Genet met with some of the nascent Democratic-Republican Societies and was rumored to have been appointed president of one of them. At the same time, the brash young minister began recruiting American seamen, commissioning and arming American ships as privateers, and setting up prize courts in American ports—all to the increasing discomfort of Secretary of State Jefferson. Genet even outfitted a captured British ship, the Little Sarah, in an American port and, in deliberate defiance of Washington’s request, sent it to sea as a French privateer—the Petite Democrate. The French minister threatened to appeal directly to the people if the government protested.34
Ignoring Washington’s instructions not to allow the captured ship to sail was one thing; suggesting that he might go over the head of the president to the American people was quite another. When Washington learned of Genet’s actions and plans, he became furious. “Is the Minister of the French Republic to set the Acts of this Government at defiance, with impunity? and then threaten the Executive with an appeal to the People?” the president asked in astonishment. “What must the world think of such conduct, and of the Government of the U. States in submitting to it?”35
In the end Genet undid himself. Those Federalists opposed to the French Revolution, led by Hamilton, John Jay, and Rufus King, exploited the French minister’s diplomatic blunders both to win support for the government’s policy of neutrality and to discredit and weaken the Republican opposition. By spreading rumors of Genet’s actions, the Federalists aroused public opinion and succeeded in transforming a diplomatic incident into a major public controversy. In meetings in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, the Federalists sponsored resolutions condemning Genet and defending the president.
All these Federalist efforts to weaken public sympathy for the French Revolution alarmed the Republican leaders. Such efforts seemed further evidence of the Hamiltonian march toward monarchism. Madison thought the Federalists were trying to use “public veneration for the President” to promote “an animosity between America & France” in order to dissolve “their political & commercial union.” This, said Madison, would be followed by a “connection” with Great Britain, and “under her auspices” the United States would move “in a gradual approximation towards her Form of Government.”36
In response to these fears the Republicans began organizing their own party meetings. In some of their celebrations the Republicans even toasted the radical Jacobins, who had taken over the French government, and they displayed models of the guillotine that the Jacobins were using to eliminate their enemies; indeed, in Paris it was on average cutting off more than two heads a minute. In the face of all the revolutionary bloodshed, Jefferson remained supportive of the French revolutionary cause, believing that it was all that kept America from undoing its own revolution.
As a member of the government that was being subverted by the French minister, Jefferson was in an increasingly awkward position. He kept trying to draw nice distinctions between his being the secretary of state while at the same time being the behind-the-scenes leader of the Republican opposition. When told by Genet of plans to arm the Canadians and the Kentuckians for expeditions against British and Spanish territories in the New World, he confided to his diary that Genet had “communicated these things to me not as Secy. of state, but as Mr. Jeff.”37 When he had to, Jefferson knew how to split hairs.
To influence public opinion effectively, the Republican leaders eventually came to realize that they would have to concede much of the Federalist position. They saw that the president was universally respected, that neutrality was overwhelmingly desired, and that Genet had to go.38“He will sink the republican interest if they do not abandon him,” Jefferson warned Madison in August 1793. The Republicans had to approve the policy of neutrality “unequivocally,” he said, and had to stop caviling about who constitutionally was to declare it. “In this way we shall keep the people on our side by keeping ourselves in the right.” This was one of the many times Jefferson had a shrewder sense of public opinion than did his colleague Madison.39
Jefferson’s acute political sensitivity to the will of the people revealed in this incident kept his personal animosities and revolutionary passions from getting out of hand. Perhaps even more crucial in dampening the extreme partisanship of both the Federalist and Republican leaders was Washington. The president used his immense prestige and good judgment repeatedly to restrain fears, limit intrigues, and stymie opposition that otherwise might have escalated into violence. Despite the intense partisan feelings that existed throughout the country, Washington never entirely lost the respect of all the party leaders, and this respect allowed him to reconcile, resolve, and balance the clashing interests. Jefferson scarcely foresaw the half of Washington’s influence when he remarked as early as 1784 that “the moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”40
THE DISMISSAL OF GENET did not end the international problems facing the United States. During the Revolution the United States had strenuously promoted the most liberal principles concerning commerce on the high seas in wartime—namely, that free ships made free goods and that neutrals had the right to carry non-contraband goods into ports of belligerents. These principles, which were to plague Anglo-American relations for the next two decades, were very much a part of the American Revolution.
Just as liberal Americans in 1776 had sought a new kind of domestic politics that would end tyranny, so too had they sought a new kind of international politics that would promote peace among nations and, indeed, might even see an end to war itself. The American Revolution had been centrally concerned with power—not only power within a government but power among governments in their international relations. Throughout the eighteenth century liberal intellectuals had looked forward to a newly enlightened world in which corrupt monarchical diplomacy, secret alliances, dynastic rivalries, and balances of power would be eliminated. In short, they had hoped for nothing less than the abolition of war and the beginning of a new era of peaceful relations among nations.
