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

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Most critics of the Confederation Congress wanted specific reforms, chiefly the authority to make its tax requisitions mandatory rather than voluntary, and equivalent federal authority over foreign and interstate commerce. Jay, however, did not just want the Articles reformed. He wanted them replaced:

  It is my first wish to see the United States assume and merit the character of one great nation, whose territory is divided into different states merely for more convenient government, and the more easy and prompt administration of justice, just as our several States are divided into countries and townships for like purposes. Until this be done, the chain which holds us together will be too feeble to bear much opposition or exertion and we shall be daily mortified by seeing the links of it give way.32

  Jay assumed that Spain was doomed as an imperial power in North America, and he also assumed that the current confederation was a mere way station on the road to full-blooded American nationhood. These were heady prophecies, both of which proved correct in the long run but were highly problematic at the time.

  This was made painfully obvious at the outset, when Jay sent a letter to all the governors, requesting the states to forward all correspondence relating to foreign policy to him so that he might consolidate diplomatic affairs in his office. Few of the governors responded, none complied, and none of the delegates in Congress found that objectionable. “I have some Reason, Sir, to apprehend,” he complained to Richard Henry Lee, then serving as president, “that I have come into the Office of Secretary for foreign affairs with Ideas of its Duties and Rights somewhat different from those which seemed to be entertained by Congress.”33

  That bracing—and depressing—insight was only reinforced when Jay objected to the presence of British troops garrisoned in several forts just south of the Canadian border on the Great Lakes, a clear violation of the Treaty of Paris. But the British justified this violation as a response to the American violation of Article IV of the treaty, which required payment of all prewar debts to the British creditors, nearly £4 million, more than half of it owed by Virginia planters. The British also objected to the violation of Article VI of the treaty, which forbade punitive action against American loyalists who had not borne arms on the British side during the war. In effect, the British would remove their troops, who were hovering in anticipation of an expected collapse of the American confederation, only if and when the Americans honored their own treaty obligations.34

  No one knew the provisions of the Treaty of Paris better than Jay, who therefore acknowledged that the British had a legitimate point, and he ordered Adams, now American minister in London, not to press the issue of British garrisons until he could put the American house in order. In a lengthy report to Congress, Jay argued that all treaties were laws of the land, an early anticipation of what became the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, meaning that the states were legally obliged to comply with all provisions of the Treaty of Paris. The Virginians would have to pay their back debts, and New Yorkers would have to stop confiscating loyalist estates.35

  A majority of delegates in the Confederation Congress supported Jay’s recommendations, but they were powerless to enforce compliance by the state legislatures. So the British troops remained on American soil, Virginia found ways to avoid paying its British creditors, and New York continued to confiscate loyalist estates. Every Jay initiative based on the assumption that foreign policy would force the confederation to recognize a collective responsibility that cemented the union had become an unmitigated failure. On the contrary, all of Jay’s nationalistic convictions disintegrated once they encountered controversial questions requiring consensus among the states. As Jay succinctly put it to Adams, “I accept that our posterity will read the history of our last four years with much regret.”36

  Jay’s final failure ironically involved the Mississippi, which drew all the dreams of American destiny into its currents. The arrival of a new Spanish ambassador, Don Diego María de Gardoqui, in June 1785 launched a debate over the Mississippi Question, when Gardoqui declared that Spain was closing the southern Mississippi to American traffic. As it soon became clear, there were conflicting dreams about America’s westward destiny that quickly assumed a decidedly sectional shape, not so much east versus west as north versus south.37

  Congress had provided Jay with strict instructions to regard American navigation rights on the Mississippi as nonnegotiable. Jay himself had taken that same position in Paris three years earlier, but the Gardoqui announcement altered the political context. As Jay explained to Congress, the United States was not prepared to go to war with Spain, at least at present: “For, unblessed with an efficient government, destitute of funds, without Public Credit either at home or abroad, war is beyond our reach.”38

  Some kind of negotiated settlement, then, was vastly preferable. And Jay had, in fact, been negotiating privately with Gardoqui for several weeks. (Spanish officials, upon learning of Jay’s well-known affection for his wife, attempted to send Sarah several presents, including a prize horse, but Jay had them returned.) During the negotiations, Jay operated on the assumption that surrendering control of the Mississippi for a limited time would not be a major concession: “As that Navigation is not at present important nor will probably become much so in less than twenty-five years, so a forbearance to use it while we do not want it is no great sacrifice.” And when the advancing wave of American settlements eventually reached the Mississippi Valley, Spanish control of navigation rights would die a natural death, much in the manner of any Native American presence east of the Mississippi.39

  In return for the temporary surrender of navigation rights, Jay obtained a significant concession from Gardoqui: namely, the granting of “favored nation” status with Spain for all American commodities except tobacco. Jay had violated his instructions in Paris and achieved stunning success. Now he was doing it again—striking a bargain with Spain that averted war and expanded American trade to boot. And there was even a collateral benefit that Jay noticed only near the end of the negotiations. In effect, by temporarily closing American access to the Mississippi, the proposed treaty would discourage settlers from venturing beyond the gradually advancing line envisioned in the Ordinance of 1785, thereby helping to ensure “compact seating.”40

