Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  For the new French republic the war was total. The French revolutionary leaders enlisted their entire society on behalf of the republican cause, which they said would be brought to all of Europe. With the execution of Louis XVI, exulted the radical Jacobin Georges Jacques Danton, France was flinging at the feet of monarchs “the head of a King.” The French revolutionary leaders drafted their citizens and turned them into the world’s first mass conscript army. By the end of 1794 the French army had grown to over a million men—not only the largest army the world had ever seen but one inspired by the most extraordinary revolutionary zeal. “No more maneuvers, no more military art, but fire, steel, and patriotism,” declared Lazare Carnot, the organizer of the French revolutionary armies. “We must exterminate! Exterminate to the bitter end!”1

  Against such revolutionary fervor, the British realized that this struggle would be different from the many previous clashes with their ancient enemy. The day in 1793 that Great Britain declared war on revolutionary France, the thirty-three-year-old prime minister, William Pitt, the brilliant son of the great minister who had won the Seven Years’ War a generation earlier, told Parliament that Britons were fighting not merely for a traditional balance of power in Europe but for their monarchy and their way of life, indeed, for “the happiness of the whole of the human race.” The French, said Pitt, wish to bring their brand of liberty “to every nation, and if they will not accept of it voluntarily, they compel them. They take every opportunity to destroy every institution that is most sacred and most valuable in every nation where their armies have their appearance; and under the name of liberty, they have resolved to make every country in substance, if not in form, a province dependent on themselves.” The cost in British blood and treasure of the nearly two and a half decades of war was astonishing—nearly three hundred thousand killed and over a billion pounds in money.2

  Although the war took place in all parts of the world, it was not a single continuous war like the world wars of the twentieth century; instead, it was a series of wars, most of them very short and distinct. Every one of the great Continental powers—Austria, Prussia, and Russia—formed and dissolved coalitions against France in accordance with their particular interests. Being often more fearful of one another than of France, they were as willing to ally with Napoleon as to wage war against him. Only Britain, except for a year of peace in 1802–1803, remained continually at war with France throughout the period.

  The Treaty of Amiens that Britain signed with France in 1802 left France in control of Belgium, Holland, the left bank of the Rhine, and Italy. This peace could not last, for it was no more acceptable to Britain than it was to Napoleon, who began to extend his sway over more and more parts of Europe. Britain declared war against France in 1803 and formed the Third Coalition with Austria and Russia against France. Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804 and made plans to invade England. In October 1805 the British navy under the command of Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson’s victory destroyed Napoleon’s plans for invading England and guaranteed Britain’s control of the seas. Then at the end of 1805 Napoleon defeated the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz (located in the present-day Czech Republic), which led to the collapse of the Third Coalition the British had mounted against the French.

  President Jefferson saw at once the implications of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz. “What an awful spectacle does the world exhibit at this instant,” he wrote in January 1806, “one man bestriding the continent of Europe like a Colossus, and another roaming unbridled on the ocean.”3 America was caught between these two leviathans, which, involved as they were in a life-or-death struggle for supremacy, could scarcely pay much attention to the concerns of the awkward young republic three thousand miles away. Napoleon thought that it would take at least two or three centuries before the United States could pose a military threat to Europe.

  Americans, however, never fully appreciated this European disdain for their country’s power. They had an extraordinary emotional need to exaggerate their importance in the world—a need that lay behind their efforts to turn their diplomacy into a major means of defining their national identity.

  JEFFERSON AND THE REPUBLICANS, in control of the national government for the first time since the European war began, put forth a peculiar conception of the United States and its role in the world. Like the Federalists, they believed that the United States had to remain neutral amid Europe’s quarrels. But more than the Federalists, they insisted, to the point of threatening war, on the right of the United States to trade with the European belligerents without restraint or restrictions. They held that free ships made free goods, which meant that neutrals had the right to carry non-contraband goods into the ports of a belligerent without their being seized by its opponent. They believed that the list of contraband articles—articles subject to seizure by the belligerents, including those owned by neutral nations—should be narrowly defined and not include, for example, provisions and naval stores. In addition, the Republicans believed that blockades of belligerent ports should be backed up by naval power and not simply declared on paper.

  With the outbreak of war in the early 1790s and Britain in control of the seas, France and Spain found it much too risky to use their own ships to carry goods between their islands in the West Indies and Europe. Consequently, they had had thrown open their hitherto closed ports in the Caribbean to American commerce. American merchants as neutrals had begun developing a profitable carrying trade between the French and Spanish West Indies and the home countries in Europe, taking sugar, for example, from the French West Indies to France and returning with manufactured goods. By September 1794 Americans had completely absorbed all the foreign trade with the West Indies—British, French, and Dutch combined.4

  As the European wars continued, this re-export or carrying trade became even more profitable, increasing in value from $500,000 in 1790 to nearly $ 60 million by 1807. Between 1793 and 1807 the total value of all American re-exports was $ 493million, an average of nearly $ 33 million a year.5

  Not only did American merchants, especially New Englanders, dominate the re-export trade between the West Indies and Europe, but these shippers were also major re-exporters of goods from Asia. Sailing by way of Cape Horn, American merchants brought home products from Canton, China, and ports in the Indian Ocean, including teas, coffee, chi-naware, spices, and silks, before shipping them on to Europe, especially to markets in the Netherlands as well as those in France, Italy, and Spain. In fact, between 1795 and 1805 American trade with India was greater than that of all the European nations combined.6 At the same time, Americans imported the manufactured goods of Europe and Great Britain and re-exported most of them to the West Indies, South America, and elsewhere. During the crucial war years of 1798–1800 and 1805–1807 the value of goods in America’s re-export trade exceeded the value of American-made goods sent abroad.

