A Sovereign People

by Carol Berkin

  Genet’s radical demands and his claims to shared revolutionary goals were likely to increase the tensions between Federalists and the Republican opposition. But his rhetorical excess was not the Republicans’ only problem; far more serious was the fact that the attacks on the president in the partisan press were increasing Washington’s hostility to the Republican camp. Washington had little experience with this sort of criticism. It is true that, during the Revolution, his military abilities had been called into question by some generals and by members of Congress, but his personal and his political integrity had always been widely admired and praised. Now, however, he suffered not only criticism but wild accusations.

  In late May, Washington unleashed his anger on the partisan press—and, by implication, the Republican Party—in a tense meeting with Jefferson. The president, who normally kept his temper under tight control, was clearly livid at the claims in Republican newspapers that a monarchical plot was afoot within his administration. Jefferson’s notes on the meeting left little doubt of the president’s mounting anger. The charge, Washington declared, was absurd. If anybody actually wanted to turn the US government into a monarchy, he was certain it was only a few individuals. More to the point, no man in the United States would set himself against it more strongly than he. The rise of an American monarchy was not his worry, Washington told his secretary of state; he was far more concerned about the social and political anarchy that could result from the constant criticism of the administration in newspapers like Philip Freneau’s National Gazette.

  The conversation was particularly uncomfortable for Jefferson. For Washington knew Jefferson had put Freneau on the State Department payroll as a translator. That this was a sinecure for the poet-turned-propagandist was obvious: Freneau knew no foreign language other than French, a language Jefferson needed no help with at all. It was not hard to guess that Washington wanted Freneau fired, but Jefferson would not comply. Without the government salary, Freneau could not afford to continue as the editor of the Gazette. “I will not do it,” Jefferson wrote in his notes, for Freneau’s paper “has saved our constitution which was galloping fast into monarchy.” The president, Jefferson concluded, was simply not aware that the Monocrats, as the Republicans called Federalist leaders like Hamilton, were plotting to take over or he would realize the public service the Gazette provided. Although the paper had allowed “some bad things” to appear, the good it had served far outweighed them. Nothing Jefferson could say, however, would persuade the president that Hamilton and other staunch Federalists were wrong in believing that the greatest danger to the Republic came from the president’s critics and opponents here at home.37

  As unsettling as the conversation with the president had been, Jefferson needed to turn his attention to the foreign problem who called himself Citizen Genet. On May 27, the French minister wrote a long and rather remarkable response to the complaints and concerns Jefferson had outlined in his May 15 letter to Ternant. He dismissed several out of hand but devoted considerable time to the question of America’s treaty obligations to France. His reading of the terms of the Treaty of Commerce of 1778 left America no legitimate right to regulate the traffic of French war vessels and their prizes into and out of American ports. That treaty, he declared, “authorizes exclusively all the vessels of war French or American, armed by the two states or by individuals, to conduct freely, wherever they please the prizes they shall have made of their enemies.” It was the “wherever they please” part that the Washington administration did not accept. Genet then elaborated on the privileges he believed the treaty extended to France when its ships brought a prize into an American port. They were free to enter “without being subjected either to admiralty or any other duties… or… stopped or seized, or the officers of the places being permitted to take cognizance of the validity of said prizes.” With that, Genet swept away the authority of American customs collectors and the jurisdiction of American admiralty courts.

  Genet was not finished. The privileges he described in this letter were exclusive to France; no other nation enjoyed them. “We alone,” he declared, “have at present the right of bringing our prizes into the American ports, and of there doing with them as we please.” In effect, Genet was setting himself up as the arbiter of American foreign policy.

  Never inclined to restraint and often ready to boast, Genet went on to report the success of the privateers he had commissioned at Charleston. These ships, he noted, have “condemned to inaction, by the terrour which they have spread among the English, all the sailors and vessels, of that nation, which were in the ports of the United States.”

  Had the granting of these commissions in Charleston encroached on American sovereignty? Genet was confident they had not. The vessels armed and commissioned at Charleston belonged to French citizens. They were commanded and manned by Frenchmen or by Americans who, at the time, were subject to no restrictions by the Washington administration. The Proclamation of Neutrality had come too late to challenge what occurred in Charleston that April, he declared—and, anyway, Washington’s policy of neutrality had no real authority to prevent such things from happening again, as it did not supersede or abrogate the 1778 treaties.

  Genet ended his letter with assurances that the French, “collectively and individually… will seize every occasion of showing to the sovereign people of the United States their respect for their laws.” And with that, Genet was finally done.38

  6

  “No one has a right to shackle our operations.”

