A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (31 page)

This warfare revived concerns that Britons and Spaniards aided and encouraged Indian uprisings. These accusations highlighted another western foreign policy problem—the hostile British and Spanish presence in, respectively, the Old Northwest and Southwest. Spain laid claim south of Natchez and west of the Mississippi by virtue of a French grant and the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Americans desperately wanted to sail goods down the river to New Orleans, but the Spaniards rightly saw this trade as the proverbial foot in the door, and resisted it. Both sides found a temporary solution in Pinckney’s Treaty, also called the Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795), which granted American traders a three-year privilege of deposit (the ability to unload, store, and transship produce) in Spanish New Orleans.
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English presence in the Ohio Valley presented an even more severe problem. In addition to being a violation of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, British ties to Indian tribes made every act by hostiles on the frontier seem suspiciously connected to British interests. Washington’s solution to these challenges, however, requires us to take a detour through events in France.

The French Revolution and Neutrality

The French Revolution of 1789 precipitated a huge crisis in American foreign policy. It was a paradoxical development, for on the surface Americans should have been pleased that their own Revolution had spawned a similar republican movement across the Atlantic, just as European intellectuals pointed with pride to America’s war for independence as validation of Enlightenment concepts. Many Americans, most notably Jefferson and his Anti-Federalist supporters, as well as the rabble-rouser Tom Paine, enthusiastically supported France’s ouster of the corrupt regime of Louis XVI. French republican leaders echoed Jefferson’s words in the Declaration when they called for
liberté, égalité, fraternité
and issued their own Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Unfortunately, France’s revolutionary dreams went largely unfulfilled, in part because of important differences in the presumption of power and the state in their revolutionary declarations. The tyranny of King Louis was soon replaced by the equally oppressive dictatorship of the mob and Robespierre. Blood ran in the streets of Paris and heads literally rolled, beginning with Louis’ own in 1793. A new wave of violence and warfare swept across Europe, pitting France against every monarchy on the continent, exactly as John Adams had predicted in a letter to his wife.
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Federalist leaders wisely saw that the fledgling United States could ill afford to become entangled in Europe’s power struggle.
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There were plenty of problems at home, and certainly neither the army nor the navy could stand toe to toe with European forces on neutral ground for any length of time. With Britain and France at war, however, America had to choose. Washington did so when—in opposition to Jefferson’s advice and the Constitution’s stipulation that the president must seek the advice and consent of the Senate—he unilaterally issued the Proclamation of Neutrality in April of 1793. The United States, declared the president, was neutral and would not aid or hurt either Britain or France.
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What constituted “neutrality” when three quarters of American exports went to Britain, and 90 percent of American imports emanated from Britain or her colonies? The British aggressively thwarted French-bound American commerce, and neither American traders nor the U.S. Navy resisted. Throughout the 1790s and early 1800s, British naval vessels routinely halted, boarded, and inspected American ships, sometimes seizing cargo in direct violation of property rights, free trade, and “freedom of the seas.” To add insult to injury, Britain began a policy of impressment, in which American sailors on a boarded vessel could be forced into British service as virtual slaves under the dubious claim that the sailors had deserted the British navy. By her actions, Britain shredded concepts of “right to life and liberty” that had rested at the center of the Declaration. France rightly questioned and furiously denounced the neutrality of a nation that bowed so easily to Great Britain. The French found enthusiastic supporters in Madison and Jefferson, who conspired to undercut the president. At the height of debate over Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality, Jefferson wrote Madison a heated note attacking Hamilton and imploring, “For God’s sake, my dear sir, take up your pen, select his most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.”
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Adams was equally horrified at the changes he noticed in Jefferson. “I am really astonished,” he wrote to Abigail, “at the blind spirit of party which has seized on the whole soul of this Jefferson.”
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Worse, Washington had already ceased to listen to the foreign policy advice of his own secretary of state, leaving Jefferson no choice but to resign. On January 31, 1794, he officially left his post, returned home to Monticello, and plotted his political revenge.

