The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Once he had settled in with Betsy outside Albany, Hamilton conjured up his vision of an American people that seemed determined to repudiate its national destiny, no matter how hard he, Morris, and Washington had tried to persuade them otherwise:

  We have now happily concluded the great work of independence, but much remains to be done to reach the fruits of it. Our prospects are not flattering. Every day proves the inefficacy of the present confederation, yet the common danger being removed, we are receding instead of advancing in a disposition to amend its defects. The road to popularity in each state is to inspire jealousies of the power of Congress, though nothing can be more apparent than that they have no power; and that for the want of it the resources of the country during the war could not be drawn out, and we at the moment experience all the mischiefs of a bankrupted and ruined credit. It is hoped when prejudice and folly have run themselves out of breath, we may embrace reason and correct our errors.57

  One of the reasons Hamilton found the word democracy so offensive was because he realized that the vast majority of American citizens had not the dimmest understanding of what he was talking about.

  Chapter 3

  THE DOMAIN

  There is as much intrigue in this State House as in the Vatican, but as little secrecy as in a boarding school.

  John Jay to Lafayette

  JANUARY 3, 1779

  There is a consensus among historians that the Treaty of Paris, though coming at the very start, can be regarded as the greatest triumph in the annals of American diplomacy. Its two cardinal achievements were the recognition of American independence and the acquisition of the eastern third of the North American continent—all the land south of Canada and north of Florida. If independence was the all-important principle, the western domain was the invaluable prize, for it immediately made the United States larger geographically than any European nation, with natural resources that defied comprehension.1

  At a celebratory dinner in Paris for the negotiators of the definitive treaty, a French delegate proposed a toast to “the growing greatness of America,” now poised to become “the greatest empire in the world.” The British negotiating team seconded the toast, then with a wink added, “And they will speak English, every one of ’em.” There was a shared sense among all the participants that the Americans had just won a lopsided victory, topped off by the acquisition of a landmass larger than England, France, and Spain put together. When Benjamin West, the American-born artist and a favorite of George III’s, accepted a commission to paint the negotiators of the peace, the entire British delegation refused to show up, fearful of being memorialized for posterity as the losers of Britain’s North American empire to an upstart American empire of its own.2

  The man most responsible for this rather extraordinary achievement was John Jay. In part, Jay’s influence was a function of chance and circumstance. Thomas Jefferson had declined the offer to serve on the American negotiating committee, citing the recent death of his wife. His replacement, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, was captured at sea and thrown into the Tower of London. John Adams was moving between Leyden, The Hague, and Amsterdam, trying to negotiate a loan from the notoriously tightfisted Dutch bankers. That left Jay and Benjamin Franklin to handle what Jay called “the skirmishing business.” And a flare-up of gout caused Franklin to delegate most of the backroom diplomacy to Jay.

  The most important meeting occurred on August 3, 1782, when Jay met with the Spanish minister, Count Aranda. It was diplomatically necessary to consult with Aranda because France was bound to Spain by treaty, and the American negotiators were under strict orders from the Confederation Congress “to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their [French] knowledge and concurrence.” As Jay and Aranda bent over a map of North America, Aranda drew a line from what is now Lake Erie, south through central Ohio, and down to the Florida panhandle, near modern-day Tallahassee. Everything east of that line, Orlando declared, belonged to the United States, and everything west belonged to Spain. Jay did not need to draw a line. He simply pointed his finger at the Mississippi River.3

  Jay immediately roused Franklin from his sickbed and declared that it had become clear that the long-term interest of America required that they disregard their instructions—he tossed his clay pipe into the fireplace for emphasis—and negotiate a separate treaty with Great Britain without any consultations with France. Franklin resisted, but Jay insisted. At stake was nothing less than the continental destiny of the American republic. Jay then proceeded to lead the American negotiations with the British delegation, making recognition of American independence and the Mississippi as the western border the two nonnegotiable items.4

  When Adams came down from Holland, Jay had already composed a first draft of the treaty. After meeting with Jay for several hours, Adams recorded his stunned sense of agreement with everything Jay had done. “Nothing has ever struck me more forcibly or affected me more instinctively,” Adams wrote in his diary, “than our entire coincidence of principles and opinions.” Adams was most pleased with Jay’s decision to bypass the French, despite the instructions from the Congress. “It is glorious to have broken such infamous orders,” Adams declared, “or so it will appear to all posterity.” Humility was not a natural act for Adams, but he went to his grave acknowledging that in the Paris peace negotiations, Jay was “of more importance than any of the rest of us, indeed of almost as much weight as all the rest of us together.”5

