by Conrad Black
The United States quickly achieved, though the retention of this felicitous balance would vary with Washington’s successors, a fine combination of the solidity and dignity of monarchy with the spirit and effervescence of popular democracy. Not until the Fifth Republic of France, 165 years after the tumultuous founding of the First, would the fiercely contesting French national traditions of monarchy and republicanism be reconciled in a president with immense powers and a renewable seven-year term, an elected sovereign, the fusion (in Charles de Gaulle) of monarchy and republicanism. In other major European republics, such as Germany and Italy, the post–World War II presidents would be just stand-ins for deposed monarchs. In the United States, and in the latest of the French Republics, the president is chief of state and head of government. Madison devised and Washington inaugurated, this brilliant novelty of government.
Another indication of the grandiose ambitions of the new nation was the engagement of the French engineer Pierre-Charles l’Enfant to design a splendid capital of grand straight boulevards in what was an unpromising swamp but grew in one long lifetime to be an elegant and monumental capital of a great nation. None of the founders of the republic, and as far as can be discerned, none of its founding citizens either, dissented from the cult of predestined greatness that Washington, especially, but all of the founders according to their means and talents, lavished upon the national experiment as if from giant and constantly swinging incense-pots.
2. THE RIVALRY BETWEEN HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON
Under Jefferson’s influence, Madison moved away from his friendship with Hamilton, which had flowered while Jefferson was in Paris, and Madison and Hamilton, with John Jay and a few others, were writing the Federalist Papers. Jefferson found Hamilton’s cynicism, materialism, and brusqueness, his lack of the idealism of the contemplative Enlightenment and disrespect for the gracious civilities of France, jarring. He and Madison took to referring to Hamilton and his entourage as “speculators, stock-jobbers, and Tories,” the last an especially odious word in the aftermath of the Revolution. With the death of Franklin, Jefferson was able to hold himself out as the worldly traveler and connoisseur of civilization at its rich sources, protesting all the while to be the true democrat, patrician and elitist though his notions of democracy were. Washington, who remained above attack, even after his whole-hearted support of Hamilton’s suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, was trying to run a government whose principal cabinet members were starting to splinter badly apart. The spirit of party and notion of opposition was not immediately respectable, but Jefferson and Madison began press attacks on Hamilton and Adams.
A battle developed between rival newspapers, John Fenno’s strongly Federalist Gazette of the United States, founded in 1789, and Philip Freneau’s opposition National Gazette, founded in 1790. Freneau was incentivized by being named an official interpreter by the State Department and his newspaper was a fire-breathing spigot of billingsgate and sensationalism directed at Hamilton, Adams, the Federalists, and, by implication, the president himself. The government was accused of promoting monarchism and an aristocracy, as well as a sleazy commercialism, and subverting republicanism and Jefferson’s notions of democracy (which were, to say the least, idiosyncratic). Fenno took the gloves off at once and directly attacked Jefferson as a scheming and treacherous enemy of the Constitution. It was an improbable and swift descent into an ear-splitting slanging match between Fenno and Freneau.
British precedents were somewhat replicated, as Hamilton and Adams were portrayed by their enemies as “the court,” the Tories around Washington’s crowned majesty, while Jefferson and Madison fancied themselves the country gentry loyal opposition, with Jefferson having the aspect of the sly Whig grandee with popular, if far from egalitarian, affectations, a new Walpole. The Whigs became the Republican Party, and the Federalists evolved from the supporters of the Constitution, which soon had general adherence, so almost everyone was in that sense a federalist, to a more urban and commercial bloc that Freneau and his sponsors labeled, as tendentiously as possible, Tories. It was a preposterous state of affairs, as the two senior cabinet members hurled muck at each other, and Jefferson employed in the government an anti-government propagandist flinging vitriol at the administration of which Jefferson was a senior member. Washington urged Hamilton to reply to Jefferson, to reassure general opinion, and tried to assure Jefferson that there was no such plot against the Constitution and to promote monarchic leanings, as he feared and alleged.
