The American Future (7 page)

Alexander Hamilton was not just dash and danger. His postwar career, whether in office as Washington's secretary of the treasury, or out of it, was spent thinking what kind of figure the United States (the two words of which for Hamilton were problematically weighted) would cut in the world. For Jefferson, the republic was supposed to be a marvelous new organism utterly unpolluted by the atavistic habits and warped customs of the old. It would resist the tendency that states, even those boasting parliamentary pedigree like Britain, had of sliding inexorably into oligarchic corruption and tyranny. And that meant it would have no need for professional armies of any size and should indeed always suspect their potential for political mischief. Pay no heed to jaded lessons from the past that insisted that states, like men, could never wean themselves from their habitual savagery. The United States had been born to refute the cynicism that a fresh start was not utopian, and to prove that it was entirely possible to live as a republic of free men and yet be a moral force in the world. War was at once the functional need and customary habit of aristocracies and despots. Do away with the latter, and you did away with the former. The coming of the French Revolution and Jefferson's own witness of it in Paris only confirmed his belief that the mighty shift from despots to democracies would obviate the habitual need for war—except as a last resort to defend liberty.

Hamilton heard what he considered all this naive Jeffersonian optimism and rolled his eyes. Let Jefferson indulge himself in philosophical entertainment if it amused him, but let him not do so, Hamilton thought, at the expense of American security. It was childish folly to pretend that the political virginity of the United States would be sufficient protection against the predators who prowled the oceans
and swarmed across continents with armies numbering tens, hundreds, of thousands. Had not Jefferson and the gentlemen who thought in his fashion observed what had become of the professedly peaceful pretensions of the revolutionary “
République une et indivisible
,” the “
grande nation
” that, while disclaiming conquest as the obsolete sport of tyrants, somehow had managed to occupy—and plunder—most of western Europe. Their war to “defend liberty” had become a transparent pretext for empire.

Hamilton urgently wanted his nation to grow up. Unlike his reluctant co-Federalist John Adams and his bitter political foe Jefferson, he had no qualms about looking to the biggest success story of all, the British Empire, as an exemplary model of power. What—other than its unfortunate moment of American coercion and the tendency of its ruler to lose his wits now and then—was actually
wrong
with the British state? The answer was nothing! Britain had had the wisdom to accept its defeat and concentrate on consolidating its power where it mattered—against the French in Canada and India, on the oceans. Good for Mr Pitt! For Hamilton, it went without saying that there were certain instruments of economic and military heft without which a stance as a great power was unthinkable or at any rate unfeasible: a national debt and a bank of issue, which, as Washington's secretary of the treasury, he resolved to establish in the United States. Hamilton noticed as well that although many commentators characterized old-regime France as top-heavy, the real machine of pure state power was in Britain. Its officers of revenue and excise—resources without which even the most virtuous of republics could not survive—swarmed over the country, virtually an army unto themselves.

And then there was the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich—a mean and skimpy thing as military schools went and nothing at all to give the impression of a Britannic Prussia. But Woolwich still offered the rudiments of instruction in the military sciences, and it may be that Hamilton had heard of steps afoot to expand the education of arms more systematically. Or perhaps Hamilton looked at the breathtaking aggression of the French Republic and knew that it had nothing to do with the republican élan (as Thomas Jefferson, who had never fired a gun in anger, fondly imagined) and a lot more to do with the incentive of loot and power that Bonaparte nakedly held out to his soldiers. At least, he might have said, there is one citizen
general who doesn't speak humbug. But from his French friends in the Revolutionary War, he would also have known that none of the spectacular successes of the French Republic in the field could have happened without a prerevolutionary officer class intensively educated in military technology. Why should the United States, blessed as it was with all manner of such practical learning, deny itself a college where young men of aptitude could create a comparable elite of scientifically minded officers? Meritocracy was power. On that, at least, Jefferson and Hamilton could agree.

