by Ian W. Toll
He had not slept well the previous night. He was visibly shaken and his hands trembled badly; he was concerned that he might even faint. He was no great orator and knew it. But he delivered his 2,300-word inaugural speech in a voice that was steady and filled with conviction.
The great danger to American independence, Adams said, came from abroad—from “the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign Influence.” Foreigners were plotting to manipulate the American democratic process, he warned, and if they were not resisted it would be they “who govern us, and not we, the people, who govern ourselves.”
He spoke only briefly on the looming crisis with France. His tone was moderate and his sentiments balanced. He felt “a personal esteem for the French nation, formed in a residence of seven years, chiefly among them, and a sincere desire to preserve the friendship which has been so much for the honor and interest of both nations.” But it was his “inflexible determination” to preserve American neutrality in the European war, and American shipping must be protected against the depredations of the belligerent nations.
Adams knew the crisis with France would define his presidency, his odds of winning reelection, and his place in history. He placed his first hope in a course of diplomacy and negotiation. A new treaty with France would, at a single stroke, avert a maritime war with the former ally and calm the waters of domestic politics. Adams was a veteran ambassador, however, and he knew the practical limits of diplomacy. A peaceful settlement might be unattainable. At a minimum, France must consent to a version of American neutrality that permitted Anglo-American trade to continue unmolested. Beyond that limit Adams would not go; he would not be bullied into offering unjust concessions. Writing that month, he confided in his son, John Quincy: “My entrance into office is marked by a misunderstanding with France, which I shall endeavor to reconcile, provided that no violation of faith, no stain upon honor, is exacted. But if infidelity, dishonor, or too much humiliation is demanded, France shall do as she pleases, and take her course. America is not scared.”
FRANCE WAS AMERICA’S FIRST ALLY. Its troops and ships and money had helped America win its independence. The French Revolution had seemed like a reflection and a vindication of the American Revolution. To many Americans, it was almost inconceivable that France could become an enemy. And yet, in 1796, the United States stood on the verge of fighting its first war, as a sovereign and independent nation, against none other than France. How could it have come to this?
In pledging its blood and treasure to the American revolutionary cause, as it did in 1778, France was chiefly interested in striking at Great Britain. Louis XVI and his ministers could not have been eager to establish the precedent of a successful rebellion against a sovereign. But it also is true that there was a powerful emotional and ideological bond between the two nations. France had been the cradle of many of America’s revolutionary ideals, while America, to a generation of young and idealistic French aristocrats, was a kind of Arcadia that promised to remake and redeem civilization. The marquis de Lafayette was revered in America as a hero of the Revolutionary War. Lafayette, in turn, so loved Washington that he insisted upon referring to himself, in broken English, as “the General’s son” and he named his own son George Washington Lafayette. No American captured the French imagination like Benjamin Franklin, who, during his nine-year diplomatic sojourn in Paris, was adored by the French as a living symbol of New World innocence and integrity. He would later be exalted as a kind of patron saint of the French Revolution. A popular slogan was: “He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”
In the summer and spring of 1789, American newspapers carried the first news of the revolutionary turmoil in Paris. First came the meeting of the Estates-General in May, then the National Assembly in June, and then the fall of the Bastille in July. In August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens was ratified, and Americans could not fail to note its resemblance to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, upon which it was largely based. In its early, temperate stages, from the spring of 1789 through the fall of 1791, the French Revolution was greeted with near-universal rejoicing in America. The beloved Lafayette was conspicuously at the center of the events unfolding in Paris, where he served as vice president of the National Assembly and commander of the revolutionary militia. He sent George Washington the key to the Bastille, engraved with the words: “It is a tribute which I owe to you, as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a Missionary of Liberty to its Patriarch.” On the streets of American cities and towns, a rush of nostalgia brought back all of the old symbolism and music and pageantry of the American Revolution. Liberty poles were erected in town squares, just as they had been in 1776; men wore liberty hats, just as they had in 1776. At festivals and civic feasts, the Stars and Stripes appeared alongside the new Tricolor of Revolutionary France: a red, white, and blue flag designed by Lafayette himself to replace the royal white banner of the Bourbons.
Beginning in mid-1792, however, there were disturbing reports of mob savagery on the streets of Paris. In August, a crowd gathered outside the Palace of the Tuileries, where the royal family was being held in closely guarded splendor, and howled for the king’s head. They slaughtered some five hundred of the king’s Swiss Guards and paraded their severed heads on pikes. Lafayette was denounced and forced to flee across the border, where he was captured by the Austrians and thrown into jail. In September, as foreign armies massed on the border, rumors of a domestic counterrevolutionary plot circulated among the sans-culottes of the Parisian mobs. More than a thousand prisoners, among them women, children, and priests, were dragged virtually at random from their cells and hacked to pieces. The princesse de Lamballe, a friend and confidante of the queen, was raped, murdered, and mutilated; her head was exhibited on a pike beneath Marie-Antoinette’s window. The duc de La Rochefoucauld, the man who had first translated the Declaration of Independence, was snatched from his carriage and stoned to death as his wife and aging mother watched helplessly.