Both Hamilton and Jefferson were urging Washington to take a second term, but the cabinet meetings by mid-1792 had the two senior cabinet secretaries quarrelling, as Jefferson said, like roosters. Washington wrote to both in July 1792, asking for “more charity for the opinions and acts of one another.” Both men replied the same day to Washington, Hamilton in terms of forthright grievances against Jefferson’s attacks on his policies and on Hamilton personally. Jefferson sent a rather labored attack on Hamilton and spent much of his letter defending the hiring of Freneau at the State Department. Given the brilliance and historic importance of the men, it was a disappointingly immature performance, a schoolyard shouting match, in which Hamilton seemed several grades more advanced than his rival. Jefferson wrote Washington that he would retire soon but that “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment when history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head”—pretty juvenile carping from the author of the Declaration of Independence, and vulgar snobbery as well, toward the illegitimate son of a Scottish West Indian merchant who had rendered invaluable service to the new nation.53
3. WASHINGTON’S SECOND TERM
By simply not responding to endless requests from all sides that he allow himself to be selected for another presidential term, Washington backed into his reelection, again unanimously. Adams ran more strongly for vice president than he had four years before, clinging tightly to the president’s coat-tails, and was irritated to have come only 77 votes to 50 ahead of the long-serving governor of New York, George Clinton, who just four years before had been one of the leading opponents of ratification of the Constitution. Hamilton had feared that Jefferson might manage to slip into the vice presidency over the less agile Adams. The Treasury secretary was less preoccupied with personal disparagements of Jefferson, but regarded him as “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination entertaining and propagating notions inconsistent with dignified and orderly government.”54 In January 1793, Jefferson’s followers moved five motions of censure against Hamilton in the House of Representatives, all of which Hamilton had rejected handily, probably with the known support of the unanimously reacclaimed president.
Lost in the controversy was the testimony Washington’s unanimous reelection gave to the unquestionable success, great dignity of office, and successful economic policies of the first presidential term. The American system was just starting to show its distinctive characteristics. It was at this time not acceptable for a man to campaign for an office, as the clever but mistrusted young New York lawyer Aaron Burr was said to have done, very unsuccessfully, for the vice presidency. Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson had stood for election to anything in the new constitutional regime, and when elections were contested, there was no campaign and the voter turnout was often as low as 5 percent. 55
The emerging Democratic-Republican opposition was a two-headed beast from the beginning—disgruntled southern slaveholders, distressed by the urban, industrial, and commercial nature of Hamiltonism, and along with them the northerners, who were in rebellion against the financial establishment of Hamilton’s friends. The first group wanted to put the brakes on the Hamilton economic system; the second wanted to accelerate it and make it more open and meritocratic. It would take no less talented a political chameleon than Jefferson to keep this broad church under the same roof and lead it anywher
e useful. These were the origins of the modern Democratic Party. The anti-Federalists were called Republicans, and later, Democratic-Republicans, and were in fact what are now known as “Democrats.” Jefferson sold the idea that the Federalists were essentially British Tories, monarchists, cronies, corrupt speculators, warring alike on the hard-working bourgeoisie and the virtuous and tranquil South, a society that was paternalistic, rather than exploitively slave-holding. (The Federalists eventually, in the 1820s, became National Republicans, then a decade later Whigs, and finally, in the 1850s, Republicans.)
The French Revolution had a huge impact on Europe, which lingers yet, but it proceeded in a haphazard, often absurd sequence. France was Europe’s greatest nation by any measurement—27 million people in 1789, almost three times as populous as Britain, with the richest agriculture and most admired literature and intellectual community in Europe.
But Louis XIV’s wars and monumental grandiosity, especially the Palace of Versailles, strained the treasury, which relied on taxation of the lower classes, and his wars, in the end, accomplished only a minor extension outwards of the northeast frontier. The wars of the eighteenth century were horribly expensive and achieved nothing for France, as in the American Revolutionary War, and the Seven Years’ War had been a disaster.