  Many of the merchants involved in this re-export trade made fortunes, including William Gray, Elias Hasket Derby, and Joseph Peabody of Salem, Nicholas Brown II and Thomas P. Ives of Providence, John Jacob Astor and Archibald Gracie of New York, and Stephen Girard of Philadelphia. At the height of his business in 1807 Gray was worth over $ 3million; he reputedly owned 115vessels, annually employed three hundred seaman, and, as his obituary said in 1825, was “probably . . . engaged in a more extensive commercial enterprise than any man who has lived on this continent in any period of its history.”7

  All of this re-export trade turned the United States into the largest neutral carrier of goods in the world. In 1790 American ships had carried only about 40 percent of the value of all goods involved in America’s foreign trade; by 1807 American ships were carrying 92 percent of a much larger volume—from combined imports and exports of $ 43 million in 1790 to $ 246 million in 1807. Between 1793 and 1807, the value of American imports and exports increased nearly sixfold, and American ship tonnage tripled. Even
accounting for a price inflation of 26 percent between 1790 and 1807, these were impressive figures.8

  With so much of its income and wealth involved in overseas trade, it was not surprising that the United States government vigorously supported freedom for neutral commerce on the high seas in wartime. Great Britain, as a strong naval power, however, never agreed with the liberal principles of wartime commerce that were so dear to the Americans. Since the British navy controlled the seas, the British government quite understandably thought that the American carrying trade between the French and Spanish West Indies and Europe was actually French and Spanish trade covered by the American flag. The British protested that this trade violated what they called the Rule of 1756, which stipulated that commerce prohibited in time of peace was also prohibited in time of war. This rule, which the British had first set forth during the Seven Years’ War, thus enabled British prize courts (courts that judged the legitimacy of the seizure of enemy ships or enemy goods on neutral ships) to deny the right of neutral nations in wartime to trade with ports in belligerent countries that had been closed to them in peacetime—which had been the case for the Americans with the French and Spanish empires. Britain was especially eager to prevent the neutral United States from carrying goods between the Caribbean colonies of France and Spain and ports in Europe. The British denied that “free ships made free goods” and declared that they would take enemy property wherever they could find it, even from neutral ships on the high seas.

  In order to comply with the British Rule of 1756 American shippers developed the legal fiction of the “broken voyage.” By carrying goods from the French and Spanish colonies to ports in the United States, unloading and paying duties on them, and then reloading and receiving rebates on most of the duties before re-exporting them to France and Spain as presumably American and therefore neutral goods, American traders technically conformed to the British Rule of 1756. At first tacitly and then officially, as determined by a British admiralty court in 1800 in the case of the Polly, British authorities had accepted this practice of the “broken voyage,” ruling that enemy goods became neutral property if imported into the United States before being re-exported. The American re-export trade thrived, and the Republicans became its great defenders.

  The situation was bizarre. The Republicans in the Congress were those most determined to promote the neutral rights of Americans to carry belligerent goods throughout the world in wartime without fear of their vessels and crew being seized by the belligerents. Yet curiously nearly all the congressional Republicans came from areas in the South and West that supplied few if any of the ships and sailors that were being taken by the belligerents. By contrast, the section of the country, Federalist New England, that did supply the bulk of the ships and sailors for America’s overseas commerce was the section most opposed to the Republicans’ policy of defending America’s neutral rights on the high seas. Republicans seemed obsessed with overseas trade even though most of them or their constituents were not directly engaged in it; they even carried their promotion of neutral rights to the point of wanting to prohibit America’s participation in the very international trade that made a defense of neutral rights necessary. It seemed as if many Republicans really did not like overseas commerce yet were eager to defend the rights of Americans to engage in it.