Monarchy and war were thought to be intimately related. Indeed, as young Benjamin Lincoln Jr., declared, “Kings owe their origin to war.”41 The internal needs of monarchies—the requirements of their bloated bureaucracies, their standing armies, their marriage alliances, their restless dynastic ambitions—lay behind the prevalence of war. Eliminate monarchy and all its accouterments, many Americans believed, and war itself would be eliminated. A world of republican states would encourage a new, peace-loving diplomacy—one based on the natural concert of the commercial interests of the people of the various nations. If the world’s peoples were left alone to exchange goods freely among themselves—without the corrupting interference of selfish monarchical courts, irrational dynastic rivalries, and the secret double-dealing diplomacy of the past—then, it was hoped, international politics would become republi canized, pacified, and ruled by commerce alone. Old-fashioned diplomats might no longer be necessary. This was the enlightened dream of liberals everywhere, from Thomas Jefferson to Immanuel Kant.
Suddenly in 1776, with the United States isolated and outside the European mercantile empires, Americans had both an opportunity and a need to put into practice these liberal ideas about international relations and the free exchange of goods. Thus commercial interest and revolutionary idealism blended to form a basis for American thinking about foreign affairs that has lasted even to the present.
“Our plan is commerce,” Thomas Paine had told Americans in 1776, “and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” There was no need for America to form any partial political connections with any part of Europe. Such traditional military alliances were the legacies of monarchical governments, and they only led to war. “It is the true interest of America,” said Paine, “to ste
er clear of European contentions.” Trade between peoples alone would be enough. Indeed, for Paine and other enlightened liberals, peaceful trade among the people of the various nations became the counterpart in the international sphere to the sociability of people in the domestic sphere. Just as enlightened thinkers like Paine and Jefferson foresaw republican society held together solely by the natural affection of individuals one to another, so too did they envision a world of these republican societies held together by the natural interest of nations in trading with one another. In both the national and international spheres monarchy and its intrusive institutions and monopolistic ways were what prevented a natural harmony of people’s feelings and interests.42
Americans had first expressed these “Liberal Sentiments,” as John Adams called them, during discussions over the proposed treaty with France at the time of Independence. There was a hope then, Adams said in 1785, that “the increasing liberality of sentiments among philosophers and men of letters, in various nations,” might lead to “a reformation, a kind of protestantism, in the commercial system of the world.”43 Many in the Continental Congress in 1776 had attempted to implement these hopes by devising a model treaty that would be applied to France and eventually to other nations—a treaty that would avoid the traditional kinds of political and military commitments and focus instead exclusively on commercial connections.44 The model treaty, drafted mainly by John Adams in July 1776, promised the greatest amount of commercial freedom and equality possible, which, if widely achieved, would eliminate the tensions and conflicts of world politics. Were the principles of the model treaty “once really established and honestly observed,” John Adams later recalled, “it would put an end forever to all maritime war, and render all military navies useless.”45
Absolute reciprocity in trade was the guiding principle of the treaty. In duties and trade restrictions foreign merchants would be treated as one’s own nationals were treated. Even in wartime trade was to be kept flowing. Indeed, a major idea of the treaty was to lessen the impact of war on civilians. Neutral nations would have the right to trade with and carry the goods of the belligerent nations—the right expressed in the phrase “free ships make free goods.”
In retrospect the naïveté of the Revolutionary Americans seems astonishing. They were desperate for an alliance with France, yet they were willing to offer Louis XVI’s government very little in return. Since political and military cooperation with France was to be avoided at all costs, the model treaty promised only that in case the commercial alliance between the United States and France led to a French war with Great Britain, then the United States would not assist Britain in the war!
In the end the Americans’ dream was not fully realized. Although they did sign a commercial treaty with France that contained the free trade principles they had wanted, they also had to agree to a traditional political and military alliance with France that obligated the United States to guarantee “from the present time and forever . . . the present Possessions of the Crown of France in America as well as those it may acquire by the future Treaty of peace.”46 Many Americans, including John Adams, came out of their experience with European diplomacy with their enlightened ideas very much in doubt. “No facts are believed but decisive military conquests,” Adams warned in 1780; “no arguments are seriously attended to in Europe but force.” Given this reality, a balance of power might be useful after all.47
Despite these doses of realism, however, the Americans’ enlightened dream of a new world order based on commerce was not lost, and the signing of a peace treaty with Britain in 1783 seemed to make possible the revival of the dream. In 1784 the United States authorized a diplomatic commission composed of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin to negotiate commercial treaties with sixteen European states based on the liberal principles of a revised model treaty. The hope was to have America, in the commissioners’ words, lead the way to an “object so valuable to mankind as the total emancipation of commerce and the bringing together all nations for a free intercommunication of happiness.”48
Only three states, however—Sweden, Prussia, and Morocco, peripheral powers with little overseas trade—agreed to sign liberal treaties with the United States. Most European states were indifferent to the Americans’ ideas. They simply were ignorant of the importance of American commerce, said Jefferson, who had been instrumental in drawing up the new model treaty. Even someone as hardheaded as Washington reflected “with pleasure on the probable influence that commerce may hereafter have on human manners and society in general,” even leading perhaps to an end of “the devastation and horrors of war.”49
But it was Jefferson and Madison, among the Revolutionary leaders, who clung longest to the belief in the power of American trade to bring about changes in international behavior, indeed, to make commercial sanctions a substitute for the use of military force. This confidence in American commerce, which harked back to the non-importation policies against Britain in the 1760s and 1770s, became the basic premise of the Republican party’s approach to international politics. It underlay Republican policies and thinking about the world well into the early decades of the nineteenth century. Jefferson and Madison never lost hope that the United States might be able to bring about a world in which war itself would no longer be necessary.