Washington, meanwhile, had come under a relentless barrage of vitriol. More than two hundred years later the temptation is to think that the Father of our country was loved by all. Yet then, as now, no one was safe from criticism, least of all the president. The
Aurora
, for example, led the pack of wolves after Washington: “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington.”
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In a line destined to go down as one of the stupidest statements ever made, the paper warned, “Let his conduct, then, be an example to future ages.”
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(The author did not mean that Washington’s conduct would be a good example!) Adams, for one, favored retaliation: the Federalists must let “nothing pass unanswered; reasoning must be answered by reasoning; wit by wit; humor by humor; satire by satire; burlesque by burlesque and even buffoonery by buffoonery.”
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The opportunity for “buffoonery” reached epic proportions when, in 1793, the new French Revolutionary government sent Edmund Genet to represent it in America. Jefferson, at the time still in his post, and his ally Madison were initially delighted. Edmund Charles Genet, who could speak fluently seven languages, enjoyed a reputation as a true believer in the French radicalism that American radicals saw as a welcome extension of their own Revolutionary experiment. “War with all kings and peace with all peoples,” as the French revolutionary saying went, might have originated with Genet. Jefferson and his followers welcomed Citizen Genet, as he was called, with open arms.

They soon regretted their enthusiasm. The obnoxious little man had scarcely set his shoes on American soil before he launched into an attack on the Federalists. Ignoring the standard protocol for diplomats serving in foreign lands, he immediately waded into domestic politics. He helped to organize pro-French Jacobin clubs and “democratick” societies to spur the Jeffersonians’ support of France. He actually tried to engage in military campaigns—organizing armed expeditions against France’s Spanish and English enemies in Florida, Louisiana, and Canada. Perhaps worst of all, Genet, while ambassador, hired privateers to attack America-bound British shipping in the Atlantic Ocean.

Needless to say, Federalists like Washington, Hamilton, and Adams were aghast at Citizen Genet’s audacity and lack of professionalism. The last straw came when Genet threatened to go, in essence, over Washington’s head to the public via the press. Genet literally gave Jefferson one of his famous migraine headaches, so the secretary was unavailable when Washington sought Genet’s head or, at least, his credentials. To make matters worse, broadside publisher Philip Freneau, of the Anti-Federalist and anti-Washington
National Gazette
, infuriated Washington with an editorial called “The Funeral of George Washington.” By then, even Jefferson and Madison were humiliated by their arrogant French ally, retreating into an embarrassed silence. Jefferson described Genet as “hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful, and even indecent towards the President.”
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Genet lost his job, but when his own party in France was swept out—and more than a few Jacobin heads swept off—Genet begged Washington for mercy. Given another chance, Genet settled in New York State, married into the respected Schuyler family, and spent the rest of his days basking in the receding light of perhaps the most infamous foreign diplomat of the early national era.
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Genet’s end, however, did not solve Washington’s ongoing foreign policy tensions with France and England. Rather, the path that began in Paris now turned toward London as a new traveler, John Jay, came to the fore.

Jay’s Treaty

Unable to stabilize volatile French diplomacy, Washington heightened tension by sending New Yorker and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Jay to negotiate a long overdue treaty with the British. American conflicts with Britain were numerous: finalization of the disputed Maine-Canadian boundary; British evacuation of the Northwest posts (which they occupied in direct violation of the 1783 Treaty of Paris); overdue compensation to American slave owners (those whose slaves Britain had liberated during the war); and, most important, British acknowledgment of freedom of the seas—the right of American ships to trade with the French West Indies and continental Europe without fear of seizure and impressment.

Jay received sharp criticism for his handling of the negotiations. The stalwart Federalist was an Anglophile inclined to let the British have their way. In Jay’s defense, however, he was in no position to talk tough to Great Britain in 1794. America completely lacked the military and economic clout necessary to challenge Britain so soon after the improbable military victory in the Revolution. More important, the United States needed what Britain could offer—trade—and lots of it.

