American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Making up that mission was in itself an exercise in diplomacy for the new President. For the sake of weight and balance the mission should consist of three persons—but what three could undertake such a crucial and delicate assignment? It was agreed that Pinckney would be sent back, and Adams would have liked to appoint both Hamilton and Madison, but he encountered resistance to this idea. John Marshall of Virginia, an experienced lawyer and moderate Federalist, was agreed on, despite his lack of diplomatic experience. The third place Adams filled with a curious choice: Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Considered by some Federalists as unreliable and even a “hidden Jacobin,” but too much of a gentleman to enjoy the company of Massachusetts fishermen and rural Republicans, Gerry followed an independent course—which was the main reason Adams trusted him and turned to him for advice.

  Awaiting the mission in Paris was Count Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, a man who personified all that Americans suspected in the diplomats of the Old World. A former bishop in the Catholic Church, Talleyrand had won a reputation as a promiscuous, pleasure-loving rake, without scruples or morals—a “cloven footed Devil,” a diplomat’s wife had called him. He had spent two years in prudent exile in the United States and professed to know Americans well—perhaps too well, as he claimed that they pursued gold far more than liberty. On gold the French foreign minister was something of an expert, for he had amassed tens of millions of francs by shaking down European kings, dukes, and even a grand vizier.

  Talleyrand did not disappoint. After being allowed to cool their heels for days, and after being informed that the Directory was outraged by Adams’ Inaugural Address, Pinckney and company were approached by Talleyrand’s agent, who whispered that in order to sweeten the Directory, a small douceur of twelve million livres or more would be necessary. The Americans rejected the proposition. Later, when the agent threatened war, Marshall replied that his country would defend itself.

  “You do not speak to the point,” Talleyrand’s man exclaimed. “It is expected that you will offer money…What is your answer?”

  “It is no; no;” Pinckney said; “not a sixpence.” Later a newspaperman converted this remark into a grander retort: “Millions for defense, but not one cent for Tribute.”

  The long months of awaiting the Pinckney mission’s report had been a wretched time for John Adams. The Republicans in Congress fought almost every proposal he made, and he could not depend on Federalists or even his Cabinet, as Hamilton continued to interfere in Administration affairs from New York. Bache and other Republican editors flogged him in print as hard as they had Washington, and even though Adams pretended not to notice the scribblers, he in fact read them and was incensed by them. His relationship with Jefferson cooled again as the Vice-President, confined in Philadelphia by his Senate duties, was drawn more and more into the role of party leadership. Lacking firm congressional, party, or even cabinet backing, Adams turned for support to Abigail Adams.

  He had begun his presidential days without his lady, as Washington had done without his wife, but like Washington he soon brought his wife to the capital. More outspoken than John, at least to her friends, more likely to suspect plots, even more aroused than he by the venom of Bache and the other “Jacobins,” the First Lady followed events closely and conducted a wide correspondence, while managing the President’s house and even the farm in Quincy from afar. There was hardly an important matter the President failed to discuss with her, though she served mainly to comfort his raveled ego and bolster his views. In their closeness they still managed to keep a little distance. On coming to his office one morning she found him reading a letter to her from Mary Cranch; she promptly lectured him on the sanctity of private correspondence.

  The political doldrums in Philadelphia ended suddenly in early March 1798 with the arrival of the first dispatches from the Pinckney mission. Reading them, Adams did not know whether to be more furious at the French or at the emissaries for their “timorous” behavior—a result, obviously, of sending amateurs abroad. The President drafted a war message to Congress that flayed French and Republicans alike, but he had second thoughts. His Cabinet urged caution, and Adams feared that publishing the mission’s dispatches would overstimulate the public, and even jeopardize the lives of the three emissaries in France. In a mild final version he rebuked the French and called for stepped-up coastal defenses and protection of American shipping, including the arming of merchantmen.

  Adams’ action was far too little for the high Federalists, far too much for the Republican opposition. At this point the Republicans fell into a trap largely of their own making. Not satisfied with blocking some of Adams’ defense measures, they demanded to see the actual dispatches from the mission in Paris, on the grounds that the saber-rattling Adams had exaggerated the hostility of Talleyrand and the Directory. While some Federalists baited the trap by joining in the call for the papers, and while some of the shrewder Republicans held back fearing a ruse, the bulk of the Republicans in the House voted through a demand for the documents. Forced to do what he had wanted to do from the start, Adams sent the dispatches to Congress after substituting the letters, X, Y, and Z for the names of Talleyrand’s agents.

  Publication of the documents not only raised a political storm throughout the country, it achieved the seemingly impossible—it made John Adams popular. In Philadelphia, merchants held a meeting to prepare a special letter of thanks to the President, and the French cockades that had adorned many a Republican hat suddenly disappeared. The wave of approval rolled through the sixteen states and brought to the President’s house hundreds of addresses of approval from colleges, grand juries, militia companies, and meetings in small towns. The song “Adams and Liberty” was on everybody’s lips. Adams, who earlier could have entered and left the theater in Philadelphia without attracting much notice, was now greeted by great shows of approval. Abigail Adams attended the theater incognito to hear a noted actor sing “The President’s March,” and rushed home to tell John that the audience had demanded four encores to the song and at the end broke forth in the chorus, singing and clapping so loudly that her head rang.

