The man who had once agreed with Washington that the nation needed a strong presidency also objected to the proclamation’s violation of “the forms and spirit” of the national charter. Matters of war and peace had been delegated to “other departments of the government.” Descending to nastiness worthy of Philip Freneau, Congressman Madison wondered why the President thought he had anything to fear “from the success of liberty in another country, since he owes his preeminence to the success of it in his own.” Madison’s devotion to Thomas Jefferson and the Secretary of State’s imagined French Revolution was persuading him to dismiss the general who had repeatedly rescued the American Revolution with his military and political skills.
Such details were now irrelevant. Enthusiasm for revolution and liberty was becoming a veritable war cry. Jefferson described the phenomenon in a letter to James Monroe. “The war between France and England seems to be producing an effect not contemplated: all the old spirit of 1776 is rekindling.”11
In Charleston, South Carolina, the new French minister, Edmond-Charles Genet, was confirming this remark. He was also introducing the first of several lessons about the real French Revolution. Red-haired and ruddy-faced, the stocky, thirty-year-old diplomat was fluent in no less than seven languages. His father had been an expert on American affairs in the French foreign ministry. The son had succeeded him in this role and had been a loyal servant of the ancien regime until the Revolution exploded. Thereafter, he had paid close attention to the shifting ideological winds from Paris.12
In Charleston, S.C., the new minister asked everyone to call him “Citizen Genet.” Titles of all sorts were now passé in Paris. The Palmetto State’s residents seemed delighted by the opportunity to adopt this down-to-earth style. Genet told them he was in America to obtain a large advance on the money Congress still owed to France from the loans that had financed the struggle for independence. He planned to use the cash to buy tons of grain to feed France’s hungry armies as well as pay for huge shipments of gunpowder and weapons.
Genet also noted that America was bordered by Louisiana, Florida, and Canada, colonies controlled by France’s enemies, Spain and England. He was eager to hire secret agents to promote revolutionary activities within these territories. He also had in his luggage dozens of “letters of marque”—certificates that would entitle the holders to launch privateers and attack British and Spanish ships on the ocean.
Gouverneur Morris had written to the President, warning that he would find Genet had “at the first blush, the spirit and manner of an upstart.” His conduct in South Carolina deserved a more serious label. Genet was an upstart with imperial ambitions. From the day of his arrival, he invoked the Edict of Fraternity, which claimed spiritual kinship with revolutionaries around the world. Where was there a more logical place to assert this bond than the United States of America, where liberté was flourishing, thanks to France’s benevolent help in throwing off England’s oppressive yoke?13
Genet was vastly encouraged by the tumultuous welcome he received in Charleston. Amid the toasts and cheering at banquets and parades, he swiftly commissioned four privateers, Republican, Anti-George, Sans-Culotte, and Citizen Genet. He also had no trouble mustering on paper sixteen hundred volunteers to invade Spanish Florida.
Thanks to Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, which was mailed to numerous French leaders in Paris, Genet thought he had an excellent grasp of what was happening inside the American government. He knew that Secretary of State Jefferson was an ardent supporter of the Revolution. So was that good man, President George Washington. But he often listened to advice from a very evil man, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.
Genet’s was sure he could force the President to stop listening to Secretary Hamilton. He planned to persuade an overwhelming majority of the American people to demand it. As Genet saw it, he did not need Washington’s permission to do or say anything. All he had to do was summon his American sans-culottes to guarantee him impunity.
Some accounts of Genet’s mission have portrayed the envoy as an ignorant extremist. But those who have taken the trouble to read his instructions from his government have quickly grasped that he was nothing of the sort. He was a daring servant of France’s grandiose ambitions. The new rulers really believed there was an immense army of the deprived and oppressed in the world, waiting to embrace the blessings of liberté. These were the vrais republicanes—the true republicans. Those who failed to receive the message were false republicans—enemies of the Revolution.
According to his instructions, Genet was “Minister Plenipotentiary of the French Republic to the Congress of the United States.” President Washington was not even mentioned. From France’s current point of view, any and all executive power was regarded as an alien force, hostile to the only true power, the will of the people. The French revolutionists had mobilized the people (aka the Paris mob) against the regime of King Louis XVI and destroyed it. They had done the same thing with the constitutional monarchy and the assembly that had endorsed it. By this light, Genet had every reason to expect a repetition of this experience with the peculiar office the Americans called the presidency.14
The Minister Plenipotentiary took a month to travel from Charleston to Philadelphia. In town after town, he was greeted by cheering citizens and banquets thick with toasts to France. “My journey was a succession of civic feasts without interruption,” he reported to his superiors in Paris. Genet was in Richmond, Virginia, enjoying still more pro-French plaudits when the news of the neutrality proclamation reached him. At first he dismissed it as a “horrendous little pleasantry designed to throw dust in the eyes of the British.” But he decided to depart for Philadelphia immediately to settle who was in charge of the country.15
The French minister’s arrival in the city of brotherly love was, he reported to his government, another “triumph for liberty.” The true republicans were “brimming over with joy.” Again, Genet was telling nothing less than the truth, from his point of view. He had barely settled in his lodgings at the City Tavern when a huge crowd jammed the streets outside the building to present him with an address of welcome signed by leading citizens of the city. Among the most effusive greeters was Thomas Mifflin, the governor of Pennsylvania, an enemy of George Washington since Valley Forge days.16
Eagerly participating in the pro-French pageant, Philip Freneau published an open letter to the President in the National Gazette. “The cause of liberty is the cause of man,” he warned the President, “and neutrality is desertion.” Two days later, Genet, escorted by Secretary of State Jefferson, presented his credentials to Washington. Already disturbed by reports of Genet’s arrogant posturing during his monthlong journey from Charleston, the President had told Jefferson he wanted the diplomat to be received without “too much warmth and cordiality.” We can be sure the President’s demeanor was dignified but firmly unemotional. By this time, Genet was so exalted by the rapturous reception he had been receiving from the true Republicans of Philadelphia, he was incapable of noticing such a subtle message.17
The Minister Plenipotentiary gave a brief speech, in which he assured the President that “We wish to do nothing but what is for your own good, and we will do all in our power to promote it…We see in you the only person on earth who can love us sincerely and merit to be so loved.” The realist side of George Washington’s mind heard these words as utter nonsense, with an underlying threat. Was this wild-eyed fellow saying he could and would decide what was “good” for America?
