One of the great watersheds of Western history was a sanguinary and tragicomic farce that presaged the ambiguity of the legacy of the Enlightenment itself. The moderate civilizing evolution advocated by Voltaire, Franklin, and their friends degenerated into terror, licentiousness, dictatorship, endless war, and futile reaction. The first claimants to emulation of the American Revolution soon became a horrifying cautionary tale.
France joined America as a republic in 1792—the first of five republics in France (to date), interspersed with a directory, consulate, two empires, two restorations, a “popular monarchy,” two provisional governments, a government in exile, and an undefined “French State,” governing in the name of a foreign occupier. The First Republic would last only three years.
American cartwheels of delight, solidarity, and legitimization of events in France would not be durable. Jefferson went impetuously cock-a-hoop for the French revolutionaries, delighted that the monarch to whom he had presented his letters of credence was executed as “a criminal,” and soon subsumed into the breezy assurance that “The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants.” Jefferson was not only a bigoted and delusional Francophile and Anglophobe; he was a poseur. He sincerely believed that revolution was a discrete movement that must sweep Europe and ensconce America as its legitimizing trailblazer, or perish and imperil the American Revolution with it. Both Hamilton and Jefferson urged on Washington a proclamation of neutrality, which he did issue on April 22, 1793, and Jefferson’s true colors as a romantic revolutionary sobered by a political opportunist and a champion of inherited and slave-holding property became more visible.
Unlike Thomas Paine and some other American true believers, Jefferson knew that what had occurred in America wasn’t a revolution at all. It was a forced national disembarkation of the colonial power, a national self-empowerment, in which the land-owning and professional and leading commercial classes reinforced their control over the disaffected country, covering the whole drama in the stirring vocabulary of liberty and obscuring a tax dispute that flared into a continental war of liberation. What was unfolding in France was a much more profound and very violent upheaval temporarily destroying an entire civilization built in rich distinction over 15 centuries. What Jefferson professed to regard as a revolutionary movement productive of human liberty was just anarchism, soon seized by an authoritarian militarist and translated into an orgy of aggressive conquest and spoliation killing several million people across Europe, although France was certainly not solely responsible for the carnage. Jefferson ran with the revolutionaries and rode in a carriage with the established and inherited interests, and reconciled it all artfully, one of history’s first and greatest limousine liberals. In 1793, he urged Madison to reply to Hamilton’s successful denunciations of the French Revolution in newspapers and pamphlets. Madison dutifully tried, but his heart wasn’t in it, and nor were the unfolding forces of history, as the French Revolution became steadily more impossible to defend.
Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson all agreed that the United States must maintain its neutrality between France and Britain. In the sage beginning of what would be a vastly successful policy for nearly 150 years, the United States would generally abstain from Europe’s quarrels, and grow steadily stronger as Europe’s penchant for internecine bloodbaths became ever more sanguinary. Washington said that with 20 years of peace and economic growth, the United States would be fully capable to see off any European intruder. This was only slightly optimistic, and did not, of course, address America’s own Achilles’ heel, the ineluctable tumor of slavery.
4. RELATIONS WITH FRANCE AND BRITAIN
Problems between neutralist America and the compulsively belligerent revolutionary government of France were not long in coming. The French minister, the bumptious and completely unqualified “Citizen (Edmond Charles) Genet,” aged just 29, arrived at Charleston on April 8, 1793, and commissioned four privateers to prey upon British shipping in American waters and also commissioned overland attacks on British and Spanish targets on the borders of the United States. He proceeded, amid considerable celebrations and extravagant greetings, to Philadelphia, where he arrived on May 16. Washington received him coolly on May 18, and on June 5 Jefferson handed him a letter from the president telling him that his privateers could not infringe U.S. territorial waters and no prizes taken would be permitted in U.S. ports. The letter noted in the sparest terms a serious trespass on U.S. national sovereignty. Genet promised to do as Washington demanded but soon rechristened a British vessel that had been taken as it was being refitted in a U.S. port, and when warned not to allow the ship to sail, he did so anyway and threatened to appeal over Washington’s head to the American people. Both Hamilton and Madison, in the midst of their newspaper debate, supported the president. On August 2, the cabinet, including Jefferson, agreed with Washington’s demand for Genet’s recall. Washington sent his full correspondence on the issue to the Congress with a message saying that Genet was trying to plunge the U.S. into “war abroad and discord and anarchy at home.”