  What could the President do with his newfound popularity? John Adams needed no lessons in the volatility of public opinion. He knew that a declaration of war while the iron was hot would be immensely popular, especially with members of his own party, but he held back. Gerry had lingered in Paris, much to the indignation of high Federalists, and Adams could not be sure whether he was softening up the French or going beyond the mission’s instructions; doubtless he heard about Pickering’s quip, uttered with the gallows humor of an old Salemite, that if the French would only guillotine Gerry it would be a great favor. Adams also judged that France might suddenly declare war on the United States—and the President preferred, if war must come, that the French take the initiative. So Adams contented himself with an innocuously spread-eagling message to Congress announcing that he would “never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored, as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”

  With passions unreined, events were in the saddle. A quasi-war in effect came to exist on the Atlantic and in the Caribbean as French warships continued their depredations and American sea captains, conducting their own military policy, responded on the high seas. As the war fever waxed, Congress created a Navy Department, enlarged the Army, authorized naval retaliation against French sea marauders, abrogated the 1778 and 1788 treaties with France, and finally—in July 1798—authorized naval operations on all the seas.

  Still Adams paused. Marshall returned home to a hero’s welcome from the Federalists, but the envoy told Adams privately that the Directory did not really want war—only to intimidate the United States into yielding. Taken aback by the American reaction, Talleyrand seemed to be having second thoughts and with his usual dexterity was sending out peace feelers through Gerry and others. The President’s main concern was the Federali
st wing that, still heated with war fever, was hoping to use the quasi-war as a way of conducting expeditions into the Southwest against Spain and France, and as a pretext for crushing the Republican opposition at home once and for all.

  A single problem converted this whole issue into a thorn in his side. With the Army expanding, the President decided that only one man could lead it as commander in chief and hence symbolize America’s unity and determination: George Washington. The old general would not come out of retirement, however, without a second-in-command who could get things done as the general wished them done—and that man was Alexander Hamilton. While Adams was urging others on Washington such as Knox and Pinckney, who had more seniority and circumspection, Pickering, McHenry, and others in his administration were conspiring with Hamilton to persuade Washington to stand fast for the New Yorker. He did, and the President, unwilling to brook the high Federalists and the ex-President, put his worst party enemy in effective command of the American Army.

  The summer of 1798 had been the most gloomy of his life, Adams wrote Pickering later. He and Abigail had been able to escape the Philadelphia heat after Congress adjourned in July, but the trip north was slowed by endless dinners and addresses to the now popular President, and Abigail, arrived home so ill that she was bedridden for weeks and her life for a time despaired of. The epidemic sweeping Philadelphia was claiming the lives of friend and foe alike, including that of John Fenno, the Federalist editor. Such piteous reports arrived of poor persons camped on the Philadelphia common and orphans taking refuge in almshouses that Adams sent $500 to be distributed anonymously among the poor.

  Yet, in a way that few discerned at the time, this was Adams’ time of greatness because of what he did not do—he refused to succumb to those demanding all-out hostilities against France. Events, to be sure, came to his aid. Naval defeats at the hands of Admiral Horatio Nelson convinced the French that they could do with fewer enemies, and American commercial interests active in the lucrative trade with the French West Indies were a force for peace. But there were long periods during which Adams could have seized on any day as “the day we went to war,” to the great enthusiasm of the populace. Instead, the “day he did not go to war” stretched into weeks and months and brought the young republic to the end of its first decade in a state at least of quasi-peace.

  SEMI-REPRESSION AT HOME

  The panic and jingoism of early ’98 left behind strange fruit—strange at least in a nation that had recently adopted a national bill of rights and seemed to worship the goddess of liberty. In one four-week period in the early summer of that year, Congress passed measures—later to be called the Alien and Sedition Acts—that threatened liberty of the press and of speech and challenged the whole conception of a legitimate or “loyal” opposition in a republic.

  That men like Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Marshall, and hundreds of other leaders who had fought for liberty as revolutionaries, could turn about only seven years after the passage of the first ten amendments and punish the kind of acts they had once committed—such as erecting a Liberty Pole—served long after as a source of surprise and dismay to later generations trying to understand the founding period. Only those able to “think their way” back into the era of the late 1790s could understand how this reversal came to pass. For this was a time when Americans were engaged in a quasi-war with France, when a full shooting war was believed imminent from day to day, when extremist Republicans were seen not only as mistaken and evil-minded but as secretly aiding and abetting the French enemy, when Republican editors in fact wrote the most scurrilous and inflammatory lies about Federalist leaders, when rumors abounded that French spies and infiltrators would attack America from within, burn down the churches, free the slaves, ravish women in the streets, and erect guillotines in town squares.

