Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (22 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Washington, Hamilton, and Jay’s sensible and profitable and honorable foreign policy, to navigate around a general European war, was a complement to their very successful financial and economic policies. Hamilton’s assumption of state debts had, as had been intended, led to a drastic reduction in state taxes and had encouraged a huge increase in American prosperity by all indices. American imports from Britain increased from $23.5 million in 1790 to $63 million in 1795, and American exports enjoyed a parallel increase in the same time. The European war and Jay’s suddenly popular treaty had raised the demand and price for all agricultural commodities. Thus began, with as great a success as it ever enjoyed in subsequent centuries, including under Ronald Reagan 190 years later (Chapter 16), the application of tax cuts and supply side economics to American spending, saving, investment, and job creation. Although the administration was decisively successful, Washington, ever mindful of his reputation and a tireless enemy of the spirit of party and faction, had found the partisan back-biting tiresome, and declined publicly and in good time to seek a third term as president.
This was another immense contribution to the stability of American politics and to the public’s trust in the presidency. It was notoriously clear that he could have retained his office as long as he wished, and his handing over of it, especially in the light of the blood-stained chaos and pelagic corruption in France, reflected great honor on him and on the young republic he had secured, had helped design, and had launched. His farewell address is generally considered another of the great state papers in the nation’s history. A first version was written four years earlier by Madison and, without being delivered, was heavily modified by Hamilton, and then substantially refined by Washington himself. The message was delivered by hand and never publicly read by the president. It extolled the virtues of religion, morality, knowledge, and financial soundness, and then dealt at length with foreign policy and warned against “permanent, inveterate antipathies” and “passionate attachments” to other countries. Washington called for commercial relations but “as little political connection as possible” to foreign countries. “Temporary alliances” might be appropriate in “extraordinary emergencies.” But the United States should “steer clear of permanent alliances,” as it was “folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another.”
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Washington and Franklin had been the principal American collaborators in the British removal of the French threat from America’s borders, the first strategic initiative of the Americans, even if in a very secondary role to the British. He and Franklin were the principal architects of the first and most important autonomous American strategic undertaking: the revision of and American emancipation from the British relationship. They would have accepted a less abrupt and complete version of this than actually occurred, but not one more ambiguous in terms of emergent American sovereignty. Jefferson was the principal expositor and propagandist of the Revolution, and Washington, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton were, in different ways, the chief authors of America’s third move of strategic genius, the Constitution. Washington was the creator of the fourth great strategic achievement, a distinguished and respected presidency, and, importantly assisted by Hamilton, was the creator of an effective executive branch and, with Hamilton, of extremely imaginative and successful economic and foreign policies for the new nation. It had been a masterly progression.
George Washington had led the new nation successfully in war and in peace for a total of 23 years with no pay except out-of-pocket expenses, and had voluntarily surrendered his supreme offices when many wished him to continue in them. He would carry into retirement the profound admiration and gratitude of his countrymen and the well-earned esteem of the whole known world. The immense regard Americans had for him while he lived has withstood the closest historical analysis and has not wavered or declined in the more than two centuries since his death. He is universally recognized as having been a capable general, a fine statesman, an outstanding president, and one of history’s great men.
5. JOHN ADAMS AS PRESIDENT AND THE CRISIS WITH FRANCE
 
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the two most prominent candidates to replace Washington, and General Thomas Pinckney ran to be Adams’s vice president, and Aaron Burr, without encouragement from Jefferson, sought the same office. Ballots were not separated; Electoral College members each wrote two different names on ballots, office unspecified. The person with the highest number of ballots became president, and the person in second place became vice president, provided there was a majority. Washington was concerned that, though Madison had done the dirty work, Jefferson had sponsored much criticism of him and that Jefferson’s victory would be interpreted as a rejection of the outgoing president. He was also concerned that Virginia not seem to be entitled to permanent occupancy of the presidency, so he publicly endorsed Adams, who was elected by 71 electoral votes to 68 for Jefferson, 59 for Pinckney, and 30 for Burr. Jefferson, as recipient of the second-largest vote total, would take office as vice president. Wolcott, Pickering, and McHenry retained the Treasury, State, and War departments, and Hamilton’s influence on them also continued. It had been a fine launch for the country, exalting the presidency, navigating the international currents, and building the foundations of prosperity and union. It was about to become more complicated, and more difficult, without Washington’s fine judgment and immense prestige.
