Alexander Hamilton (114 page)

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.
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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.”
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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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Some Republican papers had the temerity to blame the XYZ Affair on Hamilton. The
Aurora
said the whole fiasco resulted from his relationship with Talleyrand:

“Mr. Talleyrand is notoriously anti-republican…. [H]e was the intimate friend of Mr. Hamilton…and other great Federalists[,] and…it is probably owing to the determined hostility which he discovered in them towards France that the government of that country consider us only as objects of plunder.”
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This must have been hard for Hamilton to swallow. For years, he had accused France of being a faithless friend. Now that the XYZ dispatches had vindicated his judgment, the Republicans chided him instead of admitting their own errors.

As was his wont, Hamilton charged into print with a seven-part newspaper series entitled “The Stand,” in which he advocated the formation of a large army to face down French aggression. When it had been a question of a possible war with Great Britain a few years earlier, Hamilton had been willing to make concessions and negotiate at length to avoid hostilities. But his foreign-policy views frequently varied with the situation, and he now adopted a much tougher tone when France was the potential belligerent power.

In writing “The Stand,” Hamilton took dead aim against Republicans who had become apologists for French misbehavior: “Such men merit all the detestation of their fellow citizens and there is no doubt that with time and opportunity they will merit much more from the offended justice of the laws.”
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Hamilton mocked Jefferson’s claim that Talleyrand, not the Directory, was to blame for the XYZ Affair. He noted that Talleyrand was the world’s “most circumspect man” and would never have acted without the direct support of the Directory.

The recourse to so pitiful an evasion betrays in its author a systematic design to excuse France at all events, to soften a spirit of submission to every violence she may commit, and to prepare the way for implicit subjection to her will. To be the pro-consul of a despotic Directory over the United States, degraded to the condition of a province, can alone be the criminal, the ignoble aim of so seditious, so prostitute a character.
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Hamilton’s indignation with Jefferson was warranted, but the idea that he wanted to reduce the United States to a French province or that his ideas were criminal was cruelly overblown and reminiscent of the most malicious nonsense heaved at Hamilton himself.

The strident tone of “The Stand” reflects the polarization that had gripped America over the French crisis. Feelings ran so high that Jefferson told one correspondent, “Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch hats.”
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Hamilton thought that America was in an undeclared civil war that had segregated the country into two warring camps. At first, the XYZ Affair seemed a windfall for the Federalists, and their fortunes improved sharply in elections that autumn. Having been strong in the patrician Senate, they now made sweeping gains in the House and even picked up southern seats. But this sudden flush of power in time proved perilous for the Federalists, for they were henceforth to lack the self-restraint necessary to curtail their more dogmatic, authoritarian impulses, thus paving the way for abuses of power.

As he braced for potential conflict with France, President Adams had to cope with the ambivalent emotions Americans brought to the vexed subject of war. As colonists, they had been antagonized by the need to quarter and provision redcoats and remembered the arrogance of the standing armies sent to enforce hated laws. Among the fanciful dreams fostered by American independence was the fond hope that America would be spared wars and the need for a permanent military presence. “At the close of our revolution[ary] war,” wrote Hamilton, “the phantom of perpetual peace danced before the eyes of everybody.”
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Gordon Wood has observed, “Since war was promoted by the dynastic ambitions, the bloated bureaucracy, and the standing armies of monarchies, then the elimination of monarchy would mean the elimination of war itself.”
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Hamilton, by contrast, believed that war was a permanent feature of human societies.

Many Republicans deplored standing armies as tools used by oppressive kings to subdue popular legislatures. The Declaration of Independence had protested standing armies kept in the colonies in peacetime. At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: “An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.”
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Jefferson wanted to ban standing armies in the Bill of Rights. He thought state militias and small gunboats sufficient to guard American shores. Republican orthodoxy declared that citizen-soldiers could defend the nation and obviate the need for a permanent military. Jeffersonians also feared that war would engender the powerful central government favored by Hamilton. In Madison’s view, “War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies and debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
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Unlike many Federalists, John Adams thought a navy and militia would suffice to guard the country and feared a large standing army as a “many bellied monster.”
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Hobbled by this aversion to a federal military, the country was reduced to a regular army of just a few thousand troops when Washington left office.

During the Revolution, Hamilton had despaired of reliance on militias and learned to respect the superiority of trained soldiers. During the war scare with France, he saw a chance to promote a robust national defense and advanced a pet project for a fifty-thousand-man army: twenty thousand regulars joined by thirty thousand auxiliaries. The president reacted with contempt. “The army of fifty thousand men…appeared to me to be one of the wildest extravagances of a knight errant,” Adams later wrote, harping again on Hamilton’s foreign birth. “It proved to me that Mr. Hamilton knew no more of the sentiments and feelings of the people of America than he did of those of the inhabitants of one of the planets.”
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As far as Adams was concerned, “Hamilton’s hobby was the army.”
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