  Unlike Morris and Hamilton, Jay did not have to leap from impoverished oblivion to center stage. He was born into comfortable circumstances, the son of Peter Jay, a prosperous New York merchant, and Mary Van Cortlandt, a member of the city’s Dutch aristocracy. Raised on a handsome estate in Rye on the coast of Long Island Sound, surrounded by books and enveloped in love, he enjoyed a privileged childhood. His older brother, James, who turned out a bothersome scoundrel, was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine, while Jay went to King’s College. There he befriended Robert Livingston, brother of his future wife, the famously beautiful Sarah Livingston. After graduation Jay decided to pursue a career in the law and joined the circle of aspiring young New Yorkers destined to be divided over the issue of American independence.6

  In the 1760s Jay endorsed the American protest of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, though he was uncomfortable with the mob demonstrations against the Stamp Act, regarding them as a disquieting threat to the established social order of which he was a part. As a delegate in the Continental Congress, he sided with the moderates, supporting American grievances while searching for a road to reconciliation. “This is an unnatural quarrel,” he observed as late as January 1776, “and God only knows why the British Empire should be torn to pieces by unjust attempts to subjugate us.” By April 1776, once it was clear that George III was committed to a military resolution that would take the form of an invasion of New York, Jay stepped over the line and never looked back. Like Franklin, he was late to the cause but all the more ardent once committed.

  He became a leader in the provisional government of New York, drafting the resolution that made that colony the last to endorse the Declaration of Independence. The British occupation of New York in the fall of 1776 forced him to move his family to Fishkill. In this tense and dangerous time—British patrols and Tory gangs were roaming the countryside—his letters exhibited the otherworldly serenity for which he would become famous: “I am in a hot little room [in Poughkeepsie],” he wrote to Sarah, “and in defiance of the god of sleep, whom the bugs and fleas banished from my pillow last night, I sit down to write a few lines to my good wife.” He simply presumed that he would never be captured or killed, just as he presumed that the British military triumph in New York was only a temporary setback and that American independence was inevitable.7

  Early in 1777 he almost singlehandedly wrote the New York constitution, which vested more power in the executive branch than any other state constitution. The presence of the British army on New York
’s soil, he explained, demanded a government that could respond decisively and quickly to any sudden military threat. But Jay was also showing his true colors as a conservative revolutionary, a rare hybrid that simultaneously embraced American independence and endorsed political structures that filtered popular opinion through several layers of institutionalized deliberation before it became the law of the land.8

  Elected to the Continental Congress in 1778, he was almost immediately chosen to serve as president. This kept happening to Jay, in large part because his peers viewed him as a man of principle who could be trusted even by those who disagreed with his principles. His massive probity, combined with his persistent geniality, made him impossible to hate. He lacked Washington’s gravitas, Hamilton’s charisma, and Madison’s cerebral power, but he more than compensated with a conspicuous cogency in both his conversation and his prose that suggested a deep reservoir of learning he could tap at will. Permanently poised, always the calm center of the storm, when a controversial issue arose, he always seemed to have thought it through more clearly and deeply than anyone else, so that his opinion had a matter-of-fact quality that made dissent seem impolite.

  In 1778 he was appointed to the Continental Congress to defend New York’s claim against Vermont’s petition for statehood. But Jay decided, upon reflection, that New York’s case was petty and partisan, and that the larger interest of the confederation would be best served by accepting Vermont into the union. Despite pressure from the New York legislature, he would not budge from his conviction that the whole needed to take precedence over the parts, the first clear expression of his national orientation. Despite his best efforts, the Vermont question became a victim of gridlock in the Congress. As he put it with obvious disdain, “the issue was ‘bitched’ in its last as well as its first stages.”9

  His ten-month term as president of the Continental Congress convinced him that any coherent national policy was impossible within the confederation format. “There is as much intrigue in this State House as in the Vatican,” he complained to Lafayette, “but as little secrecy as in a boarding school.” Even before Hamilton had gone public with his criticism of the government under the Articles, Jay had concluded, on the basis of his experience in the Congress, that no state-based confederation could harness the full energies of the American Revolution once the war ended. As he saw it, there were really only two courses of action available: stay on the current path and witness “the Diminution of our Respectability, Power, and Felicity”; or create a government with sufficient powers to manage an ascendant American nation. That was the real choice, as Jay saw it, and all the petty squabbles within the Congress—over Vermont’s status, Virginia’s territorial prerogatives, the disproportionate impact of the impost on different states, even the payment of the federal debt—were just distractions, or perhaps symptoms of the deeper malaise. “I hope that the wheel turns round,” Jay observed, meaning that the choice would be faced rather than finessed, “for I am persuaded that America possesses too much wisdom and virtue to permit her brilliant Prospects to fade away.”10