  In fact, many Republicans did dislike much of the overseas commerce they were defending, believing that there was something fraudulent about the commercial riches that the European wars were bringing to America. Merchants involved in the carrying trade, especially New England merchants, who were mostly Federalists, seemed to be prospering simply from America’s neutrality. John Randolph objected strongly to having “this great agricultural nation” governed by urban merchants. He called the carrying trade—”this mushroom, this fungus of war”—utterly dishonest and wanted no part in defending it.9

  Although Jefferson knew the re-export trade was lucrative, he too was not happy with a commerce that tended to get America involved in Europe’s wars, especially with American ships’ carrying the goods of belligerents. He believed that “a steady application to agriculture with just trade enough to take off its superfluities is our wisest course.” By contrast, he said, the carrying trade fed on the evils of war and encouraged “a spirit of gambling” and the desire to make money without labor. Those merchants engaged in the wartime re-export trade produced nothing of their own and only profited from the work done by others. By becoming merely neutral carriers of goods, Americans, Jefferson concluded despairingly, were launched “into the ocean of speculation, led to over trade ourselves, tempted to become robbers under French colors, and to quit the pursuit of Agriculture the surest road to affluence and the best preservative of morals.”10 Not only did Jefferson, aristocratic Southern planter that he was, express disdain for what he thought were the low pecuniary motives of merchants, but he hated and thought “absurd” the fact that commerce was “converting this great agricultural country into a city of Amsterdam,—a mere headquarters for carrying on the commerce of all nations.”11

  Despite this contempt for America’s neutral carrying trade, which he thought benefited mostly his Federalist enemies, Jefferson as president devoted most of his diplomatic energies to defending it. As a result, he not only quarreled with Britain but nearly went to war with the former mother country, a war that above all he wanted to avoid. In trying to implement his policy, he ended up completely stopping the flow of all American overseas trade and at the same time repressing his fellow citizens to a degree rarely duplicated in the entire history of the United States. Jefferson’s extraordinary efforts to defend the rights of neutrals to trade freely drove the country into a deep depression and severely damaged his presidency. He ended up violating much of what he and his party stood for.

  NOT ONLY DID JEFFERSON and the Republicans have unusual ideas about America’s political economy, but, more important, they possessed a radical appreciation of the role of commerce in international affairs and an inspired vision of what the world might be.

  Jefferson’s foreign policy grew out of his hopes for America’s domestic economy. Unlike the Federalists, who anticipated the United States even-tually—maybe in a half century or less—developing a diversified and balanced manufacturing economy like that of Great Britain, Jefferson and the other Republican leaders, but not many of their Northern followers, wanted the United States to remain predominantly rural and agricultural. Jefferson and Madison certainly did not want or expect America to become more like commercially developed Europe, at least not in the foreseeable future. Madison in the Constitutional Convention had warned of a time in the distant future when “a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of property,” and reminded his colleagues that “we see in the populous Countries in Europe now what we shall be hereafter.”12 But he and many other Republicans hoped that that depressing future might be put off—for at least a century or two—by the prevalence of free land in America and by the fact that most Americans remained independent farmers. Believing in the same four-stage theory of social development as the Federalists, the Republican leaders had a vested interest in freezing time and holding America back from becoming sophisticated and luxury-loving like the nations of the Old World. And from the evidence of the seemingly unchanging rural and farming character of American society in the early nineteenth century, they were increasingly confident that the nation was pretty firmly fixed in the agricultural stage of development.

  While most Federalists were disappointed that the society was not becoming more urban, more complicated, and more hierarchical, the Republican leaders welcomed America’s social stasis. They celebrated the dominance of farming and the absence of the large-scale urban manufacturing that was characteristic of the poverty and decadence that afflicted the Old World. Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia had argued that no people in their right minds would ever voluntarily turn to manufacturing. The British and French had begun
industrializing only because they had run out of land and their farmers had been forced to migrate to the cities and become dependent laborers working in houses of industry turning out gewgaws and other superfluities that no one actually needed. But Americans, said Jefferson, were not in that situation. “We have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman.” The more farmers the healthier the society, said Jefferson. “While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff. . . . Let our work-shops remain in Europe.”13

  Although the Southern Republican leaders were opposed to European-style urban manufacturing, they were not opposed to commerce. Quite the contrary: overseas commerce was essential to preventing the development of large-scale manufacturing. Although Jefferson in the 1780s had talked wistfully of having America “stand with respect to Europe precisely on the footing of China,” practicing “neither commerce nor navigation,” so that “we should thus avoid wars, and all our citizens would be husbandmen,” he realized this was “theory only, and a theory which the servants of America are not at liberty to follow.” The American people had “a decided taste for navigation and commerce,” and the country’s political leaders had to take this taste into account. The best way to promote international trade was “by throwing open all the doors of commerce and knocking off its shackles.”14

  Opening up trade abroad became crucial for the Republican leaders. Desiring as they did the United States to remain predominantly rural and agricultural, they were confronted with the problem of ensuring sufficient markets for the agricultural surpluses of America’s many hardworking and productive farmers. Since the Southern Republicans did not want America to develop huge urban centers, they could not assume the existence of a large domestic market for the surpluses of farm goods. If the farmers were unable to sell their produce somewhere, they would stagnate, slip into mere subsistence farming, and become idle and lazy and eventually morally unfit for republican government. Hence developing markets abroad for America’s agricultural produce became essential for sustaining America’s experiment in republicanism. The Federalists, declared Jefferson, could not have been more wrong in thinking him “an enemy of commerce. They admit me a friend of agriculture, and suppose me an enemy to the only means of disposing of its produce.”15