The new French administration's change of policy vis-à-vis the United States and the Spanish possessions did not immediately deter individual Americans from offering their services to the cause of the liberation of the Spanish American colonies. Thus, on 23 November 1793 Joel Barlow and Mark Leavenworth submitted to Robespierre's government a detailed plan to take Louisiana and hand it over to the French authorities. In their ‘Plan pour prendre la Louisiane, sans couter rien à la nation’, Barlow and Leavenworth proposed to equip, arm and pay an army of two thousand men at their own expense and lead them against Louisiana ‘au nom de la République française’. Coming on the heels of the adoption of the Law of Suspects, which allowed for the creation of Revolutionary tribunals that sent thousands of ‘traitors’ to be guillotined, and in the midst of the brutal suppression of the counter-revolutionary uprising in the Vendée (which lasted from October to December), Barlow and Leavenworth's plan to establish a form of government in Louisiana ‘founded on the republican principles of the French constitution’ suggests that Thomas Jefferson and the members of the Democratic and Republican Societies were not the only Americans to continue ‘worshipping the French Revolution’ beyond the point where, in retrospect, such support for ‘the fanatical cult of Liberty’ had become synonymous with colluding with genocide. Indeed, in a footnote to the reissue of his ‘Letter to the People of Piedmont’, which appeared in 1796, Barlow still defended the establishment of the Revolutionary tribunal in March 1793, observing that it was ‘to be regretted that that institution was deferred to so late a period; as it was calculated to prevent a more tumultuous mode of exercising popular vengeance’.