But Congress continued to rule that such places were inconsistent with the “principles of republican government.” (And they would cost the nation money it could ill afford.) Instead of being an academy of virtuous, democratically minded citizen-soldiers, such a school was far more likely to breed a military caste, aristocratic in demeanor, separate from, and contemptuous of, civilian society. Worse, such a place might put itself into the hands of some self-appointed hero who had evil designs on the republic. Such horrified imaginings, which seem so far-fetched now, were part of the hot war of principles dividing the politicians of the young United States. Federalists like Hamilton were unafraid of power and believed that the nation could never survive without its vigorous and unapologetic exercise. Anti-Federalist Republicans, champions of states rights like Jefferson, believed that if the power of the government were not strictly confined by the Constitution, it was all up with democracy. For both opposing groups, the fight over the citadel on the Hudson River was a fight over the future of America.

And then, quite suddenly, the debate became less like a seminar where abstract theories contended for America's future, and more like a crash course in the thorny realities of foreign policy. This loss of innocence began with a development that should hardly have come as much of a surprise. The Jay Treaty regularizing relations with Great Britain, signed on 19 November 1794, had been taken by republican France, then fighting a ferocious war against the British, as an ungrateful repudiation of the alliance that had created the United States in the first place. The Americans did what they could to represent the Jay Treaty as a disentanglement. But in the French government's view it was a shocking violation of republican solidarity. Since the directors in Paris believed that in this life-and-death
struggle for the survival of popular revolutions, all who were not with them were against them, the Jay Treaty was not just the betrayal of American promises never to negotiate a separate peace but, in effect, an alliance with their deadliest enemy.

This was a moment when what had been assumed by Washington to be America's blessing of distance did not serve diplomatic understanding well. Had the United States a better grasp of the impossibility of neutrality in what had become a world war of ideologies, it might have had some pause in its rush to disarm. On the other hand, in justice to Washington and to John Adams, who succeeded him as president in 1797, given the relentlessness of that total war, was the diplomatic freedom of the United States to be held forever hostage to those earlier engagements? If so, the Federalists pointed out, they would have merely exchanged colonial masters. Threats and bluster coming from the French in the wake of the Jay Treaty made the scales fall from American eyes. Illusions about the altruism with which France had undertaken to liberate America were now judged sentimental. Instead, that entire enterprise seemed less a disinterested expedition for liberty and more an exercise in French imperial gamesmanship.

The ways in which France then proceeded to make the United States pay for its temerity only confirmed to Hamilton, Adams, and the Federalists that they had done the right thing by signing Jay. While they were frantically attempting to build the first ships for a United States Navy, they banked on the Royal Navy getting the better of the French
marine
in American waters. This turned out to be a poor wager, for the Royal Navy was not about to put itself to the trouble of protecting American merchantmen from the attacks of the French. If it was the armed benevolence of the Crown that Americans sought, they ought not to have sundered themselves from it in the first place. What then followed was a savage yet undeclared war at sea between France and the United States, and on a scale that the United States government could hardly have anticipated. From May 1796 to March 1797 over 300 merchantmen were taken by French privateers and naval vessels.

For a while it was what came to be called the “quasi war” but the real thing seemed only a matter of time. In the patriotic furor that gripped the Eastern Seaboard, President Adams, flossy-pated
and rotund, swaggered around wearing a sword through his sash like a cross between Mr. Pickwick and Napoleon. For the only time since the opening of the Revolutionary War, Adams heard the thunderous applause of American crowds. For a while the president's head was turned by the sound of bugles, and he acted accordingly. On the grounds that an immigrant nation preparing for war had better beware of spies and a fifth column, Adams and the Federalists began to take liberties. In 1789 an Alien Act gave the government rights of summary imprisonment and deportation. Naturalization time for citizenship was raised from five to fourteen years (there was more than a streak of xenophobe in Mr. Adams, who never ceased to think of Hamilton as a “foreigner”). A Sedition Act of the same year made it a criminal offense for persons to libel or even attack the United States government and its president. Not least, Adams sent a bill to Congress to finance the raising of a volunteer army. Hard-line Federalists wanted $20,000, and Hamilton $30,000. Congress gave them $10,000. In the same bill provisions were made for the funding of a modest degree of military instruction. Just four teachers were to be sent to educate the cadets already stationed at West Point in the engineering of mines and tunnels and the like. But it was a start.

