Gazette Of The United States And Daily Evening Advertiser

To the Printer of the Gazette of the United States.

AFTER reading the accounts that have been published in your papers of the execrable butcheries, which have been committed on the Royalists of Nantes and La Vendee, I was tempted to translate, into plain English, Carnot's address to that persecuted people, and it is now submitted to you for publication.

FOR more than two years has your country been a prey to the horrors of war, which our predecessors in office have waged against the rights, liberties, and consciences of their fellow-citizens. Those fertile plains, which were designed by Nature to be the abode of happiness, became the rendezvous of the proscribed and persecuted, and have been polluted, in every quarter, by the indiscriminate slaughter of the innocent and guilty; the butchery of enfeebled age; the violation of helpless matrons and virgins; the universal carnage of all, who had not the good fortune to fly among strangers, or make their escape to heights and holes in the mountains. The flames have devoured the habitations of the fugitives; and the earth, covered with ruins, the horrid monuments of republican vengeance, refuses a subsistence to the few miserable survivors. Such, Frenchmen, are the baneful fruits of an atheistical philosophy! such the wounds of our common country, inflicted by the avarice, cruelty, and ambition of pretended patriots. Wicked men have abused the ignorance and confidence of the people. In the names of liberty and equality, they have proscribed all liberty of speech, and the equal rights of opinion—and with the pretensions of a mild philosophy on their lips, they have urged the most barbarous savages in cruelty. In the name of the Republic, the talisman of all their nefarious acts, they have pursued their fellow-citizens, and obliged them to seek a refuge in this corner of the country; chosen because it bordered on the sea, and afforded the more easy means of escape. Alas! what lives have been immolated on the altar of a ferocious novelty!—and how have you been hunted like the wild beasts of the forests, because you would not embrace the hideous phantom! But you have preferred a precarious security in the mountains, where you might exercise the rites of worship; you have even courted the alliance of the ancient enemies of France, rather than live without God and Religion; or tamely submit your necks to the fatal axe. Animated by resentment and despair, you have often met the armies of the Republic in the field. Sometimes you have been victors: at other times you have been vanquished. Though weakened and scattered, you are yet in arms, and threaten the domination of the Convention with continued opposition and assault. Despairing at length to reduce you by force, the Convention is willing to try the arts of negotiation. She acknowledges that your conduct is not so criminal as it was represented. She says you have been misled, and her arms are now stretched out to receive you with a maternal embrace. She declares that the Commissioners, who were sent among you, (though chosen from a hardened band of cut-throats for the very purpose of your destruction) have abused their trust, and shall be sacrificed on the altar of conciliation. These scape-goats, having done their business, shall bear the sins of the Convention, and instead of being banished into the wilderness, shall fall under the axe of the law, with the universal execration they deserve. Such has been the wise policy of the Convention on all similar occasions. Witness the many generals and delegates, who have been sacrificed for their virtues as well as vices, just as it suited the views of the predominant faction. One of the crimes for which Brissot was guillotined, was, that he rushed into a war with G. B. which might have been avoided; and yet the Convention is determined to prosecute that war to the utmost extremity. Genet was displaced for attempting to drag the United States of America into the contest, though this was one of the most important articles of his commission: and such little confidence has he in our Republican justice or mercy, that he has thought it safest in order to preserve his head, to remain in America, and trust to the generosity of strangers whom he had offended, rather than return to the bosom of his political parent. I can assure you, therefore, that the Committee of General Safety will be highly gratified with an opportunity of manifesting her justice against Carrier and his associates, if their deaths are followed by your submission. Hasten then to embrace this season of clemency; God knows how