Alexander Hamilton (91 page)

News of the royal beheading reached America in late March 1793, at an inopportune time for the Jeffersonians, who had stressed France’s moral superiority over Britain. Would they condemn or rationalize the action? The answer became clear when Freneau’s
National Gazette
published an article entitled “Louis Capet has lost his caput.” The author qualified his levity in celebrating the king’s death: “From my use of a pun, it may seem that I think lightly of his fate. I certainly do. It affects me no more than the execution of another malefactor.”
⁹
The author said that the king’s murder represented “a great act of justice,” and anyone shocked by such wanton violence betrayed “a strong remaining attachment to royalty” and belonged to “a monarchical junto.”
¹⁰
In other words, they were Hamiltonians. Once upon a time, Thomas Jefferson had lauded Louis XVI as “a good man,” “an honest man.”
¹¹
Now, he asserted that monarchs should be “amenable to punishment like other criminals.”
¹²

Madison admitted to some qualms about “the follies and barbarities” in Paris but was generally no less militant than Jefferson in admiring the French Revolution, describing it as “wonderful in its progress and…stupendous in its consequences”; he denigrated its enemies as “enemies of human nature.”
¹³
Madison agreed with Jefferson that if their French comrades failed it would doom American republicanism. Madison was not fazed by Louis XVI’s murder. If the king “was a traitor,” he said, “he ought to be punished as well as another man.”
¹⁴
Like Jefferson, Madison filtered out upsetting facts about France and mocked as “spurious” newspaper accounts that talked about the king’s innocence “and the bloodthirstiness of his enemies.”
¹⁵

One mordant irony of this obstinate blindness was that while Republicans rejoiced in the French Revolution and cited the sacred debt owed to French officers who had fought in the American Revolution, those same officers were being victimized by revolutionary violence. Gouverneur Morris, now U.S. minister to France, informed Hamilton after the king’s execution, “It has so happened that a very great proportion of the French officers who served in America have been either opposed to the Revolution at an early day or felt themselves obliged at a later period to abandon it. Some of them are now in a state of banishment and their property confiscated.”
¹⁶
With the monarchy’s fall, the marquis de Lafayette was denounced as a traitor. He fled to Belgium, only to be captured by the Austrians and shunted among various prisons for five years. Tossed into solitary confinement, he eventually emerged wan and emaciated, a mostly hairless cadaver. Lafayette’s family suffered grievously during the Terror. His wife’s sister, mother, and grandmother were all executed and dumped in a common grave. Other heroes of the American Revolution succumbed to revolutionary madness: the comte de Rochambeau was locked up in the Conciergerie, while Admiral d’Estaing was executed.

If Republicans turned a blind eye to these events, the pro-British bias of the Federalists perhaps sharpened their vision. As early as March 1792, Jefferson groused in his “Anas” about Washington’s “want of confidence in the event of the French revolution…. I remember when I received the news of the king’s flight and capture, I first told him of it at his assembly. I never saw him so much dejected by any event in my life.”
¹⁷
Washington was indeed sickened by the bloodshed in France, and this widened the breach between him and Jefferson. John Adams was quite prescient about events in France and regretted that many Americans were “so blind, undistinguishing, and enthusiastic of everything that has been done by that light, airy, and transported people.”
¹⁸
He warned that “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, etc. are furies. Dragons’ teeth have been sown in France and will come up as monsters.”
¹⁹

No American was to expend more prophetic verbiage in denouncing the French Revolution than Alexander Hamilton. The suspension of the monarchy and the September Massacres, Hamilton later told Lafayette, had “cured me of my goodwill for the French Revolution.”
²⁰
Hamilton refused to condone the carnage in Paris or separate means from ends. He did not think a revolution should cast off the past overnight or repudiate law, order, and tradition. “A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious,” he opined. “When conducted with magnanimity, justice, and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.”
²¹
The American Revolution had succeeded because it was “a
free, regular
and
deliberate
act of the nation” and had been conducted with “a spirit of justice and humanity.”
²²
It was, in fact, a revolution written in parchment and defined by documents, petitions, and other forms of law.

