American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Jefferson was still in Paris during those early events; he even helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man. He was optimistic. “I have so much confidence in the good sense of man,” he wrote a friend, “that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force; and I will agree to be stoned as a false prophet if all does not end well in this country.…Here is but the first chapter of the history of European liberty.” He was not uncritical; he sent home acute observations on France’s halting progress toward self-government.

  John Adams had a more measured reaction. He hoped that the French Revolution, he wrote a friend, would favor “liberty, equity, and humanity.…” But he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling,” he wrote another friend, Dr. Price. “I know that Encyclopedists and Economists, Diderot and D’Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau have contributed to this great event more than Sidney, Locke, or Hoadley, perhaps more than the American Revolution; and I own to you I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.…” Adams could not disguise his bias in favor of the English. Nor could Hamilton: friendship with Britain was at the heart of the Secretary’s foreign policy, not least because of his admiration for English legal and economic practices.

  “We think in English,” Hamilton said. But the cause of France, Republicans said, was the cause of man.

  Soon, however, the cause of man seemed to falter in France. The rise of the Jacobins, the execution of the king and queen, the endless devouring of new cadres of leaders, the horrifying rounds of the tumbril, produced a revulsion among some Americans. “When will these savages be satiated with blood?” John Adams demanded. Jefferson deplored the fate of the Terror’s victims, but there were higher stakes—the “liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest.” Others cared not a whit about the guillotining of the king and queen—they even celebrated it. At a Philadelphia banquet the head of a pig, representing Louis XVI, was passed around while the feasters, decked out in caps of liberty, mangled it with their knives. At a tavern between Chester and Wilmington the innkeeper exhibited a sign showing a decapitated female, her dripping head lying by the side of the trunk, until the public forced him to withdraw this grim effigy of the late queen.

  Thus the Terror drove a wedge between Americans, and France’s war on Britain and Spain drove the wedge in deeper. The impact of the war stretched to the West Indies, to the Mississippi, to Canada, to the southwest frontier, to the posts on the northwest border still occupied by the British—areas of cardinal importance to the Americans. As American interests were touched and American attitudes enflamed, fierce disputes over foreign policy became linked with domestic disputes.

  With dismay Washington observed the rising feeling. He had, above all, wanted to preside over a united government that could transcend “local prejudices, or attachments,” and “party animosities.” Before the end of his first term he was noting the “internal dissensions” that were “harrowing and tearing our vitals.” To Hamilton and Jefferson he sent separate pleas for mutual forbearance and compromise. All he got for his pains was a complaint from his Secretary of State that Hamilton was intruding into foreign policy, a charge that his rival’s policies were directly opposite to his own, and an indication of intent to resign; and from his Secretary of the Treasury, a response that it was he—Hamilton—who was the “deeply injured party,” a charge that Jefferson’s “machinations” were subverting the government, and an offer that both he and Jefferson resign.

  If the two men acted like paranoids, at least they had real enemies in each other. Within a few weeks of assuming office Hamilton had been indulging in secret negotiations with a British diplomat, to whom he described Madison as “very little Acquainted with the world.” Anglophile himself, fearful of Jefferson’s Francophilism, Hamilton in effect aided the British in countering the efforts of the Secretary of State. Jefferson, on his part, fought Hamilton through political channels. He appealed to Madison: “For God’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.” Soon Madison was thwacking Hamilton hip and thigh.

  Washington stood firm amid the turbulence. He kept both men in his Cabinet, and he judiciously selected from among the views of both. He rejected Hamilton’s pleas that the American treaties of commerce and alliance with France be suspended. But he declared American neutrality as between France and Britain—a move that angered Republicans who could not forget France’s vital aid in their own revolution.

  Into this unstable equilibrium intruded the figure of Edmond Genêt. A youthful diplomat turned revolutionary, Citizen Genêt had been sent to America to shore up the cause of France, diplomatically, commercially, and militarily. Landing in Charleston in April 1793, he journeyed north to such celebration and acclaim that he arrived in Philadelphia with a head, if not crowned by a liberty cap, certainly swollen with hopes of winning a popular acclaim that would surpass even Washington’s, of enlisting Americans to conduct military adventures against Louisiana and Florida and thus engaging France’s old ally fully in the “cause of man.” Soon he was commissioning privateers in American ports to bring in fat British prizes off the Delaware capes.

  Warmly greeted by Jefferson, received even by Washington, and enthusiastically feted by Philadelphia Republicans, Genêt soon wore out his welcome with his vainglorious efforts to conduct his own foreign policy abroad. Even Jefferson cooled when Genêt renamed a captured British brigantine Petite Democrate, smuggled cannon and men aboard her in Philadelphia, and slipped her down the river, past Mud Island, and out to sea before Washington, visiting Mount Vernon, could take action. Soon the Hamiltonians were organizing mass meetings and adopting resolutions upholding Washington’s neutrality policies and condemning Genêt. In Virginia the Madisonians retaliated through public meetings attacking the Federalist “Cabal.” The result was the direct and deep involvement of large numbers of people in the making of foreign policy.