The Secretary of State, on the other hand, was charmed. “It is impossible,” Jefferson wrote in a letter he rushed to James Madison, “for anything to be more affectionate, more magnanimous than the purport of his [Genet’s] mission…he offers everything & asks nothing.”18
Thanks to Genet’s reports to his government, we know that the Secretary of State abandoned all pretensions to neutrality when he met with Genet in private. “Jefferson…gave me useful notions on men in office,” the Frenchman wro
te. He “did not at all conceal from me that Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton had the greatest influence over the president’s mind.”
Jefferson also cited Washington’s friend, Robert Morris, the wealthy merchant who was serving as U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, as a man who joined Hamilton in pro-British sentiments. It was “only with difficulty that he [Jefferson] counterbalanced their efforts.” Nevertheless, the Secretary of State assured Genet that “the people were for us.”19
That same evening came the strongest proof yet of many citoyens’ eagerness to support France—a grand banquet at Oeller’s Hotel, which had the biggest assembly room in the city. On the immense table stood a “tree of liberty” crowned by a red “liberty cap.” This symbol had become enormously popular among French revolutionists. It had its roots in ancient Rome. Freed slaves wore such a cap to signify their right to citizenship.
In the course of the evening, nineteen toasts were drunk “to the glory of America and the French Republic.” “An Ode to Liberty,” written for the occasion, was read aloud and a Frenchman sang France’s new national anthem, the Marseillaise. Outside, artillery boomed exuberantly. At the close of the evening, Genet took the liberty cap from the tree of liberty and placed it on his head. He solemnly passed it to the man next to him, and it went around the immense table, each man pledging his loyalty to France and liberté.20
While these cheers and cannon blasts echoed through the city, a tall figure strode along Philadelphia’s darkened streets. President Washington had decided to confer with Attorney General Edmund Randolph, who played a moderating role in his cabinet. Randolph sometimes agreed with Hamilton and sometimes with Jefferson. The President saw him as a voice of reasonable compromise. Unfortunately, the Attorney General was not home. The President returned to his executive mansion to meditate on the meaning of the noisy celebration honoring Citizen Genet at Oeller’s Hotel.21
Elsewhere, the President knew, people were reading the latest edition of the National Gazette, in which Philip Freneau launched a ferocious attack on him. The Secretary of State’s hired journalist claimed that Washington was surrounded by aristocrats and friends of England, and was ignoring the people’s will by refusing to support France. Freneau sent three copies of every issue of the paper to the executive mansion.
A few days later, the Secretary of State visited the President to find out if he approved a letter that Jefferson had drafted to the French government, accepting the replacement of the current minister by Edmond-Charles Genet. Jefferson used the phrase “our republic” to describe the United States. Washington had marked the phrase with an asterisk, and abruptly asked Jefferson how he could use this terminology while he supported the outrageous things Philip Freneau was saying in his newspaper. Had he read the editor’s latest gibe? American “Anglomen” had extorted the proclamation of neutrality by threatening to behead the president!
Washington reiterated the absurdity of claiming he was influenced by pro-British intriguers who wanted to turn the government into a monarchy. That was not what they should be worrying about. It was anarchy that Freneau was sowing with his berserk smears and claims. For Washington, the word recalled Shays’s Rebellion. That upheaval had fortunately been confined to the Massachusetts countryside. Now Edmond-Charles Genet and Philip Freneau were awakening its possibility in the heart of the nation’s capital.
The President might as well have berated—or pleaded with—a statue. An hour or two later, the Secretary of State wrote in his Anas that Washington wanted him to “interpose in some way with Freneau, perhaps by withdrawing his appointment of translating clerk in my office. But I will not do it. His paper has saved our constitution, which was galloping fast into monarchy, and has been checked by no one means so powerfully as by that paper.” William Short was not the only man who discovered the hard way that Thomas Jefferson seldom if ever changed his mind.22
Meanwhile, the President had to cope with Citizen Genet’s demand for a new commercial treaty that would unite France and America in an embrace that would virtually guarantee war with England. Simultaneously, protests from the British ambassador cascaded onto Washington’s desk, as the privateers that Genet had commissioned with his letters of marque began bringing captured British ships into various American ports and claiming the right to sell them.