Both Jefferson and Hamilton were sensitive to criticism and reckless in their conduct and correspondence. Jefferson sent a letter to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, in 1796, which was republished in the United States the following year. Jefferson had written that “An Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party” was subverting the Revolution, and America was being led astray by “apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.” (GSW235) This was widely interpreted as a slur on Washington, a step Jefferson had often skirted. He declined to comment and Washington would not deign to refer to it, and the controversy passed eventually. It did confirm that Jefferson’s was the party of the Enlightenment, religious and industrial skepticism, the landed gentry, and the common people; but not of faith, capitalism, or a modern economic future.
Hamilton, who, though brilliant and courageous, was young and impetuous, had in 1792 had an adulterous affair with a Mrs. Maria Reynolds, and to avoid publicity, as he was the 37-year-old Treasury secretary, had paid blackmail to her husband. When interrogated by some opposition members of the Congress, including then senator James Monroe, about his private use of Treasury funds, Hamilton foolishly confessed the affair, and five years later it came to light. A duel between Hamilton and Monroe was narrowly avoided, ironically, as it would turn out, by the suave and ambitious Aaron Burr. Monroe too was a hothead, and almost challenged President Adams to a duel in 1797, after Adams described him as “a disgraced minister, recalled in displeasure for misconduct,” only a slight exaggeration.
Despite the provision in the 1778 France-America Treaty of Friendship for free trade and navigation, France responded to Jay’s Treaty like an angry uncle, and began seizing American ships without any pretext of legality, much as the British had been doing. It refused to receive General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, brother of Adams’s vice presidential running mate, whom Washington had sent to replace Monroe as minister in Paris after Monroe’s recall. Adams called a special session of Congress for May 1797, accused the French of trying to drive a wedge between the government and the people of the U.S., and vowed that the United States would not cower in “a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority,” nor “be the miserable instruments of foreign influence.”
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Congress approved the calling up of 80,000 militiamen, the fortification of ports and harbors, and the completion of three frigates. Adams followed the successful precedent of his predecessor and tried to replicate the Jay mission to Britain in 1795. He considered sending Madison, a political foe but reliable patriot, but eventually sent the Federalists Charles C. Pinckney and John Marshall, a distinguished Virginia lawyer and assemblyman (who had declined Washington’s offers of the War office and the ministry to Paris), and the Republican Elbridge Gerry, as a commission to iron out relations with France.
At this point, France had a string of astounding military successes, having harnessed the Revolution’s exaltation of soul to a meritocratic basis of military promotion, which had thrown up some brilliant field commanders. The most conspicuous of these was the 28-year-old (in 1797) Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in one of history’s great campaigns, had just flung the Austrian Empire out of Italy with a ragtag army that had not been properly clothed when he took it over. There were mutinies in the Royal Navy and food shortages in Britain, but the Admiralty assured Parliament that the British Isles would, yet again, be successfully defended as necessary. The French foreign minister, the preternaturally cunning former bishop Charles Maurice Talleyrand, who would have a scandalous but rich and brilliant career serving a kaleidoscope of successive conflicting French regimes in high offices for another 40 years, had lived in the United States during the Terror, and felt he knew American opinion. (Washington had refused to receive him because he was cohabiting with an African-American woman.) Talleyrand was unimpressed with American threats and was being secretly advised by his Jeffersonian friends not to give Adams another Jay’s Treaty.