  Genêt’s dénouement was inglorious: Washington demanded his recall to Paris, but the Citizen, discovering that in his absence he had been converted from a radical to a reactionary in the deadly bouleversement of French politics, chose to stay in America, to wed Governor Clinton’s daughter and retire to private life. But this tragicomedy of 1793 was a fitting prelude to the crisis of 1794. That crisis was precipitated by the collision of France and Britain over possession of the seas—and by American illusions that somehow a small nation, three thousand miles away, could remain unentangled in the struggle of the great powers.

  Diplomatically, that struggle provoked the usual cynical game of sham neutrality on the high seas. Britain, possessing a mighty navy, wished to cut off the trade lines to France. France, weaker on the seas and dependent on American shipping to its home ports and to the West Indies, proclaimed its adherence to the doctrine of freedom of the seas. The United States stood on its “neutral rights.” Yet even the French violated their own doctrine when, in the face of an American neutrality that for a time seemed to be favoring Britain, it seemed expedient to confiscate American ships and cargoes.

  The British did not bother to be hypocritical. Hoping to starve France into submission, they proclaimed a blockade of that country, ordered the seizure of all neutral vessels transporting cargo to France, and—most threatening of all to the American merchant marine—extended their naval and seizure operations directly into the Caribbean. These decisions having been made in secret, the British Navy was able to fall on the big American trade to the Caribbean and to snare more than two hundred American ships.

  As news of these depredations trickled into American ports, a wave of anti-British feeling swept through the nation. Anger mounted on reports that the English were up to other heinous acts—arming Indians on the northwest frontier, helping Barbary pirates to prey on American shipping. There were calls for war, for a second struggle for independence. Never mind that the United States had practically no army or navy; Madison sugg
ested that the Portuguese Navy be hired. Or perhaps the British lion could be brought to its knees by commercial action. The issue cut deep into the structure of American opinion, inflaming Republican Anglophobia even further, deepening the North-South conflict, dividing even the Federalists among themselves. Deserted by some of his more martially inclined Federalist brethren, Hamilton stood staunchly against commercial retaliation against London. Britain, after all, was the main prop of his whole fiscal system.

  Once again the figure of Washington—outwardly imperturbable, inwardly distressed—stood in the breach. He now lacked the official advice of Jefferson, for his Secretary of State had resigned, by prearrangement, at the end of 1793, to be succeeded by another Virginian in whom Washington had less confidence, Edmund Randolph. Moving quickly to fill the semi-vacuum, Hamilton urged the President to dispatch a minister plenipotentiary to London, and Washington agreed. The choice fell on Chief Justice John Jay. Hamilton himself drafted Jay’s instructions. The move came barely in time to head off a bill passed in the House for non-intercourse with Britain; the measure failed in the Senate only on a tie-breaking negative vote cast by Vice-President Adams.

  The bill had been an effort for peace, aborted if only for a time, for Republicans were skeptical of Jay’s mission. A Federalist judge acting on Federalist instructions: this, they felt, would mean the path toward appeasement. Skepticism turned to indignation and wrath when copies of the treaty—two of which had to be thrown overboard from the ship carrying them when a French privateer intercepted it on the high seas—reached Philadelphia. Jay had secured admission of United States ships to British East Indian ports on a nondiscriminatory basis, as well as the opening of the West Indies trade, but only to small American ships carrying a limited number of staples. But the northeast boundary question and British and American claims and compensation questions were left open—they were referred to a joint commission to be established—and British trade with the United States was placed on a most-favored-nation basis. Nothing was settled with regard to the impressment of seamen, to the slaves “stolen” and liberated by the British, to the Indian question.

  In effect, Republicans claimed, Jay had surrendered the “freedom of the seas.” The opposition would appeal to the people. Soon protest meetings were held, Hamilton was hooted down when he tried to defend the treaty, and an impeachment move was launched against Jay, who was accused of selling out to British gold. The clamor against the treaty, Washington said, was “like that against a mad-dog.” Jay himself remarked that he could have made his way across the country by the light of his burning effigies. And once again it was the stolid figure of Washington that calmed the political tempest. In the face of rising Republican opposition, an untimely renewal of ship seizures by the British, and his own—and Hamilton’s—doubts about certain aspects of the treaty, he overrode opposition within his Cabinet from Randolph and insisted on Senate ratification. The senators complied, after striking out the tepid compromise on West Indies trade.

  Washington also stood firm against Republican opposition in the House. Madison and his colleagues, exercising power over appropriations necessary to put the treaty into effect, were insisting on their right to look at presidential papers involving the treaty, but the President denied that they had that right. As the appropriations issue came to be fully debated in the House, once again the party leaders turned to the people for petitions, support at rallies, and enthusiasm. Party lines tightened in the country, and especially in the House, where voting along Federalist-Republican lines increased, and both sides met in what were the first party caucuses held in Congress. An immensely effective speech by Federalist Fisher Ames, and the defection of Republican Frederick Muhlenberg, Speaker of the House (for which defection he would shortly be stabbed by his brother-in-law, a fanatical Republican), defeated the move to withhold appropriations for the treaty.