The Democratic societies had been supporting Genet, but the great majority of Americans backed Washington’s firm and sensible response, and the whole affair then rapidly descended into farce. Genet lingered in America but had no status, as the Revolution in France moved toward its most extreme phase. Genêt’s successor, Joseph Fauchet, arrived in 1794 and demanded Genêt’s arrest and extradition to France in chains. Washington, in a typical gentlemanly flourish, refused and gave him asylum, and Genet became an American and married a daughter of Governor and future vice president George Clinton. Support for France was also diluted by Thomas Paine’s pamphlet
The Age of Reason,
which sold scores of thousands of copies in America but was an attack on all religion, raised the strenuous opposition of all denominations, and brought the entire clergy of America into the Federalist camp, instantly cured of any sympathy for the French Revolution, which Paine had served as a member of the National Convention. It also destroyed much of his historical standing and caused otherwise kindred spirits to defect from his admirers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who generally referred to him as “a filthy little atheist.”
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The Treaty of 1783 had recognized American independence and ended the the American Revolutionary War but did not resolve all issues between the United States and Great Britain. Britain continued to occupy a series of forts and trading posts in the Northwest that were recognized as American but that the British still operated. The British justified their retention by the failure of the Americans to pay pre-revolutionaty debts to British merchants and promised compensation to loyalists whose property had been confiscated. The British had promoted the creation of an Indian buffer state in the Ohio country, and the Americans believed that the British had incited attacks on American settlers and had generally retarded the western progress of the United States. Orders in council of June and November 1793 authorized the impressments into British service of American crews seized on the high seas, an act of war the Americans could not ignore (and Madison did not when his time came to deal with such matters).
Canadian and West Indian ports were closed to American ships, and the British, once war broke out with France in 1792, arrogated unto themselves the right to seize American cargoes intended for France, and to detain indefinitely American ships and sailors. The Federalists responded by making war-like noises and building up the country’s armed forces, an army of 20,000 and a vigorous program of naval construction, following Washington’s long-held maxim that to preserve peace one must prepare for war. The Jefferson-Madison Republicans wanted to avoid war but engage in a complete boycott of any imports from Britain, which was impossible to enforce, punitive to certain regions, especially New England, and would have had no leverage opposite the British, since the United States provided only about 15 percent of their trade, which could be replaced. This was a mad suggestion, because tariffs on British imports were what chiefly financed Hamilton’s sinking fund for Revolutionary War and Confederation debt, the country’s standing army, and any incentivization to manufacturing such as the secretary of the Treasury proposed. In trade matters, the Americans had started out with a naïve idea of free trade with everyone, and the Confederation had empowered a commission of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson to pursue such agreements with all countries. Only Prussia, Sweden, and Morocco agreed, countries with which America’s trade was negligible.
The Federalist plan seemed to have helped motivate the British to end their policy of wholesale seizures of American shipping, which gave Washington the latitude he felt he needed to send John Jay to negotiate an agreement with the British. Madison and Jefferson were raving that any war preparations were part of a Hamiltonian plot to foist a military and monarchical dictatorship on the country in the guise of avenging wrongs from England, but that any effort to negotiate a settlement was the first step to dishonoring the nation with a sell-out of the republic’s interests to the former abusive colonial master. As was his practice, Jefferson left it to Madison to make these implausible arguments, reserving the necessary room to maneuver and dissemble, as he did in the Genet affair. Jefferson retired as secretary of state in July 1793, with effect at the end of that year. The crushing of the Whiskey Rebellion confirmed the Republicans’ fear that Hamilton, behind the cloak of Washington’s prestige, was cranking up to use the militia to curtail popular liberties.
