse and his agitation.[747]
As for the _Connecticut Courant_, its behavior was precisely what one should expect from a journal breathing always a spirit of arrogant and unreasoning Federalism. Quick to take advantage of any new issue which gave promise of offering discomfiture to the Democrats, and all too often impatient to the point of exasperation over so slight a question as the essential soundness of the facts involved, from the first day that it was made aware of the agitation against the Illuminati, the _Courant_ gave every encouragement to the men who were trying to awaken the people of the country to a sense of the gravity of the peril that threatened. The books, pamphlets, sermons, orations, and leading newspaper contributions that appeared upon the subject, these the _Courant_ urged upon the attention of its readers, and gave such assistance as it was able in the exposition of their respective merits.[748]