A Sovereign People

by Carol Berkin

  Jefferson had actually known of Genet’s designs since early July. On July 5, the French minister had paid him a personal visit, confiding in him as a private citizen rather than as the secretary of state that he intended to mount a multipronged campaign against Spanish-held territory. He also shared with Jefferson the instructions he had drafted for Andre Michaux, a botanist willing to serve as Genet’s recruiting agent in Kentucky. It would fall to Michaux to stir up the French in Louisiana and to link up with discontented Kentuckians willing to join in a march on New Orleans. Even before this meeting, Genet had inquired about the possibility of Jefferson making Michaux a consul to Kentucky, but Jefferson denied the request, explaining that consuls were not permitted in the interior of the country. Jefferson had been happy, however, to write a strong letter of introduction for Michaux to Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby.

  Genet’s later account of this meeting differed greatly from Jefferson’s. Jefferson warned him, he reported in a dispatch to France, that America could not officially participate in the invasion of Louisiana because the government was engaged in negotiations with Spain over use of the Mississippi. But “he gave me to understand that he thought a little spontaneous irruption of the inhabitants of Kentucky into New Orleans could advance matters.” Jefferson then gave the French minister the name of a contact in Kentucky who would assist Genet in local recruitment. In Jefferson’s account, however, he claimed to have sternly warned Genet that “enticing officers & souldiers [sic] from Kentucky to go against Spain, was really putting a halter about their necks, for that they would assuredly be hung if they commd. hostilities agst. a nation at peace with the U.S.” Yet he admitted he had also told the French minister he did not care whether insurrections were incited in Louisiana.80

  At the end of July, Genet learned that the French fleet had reached New York. As these ships figured prominently in Genet’s invasion plans, he was eager to take command of them. He was certain, he wrote in one of his dispatches home, that “the whole city will come to meet me.” He was wrong. There was a cheering crowd when he arrived on August 7, and church bells heralded his arrival, but his welcome was eclipsed by a pro-administration rally organized by Federalists. According to Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup, the rally was “the most respectable meeting for numbers—character—& property—ever assembled in this City.” Federalists, Troup declared, were no longer afraid to show their support for the proclamation and for peace. The beleaguered president must have been heartened by the report that appeared in Philadelphia’s Gazette of the United States on August 14. “Citizens of all parties, and every class were present,” the article noted, adding, “Their unexampled unanimity it is hoped will discourage the few, the very few, turbulent men among us, and cannot fail to instruct foreigners, that however we may disagree in our local politics, we stand united and firm, in our decision to maintain our neutrality, and to support and defend the President of the United States.”81

  While Genet was busy with his grand plans of conquest, Jefferson found his anxiety increasing about the impact of the French minister’s impetuous and ill-considered behavior on his Republican Party. He had come to realize the impossibility of rescuing Genet from himself, and now the news of the pro-administration rally in New York confirmed Jefferson’s worst fears. He had learned from private sources that Genet’s New York welcoming committee was made up of “boys & negroes” and that nine out of ten New Yorkers appeared to be in favor of the proclamation and opposed to the French minister. The people of Philadelphia, once so enthusiastic about Genet, were also turning their backs on him. Given this dramatic change in opinion, Jefferson again warned his fellow Republicans to be wary. He told Madison it was essential for members of the party to approve a policy of neutrality when Congress met once again—and they must “abandon G. entirely.” This, Jefferson told his fellow Virginian, is exactly what he had done. “I adhered to him as long as I could have a hope of getting him right,” he declared, but “finding at length that the man was absolutely incorrigible, I saw the necessity of quitting a wreck which could not but sink all who should cling to it.”82

  Even Genet was beginning to perceive the shift in public sentiment. On August 12, New York Federalist leaders John Jay and Rufus King published a signed letter in a New York newspaper attesting to the truth of “a report having reached this City from Philadelphia, that Mr. Genet, the French Minister had said he would Appeal to the People from certain decisions of the President.” The two had received this information from Hamilton, who had himself received it from Thomas Mifflin. Although Mifflin was a critic of the administration, he had been decidedly upset by Dallas’s report of the meeting with Genet about the Little Sarah.83

  On the day the Jay-King testimonial appeared in the New York press, Genet sent a long letter to the president, denying he had ever threatened Washington that he would bring his case to the American people. He knew, however, that “certain persons” had descended to personal abuse in hopes of turning public opinion against him. “It is become necessary, Sir, to dissipate these dark calumnies by truth, and publicity.” Toward this end, he proposed that the president make an explicit public declaration that Genet had never intimated to him any intention of appealing to the people. Genet’s phrasing was both clever and careful: it was true that he had never directly threatened Washington with an appeal to the people, but if Dallas’s account of his meeting with Genet was accurate, the French minister had made the threat to someone else.84

  The president did not reply to Genet’s request. Instead, Jefferson sent Genet a brief and formal note, pointing out that “it is not the established course for the diplomatic characters residing here to have any direct correspondence with [the president]. Furthermore, the President did not think it his duty to bear witness against a declaration, whether made to him or to others.” A wiser man would have accepted this pointed rebuff. But Genet was not that man. Instead, he gave his letter to the president and Jefferson’s reply to a local newspaper, the New York Diary, which obliged him by publishing them both on August 21.85

