Permit me to place here my particular thankfulness for the kind sentiments of personal regard which you have been pleased to express.
I have been in the constant hope of seeing the second volume of your excellent botanical work. Its alphabetical form and popular style, its attention to the properties and uses of plants, as well as to their descriptions, are well calculated to encourage and instruct our citizens in botanical inquiries.
I avail myself of this occasion, of enclosing you a little of the fruit of a _Capsicum_ I have just received from the province of Texas, where it is indigenous and perennial, and is used as freely as salt by the inhabitants. It is new to me. It differs from your _Capsicum Minimum_, in being perennial and probably hardier; perhaps, too, in its size, which would claim the term of _Minutissimum_. This stimulant being found salutary in a visceral complaint known on the sea-coast, the introduction of a hardier variety may be of value. Accept the assurance of my great respect and consideration.
But to return, _for the present_, to "The sensations excited in free, yet firm minds by the Terrorism of the day." You say none can conceive them who did not witness them; and they were felt by one party only.
Upon this subject I despair of making myself understood by posterity, by the present age, and even by you. To collect and arrange the documents illustrative of it, would require as many lives as those of a cat. You never felt the terrorism of Chaise's Rebellion in Massachusetts. I believe you never felt the terrorism of Gallatin's insurrection in Pennsylvania. You certainly never realized the terrorism of Tries's most outrageous riot and rescue, as I call it. Treason, rebellion--as the world, and great judges, and two juries pronounce it.
You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genet in 1793, when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house, and effect a revolution in the government, or compel it to declare war in favor of the French revolution, and against England. The coolest and the firmest minds, even among the Quakers in Philadelphia, have given their opinions to me, that nothing but the yellow fever, which removed Dr. Hutchinson and Jonathan Dickinson Sargent from this world, could have saved the United States from a total revolution of government. I have no doubt you were fast asleep in philosophical tranquillity when ten thousand people, and perhaps many more, were parading the streets of Philadelphia, on the evening of my _Fast Day_. When even Governor Mifflin himself, thought it his duty to order a patrol of horse and foot, to preserve the peace; when Market Street was as full as men could stand by one another, and even before my door; when some of my domestics, in phrenzy, determined to sacrifice their lives in my defence; when all were ready to make a desperate sally among the multitude, and others were with difficulty and danger dragged back by the others; when I myself judged it prudent and necessary to order chests of arms from the war office, to be brought through by lanes and back doors; determined to defend my house at the expense of my life, and the lives of the few, very few, domestics and friends within it. What think you of terrorism, Mr. Jefferson? Shall I investigate the causes, the motives, the incentives to these terrorisms? Shall I remind you of Phillip Freneau, of Loyd, of Ned Church? Of Peter Markoe, of Andrew Brown, of Duane? Of Callender, of Tom Paine, of Greenleaf, of Cheatham, of Tennison at New York, of Benjamin Austin at Boston?