The details of the massacres were so outlandish that many Americans refused to believe them. Jefferson maintained that they should be dismissed as English propaganda. But in late March 1793, shortly after Washington was sworn in for his second term as president, news arrived in Philadelphia that could not be so easily ignored. Louis XVI had been sent to the guillotine in the public square named for his father. As his severed head was lifted from the basket into which it had fallen, cries of “Vive la Republique!” had resounded through the streets of Paris and “every hat was in the air.”
Republicans justified the act. Madison said that if Louis “was a Traytor, he ought to be punished as well as another man,” and Jefferson agreed that monarchs should be “amenable to punishment like other criminals.” On the streets of American cities, liquor-fueled demonstrations provided entertainment to those who would otherwise pass their leisure hours in boredom. French revolutionary anthems such as La Marseillaise and Ça Ira were performed nightly in the theaters. Men and women addressed one another as “Citizen” and “Citess.” Philadelphians lined up to see an exhibit in which a wax likeness of Louis was shoved into a mock-up of the guillotine. The audience was thrilled to watch “the knife fall, the head drop and the lips turn blue.” In Boston, twelve men armed with cleavers performed a ritualistic slaying of an “Ox of Aristocracy.” The animal’s head and horns were erected on a pike in Liberty Square.
Washington, Hamilton, and the Federalists worried that this upsurge of pro-revolutionary sentiment would alienate Britain and pull the United States into the war. Popular demonstrations were mostly harmless, but some of the demonstrators were threatening to take direct action. Democratic societies passed resolutions deploring “the cruel and unjust war carried on by the combined powers of Europe against France” and declaring that “America is implicated in the fate of the French republic.” Francophile militias drilled on public greens and primed their old artillery fieldpieces.
John Adams wondered if there were more rounds fired in America to celebrate the French victory at Valmy than the French army itself had fired in battle. In the seaports, sea officers and shipwrights outfitted privateers to sail against British merchantmen. The British ambassador warned that if American harbors were converted into bases for French privateering, the Royal Navy would retaliate.
Washington’s answer was the historically famous Neutrality Proclamation of April 22, 1793, which decreed that American citizens must observe “a conduct friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers.” Any American found “committing, aiding, or abetting hostilities” against either side in the conflict would be prosecuted.
Before the ink on the proclamation was dry, however, a new ambassador named Edmond-Charles Genet arrived from France with a sheaf of three hundred privateering commissions. Disembarking at Charleston, Genet commissioned four privateers within a week of his arrival. They were christened the Republican, the Sans-Culotte, the Anti-George, and the Patriote Genet. They would be manned and officered by American citizens. Genet empowered Charleston’s French consul to condemn and sell any British prizes that might be brought into port. A week later, the French frigate Embuscade dropped anchor at Gray’s Ferry in the Delaware River with a captured British merchantman, the Grange, in company. Jefferson described the scene to James Monroe: “Upon her coming into sight, thousands & thousands of the yeomanry of the city crowded & covered the wharves. Never before was such a crowd seen there, and when the British colours were seen reversed, and the French flag flying above them they burst into peals of exultation.”
Though the Secretary of State was sympathetic to the French cause, the Grange had been captured within American territorial waters, and he had no choice but to inform Genet that the vessel must be restored to her owners. Genet grandly announced that he would do as Jefferson asked, but only as a voluntary gesture “to convince the American government of our deference and friendship.” The Treaty of 1778, he said, gave him the right to carry on privateering operations against Britain, and he intended to do just that. On July 6, the governor of Pennsylvania reported that a French privateer, the Little Democrat, was making ready to sail from Philadelphia. Secretaries Hamilton and Knox favored erecting a battery of guns on Mud Island, manned by men from the Pennsylvania militia, to prevent her from dropping down the river. Before such action could be taken, however, the Little Democrat weighed anchor and dropped downriver to Chester. When Jefferson asked Genet to stop the ship from sailing, he refused.
In the cabinet meetings that followed, it was decided to call upon the French government to recall the minister. The point, as it turned out, was moot. The Girondin faction which had sent Genet to America was driven from power by a coup d’état engineered by the rival Jacobins. When the news arrived in America, Genet asked for—and received—permission to remain in exile in the United States.
With the Jacobin “Grand Terror” in the autumn of 1793, France surrendered to its worst demons. The Jacobins saw their enemies everywhere, and their answer was judicial mass murder. Everyone was suspected; anyone could be denounced. Summary executions at the guillotine were a daily event. Records gave proof of the mechanical efficiency of the device. On one occasion, thirty-two heads were struck off in twenty-five minutes; on another, twelve heads in five minutes. In Paris, the corpses piled up in the streets and the blood overflowed the gutters, posing a sanitary emergency. In Lyon, the Jacobins grew impatient with the pace of the guillotine. The condemned were simply lashed together and bombarded with cannon fire. The executioners then moved in and finished off the survivors with knives, bayonets, and swords.