Even though all of this came about through the agency of John Adams, whom Hamilton despised as an irascible egotist, he agreed it was necessary for the well-being of the country. Hamilton began to think of the new force as, in some sense, “his” army, and for the good reason that Washington had been persuaded to come out of retirement to command it, for he was the only person who could silence doubts about the army's political neutrality. But Hamilton had also managed to become Washington's second in command, which, given the great man's advanced years and uncertain health, meant that Hamilton was the general-in-waiting. Hamilton's fertile brain now began to quick march. Legions, divisions, uniforms, drills—all were set down on paper and sent to the secretary of war, McHenry. In short order, Hamilton also devised a complete curriculum for the cadets of West Point: four years, half of which would be spent in common at a “Fundamental School” (heavy on the mechanical sciences, but also with a healthy dose of history and geography) and the remainder in whichever military subdivision the cadet would be
destined for: cavalry, infantry, artillery, or engineers. He had in mind around 200 cadets taught by six directors and eighteen faculty. Most important of all, officers already on active service would be required to rotate through the academy.

None of this materialized in the way Hamilton had imagined. The belated warrior Adams suddenly turned nervous about taking on a war with France. It may be that the spectacle of Hamiltonian men-in-arms springing from the field like the harvest of Jason's dragon's teeth gave him pause. At the other end of the world, Horatio Nelson's annihilation of the French Navy at Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile on 1 August 1798, and Bonaparte's subsequent abandonment of his army in Egypt, followed by the coup d'état that made him first consul, evidently made an Atlantic war less of a priority. He was already facing a renewed attack from the coalition monarchies. With the threat of a French war dissipating, so did the need for Hamilton's new army. Washington's death in December 1799 put an end to it altogether. What remained, though, in early 1800, was the plan for the academy approved of by Adams, as he had always been an enthusiast of the idea. Congress, however, was less happy. There were noises about its undemocratic potential from the anti-Federalists. And for Thomas Jefferson, the whole idea smelled of Hamiltonian Caesarism.

Thomas Jefferson had been taken aback by the war crisis and what Adams and Hamilton in their respective ways had made of it. Jefferson had been the agent of the United States in Paris in the early years of the French Revolution and though he had witnessed some of the worst abuses of the Jacobin “Dictatorship of Virtue,” emotionally he had never been able to uncouple the French Revolution from the unfolding history of the dawning age of liberty. It had been the French who had been forced to defend themselves against the monarchs of the coalition powers and who embodied what, in 1793, he told the French envoy to the United States, Edmond Genet: “By nature's law, man is at peace with man till some aggression is committed which, by the same law, authorises one to destroy another as his enemy.” For Jefferson, that alone explained why France had reluctantly turned into a belligerent state and one in which individual liberties had been regrettably curtailed for the needs of security. Forced to choose between the British and the French, he had no doubts who were liberty's true
enemies. The Anglophilia of the Federalists, especially Hamilton, he thought, was all of a piece with their design to introduce into the United States the strong-armed executive government power against which the Revolutionary War had been fought, making independence a pyrrhic victory. Henry Knox, who had founded an “Order of Cincinnati,” as a hereditary association of ex-officers, Jefferson thought, was introducing a military aristocracy into the country, possibly even a monarchy with a second King George, reigning from Mount Vernon. Constitutionally entitled to be vice president to Adams (though making himself the leader of opposition to his policies), Jefferson thought the usurpation of power represented by the Alien and Sedition Acts augured the death of the free America.