A Sovereign People

by Carol Berkin

  Monroe’s reaction to the Barras attack on America was entirely personal—his anger was aimed at the president rather than at the French government. He was furious at his recall by Washington. Soon after returning home, Monroe composed a long and bitter accusation that his removal was a flagrantly partisan political decision.6

  The situation only worsened as 1796 ended. On December 6, Washington’s new American minister to France, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, arrived in Paris, eager to restore good relations between the two nations. Pinckney was an affable though far from brilliant South Carolina planter, distinguished by his moderate approach in all matters political. His guiding principles were honor and duty; his manner was genteel and gracious. Yet he would have no opportunity to test his skills at diplomacy. When he presented his credentials to Charles-François Delacroix, the new minister of foreign affairs, they were flatly rejected. The French government, he was told, would receive no US minister until a number of unspecified US injuries to France were redressed. Delacroix then insulted Pinckney by ordering him to go to the minister of police to receive the necessary passport home—just as any private citizen was required to do. By February, a flustered Pinckney was in Amsterdam, awaiting instructions from president-elect John Adams. Although Pinckney rightly viewed his treatment as a slight against the United States, it was not unique; the Directory had sent off thirteen other foreign ministers in a similar fashion.7

  News of developments across the Atlantic traveled slowly, however. Adams did not learn of the rebuff of Pinckney until he had taken over the presidency. Although Benjamin Bache, the partisan Republican editor of the Aurora, was quick to blame the French refusal to accept Pinckney on the South Carolinian’s “haughtiness,” President Adams considered Pinckney blameless. The fault, he told Henry Knox and Benjamin Lincoln, was rooted in the overblown sense of importance shared by all Frenchmen. “They consider nobody but themselves,” Adams declared. “Their apparent Respect and real Contempt for all men and all nations but Frenchmen are proverbially among themselves… they have no other rule but to give reputation to their Fools and to destroy the reputation of all who will not be their Fools… to a Frenchman the most important man in the world is himself and the most important nation is France.” Former president George Washington had his own criticism of French behavior. “The conduct of the French government,” Washington told James McHenry, “is so much beyond calculation, and so unaccountable upon any principle of justice, or even to that sort of policy which is familiar to plain understanding, that I shall not now puzzle my brains in attempting to develope [sic] their motives to it.” Washington was clearly relieved that the burden of French aggression now fell on John Adams rather than on him.8

  Did the rejection of an American minister mean war? Benjamin Bache, at least, was convinced that war was not the goal of France but of the Federalists. The Anglophiles within that party, he declared, did not care that war would spell the end of republicanism in the world and a punishing economic depression in America. Bache’s fellow contributors to the Aurora went on to describe this economic disaster in dramatic terms. Produce, they wrote, would rot on the wharves as the French market for American crops vanished, the Mississippi River would be closed to American traffic, the public debt would soar, corruption would be rampant, and the executive branch would become more powerful. Predictably, the Federalist press responded, countering this nightmare vision with reassuring cynicism: France was not going to declare war on the United States as long as it could plunder American commerce so profitably.9

  Adams, however, was uncertain whether this insult to American sovereignty, blatant though it was, actually required a military response. He consulted his cabinet. Was the refusal to receive Pinckney a circumstance of such “Indignity, insult & Hostility” that no further negotiations could be considered? If, instead of war, a peace mission were undertaken, what demands should be made and what concessions offered? What terms in the treaty with Great Britain could also be offered to France? What articles in the treaties of 1778 should we propose be abolished? What demands for reparations should our negotiators make? Several of the reparation demands Adams listed as examples dealt with abuses going back to the era of Citizen Genet. In his own notes on the situation, Adams sketched out several retaliatory actions the United States might take, including an embargo and the approval of American privateers. But he also considered preparations for war, such as increasing the size of the army, creating a navy, and constructing additional fortifications along the nation’s coast.10

  Adams seemed to be planning for peace but preparing for war. In a letter to William Heath on April 19, the president declared, “There is Such a Thing as a just and necessary War,” but, he quickly added, “if we have a War it will be forced upon Us.” He ended with a note of bravado: “I know not that We need tremble before any Nation at a thousand Leagues distance, in a just Cause.” He had struck this same note of confidence in a letter to his oldest son that March. “America,” he told John Quincy, “is not Scared.”11

  2

  “I have it much at heart to Settle all disputes with France.”