American conservatives recoiled in disgust. The French Revolution, they argued, had spiraled into a meaningless cycle of terror and counterterror that would end in autocracy. “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, etc. are furies,” John Adams wrote his son. “Dragon’s teeth have been sown in France and will come up as monsters.” The so-called Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, an abortive tax revolt led by a ragged band of impoverished frontiersmen in western Pennsylvania, seemed to confirm Federalist fears that the turmoil was being imported into America by homegrown radicals. To put down the insurrection, Washington raised an army of thirteen thousand militiamen, a force far larger than any he had commanded in the American Revolution. The rebellion petered out before the army arrived on the scene, but the episode reinforced the Federalists’ premise that anarchy was endemic to democracy. “We might have seen the banks of the Delaware covered with human carcasses and its waters tinged with blood,” warned a Federalist editor; “…and even the head of our admired and beloved President rolling on the scaffold.”
Fearing and reviling what the French Revolution had become, Federalists hoped to reduce the growth of French influence in America. Whatever its flaws, Great Britain offered the chief alternative. Conservatives found much to admire in Britain’s example of a constitutional government that balanced the interests of monarch, nobles, and commoners. John Jay went to London as Washington’s envoy in the hopes of negotiating a treaty that would avert war and reduce Anglo-American hostilities at sea. The Jay Treaty was an act of submission that in effect recognized British naval supremacy and set out the rules by which American vessels could prosper in the carrying trade. News of the treaty sparked a political brushfire. Jefferson derided it as a “monument of venality,” and Madison said it had been forced on the nation by a formidable combination of interests: “the exertions and influence of Aristocracy, Anglicism, and mercantilism,” directed by “the Banks, the British Merchants, the insurance Companies.” Jay was burned in effigy in cities and towns throughout the nation. When Hamilton defended the treaty at a riotous meeting in New York, a protester threw a rock which struck him in the head. Washington supported the treaty, ensuring its ratification in the Senate in August 1795.
Though the Jay Treaty headed off a rupture with Great Britain, it guaranteed that there would be a rupture with France. The French interpreted the treaty as a formal alliance that broke the letter of the old 1778 Franco-American alliance, and as a personal betrayal of the most base and insidious kind. The Directoire, the latest revolutionary government of France, decreed in the summer of 1796 that France would “treat neutral vessels, either as to confiscation, as to searches, or capture, in the same manner as they shall suffer the English to treat them.” The American minister in France, James Monroe, was informed of the decree five days after it had taken effect. The French policy, he was told, would be one of simple parallelism. America was no longer the ally it had once been; therefore, the new policy would be to treat America as no different from any other neutral, and to deal with the nation as it had consented to allow the enemy to deal with it. As an added measure of hostility, the French ambassador to American was recalled and none other appointed. Diplomatic relations were broken off completely.
The real crisis, however, was not in France’s official policy toward the United States, but the avarice of its privateers and the corruption of its prize courts, both in France and in the French West Indies. Essentially, the French practiced high-seas piracy, thinly disguised as national policy. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering reported that in the year 1795, French privateers had captured 316 American merchantmen. He protested in vivid terms the treatment of captured American seamen, of embargoes illegally laid upon American shipping by local authorities in Bordeaux, and of the non-payment of bills run up by colonial officers in the West Indian colonies. The French depredations were increasing both in frequency and in violence. As the privateersmen realized that they had nothing to fear from an American naval force, they drew closer to U.S. shores. When the spring sailing season commenced in 1797, privateers were hovering just off the coast, even sailing into rivers and bays, and taking ships within sight of land. Hostile privateers were hove to at the mouth of Delaware Bay; in the waters just off Sandy Hook in New Jersey; in the placid waters of Long Island Sound; and in the lee of Block Island. There was nothing the United States could do to s
top them.
THE CONFLICT WITH REVOLUTIONARY France was more than a foreign policy crisis. It was a domestic political crisis that polarized the American public and threatened to end in disunion or even civil war. In the minds of Jefferson and his followers, the years 1776 and 1789 would be forever linked in history. The two revolutions constituted a break from the feudal past, a rejection of all tyrants and their supplicants. Other nations would inevitably follow. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll around the globe,” wrote Jefferson. He saw England as “the dead hand of the past”—a fortress of corruption, repression, militarism, privilege, and monarchy. Though he did not advocate entering the war on France’s side, Jefferson advocated a pro-French version of American neutrality, and held the Federalists responsible for provoking French aggression by their evident preference for England in the war raging in Europe.
Adams, by contrast, felt little affection for the French and no confidence in their revolution. He found them passionate, erratic, and undependable. He had experienced at firsthand the subterfuge and doublespeak that seemed to permeate French diplomatic culture, and had concluded that corruption and cynicism were endemic to French society. He held a common prejudice against their Catholicism. He had always been skeptical of the French Revolution, even in the heady days of 1789 and 1790, and construed its later, bloodstained excesses as a vindication of his original instincts. Most of all, he was persuaded that the French were incapable of self-governance, and that their revolution would end in despotism. “The French are no more capable of a republican government than a snowball can exist a whole week in the streets of Philadelphia under a burning sun,” he told Elbridge Gerry.