  Throughout the rest of the month, Hamilton received the welcome news that, as William Loughton Smith would put it, an “anti-Gallican spirit… has lately burst forth.” A letter to Jefferson from Robert Gamble of Virginia confirmed that people in that state were alarmed by Genet’s insults to the American government. Gamble predicted, “The flame will Spread.” Jefferson himself admitted to Madison that support for the president and opposition to Genet was “universal.” It was particularly galling to Jefferson to see that the Federalists in his home state had organized several pro-administration public meetings. Virginia Republicans were simply slow to respond, and they were also at a distinct disadvantage when they at last mobilized. They could not support Genet or attack the president; they could not criticize the neutrality proclamation. In the end, men like Madison and Monroe drafted resolutions that focused on solidarity with the republicanism of France. They had some success with this approach. In Caroline County local Republicans even managed to pass a resolution that criticized Jay and King as well as Genet. But this was little consolation.86

  11

  “He is abandoned even by his votaries.”

  —James Madison to James Monroe, September 15, 1793

  IN JULY, GENET had assured his superiors in Paris that the invasion of Spanish and British territories would succeed. He had also assured them that the American people supported those invasions “in spite of their stupid government.” Yet, by the end of August, that support was vanishing, and Genet’s plans were falling apart. The commanders of the French fleet proved uninterested in mounting an attack against Spanish or British territory in America. They preferred to go home. By November the ships were on their way to France rather than Canada or New Orleans. The recruitment of troops in Kentucky had produced few results, in part because Genet’s deputy, Andre Michaux, had never reached the region and in part because Genet’s funds had dried up. The French consul in New York, Alexandre Maurice Blanc
de Lanautte, Comte d’Hauterive, now dismissed the invasion as a foolish and undiplomatic scheme. Writing in his journal, d’Hauterive privately condemned Genet’s military preparations in New York as a blatant insult to American sovereignty. “We have here,” he wrote, “supplies of stores, a military hospital, an arsenal, sentinels going and coming, rifles on their shoulders: it is as Mr. Jefferson says, a sovereignty within a sovereignty.”87

  The collapse of his invasion plans and public support were not Genet’s biggest problems, however. He did not yet know it, but there had been a regime change in France. The Girondins had been ousted in early June, although the news did not reach the United States until August. In the place of the Girondin leader Jacques Pierre Brissot and his fellow idealists, Maximillian Robespierre’s Jacobins now held power. Robespierre believed in the need for a heavy hand in governance. “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue,” he declared, “the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.” This philosophy would lead, by September, to the start of massacres in which more than 16,000 French men and women were guillotined and some 25,000 more killed by summary execution.88

  For two months Genet’s dispatches had been going to men decidedly less sympathetic to his efforts in America than were those who had appointed him. While the Girondins had looked outward, eager to wage a war of liberation for all the oppressed of Europe, the Jacobins preferred to stabilize the Revolution within France and to defend their nation from the allied European monarchies. They had no interest in forging a closer brotherhood with the United States; they simply wanted the provisions for their army and their civilian citizens that America could offer. Given this practical agenda, it is not surprising that they frowned on Genet’s crusading.

  Once the Jacobins began drafting them, government dispatches to Genet took on an unfriendly tone. In his report to the home government on July 31, Genet had blamed his failures on Washington and his cabinet, yet a July 30 dispatch to him from the new minister of foreign affairs, Francois Louis Michel Chemin Deforgues, offered a quite different explanation. Deforgues, who had read both of Genet’s earlier reports, insisted that the minister’s impulsive behavior and obvious egotism led to his failures. Deforgues was cruelly blunt. He told Genet that his popularity led him to believe “that it depended on you to direct the political operations of this people and to engage them to make common cause with us in spite of their government.” The Executive Council of France never authorized him to “exercise proconsular powers in a friendly and allied nation, to undertake a line of conduct without the positive consent of the government and before being recognized by its leaders.” Deforgues insisted that Genet’s instructions were “directly contrary to this strange interpretation; you are directed to treat with the government and not with a portion of the people, to be to Congress the organ of the French Republic and not the chief of an American party, to conform scrupulously to the established forms for communication between foreign ministers and the government.” But Deforgues was rewriting history, for Genet’s instructions had indeed demanded the ends, if not the means, that the French minister had so zealously but unsuccessfully pursued.

