Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (33 page)

In an effort to win support for the proclamation, Hamilton in the summer of 1793 wrote seven powerfully argued newspaper essays under the name “Pacificus.” These became the classic constitutional justification of the president’s inherent authority over foreign affairs. Hamilton contended that not only did the United States have the right to declare its neutrality, but the president was the proper official to make such a declaration, since the executive department was the “organ of intercourse between the Nation and foreign Nations.” Moreover, the United States had no obligation under the 1778 treaties to come to the aid of France, since those treaties provided for only a defensive alliance and France was engaged in an offensive war. Besides, said Hamilton, the great contrast between the situation of France and that of the United States by itself rendered foolish any obligation to go to France’s aid.

“The United States,” wrote Hamilton, “are a young nation.” (Note the use of the plural verb, which remained common usage until after the Civil War.) Hamilton went on to express the basic assumption of relative American weakness that lay behind all his policies. “Their population though rapidly increasing, still small—their resources, though growing, not great; without armies, without fleets—capable from the nature of their country and the spirit of its inhabitants of immense efforts for self-defense, but little capable of those external efforts which could materially serve the cause of France.” Finally, Hamilton dismissed the idea that gratitude should dictate America’s helping France. Gratitude, he said, should have no bearing on relations between states; national interest ought to be the only consideration. France, after all, came to America’s aid in 1778 only out of its own national interest in defeating Britain.
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Jefferson, believing that American neutrality was coming to mean “a mere English neutrality,” was alarmed at the influence Hamilton’s writings were having.
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“Nobody answers him,” he warned Madison, “and his
doctrine will therefore be taken for confessed. For god’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him.”
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Madison with great reluctance agreed to reply, unsure that he could match the secretary of the treasury in knowledge or energy. He found the task, he confessed, “the most grating one I ever experienced.”
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And the resultant “Helvidius” essays, published in August and September 1793, revealed his difficulty. Madison knew he would have to set forth some intricate details, but he assumed, as most essayists of the 1790s did, that “none but intelligent readers will enter into such a controversy, and to their minds it ought principally to be accommodated.” He avoided the larger questions involving America’s neutrality and focused instead on the constitutional limits of executive power, thus contributing further to what would become the peculiar American tendency to discuss political issues in constitutional terms—a tendency that had the effect of turning quarrels over policy into contests over basic principles. In an uncharacteristically long-winded argument Madison concluded that “Pacificus” could only have borrowed his peculiar notions of executive power from “
royal prerogatives
in the
British government
.”
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Each of the two American parties was now unambiguously identified with one or the other of the two great belligerents.

T
HE ACTIVITIES IN
A
MERICA
of the twenty-nine-year-old French minister Citizen Edmond Charles Genet further excited public opinion—his title a sign of the new egalitarian order in France. No one could have been more ill suited for his diplomatic mission. As the minister of one of the two most powerful nations in the world, Genet was cocky, impulsive, and headstrong, with little or no understanding of the American government he was supposed to deal with. He landed in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1793, and in his monthlong journey north to Philadelphia he was everywhere greeted with warmth and enthusiasm. Americans sang the “Marseillaise,” waved the French revolutionary flag, and passed liberty caps around. Some Federalists thought the French Revolution was being brought to America. Late in his life John Adams still vividly recalled the frenzied atmosphere of “Terrorism, excited by Genet,” that ran through the nation’s capital in the late spring of 1793. “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 favour of the French Revolution, and against England.”
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Genet was instructed to get the Americans to recognize their treaty obligations and allow the outfitting of French privateers in American ports. He was also to seek American assistance in the conquest of Spanish and British possessions in America and help to expand what the French revolutionary government called the “Empire de la Liberté.”
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When he was in Charleston, he began organizing filibustering expeditions against the Spanish in the Southwest. He even told his government that he planned to “excite the Canadians to free themselves from the yoke of England.” He persuaded the French immigrant and naturalist André Michaux to abandon his plans to travel overland to the Pacific, which had been supported by Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society, and instead aid his native France by joining up with George Rogers Clark and Benjamin Logan in Kentucky and using soldiers they recruited to attack the Spanish in Louisiana. If this impetuous French minister had his way, America would soon be at war with both Great Britain and Spain.
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Seeing himself as a revolutionary agent on behalf of the international cause of liberty, Genet mistook the enthusiastic welcome he received in America as a license to promote the French Revolution in any way he could; indeed, initially Jefferson seems to have encouraged Genet in his ambitious plans to gather armies on American soil in order to attack Spanish possessions in the West and Florida. When Michaux changed his plans in order to rendezvous with Clark and the Kentuckian soldiers, Jefferson more or less supported him, but he informed Genet that Michaux had to travel as a private citizen and not as a French consul, as Genet wanted. The secretary of state warned Genet that if Michaux and the Kentucky soldiers were caught taking up arms against a friendly country, they might be hanged. “Leaving out that article,” he blithely told Genet, he “did not care what insurrection should be excited in Louisiana.”
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Genet met with some of the nascent Democratic-Republican Societies and was rumored to have been appointed president of one of them. At the same time, the brash young minister began recruiting American seamen,
commissioning and arming American ships as privateers, and setting up prize courts in American ports—all to the increasing discomfort of Secretary of State Jefferson. Genet even outfitted a captured British ship, the
Little Sarah
, in an American port and, in deliberate defiance of Washington’s request, sent it to sea as a French privateer—the
Petite Democrate
. The French minister threatened to appeal directly to the people if the government protested.
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Ignoring Washington’s instructions not to allow the captured ship to sail was one thing; suggesting that he might go over the head of the president to the American people was quite another. When Washington learned of Genet’s actions and plans, he became furious. “Is the Minister of the French Republic to set the Acts of this Government at defiance,
with impunity
? and then threaten the Executive with an appeal to the People?” the president asked in astonishment. “What must the world think of such conduct, and of the Government of the U. States in submitting to it?”
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In the end Genet undid himself. Those Federalists opposed to the French Revolution, led by Hamilton, John Jay, and Rufus King, exploited the French minister’s diplomatic blunders both to win support for the government’s policy of neutrality and to discredit and weaken the Republican opposition. By spreading rumors of Genet’s actions, the Federalists aroused public opinion and succeeded in transforming a diplomatic incident into a major public controversy. In meetings in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, the Federalists sponsored resolutions condemning Genet and defending the president.

