Alexander Hamilton (107 page)

ne reason that Hamilton so feared the repercussions of the Reynolds affair was a premonition that the United States might soon be at war with an imperious France. If this conflict came about, Hamilton intended to

assume a major position and could not afford any hint of scandal. As many Republicans had predicted, the French had retaliated against the Jay Treaty by allowing their privateers to prey on American ships carrying contraband cargo bound for British ports. With Napoleon emerging as the new French military strongman, Hamilton had little doubt that his troops would spread despotism across Europe. Writing under “Americus,” Hamilton had warned early in 1797 that the “specious pretence of enlightening mankind and reforming their civil institutions is the varnish to the real design of subjugating” other nations.
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Hamilton predicted that France would become “the terror and the scourge of nations.”
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Soon after being sworn in as president, John Adams learned that the Directory, the five-member council now ruling France, had expelled the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and promulgated belligerent new orders against America’s merchant marine. By spring, the French had seized more than three hundred American vessels. To lift domestic morale, Hamilton suggested to Secretary of State Pickering a day of prayer “to strengthen religious ideas in a contest” that might pit Americans “against atheism, conquest, and anarchy.”
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Not trusting to the Lord alone, Hamilton also recommended more muscular measures, principally a new naval force and a twenty-five-thousand-man provisional army. Far from being a reflexive warmonger, Hamilton wanted to explore first every diplomatic option. “My opinion is to exhaust the expedients of negotiation and at the same time to prepare
vigorously
for the worst,” he advised Oliver Wolcott, Jr.
⁴
“
Real firmness
is good for everything.
Strut
is good for nothing.”
⁵
He told William Loughton Smith, “My plan ever is to combine
energy
with
moderation.
”
⁶

President Adams decided to pursue a two-pronged strategy: maintaining American neutrality through negotiations while simultaneously expanding the military in case talks with France miscarried. He entertained the anodyne hope that he could thread a neat path between Federalist Anglophiles and Republican Francophiles. Like Adams, Hamilton wanted to preserve peace with France through diplomacy and possibly even negotiate a commercial treaty on the Jay Treaty model. In a highminded mode, he urged that a bipartisan three-man commission that included an old political rival be sent to France. “Unless Mr. Madison will go, there is scarcely another character that will afford advantage,” he said.
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Despite heated protests from some Federalists, Hamilton thought that any delegation lacking a prominent Republican would forfeit all credibility with the French. He also yearned to call the Republicans’ bluff and show that the Federalists had done everything possible to conserve peace. Nevertheless, the three members of Adams’s cabinet under Hamilton’s supposed dominion—Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry—steadfastly opposed the choice of a Republican. Wolcott did more than just defy Hamilton’s wishes: he threatened to resign if Adams executed such a policy. As Hamilton suspected, Madison, who had a deathly fear of transatlantic travel, turned down the chance to join the delegation to France, as did Jefferson.

Starting with this first crisis of the Adams administration, Hamilton answered interminable queries from the secretaries of state, treasury, and war, who sought his guidance and shared with him internal cabinet documents. Ensconced in his Manhattan law office, Hamilton was apprised of everything happening in Philadelphia. Adams knew nothing of these contacts. At first, Hamilton did not denigrate Adams or his cabinet and behaved in exemplary fashion. “I believe there is no danger of want of firmness in the executive,” he told Rufus King. “If he is not ill-advised, he will not want prudence.”
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Vice President Jefferson, by contrast, was already in the thick of a secret campaign to sabotage Adams in French eyes. The French consul in Philadelphia, Joseph Létombe, held four confidential talks with Jefferson in the spring of 1797—talks no less unorthodox than the ones Hamilton had held with British minister George Hammond—and informed his superiors in Paris, paraphrasing Jefferson, that “Mr. Adams is vain, suspicious, and stubborn, of an excessive self-regard, taking counsel with nobody.”
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Jefferson predicted to Létombe that Adams would last only one term and urged the French to invade England. In the most brazen display of disloyalty, he advised the French to stall any American envoys sent to Paris: “Listen to them and then drag out the negotiations at length and mollify them by the urbanity of the proceedings.”
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Jefferson and other Republicans encouraged the French to believe that Americans sided with them overwhelmingly, and this may have toughened the tone that the Directory adopted with the new administration.