  Jay was also one of the first to recognize that America’s prospects were inextricably linked to possession of the huge landmass between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi. During his presidency of the Congress, he had the audacity to apprise the unofficial Spanish minister, Don Juan de Miralles, that he regarded Spain as a hollowed-out European power destined to be overwhelmed demographically by the wave of American settlers sweeping across the North American continent. As for the Mississippi, any discussion of Spanish control was superfluous. “The Americans, almost to a man,” he declared, “believe that God Almighty had made that river a highway for the people of the upper country to go to the sea.” The clarity of his thinking about the nonnegotiable status of the Mississippi border during the peace negotiations was a product of his long-standing conviction about the significance of the western domain for American destiny.11

  In 1779, four years before Washington declared his vision of a continental American empire, Jay had a vision of his own: “Extensive wildernesses, now scarcely known or exposed, remain yet to be cultivated, and vast lakes and rivers, whose waters have for ages rolled in silence and obscurity to the ocean, are yet to hear the din of industry, become subservient to commerce, and boast villas, gilded spires, and spacious cities rising on their banks.” Just as Morris had made a career, and a fortune, betting on the way markets would move, Jay had made a reputation predicting the future course of American history, and he shared Washington’s keen sense that all arrows pointed west.12

  Although Jay had earned his diplomatic reputation in Europe, he shared Washington’s belief that the western lands acquired in the Treaty of Paris made Europe a sideshow. The chief task for the foreseeable future was to manage westward expansion across the North American continent. And the very act of performing that task would require the members of the confederation to abandon their provincial perspectives in favor of a common goal that bound them together as an emerging nation with prospects as unlimited as the western horizon.

  Such was Jay’s state of mind when he and Sarah returned to New York in July 1784. The glow of his diplomatic triumph in Paris still burned brightly, so only five days after his arrival the delegates of the Confederation Congress requested his service as secretary of foreign affairs. It is doubtful that the delegates recognized that they were courting an unalloyed nationalist with the courage of his convictions and a track record of fiercely independent behavior. On the other hand, it is also doubtful that Jay recognized the political cloud bank that he was being asked to enter. In the year since the war had ended, a majority of candidates elected to serve in the Congress had declined, or just failed to show up, and on fourteen occasions no business could be conducted for lack of a quorum. More dispiriting than any clash of opinions was the pervasive indifference that rendered argument itself impossible. There was not even a quorum available to ratify the definitive version of the Treaty of Paris or to accept Washington’s highly symbolic resignation as commander in chief at Annapolis.

  The delegates were essentially asking Jay to do for American foreign policy what they had asked Robert Morris to do for fiscal policy. Morris’s heroic efforts, as we have seen, eventually fell victim to the political provincialism they were intended to correct. But there was some reason to believe that the Jay appointment would not meet the same fate, for while the states could and did remain sovereign when it came to taxes, they could not plausibly claim to exercise the same control over foreign policy, which almost by definition needed to speak with one voice. (Abigail Adams, writing from London, somewhat caustically observed that British diplomats loved to ridicule her husband for allegedly representing a government that in fact did not exist.) Jay was being asked to convert the American cacophony on foreign policy into a chorus.

  It is a measure of Jay’s prestige, and also of the delegates’ desperation, that all the conditions he proposed were found acceptable. He could appoint his own staff, presume to speak as a representative of the confederation as a collective, and—this was a rather audacious demand—the Congress would move from its current location in Trenton to New York in order to facilitate his family obligations. With Morris now retired, Jay became the most powerful person in the Confederation Congress.

  All thinking about development of the western domain had been delayed until agreement was reached on Virginia’s cession of its claims to the Ohio Country. Congress never agreed to all the terms Virginia insisted upon, chiefly the voiding of all treaties between Indian tribes and land speculators. But in an act of uncharacteristic generosity, Virginia went ahead with the cession in February 1784, albeit under pressure from other states to end the impasse in order to start earning revenue from land sales. “It is said by good judges that the tract acquired comprehends five hundred thousand square miles,” one delegate observed, “and some men who are acquainted with that country assert that the value of it is sufficient to discharge the public debt.” David
Howell of Rhode Island, who had been the most outspoken opponent of the impost, took great satisfaction in calculating that the sale of 320 million acres at a dollar an acre would easily retire the national debt without recourse to an impost. Most of the initial thinking about what to do with the domain, then, focused less on its boundless borders than on its equally boundless prospects as a providential solution to America’s debt crisis.13

  A distinctively different voice then entered the conversation, less interested in the revenue to be acquired than in the values that should guide American western expansion. In the deed ceding its claims to land northwest of the Ohio River, the Virginia delegation proposed the following principles: “The Territory so ceded shall be laid out and formed into states containing a suitable extent of Territory not less than one hundred or more than one hundred and fifty square miles…and that the states so formed shall be distinctive Republican States and admitted members of the Federal Union, having the same rights of Sovereignty, Freedom, and Independence as the other states.” These words were written by Thomas Jefferson, and it is possible to argue that, apart from his more famous phrases in the Declaration of Independence, they are the most historically consequential words he ever wrote, since they defined the political and legal framework that would shape American expansion across the entire North American continent for the next century.14