What threw Hamilton into despair was not just the betrayal of revolutionary hopes in France but the way its American apologists ended up justifying a “state of things the most cruel, sanguinary, and violent that ever stained the annals of mankind.”
²³
For Hamilton, the utopian revolutionaries in France had emphasized liberty to the exclusion of order, morality, religion, and property rights. They had singled out for persecution bankers and businessmen—people Hamilton regarded as agents of progressive change. He saw the chaos in France as a frightening portent of what could happen in America if the safeguards of order were stripped away by the love of liberty. His greatest nightmare was being enacted across the Atlantic—a hopeful revolution giving way to indiscriminate terror and authoritarian rule. His conclusion was categorical: “If there be anything solid in virtue, the time must come when it will have been a disgrace to have advocated the revolution of France in its late stages.”
²⁴

Reports that France had declared war against England and other royal powers did not reach American shores until early April, when Hamilton informed Washington, then at Mount Vernon, “there seems to be no room for doubt of the existence of war.”
²⁵
Washington rushed back to Philadelphia to formulate policy. He inclined instantly toward neutrality and blanched at rumors that American ships were getting ready to wage war as pro-French privateers. Before Washington’s arrival, Hamilton mulled over a neutrality proclamation and consulted with John Jay, not Thomas Jefferson, who was slowly being shunted aside in foreign policy. The day after his return on April 17, Washington asked his advisers to ponder thirteen questions for a meeting at his residence the next morning. The first question was the overriding one: Should the United States issue a proclamation of neutrality? The next twelve questions related to France, among them: Should America receive an ambassador from France? Should earlier treaties apply? Was France waging an offensive or defensive war? In these queries, with their implicit skepticism of France, Jefferson saw the handiwork of Hamilton, even though Washington had taken pains to write out the questions himself.

With his usual fierce certitude, Hamilton believed that neutrality was the only proper course and had already lectured Washington on the need for “a continuance of the peace, the desire of which may be said to be both universal and ardent.”
²⁶
This had less to do with scruples about war than with a conviction, shared by Washington, that the young country needed a period of prosperity and stability before it was capable of combat. The United States did not even possess a regular navy. At such a moment, Hamilton said, war would be “the most unequal and calamitous in which it is possible for a country to be engaged—a war which would not be unlikely to prove pregnant with greater dangers and disasters than that by which we established our existence as an independent nation.”
²⁷
Though Jefferson sympathized with France and Hamilton with Great Britain, they agreed that neutrality was the only sensible policy. The two secretaries differed on the form this should assume, however, and three days of spirited debate ensued.

At a dramatic session on April 19, Washington listened as Jefferson, eager to extract concessions from England, opposed an immediate declaration of neutrality, or perhaps any declaration at all. Why not stall and make countries bid for American neutrality? Aghast, Hamilton said that American neutrality was not negotiable. Drawing on his formidable powers of persuasion, he pummeled his listeners with authorities on international law: Grotius, Vattel, and Pufendorf. Hamilton carried the day, and the cabinet decided to issue a declaration “forbidding our citizens to take part in any hostilities on the seas with or against any of the belligerent powers.”
²⁸
Jefferson was horrified at suspending the 1778 treaties with France, sealed during the Revolution. But Hamilton argued that France had aided the American Revolution not from humanitarian motives but only to weaken England. He also argued that the French, having toppled Louis XVI, had traded one government for another, rendering their former treaties null and void. Predictably, he opposed a friendly reception for the French minister recently arrived in America, lest it commit the United States to the French cause. Nonetheless, Jefferson triumphed on the issue of accepting the new French minister without qualifications, as Washington demonstrated anew that he was not a puppet in Hamilton’s hands.