SINCE THE PRINCIPAL OBSTACLE to their hopes was Great Britain, the Republican leaders aimed to use the power of American commerce to convince Britain to change its policies. Yet Jefferson and Madison were not merely interested in opening up British ports to American trade. For the Republicans the economics of America’s relationship with Britain was always less important than the politics of it. What they really wanted was to destroy Britain’s commercial hegemony in the world and end America’s commercial, and hence political, dependence on the former mother country; and they were willing to compromise America’s commercial prosperity to bring about this crucial end.
In 1789 Madison had sought unsuccessfully to levy discriminatory tariffs on British imports in order to force Britain to open its ports in the West Indies and Canada to American shipping. Although the British West Indies remained legally closed, American merchants continued to trade illegally with them. Indeed, American commerce with Britain was flourishing; three-quarters of all American exports and imports were exchanged with the former mother country.50 Precisely because of all this trade, the Republican leaders thought the British were susceptible to American pressure; the time seemed ripe for using trade restrictions to break up Britain’s navigation system. Relying on the arguments set forth by Jefferson in his December 1793 report to Congress on the state of America’s foreign commerce, Madison in January 1794 introduced resolutions in the House calling for commercial reciprocity with all nations with which the United States did not have commercial treaties, the only important one, of course, being Great Britain. If that reciprocity were not forthcoming, the United States would retaliate with tariffs and trade restrictions against a nation that had already showed its hostility toward the United States by refusing to vacate American territory.
Although trade with America constituted only one-sixth of Britain’s total commerce, the Republican leaders nevertheless assumed that American trade was absolutely vital to Great Britain. If Americans ceased buying luxuries from Britain, British manufacturers would be thrown out of work, riots would follow, and the British government would be compelled to capitulate. The Republican leaders did not expect their commercial retaliation to result in war. “If it does,” said Jefferson, “we will meet it like men: but it may not bring on war, and then the experiment will have been a happy one.” And America will have given “the world still another useful lesson, by shewing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as the sufferer.”51
Naturally, the Federalists opposed these measures, which would have unsettled the economy and undermined Hamilton’s entire financial program. Financing the funded national debt depended on the customs duties le
vied on foreign imports, most of which were British. Indeed, it was the extraordinary growth of federal customs revenue in the 1790s that enabled the state governments to lower their taxes, which of course enhanced the reputation of the Washington government.
In the Congress William Loughton Smith of South Carolina and Fisher Ames of Massachusetts took the lead in exposing the harmful consequences of destroying trade with Great Britain. American producers and consumers would suffer far more than the British from these proposed trade restrictions. No American merchant, no trading state in the Union, favored Madison’s measures, said Ames in the Congress. We are asked “to engage in a contest of self-denial. For what?” In a letter in January 1794 Ames went on to inform his friend Christopher Gore of the progress of the debate and the strange nature of the Republicans’ thinking. “The ground is avowedly changed,” he told Gore. “Madison & Co. now avow that the political wrongs are the wrongs to be cured by commercial restrictions.” In other words, “in plain English,” the Republicans “set out with a tale of restrictions and injuries on our commerce.” When that was “refuted solidly,” and they were “pressed for a pretext,” they declared “that we will make war, not for our commerce, but with it; not to make our commerce better, but to make it nothing, in order to reach the tender sides of our enemy, which are not to be wounded in any other way.”52
In his response to the Federalists’ arguments the best that Madison could do was emphasize the great political danger that America’s extraordinary dependence on British trade and capital posed for the fledgling republic. That dependence, he told the Congress in January 1794, created an “influence that may be conveyed into the public councils . . .and the effect that may finally ensue on our taste, our manners, and our form of Government itself.” In Republican eyes the Revolution against the British monarchy was far from over: a decade after the treaty of peace, England and English ways still seemed capable of destroying the young Republic.53
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