Nevertheless, Jay’s negotiations were marked by a tone of appeasement that enraged pro-French Jeffersonians. His treaty, signed in November of 1794, yielded to the British position by dropping compensation for American slavers, and agreed to the British definition of neutrality at sea, namely the shipment of naval stores and provisions to enemy ports. Maine’s boundary dispute was turned over to a commission, and the U.S. government agreed to absorb all losses arising from debts to British merchants. In return for these concessions, Britain agreed to evacuate the Northwest posts by 1796, in essence opening the fur trade in the region. As for the French West Indies, the British begrudgingly agreed to allow small American ships (seventy tons or less) to do business with the French, whereas both England and the United States granted most-favored-nation trading status to each other, providing both nations with the most lucrative trading partner possible.
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Although John Jay believed he had gained the best deal possible, his Jeffersonian opponents cried treason. Southerners hated his concessions on slavery, whereas some northerners disliked the trade clauses. One editor wrote, “I believe that the treaty formed by Jay and the British king is the offspring of a vile aristocratic few…who are enemies to the equality of men, friends to no government but that whose funds they can convert to their private employment.”
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Jay was not unaware of such vitriol, observing in 1794 that he could travel from New York to Boston by the light of his own burning effigies (a line repeated by several politicians at later dates).
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New Yorkers threatened impeachment, and Jay’s colleague Alexander Hamilton was stoned by angry mobs. “To what state of degradation are we reduced,” a Jeffersonian newspaperman exclaimed, “that we
court
a nation more perfidious than Savages—more sanguinary than Tigers—barbarous as Cannibals—and prostituted even to a proverb!”
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Over Jeffersonian opposition, the Senate ratified Jay’s Treaty in June of 1795. Aware it antagonized some of his former friends and allies, Washington let the bill sit on his desk before finally signing it in August, convinced this was the proper course for an honorable man to follow. Jay’s success allowed Washington to deploy Pinckney to Spain to secure the Mississippi navigation rights. Taken together, Jay’s and Pinckney’s treaties opened the West for expansion. Lost in the international diplomacy was a remarkable reality: what some saw as a sign of weakness in the political system in fact emerged as its strength, proving Madison right. Foreign policy honed each side’s positions, and the partisanship resulted in clearly defined opposing views.

Republicans Versus Federalists

These fierce disputes created a political enmity Washington and others sought to avoid—two vibrant, disputing political parties instead of consensus.
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Although Republicans and Federalists of the 1790s may appear old-fashioned in comparison to modern politicians, they performed the same vital functions that characterize members of all modern political parties. They nominated candidates, conducted election campaigns, wrote platforms, pamphlets, and newspaper editorials, organized partisan activity within the executive and legislative branches of government, dispensed patronage, and even conducted social events like parties, barbecues, fish fries, and so on.

Unfortunately, some have overgeneralized about the parties, characterizing them as rich versus poor men’s parties, big government versus small government parties, or even proslavery and antislavery parties. The truth is much more complex. The Federalists and the Republicans were closely related to their 1787–89 Federalist and Anti-Federalist predecessors. For the most part, Republicans were more rural and agricultural than their Federalist opponents. Whereas an Alexander Hamilton would always be suspicious of the masses and their passions, to the Republicans, “Honest majorities, unmolested by priests, quacks, and selfish deceivers, necessarily would make good decisions.”
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This did not mean that all Republicans were poor yeomen farmers, because much of their leadership (for example, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe) consisted of affluent southern planters; at the same time affluent merchants and entrepreneurs led a Federalist following of poorer, aspiring middle-class tradesmen. Because the northeastern part of the United States was more populous and enjoyed a more diverse economy than the agricultural South and West, this rural/urban dichotomy tended to manifest itself into a southern/western versus northeastern party alignment. Characterizing the first party system as one of agrarian versus cosmopolitan interests would not be wholly inaccurate.