Subordinates of Talleyrand (later known as X, Y, and Z) told the American commissioners that the foreign minister would receive them only if they apologized for Adams’s anti-French remarks to Congress in May, assumed France’s debts to individual Americans, made France a sizeable loan on excellent terms, and paid Talleyrand a direct bribe of 50,000 pounds (over $1 million today). They also said that France, which was now governing the Netherlands, Switzerland, and chunks of Germany and Italy, was taking the position that neutrality was tantamount to animosity and that American neutrality was unacceptable. Intoxicated with military success, the French were back to the mad official egotism, tinged with rampant corruption, of the Genet school of diplomacy. Pinckney and Marshall indignantly departed, leaving the Republican Gerry behind because Talleyrand had implied that if all the commissioners departed, it could result in war. Gerry subscribed to the Jeffersonian admiration of France and belief in the imminent French crushing of Britain. (Gerry was no political angel himself, and though his name was pronounced with a hard G, his redistricting practices gave rise to the expression “gerrymandering” for refreshing congressional districts in the contorted shape of salamanders.)
Adams informed Congress of the failure of the mission to France in March 1798, and requested congressional approval of the arming of American merchant vessels. Jefferson denounced his former (and future) friend Adams’s conduct as “almost insane” and, in a bitter debate that followed, called for release of the diplomatic correspondence, having no idea how incendiary it was. Adams obliged and the effect was devastating to Jefferson and the Republicans, whom Federalist orators had taken to referring to as Jacobins, to assimilate them to Robespierre and St. Just and the Terror that had sent thousands of innocents to the guillotine, before the leaders were toppled and taken on carts past jeering crowds to the guillotine in a principal public square and decapitated as a much-appreciated public entertainment, their severed heads held up to the delight of the blood-crazed masses. Adams regained control of Congress in 1798, and Congress embargoed all trade with France and canceled all treaties with that country, ordered 15 more warships, and approved a naval budget for 1799 greater than the entire history of American naval expenses prior to that. Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the new army and Hamilton his second-in-command and inspector general. (Washington expressed concern that accepting the nomination might be seen as a “restless act, evincive of my discontent in retirement.”)
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An independent Navy Department was established with Benjamin Stoddart of Maryland as the first secretary.
Along with this military preparedness came a domestic political hysteria that would be replicated in America from time to time over the next 175 (or more) years. There suddenly arose a widespread paranoia about recent Irish, Dutch, German, and French immigrants, who were suspected of being French agents. (One of the targets was Albert Gallatin, the very capable Swiss immigrant who succeeded Madison as Republican leader in the House of Representatives.) The Federalists rammed through a series of reactionary measures, as Adams ponderously replied to testimonials of loyalty and fealty from all over the country. Again and again in American history, such patriotic fervor would flair up and then subside quickly (like the brief spikes in reactive popularity in the Bush administrations roughly 200 years later), and leave the incumbent president looking like he oversold the crisis, mismanaged it, or tried to exploit it for partisan gain.
6. THE NATURALIZATION, ALIEN, AND SEDITION ACTS
 
In June and July 1798, Adams rushed through the Naturalization Act, which raised the period of residency needed for citizenship from five to 14 years (repealed in 1802); the Alien Act, which expired in 1802 and authorized the president to expel any alien judged dangerous or suspected of “treasonable or secret” ambitions; the Alien Enemies Act, which empowered the president to arrest, imprison, or expel in wartime any alien judged to be acting in the interest of an alien power; and the Sedition Act, which provided for fines and imprisonment for citizens or aliens who collaborate to frustrate the execution of national laws or prevent a federal officer from carrying out his duties, to aid or promote “any insurrection, riot, unlawful assembly, or combination,” or to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” disparaging the U.S. government, the Congress, or the president. The Sedition Act would expire in March 1801, but it was clearly aimed at partisan opponents, and the anti-publication section was used against 10 Republican editors, including James Thomson Callender, who had revealed Hamilton’s affair with Mrs. Reynolds.

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