All these Federalist efforts to weaken public sympathy for the French Revolution alarmed the Republican leaders. Such efforts seemed further evidence of the Hamiltonian march toward monarchism. Madison thought the Federalists were trying to use “public veneration for the President” to promote “an animosity between America & France” in order to dissolve “their political & commercial union.” This, said Madison, would be followed by a “connection” with Great Britain, and “under her auspices” the United States would move “in a gradual approximation towards her Form of Government.”
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In response to these fears the Republicans began organizing their own party meetings. In some of their celebrations the Republicans even toasted the radical Jacobins, who had taken over the French government,
and they displayed models of the guillotine that the Jacobins were using to eliminate their enemies; indeed, in Paris it was on average cutting off more than two heads a minute. In the face of all the revolutionary bloodshed, Jefferson remained supportive of the French revolutionary cause, believing that it was all that kept America from undoing its own revolution.

As a member of the government that was being subverted by the French minister, Jefferson was in an increasingly awkward position. He kept trying to draw nice distinctions between his being the secretary of state while at the same time being the behind-the-scenes leader of the Republican opposition. When told by Genet of plans to arm the Canadians and the Kentuckians for expeditions against British and Spanish territories in the New World, he confided to his diary that Genet had “communicated these things to me not as Secy. of state, but as Mr. Jeff.”
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When he had to, Jefferson knew how to split hairs.

To influence public opinion effectively, the Republican leaders eventually came to realize that they would have to concede much of the Federalist position. They saw that the president was universally respected, that neutrality was overwhelmingly desired, and that Genet had to go.
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“He will sink the republican interest if they do not abandon him,” Jefferson warned Madison in August 1793. The Republicans had to approve the policy of neutrality “unequivocally,” he said, and had to stop caviling about who constitutionally was to declare it. “In this way we shall keep the people on our side by keeping ourselves in the right.” This was one of the many times Jefferson had a shrewder sense of public opinion than did his colleague Madison.
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Jefferson’s acute political sensitivity to the will of the people revealed in this incident kept his personal animosities and revolutionary passions from getting out of hand. Perhaps even more crucial in dampening the extreme partisanship of both the Federalist and Republican leaders was Washington. The president used his immense prestige and good judgment repeatedly to restrain fears, limit intrigues, and stymie opposition that otherwise might have escalated into violence. Despite the intense partisan feelings that existed throughout the country, Washington never
entirely lost the respect of all the party leaders, and this respect allowed him to reconcile, resolve, and balance the clashing interests. Jefferson scarcely foresaw the half of Washington’s influence when he remarked as early as 1784 that “the moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”
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T
HE DISMISSAL OF
G
ENET
did not end the international problems facing the United States. During the Revolution the United States had strenuously promoted the most liberal principles concerning commerce on the high seas in wartime—namely, that free ships made free goods and that neutrals had the right to carry non-contraband goods into ports of belligerents. These principles, which were to plague Anglo-American relations for the next two decades, were very much a part of the American Revolution.

Just as liberal Americans in 1776 had sought a new kind of domestic politics that would end tyranny, so too had they sought a new kind of international politics that would promote peace among nations and, indeed, might even see an end to war itself. The American Revolution had been centrally concerned with power—not only power within a government but power among governments in their international relations. Throughout the eighteenth century liberal intellectuals had looked forward to a newly enlightened world in which corrupt monarchical diplomacy, secret alliances, dynastic rivalries, and balances of power would be eliminated. In short, they had hoped for nothing less than the abolition of war and the beginning of a new era of peaceful relations among nations.

Monarchy and war were thought to be intimately related. Indeed, as young Benjamin Lincoln Jr., declared, “Kings owe their origin to war.”
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The internal needs of monarchies—the requirements of their bloated bureaucracies, their standing armies, their marriage alliances, their restless dynastic ambitions—lay behind the prevalence of war. Eliminate monarchy and all its accouterments, many Americans believed, and war itself would be eliminated. A world of republican states would encourage a new, peace-loving diplomacy—one based on the natural concert of the commercial interests of the people of the various nations. If the world’s peoples were left alone to exchange goods freely among themselves—without the corrupting interference of selfish monarchical courts, irrational dynastic rivalries, and the secret double-dealing diplomacy of the past—then, it was hoped, international politics would become republi
canized, pacified, and ruled by commerce alone. Old-fashioned diplomats might no longer be necessary. This was the enlightened dream of liberals everywhere, from Thomas Jefferson to Immanuel Kant.