  —John Adams to Henry Knox, March 1797

  THE REJECTION OF Pinckney’s credentials was not the only issue with France facing Adams in his first months in office. On March 2, only two days before John Adams entered the presidency, France struck a serious blow against American commerce. On that day, the Directory issued a decree that ended France’s commitment to the principle of “free ships / free goods.” The decree made American vessels carrying goods to or from Britain vulnerable to capture and confiscation by the French navy and by French privateers. The Directory justified the change in policy as a response to the Jay Treaty, which they claimed forged a new alliance between Britain and the United States. The American minister to Great Britain, Rufus King, believed this was simply an excuse. The French, he said, had also demanded that Hamburg and Bremen suspend all commerce with England, and these powers “have made no late treaties with England.” John Quincy Adams, the American ambassador to the Netherlands at the time, also pointed out that “the neutrality of every other nation is as little respected by the French Government as that of the United States.” French contempt for weaker nations, whether allies or enemies, could be seen in the comment of Claude E. J. Pastoret, a member of the French Council of Five Hundred. “Are we not the sovereigns of the world?” he asked his fellow council members, adding, “Our allies, are they not then our subjects?”12

  France had not only insulted Americans’ pride by rejecting their ambassador, it had also struck a blow against American independence and its economic linchpin, neutrality. The president thus decided that the French crisis was serious enough to merit a special session of Congress that May. His old friend Elbridge Gerry was pleased that Adams intended to put the French problem before the House as well as the Senate. It was always good policy, the former congressman from Massachusetts said, “to consult the representatives of the people,” for “they are the nerves of the body-politic.” Personally, however, Gerry was strongly against war with France. He feared that a successful war would plunge the nation into debt and stifle economic growth while an unsuccessful war would lead to the overthrow of the American government and the creation of a new one modeled on the French system, “& we should hereafter be meer [sic] French colonies.” Never an optimist, Gerry could see no positive outcome to the dilemma facing John Adams and the nation. In his reply to Gerry, Adams did not deny that there were high costs to both victory and defeat. Yet Adams argued that his friend could not deny France’s long history of abusing American sovereignty. “You know as well as any Man,” he wrote, “that france under all Governments from the Year 1776… down to this moment have invariably preserved a Course of Intrigue to gain an undue Influence in these states.—to make Us dependent upon her, and to keep up a quarrell [sic] with England.” Perhaps war was the only way to end that abuse.13

  On May 16, Adams delivered a message to this emergency sessio
n of Congress. He began with a description of the Directory’s humiliation of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. “The refusal to hear him, until we have acceded to their demands without discussion, and without further investigation,” he told Congress, “is to treat us neither as allies, nor as friends, nor as a sovereign state.” Adams turned next to the speech by Barras, which he believed expressed sentiments “more alarming than the refusal of a Minister.” The speech, he declared, evinced once again a disposition to separate the American people from their government, a tactic that required a firm response. “Such attempts,” Adams insisted, “ought to be repelled with a decision which shall convince France, and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence; and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.” The president then argued that France’s depredations of American commerce, its injuries to American citizens, and “the general complexion of affairs” demanded appropriate measures for the defense of the country. He called for a naval establishment that would include armed frigates able to protect merchantmen at sea. He also called for the creation of a provisional army. Still, Adams left the door open for peace. He intended, he announced, to open negotiations with France once again if possible.14

  THREE DAYS LATER, the president forwarded to the House a number of documents relating to Pinckney’s rejection, including the speech by Barras and extracts of Pinckney’s correspondence with the secretary of state. On Monday, May 22, the representatives began a debate over the appropriate response to the president, a debate that would last almost two weeks. Threaded through this long and often heated discussion was a shared sense that America’s position as an independent and sovereign nation was at risk. Republicans and Federalists alike roundly denounced all “attempts to wound our rights as a sovereign state,” but there the unity ended. Republicans did not think Pinckney’s expulsion merited a declaration of war, and they opposed steps toward preparedness that might provoke such a declaration from France. Virginia Republican John Nicholas proposed that the House response to the president include a defense of those pro-French American voices Adams had described as immoderate. Federalists rejected this. The president’s criticism of these overzealous partisans was deserved, said William Loughton Smith, and any acquiescence to French demands—especially the demand for the annulment of the Jay Treaty—would be “virtually and essentially to surrender our self-government and independence.” Smith’s fellow Federalist, the wealthy thirty-two-year-old Bostonian, Harrison Gray Otis, was even more emphatic. Americans, he declared, must not respond with a “spiritless expression of civility, but a new edition of the Declaration of Independence.” When Nicholas’s motion was defeated, the focus of debate turned to a long and predictably tendentious comparison of the relative evils of France and England, but few if any minds were changed despite the impressive and lengthy citations of import and export data.15

  George Washington was eager to learn how the House would respond to the president’s message. He believed the crisis facing the nation called for “an unequivocal expression of the public mind.” But, in a letter to Oliver Wolcott Jr., Washington focused his criticism on the “internal disturbers” of the country’s peace who had collaborated with the French ministers rather than on the recent behavior of France. In the former president’s view, these were the same reckless and ambitious men who had encouraged the Whiskey Rebellion in the West and excused the excesses of Edmond Genet. The danger they posed to America ought to be obvious, he said; Americans had only to look at the victims of collaboration with France in Europe, “so bewildered & dark, so entangled & embarrassed, and so obviously under the influence of intrigue” to realize the damage that these irresponsible men could inflict upon their own country. John Adams had a still darker view. He believed the American people as a whole were responsible for their plight. For him, as for many New England revolutionaries, the survival of a republic depended upon the moral strength and commitment of its people. There might be enemies of the Republic among them who hope to undermine their country’s government and weaken its independence, but the real danger, he told fellow New Englander Elbridge Gerry, “is in the Universal Avarice & ambition of the People.”16