On May 16, 1797, President Adams delivered a bellicose message to Congress, denouncing the French for ejecting Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and stalking American ships and chiding them for having “inflicted a wound in the American breast.”
¹¹
He also announced plans to expand the navy and bolster the militias. For the
Aurora,
this suggested too much belligerence. After a pacific inaugural speech, editorialized the paper about Adams, “we see him gasconading like a bully, swaggering the hero, and armed cap-a-pie, throwing the gauntlet to the most formidable power on earth.” Ergo, Adams must be a British agent: “We behold him placing himself the file-leader of a British faction and marshalling his forces as if he were the representative of George the Third, instead of the chief magistrate of the American people.”
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Dashing this Republican stereotype, Adams made a conciliatory overture and announced plans to dispatch a diplomatic mission to Paris. The three-man delegation was to include two southern Federalists, John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and a northern Republican, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who had been a partisan of the French Revolution. “The French are no more capable of a republican government,” Adams advised Gerry, “than a snowball can exist a whole week in the streets of Philadelphia under a burning sun.”
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Quite unlike the cabinet members he reputedly controlled, Hamilton applauded Adams with gusto. “I like very well the course of executive conduct in regard to the controversy with France,” he told Wolcott.
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But he had reservations about the likely outcome of the mission. He believed that Adams had erred by not sending a southern Republican, a move that would have convinced the French that the deck was not stacked against them. He also doubted that French officials would treat the American envoys respectfully and fulminated against them as “the most ambitious and horrible tyrants that ever cursed the earth,” rebuking Republicans who would “make us lick the feet of her violent and unprincipled leaders.”
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When the American commissioners arrived in France in August 1797, they were greeted by a lame minister of foreign affairs who had been a pariah a few years earlier: Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who had befriended Hamilton in Philadelphia. With the end of the Terror, Talleyrand had been rehabilitated and returned to France. Hamilton knew that he was avaricious and regarded public office as a means of obtaining money. The cynical Frenchman once told a mutual friend that “he found it very strange that a man of his [Hamilton’s] quality, blessed with such outstanding gifts, should resign a ministry in order to return to the practice of law and give as his reason that as a minister he did not earn enough to bring up his eight children.”
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After Hamilton returned to New York, Talleyrand was en route to a dinner party one night when he glimpsed Hamilton toiling by candlelight in his law office. “I have seen a man who made the fortune of a nation laboring all night to support his family,” he said, shocked.
¹⁷
After becoming French foreign minister in July 1797, he rejoiced at the plunder placed at his fingertips. “I’ll hold the job,” he confided to a friend. “I have to make an immense fortune out of it, a really immense fortune.”
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He proceeded to scoop up an estimated thirteen to fourteen million francs during his first two years as foreign minister alone.

By the time the three Americans showed up in Paris, Napoleon had crushed the Austrian army in Italy. Then, in early September, the Directory staged a veritable coup d’état, arresting and deporting scores of deputies and shutting down more than forty newspapers in a wholesale purge of moderate elements. John Marshall sent a gloomy assessment to Pickering: “All power is now in the undivided possession of those who have directed against us those hostile measures of which we so justly complain.”
¹⁹
Corruption, long endemic among French officials, had only worsened under the Directory. When Talleyrand received the three American commissioners in October, he treated them civilly during a fifteen-minute audience, but they did not hear from him again for another week. The tone then turned frigid as Talleyrand explained that the Directory was “excessively exasperated” by statements made about France by President Adams in his May 16 address to Congress. Talleyrand then forced the three Americans to deal with three minions—Jean Conrad Hottinguer, Pierre Bellamy, and Lucien Hauteval—who were to become infamous in American history through the three coded letters,
X, Y,
and
Z,
that identified them in diplomatic dispatches sent to Philadelphia. Through these underlings, Talleyrand imposed a series of insufferable demands: that President Adams retract the controversial passages of his truculent speech; extend a large loan to France; and even pay for damage inflicted on American ships by French privateers! Talleyrand’s lieutenants further insisted that the Americans fork over a considerable bribe as the prelude to any negotiations. Playing a cat-and-mouse game, Talleyrand deferred meetings with the American envoys, allowing extra time for his intermediaries to extort money.