On April 22, after days of heated rhetoric from Hamilton and Jefferson, Washington promulgated his Proclamation of Neutrality. Hamilton was the undisputed victor on the main point of issuing a formal, speedy executive declaration, but Jefferson won some key emphases. In particular, Jefferson had worried that the word
neutrality
would signal a flat rejection of France, so the document spoke instead of the need for U.S. citizens to be “friendly and impartial” toward the warring powers.
²⁹
The proclamation set a vital precedent for a proudly independent America, giving it an ideological shield against European entanglements. Of this declaration, Henry Cabot Lodge later wrote, “There is no stronger example of the influence of the Federalists under the leadership of Washington upon the history of the country than this famous proclamation, and in no respect did the personality of Hamilton impress itself more directly on the future of the United States.”
³⁰
With the Neutrality Proclamation, Hamilton continued to define his views on American foreign policy: that it should be based on self-interest, not emotional attachment; that the supposed altruism of nations often masked baser motives; that individuals sometimes acted benevolently, but nations seldom did. This austere, hardheaded view of human affairs likely dated to Hamilton’s earliest observations of the European powers in the West Indies.

The Neutrality Proclamation provoked another contretemps between Jefferson and Hamilton. The secretary of state opposed the form of this milestone in American foreign policy and expressed his indignation to Monroe: “Hamilton is panic-struck if we refuse our breech to every kick which Great Britain may choose to give it.”
³¹
Madison, too, was enraged by the “anglified complexion” of administration policy and dismissed the proclamation as a “most unfortunate error.” The executive branch, he thought, was usurping national-security powers that properly belonged to the legislature. Didn’t Congress alone have the power to declare war and neutrality? He deplored Hamilton’s effort to “shuffle off” the treaty with France as a trick “equally contemptible for the meanness and folly of it.”
³²
Madison favored American support for France and bemoaned that Washington had succumbed to “the unpopular cause of Anglomany.” He still viewed the French Revolution as an inspirational fight for freedom and asked indignantly why George Washington “should have anything to apprehend from the success of liberty in another country.”
³³

On April 8, 1793, the new French minister to the United States sailed into Charleston, South Carolina, aboard the frigate
Embuscade
and enjoyed a tumultuous reception from a giant throng. His name was Edmond Charles Genêt, but he would be known to history, in the fraternal style popularized by the French Revolution, as Citizen Genêt. Short and ruddy, the thirty-year-old diplomat had flaming red hair, a sloping forehead, and an aquiline nose. Gouverneur Morris sniffed that he had “the manner and look of an upstart.”
³⁴
Though he often acted like a political amateur, he had an excellent résumé. Fluent in Greek at age six, the translator of Swedish histories by twelve, he spoke seven languages, was an accomplished musician, and had already seen diplomatic service in London and St. Petersburg. He was so closely associated with the moderate Girondists that, before the king’s head was severed, there had been speculation that Citizen Genêt might accompany the royal family to America.

In social situations, the bustling young emissary could be charming and engaging, but he did not behave with the subtlety and prudence expected of a diplomat. Indeed, if Hamilton had decided to invent a minister to dramatize his fears of the French Revolution, he could have conjured up no one better than the vain, extravagant, and bombastic Genêt. The Frenchman was to swagger and bluster and wade blindly into the warfare between Hamilton and Jefferson.

Citizen Genêt landed with a lengthy agenda. He wanted the United States to extend more funds to France and supply foodstuffs and other army provisions. Much more controversially, he wanted to strike blows against Spanish and British possessions in North America and was ready to hire secret agents for that purpose. Jefferson became his clandestine accomplice when he furnished Genêt with a letter introducing a French botanist named André Michaux to the governor of Kentucky. Michaux planned to arm Kentuckians and stir up frontier settlements in Spanish Louisiana. Jefferson’s aid violated the policy of neutrality and made Hamilton’s unauthorized talks with George Beckwith seem like tame indiscretions in comparison.