  When Jay presented the proposed treaty to Congress in the summer of 1786, there was a thoroughly sectional split in the reaction. Northern states, which stood to gain the most from the new commercial agreement with Spain, were wholly supportive and praised Jay’s diplomatic savvy. Southern states, with little to gain, conjured up nightmare scenarios of western land values dropping precipitously because of the uncertainty generated by Spanish control of the Mississippi. In a long speech, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina foresaw western settlers throwing themselves into the arms of Spain and severing their connection with the United States. According to Pinckney, surrendering control of the Mississippi, even for a short time, placed American control of the entire domain at risk.41

  This was rather far-fetched, especially given Spain’s waning power, but mere mention of the Mississippi touched a raw nerve for most southern delegates, who regarded Jay’s pragmatic approach to the Mississippi Question as an unprincipled abandonment of America’s singular role as master of the eastern third of the continent. And speaking of singular roles, Jay’s insistence on conducting the negotiations privately and in total secrecy almost invited questions about a northern conspiracy. James Monroe, a Virginia delegate who had initially supported the treaty, had a political version of the conversion experience, concluding that Jay was complicitous in a plot to shift American policy toward the west in a way that sacrificed southern interests to some ill-defined northern plan for domination. “This is one of the most extraordinary transactions I have ever known,” Monroe wrote to Patrick Henry, “a minister negotiating expressly for the purpose of defeating the object of his instructions, and by a long train of intrigue and management seducing the representatives of the [northern] states to con
cur in it.”42

  Conspiracy theories usually look rather bizarre in retrospect, when the issues at stake have lost their relevance and the political temperatures have cooled down. In order to comprehend the irrational edge of the southern argument against Jay’s proposed treaty, one needs to recover the following forgotten facts: first, that the Virginians were accustomed to regarding themselves as the proprietors of the Ohio Country and therefore deeply resented any policy toward western expansion that spoke with a northern rather than a southern accent; second, any discussion of the Mississippi generated a kind of electromagnetic field in which alternative visions of America’s future hovered like mirages over the western horizon; and third, Jay’s previous diplomatic posts in Madrid and Paris had allowed him considerable independence from Congress—a discretion that came with distance—but what worked so well abroad generated resentment at home. It also did not help that he was the person who officially apprised all the southern states that they were obliged by treaty to pay back debts owed to British creditors, a price tag that Monroe estimated at £2.8 million for Virginia.43

  In the end, the Mississippi Question was never answered. All seven northern states voted to ratify Jay’s treaty. All five southern states voted to reject it. (The Delaware delegation lacked a quorum.) Then the southern states, led by Virginia and South Carolina, invoked the provision in the Articles requiring a nine-vote majority for approval of all treaties. Pinckney wrote Jay, warning that “if you proceed we shall consider you as proceeding upon powers incompetent and unconstitutional.”44

  Jay was gracious in defeat, thanking the delegates of Congress for their obviously difficult deliberations. Then he paid a call on Gardoqui, informing him that the treaty was dead, but that he could privately assure the Spanish king that the United States would not contest Spain’s control of navigation of the Mississippi for the foreseeable future. Americans would have to forfeit the benefits of expanded trade with Spain, but there would be no war.

  Watching all this from Mount Vernon, Washington regarded this inconclusive outcome as wholly satisfactory. With his preternatural sense of where history was headed, he observed that demography would trump diplomacy. The delegates in Philadelphia were merely quibbling over problems that would be settled by those families streaming over the Alleghenies by the thousands: “Once the white population becomes sufficient in western lands, there is no power that can deprive them of the use of the Mississippi. Why then should we prematurely urge a matter…if it is our interest to let it sleep?”45

  While Jay agreed with Washington’s strategic assessment, his experience with the sectional politics surrounding the Mississippi Question deepened his despondency about the fate of the Confederation Congress, which he now regarded as a political arena in which the states came together to display their mutual jealousies, almost a laboratory for the triumph of parochialism and provincialism. To say that something snapped in Jay would not be accurate; he was temperamentally incapable of losing his composure. But something shook his faith that providence had plans for America, that the current confederation of states was destined to cohere into a single nation-state if one waited patiently for the providential forces to align themselves.