  —Edmond Genet to Thomas Jefferson, June 8, 1793

  IN HIS SPIRITED defense of French rights, Genet had almost casually mentioned that the crews of the privateers in question had included American seamen. One of these Americans was a sailor named Gideon Henfield, who at the time of Genet’s writing was being held by Pennsylvania authorities. In a brief note, written on the same day, Genet demanded that Jefferson use his good offices to have Henfield released immediately. Then, on June 1, before Jefferson could respond to either of the May 27 letters, Genet sent a second request for the release of Henfield. This time he mentioned a second American, John Singletary, as a victim of injustice, but Singletary would soon disappear from Philadelphia and thus escape any legal proceedings. In language that suggested he was highly agitated, Genet described the charge against these men as a “crime which my mind cannot conceive, and which my pen almost refuses to state… the serving of France, and defending with her children the common and glorious cause of liberty.”39

  Who was Gideon Henfield—and how had he come to serve as a French officer? The Massachusetts-born seaman had signed aboard the aptly named Citoyen Genet, one of the privateers commissioned by the French minister in Charleston. He had participated in the capture on the Delaware River of the William, a Scottish merchant vessel, and, when he arrived in Philadelphia as the ship’s prize master, he was arrested by local authorities. Henfield’s actions were a direct challenge to the president’s neutrality policy regarding the participation of individual American citizens in the war. But the case raised a diplomatic as well as a domestic issue for the United States: France had defied American neutrality by attacking and capturing a British ship in American waters.

  Jefferson informed Genet that he had forwarded all correspondence on the Henfield matter to the president. He had also asked Attorney General Randolph for his legal opinion, which he enclosed. Jefferson then summarized the situation: as Henfield was in the custody of the civil magistrate, the matter was outside the jurisdiction of the executive branch. The law would take its due course: “The act with which he is charged will be examined by a Jury of his Countrymen, in the presence of Judges of learning and integrity, and if it is not contrary to the laws of the land, no doubt need be entertained that his case will issue accordingly.” Put another way, autonomous American legal procedures could not be violated.40

  On June 5, Jefferson turned to the larger diplomatic issue raised by the Henfield case. His letter to Genet that day was
carefully worded and had been read and revised by Randolph and Hamilton. Jefferson began by reminding Genet that the president had determined that “the arming and equipping of vessels in the Ports of the United States to cruise against nations with whom we are at peace, was incompatible with the territorial sovereignty of the United States.” The president had therefore ordered the departure of such vessels from American ports; in his words, their exit would prove a “proper reparation to the Sovereignty of the Country.” Genet had challenged this decision in his lengthy letter of May 27, but his argument had not persuaded the president or his cabinet. “After fully weighing again however all the principles and circumstances of the case, the result appears still to be that it is the right of every nation to prohibit acts of sovereignty from being exercised by any other within its limits; and the duty of a neutral nation to prohibit such as would injure one of the warring powers.” Jefferson then wrote as plainly and as definitively as possible: “The granting military commissions within the United States by any other authority than their own is an infringement on their Sovereignty, and particularly so when granted to their own citizens, to lead them to commit acts contrary to the duties they owe their own country.”41

  Yet Jefferson may as well have been shouting into the wind. Genet’s startling response arrived on June 8. It began with an upbraiding of the president, who, in Genet’s words, “persists in thinking that a nation at war had not the right of giving commissions of war to those of its vessels which may be in the ports of a neutral nation.” Such thinking, Genet insisted, was simply wrong. But Washington was more than wrong. Genet declared the president had overstepped his authority by attempting to enforce his erroneous interpretation of French rights in America. That authority, Genet insisted, belonged to Congress alone. Unless Congress prohibited these actions by France, “no one has a right to shackle our operations.” Nevertheless, in the interest of maintaining “good harmony” between the United States and France, Genet had instructed his consuls in the port cities to grant letters of marque only to the captains of these ships. These captains would give oaths to protect the territory of the United States “and the political opinions of their President, until the representatives of the sovereign shall have confirmed or rejected them.” With this, Genet had pronounced Congress the only branch of government entitled to express the people’s sovereign will and had reduced the president’s proclamation and his decisions regarding the arming of ships in American ports to a “political opinion” rather than a legitimate state policy.

  Genet ended his letter with a standard Girondin flourish. “Every obstruction by the government of the United States, to the arming of French vessels, must be an attempt on the rights of man, upon which repose the independence and laws of the United States.” He wished that the federal government shared the people’s sentiments and that it would give the world an example of true neutrality, “which does not consist in the cowardly abandonment of their friends in the moment when danger menaces them.”42

  Hamilton wasted no time in informing George Hammond of Genet’s defiance of American neutrality. In reporting the news to his superiors, Hammond characterized Genet’s language as “offensive and intemperate” and accused the Frenchman of making “some direct menaces.” The British minister was eager to learn how Washington would respond to Genet’s “singular performance” and to discover what measures the president intended to pursue in response. But Genet’s rudeness was not Hamilton’s main concern. Instead, he wanted to assure Hammond that the United States would not give in to the request that the Treasury pay the full debt owed to France rather than continue its payment in annual installments. Nor would the Treasury convey upcoming installments earlier than they were due. Genet needed these funds badly to purchase supplies from American sources and had tried to pressure Hamilton into complying by refusing to pay the outstanding bills from American suppliers. The French minister hoped that this would embarrass the administration into acceding to his demands. Washington, however, refused to be intimidated. Instead, Hamilton later told Hammond, the merchants holding the bills would have to wait.43