Finally, in May 1789, to raise revenues, Louis summoned the Estates General, which had not met since Richelieu had dismissed it in 1614. The first estate, the clergy, had 300 of the 1,200 delegates, owned 10 percent of the country’s land, and paid no tax. The second estate, the nobility, had 300 delegates and owned about 30 percent of the country’s land, and about half of their delegates were somewhat reform-minded. The remaining 97 percent of the people were represented by the 600 delegates of the third estate, though most of them were lawyers, business people, and the bourgeoisie; the rural peasantry and urban poor, at least 60 percent of the population of France, were not represented other than in whatever altruistic thoughts their socioeconomic betters had for them.
After a few weeks, the first two estates tried to exclude the third, who repaired to a covered tennis court and, joined by 47 nobles, swore to pursue reform, which was not why they had been summoned. They declared themselves to be the National Assembly, and the king attempted to dissolve them on June 27. Riots ensued, culminating in the seizure of the Bastille, a prison and arsenal in Paris, on July 14. It contained only five counterfeiters and two deranged prisoners, and 250 barrels of gunpowder. (The half-mad dissolute, the Marquis de Sade, had been released a week before.) The governor of the Bastille was decapitated and his head bobbed on a pike at the head of tens of thousands of angry marching demonstrators, after they had blown up and burned down the Bastille.
On August 4, the National Assembly voted to abolish almost all aristocratic and clerical privileges, and on August 26 adopted a Declaration of the Rights of Man largely based on the American Declaration of Independence. On October 5, a mob of 5,000 women, and men dressed as women, marched to Versailles and compelled the return with them of the royal family to the Tuileries Palace (the Louvre) in central Paris, where they were more or less detained.
The Count Mirabeau was the principal figure of the National Assembly, and he was a constitutional monarchist who was adept at preventing the extremes from making inroads. Unfortunately, he suddenly died in March 1791, following a particularly frolicsome evening with two dancers he brought home with him after an evening at the opera. A new constitution establishing a monarchy of limited powers which Mirabeau had been working on was proclaimed on May 3, 1791. Maria Theresas daughter, Queen Marie Antoinette, persuaded the king to flee Paris, which they did on June 20, 1791, disguised as servants. They crowded everybody into a slow carriage and foolishly stopped for the night at Varennes, not far from the frontier of the Austrian Netherlands, where the king was recognized, captured, and ignominiously returned to Paris.
The moderates felt betrayed by the king’s flight and the extremists vindicated. Marie Antoinette’s brother, Emperor Leopold II, asked for all Europe to help restore the French monarchy. On August 27, he and the Prussian king, Frederick William, joined by Louis’s brother the Count d’Artois, met at Pillnitz and urged pan-European action to restore Louis to power. Nothing came of this except the rage of the National Assembly, which achieved its apotheosis with France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792.
Except for one year, war would continue until 1815, taking about 750,000 French lives and a larger number of other nationalities as war engulfed Europe from Cádiz to Moscow and from Copenhagen to Naples and, briefly, spread into Egypt and Palestine. The Revolution moved steadily to the left and ever further from its declared goals, and violently devoured ever greater numbers of innocents, until the Committee of Public Safety, which had implemented the Reign of Terror, was itself executed on the guillotine, to the delight of the fickle, blood-thirsty mob. Reaction and corruption ensued, followed by the Bonapartist dictatorship and empire.
If the king had had any notion of how to govern, he would not have had to call the Estates General. If he had had any political acumen, he could easily have set himself at the head of the reformers and been the indispensable man. If he had even managed the flight to Varennes and beyond properly, he could have returned to Paris eventually, as his brothers did, in the baggage train of the Duke of Wellington’s army.
One of the great watersheds of Western history was a sanguinary and tragicomic farce that presaged the ambiguity of the legacy of the Enlightenment itself. The moderate civilizing evolution advocated by Voltaire, Franklin, and their friends degenerated into terror, licentiousness, dictatorship, endless war, and futile reaction. The first claimants to emulation of the American Revolution soon became a horrifying cautionary tale.