  As if argument over policy were not enough to keep the parties divided, the Administration and its opponents fought hard over power and procedure. The President’s claim of sole authority to proclaim neutrality, and of his right to withhold treaty papers, his bold assertion that treaties signed by the President and ratified by the Senate were the supreme law of the land (subordinating the role of the House)—these and other presidential and congressional claims led to furious debates between Federalist and Republican. The men of ’89 knew that they were creating vital precedents in resolving the ambiguous decisions of the men of ’87—and the fact that many of these were the same men did not temper their feelings. Indeed, when Washington said that he knew what he was talking about because he had taken part in the constitutional convention, Madison and his friends retorted that that piece of parchment in itself was “nothing but a dead letter, until life and validity were breathed into it by the voice of the people” in the state ratifying conventions. The man who would come to be known as the Father of the Constitution would not accept lessons in constitutional law from the man who would become known as the Father of His Country.

  Thus were Washington’s hopes dashed for a foreign policy that would rise above party and sectional and group politics. Not only were Federalists and Republicans divided over the year-to-year strategy and the everyday tactics of foreign policy, they were profoundly divided over ideology, sentiment, and in their sympathies for Britain and France; over the kind of nation they were trying to build; over the kind of people Americans should become; over America’s political and symbolic place in the world. Ordinarily attitudes over foreign and domestic policy are not congruent; persons combining with one another over domestic issues often split with one another over foreign. In the 1790s, however, congruence was intensifying among both Federalists and Republicans over the two sets of policies.

  The result was a sharpening and hardening and deepening of attitudes separating and polarizing the Federalist and Republican groupings—a polarization that helped produce enormous popular participation in the debates over foreign policy. The further result was to lay the foundations for a powerful two-party politics, the shape of which could not be fully divined in the 1790s.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Trials of Liberty

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1796 two farmers were busy improving their estates. In Quincy, Massachusetts, John Adams supervised the building of a large barn, using red cedar that he and his hands had cut from a grove in the lower township and hauled home behind a team of oxen. Every day he inspected his fields of barley and oats and rye and corn; the main problem this summer was the corn, attacked by worms. With special pleasure he rode across his once thin and stony fields, now rich from years of treatment with his special compost of salt hay, seaweed, cow dung, and horse manure, interlaid with lime.

  He did not neglect his moral duties. Sundays he attended church morning and afternoon, and he reflected on the Christian teachings of love and brotherhood. Weekdays he struggled for the soul of his hired man Billings, a good worker when sober, but prone to spending days swilling brandy, wine, and cider, “a beast associating with the worst beasts in the neighborhood.” Sick and dizzy, he would return to the farm, seize the hoe Adams thrust at him, and stagger from hill to hill slashing weeds and cornstalks alike. Finally Adams set about carrying enormous stones with Billings in order to sweat him out, only to provoke the man into threatening to quit, after ranting about Adams’ hardness, his endless lecturing, his treating him like a hired beast. Morality won out; taken to Abigail to be paid off, Billings reconsidered, haggled a bit, and agreed to stay on at forty-five pounds a year—and to take the pledge against hard liquor.

  In Monticello, Thomas Jefferson was busier than ever with the endless remodeling of his house. He had found that the interior timbers of the upper part of the house were decaying and shaky, and soon seven workmen were prying bricks loose by the thousands. Now Jefferson was planning to replace the attic with an octagonal dome that would enclose a mezzanine balcony around the interior. On the ground floor he established his own suite, with a bed alcove between his dressing
room and study, which were directly connected when he drew the bed up into the recessed ceiling during the day. Outside the house two long terraces, linked by an all-weather passageway, would cover kitchen and servants’ rooms on the south, and stables, carriage house, and laundry on the north. And beyond this little estate on its mountaintop stretched Jefferson’s fields, the paths he called “roundabouts,” and the huts that housed his 150 slaves, now mortgaged to the hilt from his heavy spending. While his home was roofless during the rebuilding, Jefferson and his family camped out under the “tent of heaven.”

  The two men were tending their gardens—and keeping their eyes cocked on Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston. In Philadelphia, the President had firmly decided against running for a third term and indeed was contemplating an elaborate Farewell Address. Madison and other Republican leaders were quietly preparing the way for Jefferson to run for President, though they had received little active encouragement from him. Supporters of John Adams, hoping for the united backing of their fellow Federalists, were maneuvering in the critical mid-Atlantic states. From New York, Alexander Hamilton was looking for a pliable southern Federalist who might have a chance against Adams, whom he had found unresponsive, stubborn, and occasionally weak in his Federalism.

  In New York too, an ambitious, forty-year-old Republican, Aaron Burr, was hoping to win the vice-presidency—and perhaps more eventually—as Jefferson’s running mate. In Charleston, Thomas Pinckney, brother of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and second cousin of Charles Pinckney, was hoping that his recent success in gaining navigational freedom on the Mississippi from Spain would make him appear to be the kind of southern Federalist that the northern Federalists were seeking. And complicating the calculations of all the politicians was the strange presidential election system that required each elector to cast his ballot for two presidential candidates, with the man receiving the most votes winning the presidency, and the runner-up settling for the political booby prize, the vice-presidency.