  It was a time too of escalating domestic conflict, when pro-Constitution Republican leaders like Madison feared that the monstrous “consolidated government” they had dreaded was actually coming to pass, that John Adams was really trying to set up a monarchy or at least an aristocracy, that in taking on France the Administration was fighting the wrong war at the wrong time against the wrong nation, that the Federalists were using the war scare as an occasion for suppressing criticism and destroying the whole Republican party.

  Buoyed by popular feeling, sure of their majorities in both houses, the Federalists pushed through four measures. Though innocuously entitled and phrased in dry eighteenth-century legalese, these bills laid bare the passions and conflicts of the time. An “act to establish an uniform rule of naturalization” increased the period of probationary residence for immigrants from five to fourteen years. For years Federalists had been looking with disdain and fear on the disaffected and even “revolutionary” Scotch and Irish fleeing British oppression, and especially on the “hordes of wild Irishmen” who had come to America to disturb her tranquillity after failing to overthrow their own governments. For years Republicans had been welcoming the political support of these same immigrants—another reason for Federalist anger.

  An act “concerning Aliens” gave the President the power to deport aliens in time of peace, and another act “respecting Alien Enemies” in time of war was passed. Because no formal war occurred, the latter act did not come into effect, but the former hung like a sword over the heads of aliens and was branded by Jefferson as a “detestable thing” that was “worthy of the 8th or 9th century.”

  The “act for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States”—the Sedition Act—would fine and jail those found guilty of writing, publishing, or saying anything of “a false, scandalous, and malicious” nature against either house of Congress or the President, with intent to defame them, bring them into contempt or disrepute, or excite against them “the hatred of the good people of the United States.” Those prosecuted under the act were allowed to offer evidence supporting the truth of the matter charged as libel, and a jury was empowered to decide the law and facts of the case. This measure, sweeping and harsh as it seemed, was a milder version of an earlier bill, which declared the people and government of France to be enemies of the United States and levied the death penalty on any citizen giving them aid and comfort. Since few governments or politicians have ever existed who did not feel that criticism of them was defamatory and liable to arouse hatred against them, the act was a clear declaration by the Federalists that opposition to a particular group of leaders in power was in fact opposition to the whole government and an effort to subvert the Constitution.

  A new corps of leaders came to the fore in the congressional debates over these bills. Dominating the high Federalist effort in the House was a group of New Englanders, including such activists as young Harrison Gray Otis, whose ardent ambition disturbed some of the older Federalists, and Samuel Sewall, chairman of the House Defense Committee, both from Massachusetts, and Connecticut men like John Allen and Samuel Dana. An aroused group of Republicans opposed the bill in both houses; their leader in the lower chamber was Albert Gallatin. An immigrant from Switzerland, onetime Harvard instructor, frontier trader, and western Pennsylvania farmer, Gallatin had a special interest in the question of naturalization, for he had been denied a United States Senate seat to which he had been elected in 1793 because he had not been a United Stales citizen for nine years. Most of the voting on the Alien and Sedition bills was sharply sectional. The Sedition Act itself won the votes of only two representatives from south of the Potomac.

  The “old revolutionaries” in both parties followed the efforts of the younger cohorts with mixed feelings, but mainly with approval. George Washington supported the acts in general, but made no direct defense of the Sedition Act. Alexander Hamilton opposed the earlier, harsher version of the Sedition Act but strongly approved the bill as signed. President Adams had little if any hand in framing the Sedition Bill, but he both approved it in principle and approved it in fact with his all-important signature at the bottom of the bill. Thomas Jefferson, on the other
hand, thoroughly opposed the acts as steps toward tyranny, but his main objection seemed to be that this was federal rather than state control of the press.

  Some waited to see the actual impact of the legislation before making up their minds. The general effect of the acts was mixed. The force of the Naturalization Act was diluted by the fact that some states had their own naturalization laws, which differed from the federal and carried their own authority. Secretary of State Pickering was put in charge of administering the Alien Act; the zealous Secretary would send Adams blank warrants to sign, but the cautious President would not delegate his authority and hence refused to comply. Still, the mere existence of the act evidently caused some French agents and a number of other persons to flee the country.

  The Sedition Act had by far the most dramatic and controversial impact. Adams had no compunction about giving the indefatigable Pickering full rein to interpret the vague and sweeping law as broadly as he wished. The President felt strongly about the calumnies inflicted on him—almost as strongly as did Abigail Adams, who noted that Bache in his paper called her husband “old, querilous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams”; the First Lady consistently favored passage of the Sedition Act, its harsh enforcement, the suppression of traitorous Republican newspapers, and the arrest of erring editors. Pickering and others moved ahead with a series of indictments and arrests. Usually the safeguards in the act—especially the prosecution’s obligation to prove the malicious intent of writers and the use of truth as a defense in criminal libel—faltered in courts run by zealous Federalist judges. The fact that sixteen of the seventeen federal proceedings were set in Federalist-dominated New England and middle states indicated the importance of such judges, and of the pressure of popular attitudes in the area. Only one verdict of “not guilty” was returned in the prosecutions instituted under the Sedition Act.