France joined America as a republic in 1792—the first of five republics in France (to date), interspersed with a directory, consulate, two empires, two restorations, a “popular monarchy,” two provisional governments, a government in exile, and an undefined “French State,” governing in the name of a foreign occupier. The First Republic would last only three years.
American cartwheels of delight, solidarity, and legitimization of events in France would not be durable. Jefferson went impetuously cock-a-hoop for the French revolutionaries, delighted that the monarch to whom he had presented his letters of credence was executed as “a criminal,” and soon subsumed into the breezy assurance that “The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants.” Jefferson was not only a bigoted and delusional Francophile and Anglophobe; he was a poseur. He sincerely believed that revolution was a discrete movement that must sweep Europe and ensconce America as its legitimizing trailblazer, or perish and imperil the American Revolution with it. Both Hamilton and Jefferson urged on Washington a proclamation of neutrality, which he did issue on April 22, 1793, and Jefferson’s true colors as a romantic revolutionary sobered by a political opportunist and a champion of inherited and slave-holding property became more visible.
Unlike Thomas Paine and some other American true believers, Jefferson knew that what had occurred in America wasn’t a revolution at all. It was a forced national disembarkation of the colonial power, a national self-empowerment, in which the land-owning and professional and leading commercial classes reinforced their control over the disaffected country, covering the whole drama in the stirring vocabulary of liberty and obscuring a tax dispute that flared into a continental war of liberation. What was unfolding in France was a much more profound and very violent upheaval temporarily destroying an entire civilization built in rich distinction over 15 centuries. What Jefferson professed to regard as a revolutionary movement productive of human liberty was just anarchism, soon seized by an authoritarian militarist and translated into an orgy of aggressive conquest and spoliation killing several million people across Europe, although France was certainly not solely responsible for the carnage. Jefferson ran with the revolutionaries and rode in a carriage with the established and inherited interests, and reconciled
it all artfully, one of history’s first and greatest limousine liberals. In 1793, he urged Madison to reply to Hamilton’s successful denunciations of the French Revolution in newspapers and pamphlets. Madison dutifully tried, but his heart wasn’t in it, and nor were the unfolding forces of history, as the French Revolution became steadily more impossible to defend.
Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson all agreed that the United States must maintain its neutrality between France and Britain. In the sage beginning of what would be a vastly successful policy for nearly 150 years, the United States would generally abstain from Europe’s quarrels, and grow steadily stronger as Europe’s penchant for internecine bloodbaths became ever more sanguinary. Washington said that with 20 years of peace and economic growth, the United States would be fully capable to see off any European intruder. This was only slightly optimistic, and did not, of course, address America’s own Achilles’ heel, the ineluctable tumor of slavery.
4. RELATIONS WITH FRANCE AND BRITAIN
Problems between neutralist America and the compulsively belligerent revolutionary government of France were not long in coming. The French minister, the bumptious and completely unqualified “Citizen (Edmond Charles) Genet,” aged just 29, arrived at Charleston on April 8, 1793, and commissioned four privateers to prey upon British shipping in American waters and also commissioned overland attacks on British and Spanish targets on the borders of the United States. He proceeded, amid considerable celebrations and extravagant greetings, to Philadelphia, where he arrived on May 16. Washington received him coolly on May 18, and on June 5 Jefferson handed him a letter from the president telling him that his privateers could not infringe U.S. territorial waters and no prizes taken would be permitted in U.S. ports. The letter noted in the sparest terms a serious trespass on U.S. national sovereignty. Genet promised to do as Washington demanded but soon rechristened a British vessel that had been taken as it was being refitted in a U.S. port, and when warned not to allow the ship to sail, he did so anyway and threatened to appeal over Washington’s head to the American people. Both Hamilton and Madison, in the midst of their newspaper debate, supported the president. On August 2, the cabinet, including Jefferson, agreed with Washington’s demand for Genet’s recall. Washington sent his full correspondence on the issue to the Congress with a message saying that Genet was trying to plunge the U.S. into “war abroad and discord and anarchy at home.”