Philip Freneau launched a series of open letters signed by one Veritas that denounced Washington’s foreign policy all the way back to the start of his first term. Veritas warned the President it was time to realize he was being lulled into complacency by an “opiate of sycophancy.” Didn’t he realize “principles not men” were the essence of republican government?
By the end of the first week in June, the exasperated President complained of “little lingering fevers.” His Secretary of State told James Madison that Washington seemed more sensitive to newspaper abuse “than any person I ever yet met with.” He was “sincerely sorry” to see him in such a low state of mind and health. Madison more than matched his leader in schadenfreude. “I regret extremely the position into which the P has been thrown. The unpopular cause of Anglomany is openly laying claim to him.”23
In France, the real French Revolution was about to make a mockery of the benign view of it the Secretary of State and his two lieutenants, Madison and Monroe, were propagating in America. In the first six months of 1793, everything seemed to go wrong for the cause of liberté. French armies in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands had retreated back to the theoretical safety of their homeland after their untrained volunteers developed a dismaying habit of running away. Another army, sent to suppress a counterrevolution in the Vendée region of France, was even more totally routed. With no foreign country to plunder, the National Convention could only issue another eight hundred million assignats—paper money that only made the first four hundred million even more worthless.
In hungry Paris, this maneuver produced a group of orators known as the enrages, a word that originally meant revolutionary zeal, but soon became viewed (and heard) as maniacal anger. The enrages blended wild attacks on the selfish rich with berserk demands to punish traitors. Simultaneously, they enshrined the supposedly starving sans-culottes in a haze of saintliness. The streets and squares rang with comparisons between these ragged martyrs and the greed of the capitaliste and the gros-negociant [large merchants].
Next, the enrages were denouncing the Girondins, the men who had issued the Edict of Fraternity and sent Edmond-Charles Genet to America. (The name was derived from the department of Gironde, in southwest France from which their leaders came.) The enrages claimed they were secret worshippers of kings, who yielded Louis Capet to the guillotine only when their appeal for a popular vote on his sentence had failed to win a majority in the National Convention. In June, an immense crowd, estimated to be eighty thousand people, surrounded the National Convention. They were responding to a call from the leader of the Jacobins, Maximilian Robespierre, to launch a “moral insurrection” against the corrupt leaders of the Convention.
Soon, most of these delegates could only go to the privy escorted by armed guards. Expensive scarves and coats were torn from their owners’ throats and backs. The arrest and execution of twenty-two condemned Girondists became a sine qua non to prevent a larger explosion of violence. The commander of the guards at the entrance to the hall told the president of the Convention, if the twenty-two were not delivered, they would open fire. Cannon were rolled into position and grimly loaded with balls and powder. More and more delegates who had remained in “The Plain”—uncommitted to any party—began moving to the section of the assembly hall known as “The Mountain” where the Jacobins gathered.
This new revolution had three goals: a confiscatory tax on the rich, the destruction of the Girondists, and the surrender of almost all power to a Committee of Public Safety, controlled by the Jacobins. Under the leadership of the ascetic, icy-voiced Robespierre, that twelve-man body subscribed to a new, all consuming motto: “The republic consists in the exterminatio
n of everything that opposes it.” In Paris, in the Vendée, in Lyon and other cities, massacre became the order of the day.24
CHAPTER 14
Challenging Old Man Washington
WILD ENTHUSIASM FOR FRANCE continued to rampage through Philadelphia, Vice President Adams reported that Governor Thomas Mifflin offered a toast at one of the ubiquitous banquets: “To the ruling powers of France. May the United States of America, in alliance with them, declare war against England.” Mobs regularly paraded past the President’s door, shouting praise for France. The Vice President became so alarmed, he persuaded Secretary of War Henry Knox to smuggle him a supply of weapons to defend his house.1
When the French frigate Embuscade, which had brought Citizen Genet to America, captured the British merchantman Grange and escorted it to Philadelphia with the British flag flying upside down, signifying surrender, another stupendous crowd swarmed to the waterfront to cheer and shout. No one was more pleased by the demonstration than Secretary of State Jefferson. “Upon coming into sight, thousands and thousands… crowded and covered the wharves,” he told Senator James Monroe. “Never was such a crowd seen there, and when the British colors were seen reversed, and the French flag flying above them, they burst into peals of exultation.” The Secretary of State was as thrilled by this expression of the will of the people as the most berserk sans-culotte in Paris. He did not show a trace of concern for the President’s Proclamation of Neutrality.2
Perhaps Jefferson thought the cheers for the Embuscade were a rebuke to President Washington. He had told the Secretary of State that there was no rush to reply to Genet’s proposal for a new treaty of commerce, or an advance on the debt to France. “We ought not to go faster than it was obliged, and to walk on cautious ground,” Washington said. One can almost hear the growl in these words.
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