  Genet’s demands had only deepened Hamilton’s hostility both to him and to the government of France. But Genet would not be subjected to Hamilton’s anger, for it was the secretary of state’s duty to give him the bad news. On June 11, Jefferson wrote to the French minister, explaining that full payment would far exceed the ordinary resources of the United States. To buttress his point, Jefferson enclosed the recent Treasury report. Jefferson assured Genet that America’s fiscal policies were designed to enable the United States to pay its debts “with punctuality and good faith.” Making this defense of the Hamiltonian system must have been painful for Jefferson, who had opposed every element in it. The news was equally painful to Genet, who had applied most of his available funds to his various projects—including arming privateers and attempting to mount expeditions against Spanish territories—and was now desperate to complete the purchases of American produce needed in France.44

  By early June, Jefferson seemed exhausted, as much by the tensions within the cabinet as by the demands of his office. Writing to the American minister in France, Gouverneur Morris, on June 13, he lamented the impact of the European war on the administration. “Questions respecting chiefly France and England,” he observed, “fill the Executive with business, equally delicate, difficult and disagreeable.” The course of strict neutrality dissatisfied both Republicans and Federalists, he added, but the president remained adamant that this policy must be enforced.45

  Washington, too, was weary, worn down by criticisms of his neutrality policy. A long letter from Henry Lee, written on June 14, must have raised his spirits, however. Despite the newspaper attacks on neutrality, Lee was convinced that nine-tenths of Americans applauded the policy and felt increasing gratitude and love for their president. As for Washington’s critics, Lee allowed that only a stranger could assume widespread opposition and only if he gathered his information in taverns where “wicked & abandoned” men assembled to drink and gamble the night away. Lee described his own encounter with Edmond Genet. He had done his best to convince the Frenchman of the benefits that would accrue to France from American neutrality. Given the superiority of the British fleet, he had argued, neutrality was the only way America could ensure the delivery of provisions to France. Lee had also assured Genet that the president preferred the interests of France to those of all other parties, a claim that was now far from true. But, with no fleet, no army, and no money to authorize participation in the war, he explained that Washington was limited in the assistance he could provide. Genet’s response was to warn that if royal government were reestablished in France, the kings of Europe would combine to destroy American liberty. Genet’s message was clear: America’s destiny was linked to the destiny of the French Republic.46

  The most immediate danger to those linked destinies was Genet himself. He had already insulted Washington, a man highly sensitive to criticism and attacks on his integrity. Then, on June 14, Genet sent two blustering letters to Jefferson that did not improve his relationship with anyone in the administration. The first was a response to the news that the debt to his country would not be paid in full. It began abruptly: “It is the character of elevated minds, of freemen, not to expose themselves twice to a refusal.” He had made clear the needs of his country; without sufficient produce from America, both the million Frenchmen in arms and the people of the French colonies would suffer “the horrours of famine.” By its decision, the United States would assist the king of England and his fellow monarchs in destroying the French nation by starvation. Because the president had refused Genet’s every proposal regarding payment of the debt, the French minister now asked that the secretary of the treasury be ordered to immediately recalculate the total amount of the American debt to France. The letter ended with a vague threat: he would have no recourse but to put in motion an “expedient… onerous to the French nation.”47

  The second let
ter returned to the issue of the treaties and the right they gave France—as Genet interpreted them—to sell prize ships and to arm and send out privateers from American ports. He reported that, in Philadelphia, civil and judiciary officers of the United States had stopped the sale of vessels and, in New York, they had prevented the sailing of a vessel commissioned by the Executive Council of the Republic of France. Jefferson, he declared, should inform the president that these officials had committed the infractions against the laws and treaties in his name. The president, he insisted, must intercede to defend “the interests, the rights and the dignity of the French nation” against the pro-English faction within his government.48

  Genet’s conviction that a pro-English faction was “labouring secretly” against France and its minister resonated with Jefferson’s own belief in a conspiracy by members of the “Anglomancy” to establish a monarchy in America. Genet made the mistake, however, of assuming that the two men were natural and firm allies and that their political agendas must be complementary, if not identical. But the danger Jefferson saw was domestic; it was not the downfall of France but the destruction of the American Republic by men like Hamilton that he hoped to prevent. Although Jefferson was ready to assist France, he was not prepared to lead the United States into a disastrous war with Great Britain. Later, when at last Genet realized that Jefferson would not advocate unequivocal support for the French cause, he would conclude bitterly that the secretary of state had pretended friendship but all along had intended betrayal.49