Jay signed with the British a draft treaty on November 19, 1794, which assured the British withdrawal from the Northwest posts and forts by June 1, 1796; admitted U.S. vessels to British East Indian ports, and to West Indian ports if they did not carry over 70 tons of cargo; and renounced the right to ship from the West Indies cotton, molasses, sugar, and other staples. Joint commissions would take up pre-revolutionary debts, a dispute over the northeast border with Canada, and compensation for illegal seizures of American vessels. Trade between the two countries was upgraded to a most-favored-nation status. Impressment of sailors had been officially abandoned and compensation for impressed sailors and for deported slaves taken by the British were dropped as a complaint, as was, on the British side, compensation for loyalist property that had been seized. Various concerns about the Indians, including responsibility for their alleged aggressions, were not dealt with, leaving the Americans a free hand to resolve matters by force, as they were more than pleased to do.
There was fierce opposition from the Republicans (again, Jefferson and Madison), because of treatment of debts, West Indian shipping rights, and, for the southerners, fugitive slaves. Washington acknowledged that the agreement, known at the time and since as Jay’s Treaty, was imperfect, but he recognized that given the correlation of forces, it was a commendable effort. Furthermore, it was brilliant general policy, because it levered on a military build-up to magnify the trade relationship with Britain, which sharply increased tariff and excise revenue and strengthened the American central government and directly increased and spread American prosperity. The sources of revenue safeguarded by Jay’s Treaty, the tariffs, financed the military build-up that gave America the leverage to extract the revenue from its arrangements with Britain. The treaty, and Jefferson and Madison’s response to it, showed the superiority of the Washington, Hamilton, Jay, and later Adams policy, which had been pioneered by Franklin, of playing on the British vulnerability in Canada and manipulating Britain and France against each other. It was profoundly sensible strategic thinking, rigorously implemented by Washington, Hamilton, and Jay.
The Jefferson-Madison policy of a trade embargo would have severely enfeebled America without much harming the British. Hamilton led the fight for ratification, against Madison, and the treaty was voted through by the Senate, except for the West Indian trade provisions. Madison led a battle in the House to block appropriations for enforcement. The House asked Washington for the papers of the treaty negotiations. Washington refused, establishing an important precedent. In April 1796, in a stunning defeat for Madison, even the appropriations were passed, as sensible opinion warmed to the virtues of Jay’s Treaty, while the Reign of Terror unfolded in France in 1794 and during its seedy aftermath.
Randolph (again, Jefferson’s cousin), who had succeeded Jefferson in the State Department, was accused of conspiring with Fauchet, the French minister, to sandbag the treaty, on the basis of captured letters, and resigned, in order to avoid being fired by Washington, and was replaced by Timothy Pickering, in August 1795. Hamilton retired as secretary of the Treasury and was replaced by Oliver Wolcott. Pickering had replaced the rather plodding Knox at the War Department, and was succeeded by James McHenry, though Washington was his own secretary of war, as many future presidents would be their own secretaries of state. (McHenry was only Washington’s fourth choice for the War Department, and Pickering was his seventh choice for State—the atmosphere was becoming inflamed and many of the best-qualified people declined to enter public life.)
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Hamilton continued to be a strong influence and counselor to the president, and it was an entirely Federalist cabinet.
The British claims for pre-revolutionary debts were finally settled by mutual agreement in 1802 at $2.66 million. In October 1795, Thomas Pinckney, minister to Britain and special envoy to Spain, signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo with Spain, which conceded points Spain had sought to withhold from America when Jay had negotiated with the Spanish in 1786, especially the unfettered navigation of the Mississippi. In 1796, Washington and Pickering recalled James Monroe as minister to France, when it came to light that he had implied to the French that he could negotiate an American loan to France of $5 million, and showered his hosts with other obsequious deferences that completely exceeded his diplomatic remit.