  At last, on June 3, the House settled on sending the president a general, and vague, pledge of its “zealous cooperation” in any measures he might decide were necessary for America’s security or peace. But it gave its hearty approval to the opening of new negotiations with France.17

  Adams had already drafted four questions concerning negotiators to be sent to France, but he was uncertain to whom he could turn for their answers. There were few men he could trust for sage political advice on the crisis facing the nation and fewer still for unconditional support. He could not rely on his cabinet. His secretary of state Thomas Pickering ought to have been Adams’s chief advisor on foreign affairs and the man who ensured that the president’s decisions were carried out. But Pickering saw himself as an independent officer of the government. Not even Hamilton was able to exert control over this tall, austere, and bespectacled man in his fifties who had a brittle ego and an unforgiving temperament. Pickering was unwilling to forgive France for its insults to the nation, especially the escalating attacks on American commerce. In fact, months before John Adams delivered his views on the French situation to Congress, Pickering had acted on his own, presenting to the legislature a full—and damning—accounting of France’s past and present persecution of US commerce. In his report to Congress, Pickering pointed out that officially sanctioned French attacks on American shipping had actually begun months before the decree of March 2, 1797. In August 1796 the Directory had issued instructions to the Windward Islands to attack American vessels. By November 1796, officials in the Leeward Islands were ordering the capture of all American ships bound for British ports. The Jay Treaty, therefore, was not the cause of the decree legitimating these attacks. Instead, Pickering argued, there was only one motive for escalating seizure of American vessels: greed. And, in his judgment, the only appropriate response to France was war.18

  Pickering was correct, of course, in his assessment of France’s new trade policy. Despite all the French government’s indignant rhetoric, that policy seemed to be motivated more by privateering profits than by disappointment at America’s alleged betrayal. Britain, it was true, had often ignored American claims to neutrality; it had impressed American seamen and imposed a variety of barriers to American commerce. But it had never completely cut off neutral trade.

  The question remained: Was war America’s best response? The president seemed to face an impossible choice between ruinous peace or ruinous war. He chose to continue down his middle path of preparing for war but pursuing peace. Ironically, the man who most closely shared Adams’s view that a peace commission was the wisest course was Alexander Hamilton. Although he had been quick to advocate the use of military force in the domestic uprising by whiskey rebels, Hamilton doubted America had the capacity to challenge Europe’s dominant power. He approved of the president’s course of action.19

  When Adams made it known that he would appoint a three-man commission to negotiate a new treaty with France, Hamilton urged that one of these men be a leading Republican, preferably Madison or Jefferson. Such a choice, Hamilton argued, would prevent accusations of an administration conspiracy to force France to reject the olive branch and allow Adams to declare war. Pickering, whose political finesse was limited, saw no reason to send a Republican commissioner, but then, he didn’t want to send any commissioners at all. However, French military successes against Britain and its allies that spring and summer forced him to change his mind. He understood it would be wise to heed the warning of Rufus King, American minister to Great Britain, who reported rumors that England would soon make peace with the enemy, leaving France dangerously free to crush the United States.20

  In the end, both Jefferson and Madison declined to serve as a
n American envoy. As vice president, Jefferson could make a case that such an appointment was inappropriate. Adams agreed. He had, he told Elbridge Gerry, “made a great stretch in proposing it, to accommodate to the Feelings, Views and Prejudices of a Party,” but “upon more mature reflection I am decidedly convinced of the Impropriety of it.” To send such a high-ranking member of the government, Adams said, “would be a degradation of our Government in the eyes of our own people as well as of all Europe.” Madison’s motives for rejecting the appointment were not hard to fathom; like his fellow Republican James Monroe, he had no interest in helping to preserve the reputation or prestige of the Federalists at home or abroad.21

  Adams’s calm acceptance of rejection by the two Virginians showed political sophistication, but his decision to appoint two diplomatic novices to the commission can only be wondered at. Indeed, all three of the men chosen were problematic. The appointment—or reappointment—of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney ran the risk of appearing aggressive, or worse, insulting, to the French. Perhaps the president believed he owed this vote of confidence to the South Carolinian who had not only been humiliated but had endured an expensive journey from Paris to the safety of the Netherlands. But Pinckney’s brief moment as the US minister hardly qualified him for the delicate negotiations that lay ahead. The president’s second appointee, John Marshall, had even less diplomatic experience—which is to say, none. Marshall, tall, lanky, and handsome, with jet-black hair and fine features, was considered a potential leader of the Federalist Party. He was known for his exceptional intelligence, his affable manner, and his tendency to dress carelessly. His less-than-stylish attire would not favorably impress even the most ardent French revolutionaries. But his amiability would be an asset. The forty-two-year-old lawyer was well liked in his home state, although his cousin Thomas Jefferson was not among his admirers. Jefferson found what he called Marshall’s “lax, lounging manners” infuriating. Marshall returned the animosity, labeling Jefferson untrustworthy.22