Jefferson and Hamilton (48 page)

Hostilities in what would be known as the Wars of the French Revolution began in the spring of 1792. Initially, France was at war with Prussia and Austria, but in 1793 Great Britain entered the conflict, and that sent passions soaring within the United States. Just weeks after news of Franco-British fighting reached America, Jefferson remarked that the “war has kindled … the two parties with an ardour which our own [domestic] interests … could never excite.”
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In most eighteenth-century European wars, the outcomes perhaps altered the balance of power, but had little impact on the lives of most people. This war was different. The Franco-British war was a life-and-death struggle between rival ideologies. The fate of ruling classes hung in the balance, convincing many Americans that the war’s outcome was vitally important to the future of the United States. Sometimes portraying England as “fighting the battle of the civilized world,” Federalists craved the defeat of the French radicals, and some would not have been displeased by the restoration of the monarchy. Republicans drank toasts to the French and yearned for “liberty … [to] assume a predominating influence” as “every monster” of despotism was destroyed.
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Partisanship, already venomous, moved to another level, prompting scholars to observe that in all of American political history the “bitterness of the division” was exceeded only by the frenzied malice of the Civil War era.
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All the key players in Washington’s administration agreed on one thing: The United States must remain neutral in this war. Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson may have agreed on little else, but each was convinced that another war so soon after the War of Independence would be economically ruinous and possibly fatal to the American Union. The cabinet officers skirmished, however, over whether to maintain the Treaties of Alliance and Commerce with France. Hamilton wished to suspend the accords, Jefferson to preserve them. Behind the infighting was the desire of each to aid one side or the other without injuring the interests of the United States. In the end, Washington sided with Jefferson, who argued persuasively—and correctly—that the United States could safely abide by the treaty’s stipulation that it must permit French warships and privateers to utilize American harbors as a refuge, a privilege that would be denied England. Though excoriated later as a Francophile, Jefferson always put America’s interests first. In that spirit, he advised Washington that the alliance did not extend to France the right to
equip its privateers or sell its prizes in American ports, and he counseled that the United States should not waver on that point. It was an opinion that required a broad, legalistic reading of the treaty, and it was one with which Washington concurred. On April 22, the president, eschewing the word “neutral,” declared that the United States was “impartial” toward all belligerents. This would be “a disagreeable pill” to many Republicans, Jefferson allowed, but it was “necessary to keep us out of the calamities of a war.”
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The cabinet additionally discussed whether Washington should receive the first minister sent to the United States by the French Republic, an envoy who was known to have already begun his Atlantic crossing. Once again, all agreed that he must be received. By the time the cabinet made that decision, Citizen Edmond-Charles-Edouard Genêt, the twenty-nine-year-old French minister, was in Charleston, where he had landed ten days earlier.

Genêt came to a United States that was blazing with partisanship, and his impetuous manner only added fuel to the fires already raging. France could not have chosen a worse envoy. Genêt was rash and stubborn, and in the grip of a feverish revolutionary zeal. Yet, the problems that befell his mission were not entirely his fault. France had stuffed Genêt’s pockets with inflammatory instructions. He was directed to use propaganda, secret agents, and hired American adventurers to arouse fervor for the French Revolution among the residents of Spanish Florida and Louisiana, as well as British Canada, steps aimed at helping France in its war against Britain and its Spanish ally. The envoy was also to play a pivotal role in the privateering war on British shipping. Genêt was not only to recruit American sailors for those vessels but also to see that the privateers were outfitted in American ports and permitted to sell their prizes in those havens. Aside from these inevitably provocative undertakings, there was an aspect of Genêt’s mission that held the promise of substantive gain for the United States. Genêt was to reveal that France was opening its ports, and those of its colonies, to American commerce, the goal that Franklin and Jefferson had unsuccessfully sought throughout the 1780s. This was a pot-sweetener. Genêt’s final task was to negotiate a new Franco-American treaty of commerce, one with enticing benefits to Americans. However, it would come with the condition that United States must discriminate against any nation (such as Great Britain) that pursued a mercantilistic policy toward America.

The ecstatic greeting that Genêt received in Charleston put Washington on guard against potential troubles in pursuing a neutral course. A huge crowd welcomed the envoy ashore, after which he commissioned four vessels as French privateers. That was merely the beginning. Throughout Genêt’s month-long journey to Philadelphia, town after town hailed him with banquets, the
pealing of bells, artillery salutes, and addresses that pulsated with love for France. Philadelphia welcomed him with open arms on May 16. Two days later, the president, a formidably reserved, cold individual to begin with, received Genêt with glacial formality while standing beneath portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
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The reception extended by Jefferson could not have been more different. Hoping that the voice of the people would melt the “cold caution of their government,” Jefferson saw that, through Genêt, the United States might gain its long-sought commercial ends with France, a step that might weaken Great Britain and set in motion the death rattle of the British monarchy. One other thing. Jefferson interpreted the receptions lavished on Genêt as evidence that “the old spirit of 1776 is rekindling,” which he was convinced would be to the detriment of the Federalist Party. Genêt, he believed, could be useful for partisan political reasons.
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Jefferson was eager for Genêt to succeed, and as a result of things that the secretary of state said, or through his tone and manner, the Frenchman may have surmised that he would be given extraordinary latitude. Early on, Jefferson shared things with Genêt as he had never done with George Hammond. For instance, he divulged that Washington was influenced by the Anglophiles in his cabinet. Jefferson additionally coached Genêt, advising patience, as a more friendly Congress—the one elected the previous autumn—would convene near the end of the year. However, Jefferson also told Genêt what the United States would not tolerate, and he defended and elucidated his country’s position in a lengthy and learned discourse on international law.