  In that somber mood, he unburdened himself to Washington: “Our affairs seem to lead to some Crisis, some Revolution, something that I cannot foresee or Conjecture. I am uneasy and apprehensive, more so than during the war. Then we had a fixed Object, and though the Means and Time of attaining it were often problematical, yet I did firmly believe we would ultimately succeed because I was convinced that Justice was with us. The case is now altered, we are going and doing wrong, and I therefore look forward to Evils and Calamities.” Achieving nationhood, he now believed, was a more challenging task than winning independence.46

  During more optimistic moments, Jay had expressed his belief that the inadequacies of the government under the Articles would prove so obvious over time that they would be corrected incrementally, from within, without recourse to dramatic interventions. Now he reached the conclusion that the very structure of the Articles of Confederation was fatally flawed, inherently incapable of self-correction. He shared this diagnosis with Adams, his former colleague in Paris, who he knew would agree with him:

  I have long thought and become daily more convinced that the Construction of our federal Government is fundamentally wrong. To vest legislative, judicial, and executive Powers in one and the same Body of Men, and that too in a Body daily changing its members, can never be wise. In my opinion these three great Departments of Sovereignty should be forever separated, and so distributed as to serve as checks on each other. But these are Subjects that have long been familiar to you and on which you are so well informed to anticipate every thing that I might say on them.47

  Jay was referring to Adams’s Thoughts on Government (1776), which had proposed the basic framework subsequently embodied in the state constitutions, now suggesting that the same three-branch framework should be established at the federal level. Given the current political context in the Confederation Congress, there was not the slightest possibility that such a fundamental reform would occur from within; indeed, any proposal to establish a more energetic federal government would be eviscerated by the state and sectional voting blocs it sought to replace.

  It followed logically, then, that root-and-branch reform was necessary, and that the leadership for such a movement must come from outside the currently gridlocked Congress. In a separate letter, Jay shared these same strategic thoughts with Washington, then concluded: “The Plan is not matured; if it should be well concerted and take Effect, I am fervent in my wishes that it may conform with the Line of Life you have marked out for yourself, to favor your Country with our Counsels on such an important and single occasion. I suggest this merely as a Hint for your Consideration.” This was a diplomatic way of alerting Washington that the looming crisis might require his reappearance on the public stage.48

  There were almost surely other unrecorded conversations about reform of the Articles going on in the corridors and taverns of New York. But with all the advantages of hindsight, if one was looking for the moment when the first glimmering of a campaign to replace and not just reform the Articles enlisted the enormous prestige of America’s singular figure, this was it.

  Washington, for his part, agreed wholeheartedly with Jay’s analysis of the problem, but not with his solution. “I coincide perfectly in sentiment with you,” he wrote, “that there are errors in our National Government which call for correcting, loudly I will add…but my fear is that the people are not yet sufficiently misled to retract from error.” His major task in the recent war had been deciding when to engage the British army and when to defer in favor of better terrain or superior numbers. In this case, deferral was probably the wise choice, he advised, since a convention called to reform or replace the Articles at present would most probably produce an embarrassing defeat that would set back the cause indefinitely. In short, though things were bad, they had to get worse before they became better. On the matter of his own role in Jay’s prospective political campaign, Washington remained enigmatically silent. Meanwhile, things proceeded to get worse.49

  Chapter 4

  THE COURTING

  I have had my day.

  George Washington to Lafayette

  DECEMBER 8, 1784

  Soon after receiving Jay’s proposal, Washington summed up his sense of the political situation in a letter to Lafayette. “A General Convention is talked of by many for the purpose of revising & correcting the defects of the federal Government,” he observed, “but whilst this is the wish of some, it is the dread of others from an opinion that matters are not yet sufficiently ripe for such an event.” Left unsaid was the intractable fact that the majority of state legislators opposed any effort at political reform, not because they believed it would fail but because they feared it might succeed. Any energetic projection of power at the federal level defied their understanding of revolutionary princip
les, making the very weakness of the Confederation Congress its most attractive feature. Meanwhile, beyond the halls of Congress and the corridors of the state legislators, ordinary Americans were getting on with their lives, relieved that the war was over, blissfully indifferent to any political debate that ranged beyond the borders of their towns or counties.1

  Nevertheless, Washington’s description of the dilemma facing prospective reformers of the Articles was quite accurate, and it was just the latest installment in a long-standing pattern of frustration almost as old as the Articles themselves.

  As we have seen, the first reform proposal to find its way into the historical record came from Alexander Hamilton in July 1783, when he was serving as a delegate in the Confederation Congress. A few weeks later, with time on his hands while waiting for a quorum to arrive at Princeton, Hamilton decided to draft a resolution calling for a convention to amend the Articles. Characteristically, it was the political equivalent of a cavalry change against impossible odds in which even assessing the risk was regarded as a form of cowardice.

  Hamilton’s list of defects in the Articles began with the basic flaw: namely, that they were less a government than a league of nations lacking even a mandate to govern. (The fact that you had to use the plural rather than the singular to describe the Articles provided a grammatical clue to the deeper problem.) There needed to be stronger executive and judicial branches; the legislature should be empowered to tax and not just request money from the states; and foreign policy, especially the treaty-making power, must become a federal responsibility immune to meddling by the states. Finally, the nine-vote requirement for principal legislation was a recipe for stalemate and had to be scaled back.