John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney were disgusted and wanted to terminate the negotiations at once—“No! No! Not a sixpence!” Pinckney spluttered in protest—while the Francophile Elbridge Gerry counseled patience. Marshall began drafting two long accounts to Timothy Pickering that chronicled the indignities they had endured. Due to the absence of winter traffic across the North Atlantic, the dispatches did not arrive in Philadelphia until the spring. While Adams awaited the results, Jefferson continued to make mischief by urging France to put off talks with the American delegation. “The Vice-President still argues that the Directory has everything to gain here by temporizing and he repeats to me incessantly that Machiavelli’s maxim,
Nil repente
[nothing suddenly], is the soul of great affairs,” Létombe told his French bosses.
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Not until March 4, 1798, did Marshall’s explosive narratives land on President Adams’s desk. Once decoded, they made for shocking reading. The mission had been a disaster, nothing short of a grand national humiliation. After receiving an account of Talleyrand’s chicanery, Hamilton advised Pickering, “I wish to see a
temperate,
but
grave, solemn,
and
firm
communication from the president to the two houses on the result of the advices from our commissioners.”
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Still willing to leave the door to talks open, Hamilton laid out an ambitious program for an enlarged army: “The attitude of
calm defiance
suits us,” he told Pickering.
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At first, President Adams made a politic speech to Congress that announced that the mission had foundered while omitting the notorious circumstances that would have riled the public. He asked for a broad array of military preparations. In a serious miscalculation, the Republicans branded Adams a warmonger and claimed that France had behaved far better than the president was allowing. Vice President Jefferson referred privately to Adams’s speech as an “insane message.”
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On March 29, 1798, Hamilton’s old foe William Branch Giles of Virginia intimated that Adams was suppressing documents that would show France in a more flattering light. When he and other Republicans demanded the release of the communiqués, the House agreed. Hamilton was pleased that France would now be shown in its true colors. Americans “at large should know the conduct of the French government towards our envoys and the abominable corruption of that government together with their enormous demands for
money.
These are so monstrous as to shock every reasonable man when he shall know them.”
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When the XYZ papers were published, they proved a bonanza for the Federalists, and John Adams attained the zenith of his popularity as president. Although he had no military background, he now began to appear in military regalia, exhorting his followers to adopt a “warlike character.”
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After Adams dined with a delegation of patriotic admirers from New York in late May, Abigail gave each visitor a black cockade—a knot of ribbons—which became the emblem of support for the administration. “The act has produced the most magical effects,” Robert Troup said after the XYZ dispatches appeared. “A spirit of warm and high resentment against the rulers of France has suddenly burst forth in every part of the United States.”
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Congress rushed through a program for fortifying eastern seaports and augmenting the army and navy.

The Republicans contrived ways to rationalize what had happened. Jefferson complained to Madison that Adams had perpetrated “a libel on the French government” as part of his “swindling experiment.”
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He conceded that Talleyrand might have organized an extortion plot, but “that the Directory knew anything of it is neither proved nor provable.”
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Jefferson’s conviction that the XYZ Affair was a Federalist hoax only grew with time. The whole brouhaha was “a dish cooked up by [John] Marshall, where the swindlers are made to appear as the French government.”
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Nor did the XYZ Affair lead Madison to reevaluate the French Revolution. After hearing of Talleyrand’s conduct toward the American envoys, Madison could not believe that the French minister had behaved so stupidly. He thought President Adams, not the Directory, “the great obstacle to accommodation” and accused the Federalists of resorting to “vile insults and calumnies” to foment war with France.
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