Genêt refused to listen, and he rapidly wore out his welcome. He answered Jefferson with impertinence, threatened to go over Washington’s head to the American public to get what he wanted, and ignored United States policy by arming a privateer in the port of Philadelphia. Hamilton, who labeled Genêt the “most offensive” diplomat imaginable, was so sufficiently worried—“panick struck,” was how Jefferson characterized him—that he met secretly with Hammond to assure him of his efforts to prevent the French envoy from dragging the United States into war with Great Britain. Through conduits such as the influential Federalists John Jay and Rufus King, Hamilton leaked to the press word of Genêt’s threat to appeal to the public. And he launched yet another newspaper campaign, a series of nine essays that he penned that summer under the signature “No Jacobin.” His objective was to turn public opinion against Genêt by publishing details of the envoy’s behavior, and in fact Hamilton’s initial sentence trumpeted: The “Minister of the French Republic has threatened to appeal from the President of the United States to the People.” Within fifty days, Jefferson was equally dismayed, having on his own
come to see Genêt as a detriment to Franco-American relations. Condemning Genêt as a “Hotheaded … disrespectful and even indecent” blunderer, Jefferson “saw the necessity of quitting a wreck which could not but sink all who should cling to” him. He agreed with Washington and Hamilton that the administration must demand Genêt’s recall.
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Genêt was gone, but the firestorm aroused by the European war blazed on. The French minister had stirred the pot, but most of the heat directed toward the Washington administration had been provoked by American neutrality, which was assailed in Republican quarters as a betrayal of France and republicanism, and as a pro-British policy. To this point, Washington had largely escaped criticism. No longer. He was ripped in the Republican press for his “cold indifference” toward America’s Revolutionary War ally and a republic at war with a monarchical tyrant, and blasted for listening only to those Toryinclined members of his cabinet rather than to public opinion. The criticism did not sit well with the notoriously thin-skinned president. At one cabinet meeting, his volcanic temper erupted, causing Jefferson to note that the “President … got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.”
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However, nothing bothered Washington and Hamilton more than the emergence of the Democratic-Republican Societies that sprang up after Great Britain entered the war. Hamilton was sure that Genêt, or possibly French secret agents, had orchestrated their creation, but in fact they mushroomed spontaneously to give voice to the pulsating popular mood. They were, as their name suggested, the manifestation of the democratizing spirit that was part and parcel of Revolutionary America, and that in itself excited pangs of anxiety in Hamilton.

The first Democratic-Republican Society was formed in Philadelphia in 1793, but within a few months some fifty others had come into being in several states. The membership was galvanized by alarm at the growing reach and power of the national government, and particularly by signs of presidential omnipotence and the monarchical overtones of Washington’s presidency. Manhattan’s Society, for instance, sprang into being in the course of a campaign to protect a local printer accused by Federalists of sedition for having criticized the Washington presidency. But it was the French Revolution, and the threat it faced from Europe’s monarchical powers, that really fueled the movement. Members often wore red, white, and blue cockades in imitation of French radicals, frequently addressed one another as “fellow citizen” rather than with the class-imbued “sir,” and on occasion actively mobilized voters for the Republican Party. Now and then a fiery orator urged republicans everywhere to “unite with France and stand or fall together.” But on the whole, few advocated American involvement in France’s war, though they were
clearly bent on making it difficult for the Washington administration to aid London.
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Hamilton feared the clout of the Democratic-Republican Societies, which mimicked the Sons of Liberty and other radical organizations that had played an important role in organizing the insurgency against Great Britain during the American Revolution. His most immediate concern was the danger they posed to American neutrality, and during the summer of 1793 he authored seven newspaper essays on the subject. He defended Washington and his authority to proclaim neutrality. He insisted that since France had started the European war, the United States was not obligated by the Treaty of Alliance to come to its assistance. Hamilton argued that it was not in the best interests of the United States to enter the war on the side of France. Surrounded by British and Spanish possessions, faced with hostile Indians along its frontier, and lacking a navy, the new American nation would find itself in an “unequal contest.” And in what would be a staple of right-wing politics for generations to come, Hamilton painted those who questioned American foreign policy as disloyal. However, the lengthiest portions of his essays were devoted to extinguishing America’s sense of obligation toward France. Only weeks after his lachrymose essays praising Louis XVI for his magnanimity in providing assistance during the American Revolution, Hamilton asserted that “the interest of France had been the governing motive of the aid afforded us” after 1775.
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Eighteenth-century politicians and polemicists were decidedly modern in that not every word they uttered was to be taken as forthright.

At the height of the partisan furor, Philadelphia was invaded by a more dangerous foe than any foreign adversary. Yellow fever struck in August, and for weeks it gripped the city. Transmitted by mosquitoes, Philadelphia’s outbreak commenced along the waterfront, a low-lying, swampy region that was a breeding ground for the insects. It quickly spread across the city. In no time, nearly 150 people were dying each week, and the epidemic continued until autumn’s first frosts destroyed the mosquitoes. By then, nearly five thousand had perished, roughly 8 percent of the population.

Philadelphians assumed the disease was spread by human contact, leading them to avoid others as much as possible. “Every body who can is flying” from the city, Jefferson said, and in fact upwards of twenty thousand did flee, but neither he nor Hamilton took that expedient. Jefferson never fell ill, which he attributed to his remoteness from the “filth” and heat of the city. Thinking that he would retire at the conclusion of Washington’s first term, Jefferson had given notice that he would be abandoning his Market Street home. However, when the president persuaded him to stay on, Jefferson had to find another
residence, and in April he had moved beyond the city to a summer cottage on the east bank of the Schuylkill River. That reduced his risk, but did not eliminate it, as he commuted daily to his office.
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Fortune smiled on Jefferson, and he escaped the malady.