  Deforgues ended his upbraiding by sweeping away Genet’s last excuse for failure. “You say that Washington does not forgive your success and that he impedes your business in a thousand ways.… Dazzled by a false popularity you have alienated from you the only man who should be for us the organ of the American people, and if you find your business impeded, you have only yourself to blame.” Neither Washington nor Hamilton nor even Jefferson could have put it better.89

  More criticism followed. In September, a report by the French Committee of Public Safety did not spare Genet: “The giddiness of this minister is the more surprising in that he should have known that only the government, and not the portion of the people that played on his vanity, could procure him the advantages he was charged to solicit.” Genet mounted the only defense he could. On October 7, he would write to Deforgues, “Seeing myself abandoned by [Jefferson] on whom we had to count the most… seeing that all the decisions of the federal government were opposed to us… I took the only course there was left to take. I surrounded myself with the most pronounced republicans, and in the local governments, the special tribunals of the states, the popular juries, the democratic societies which have formed themselves from north to south in imitation of ours, in the anti-federal gazettes, in all good citizens, in all men more attached to the social weal of America than to the mercantile interest, in the entire body of the militia, I have found the most energetic support.” It was to no avail; the Jacobins were not moved to change their opinion.90

  Deforgues’s dispatches did not reach Genet until later in the fall. However, the French minister’s efforts to defend himself suggest he realized the new government would be critical of his failures. What he may not have fully realized was how dramatically the Jacobin agenda diverged from the one the Girondins laid out in his instructions. Robespierre and his colleagues did not dream of liberating the French residents of Louisiana. They did not envision a combined force of Americans and Frenchmen battling the British on the oceans and making use of the safe harbors of the United States to arm and repair their ships. They did not want to shame the American government into providing aid and succor, nor did they have any interest in meddling in the domestic politics of the United States. Deforgues and his superiors did not want to test the revolutionary fervor of the American people; they simply wanted a beneficial trade relationship with Washington’s government. In short, much of the mission Genet had been given by the Girondins had become irrelevant. Genet was in the unenviable position of defending his lack of success in achieving goals no one in power desired.91

  Genet did attempt to personally play a more cautious hand in the wake of the Jacobin ascendance. But he allowed his consuls who served as French representatives in America’s major port cities to serve as his surrogates in aggravating the Washington administration and insulting the sovereignty of the American nation. American officials responded firmly, upholding the president’s directives. In Boston, the consul, Antoine Charbonnet Duplaine, arrived at the dock with an armed force and repossessed a vessel taken by the local courts. In something of an understatement, Jefferson told the US district attorney in Massachusetts, Christopher Gore, that this was a “daring violation of the laws.” As Duplaine had no diplomatic immunity, Jefferson told Gore that the president wished the consul arrested. And, in Maryland, the local consul protested a threatened seizure of French prizes, arguing, as Genet had so often done, that such an action violated French treaties with the United States. He closed his protest by demanding reparations. Governor Thomas Lee replied twice, both times noting that the action taken by his state conformed to instructions from the federal government “in which the interpretation of treaties is exclusively invested.” These incidents had unexpected and important benefits for the administration: they encouraged state authorities to support federal policies just as Genet’s attacks on the president encouraged American citizens to confirm the authority of their new federal government.92

  The consuls’ total disregard of American sovereignty gave British minister George Hammond an opportunity to assume the role of the innocent and injured party. The contrast between Hammond’s and Genet’s diplomatic styles became clear in the exchange of letters between the secretary of state and the British minister that September. Hammond expressed concern about the enemy’s continuing seizure of British ships in American waters. In a September 4 memorial to Jefferson, he explained that he had, “to this moment,” preserved the strictest silence on this matter. Now, however, he conceived it his duty to ask “whether the existence of [these circumstances] has come to the knowledge of the executive government of the United States.” Jefferson assured Hammond that the United States was using “all the means in our power” to protect and defend the vessels o
f the three belligerent nations, Sweden, Prussia and France, with whom the United States had treaties. “Though we have no similar Treaty with Great Britain,” he added, “it was the opinion of the President that we should use towards that nation the same Rule which… was to govern us with the other nations; and even to extend it to captures made on the high Seas and brought into our ports, if done by vessels which had been armed within them.” Although Hammond surely doubted the efficacy of American enforcement, he chose to send a gracious reply. Should any further captures occur, he wrote, he would see that the evidence needed to substantiate his nation’s complaints was obtained. “In the meantime, Sir, I esteem it an act of justice on my part, to offer my testimony to the scrupulous fidelity and vigilance, with which the collectors of the Customs have discharged the duty imposed on them by the President’s directions.” Without pointing a finger of accusation at the federal government, without any resort to rhetoric, Hammond could be confident he had gotten his point across.93

  The following day Hammond did, in fact, submit a memorial with supporting evidence of French privateering in American waters. A brigantine had been captured half a mile from the shore of the American coast, but the French consul had prevented the marshal of New York from taking the ship into custody. Hammond smoothly inserted what he characterized as his concern for the American government in the face of repeated assaults on its sovereignty by France. “It would certainly be improper,” he wrote, “for the undersigned to offer any observations on the various aggressions on the sovereignty of the United States, which a review of this single case presents—in the particulars of the capture itself—in the extent of the powers arrogated by the pretended tribunal of the French Consul—and in the nature of the threats thrown out by the person representing, in this country, the ruling party of France.” Having voiced his solicitude, he closed with a direct challenge, posed artfully as a question: “Whether it be the intention of the executive government of the United States to grant to the French ships of war the permission of an indefinite continuance within its ports.”94