The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  THE FIFTH LESSON proved the most useful of all to the man who set the future course of U.S. foreign policy: in the world of diplomacy, nothing is what it seems, so trust no one. He entered that murky world in November 1775, well before the colonies declared independence, when Congress sent him, Franklin, and Jefferson to see a nameless Frenchman who’d requested a secret meeting in Philadelphia. As William Jay remembers his father often recounting, the elderly, lame man stated that the king of France, then officially at peace with George III, favored the colonists’ defense of their rights and wished to help with arms and money. When the trio repeatedly asked by what authority he spoke, the man merely drew his hand across his throat and replied, “Gentlemen, I shall take care of my head.” Shortly thereafter, Congress—impressed by this drama, Jay thought—appointed him to a secret committee to seek aid from abroad.65

  A year later, after further foreign encouragement—especially a secret French loan that Arthur Lee negotiated through the playwright Beaumarchais—the committee sent Silas Deane to France, posing as a merchant and equipped with invisible ink for reporting home, to obtain the promised arms and supplies, which France furnished through a front company to hide its role.66 One of Arthur Lee’s accusations in the Deane-Lee catfight raging in Congress when John Jay assumed its presidency was that Deane had charged Congress for materiel that France had given as a gift. When Tom Paine, secretary to Congress’s Committee for Foreign Affairs, leaked in the press the secret information that France had most certainly given such a free gift, French ambassador Conrad Gérard, to preserve the fiction that France had not aided America while still at peace with Britain, demanded that Congress refute what he claimed was a calumny against “the Dignity and the Reputation of the King my Master”—even though by then France, convinced by the American victory at Saratoga in October 1777 that the rebels could win, had signed a formal alliance with the United States in February 1778. So John Jay, in one of his first acts as president, had to call Paine before the bar of Congress to discipline him for telling the truth. Sacrificial whistle-blower Paine resigned in outrage before Jay could fire him.67

  During Jay’s nine months as president, Ambassador Gérard “used frequently to spend an evening with me,” Jay wrote, “and sometimes sat up very late,” urging on Jay the wisdom of drawing Spain into the war as an ally, and outlining the inducements America might offer.68 He made the same argument to Congress, which in late September 1779 named Jay minister plenipotentiary to Spain, with instructions to seek such an alliance.

  SO SUDDEN was the appointment that Jay could say good-bye to his family only by letter—as could his wife, who, as sharp an observer of the era and as sparkling a writer as Abigail Adams, had with utter unconventionality decided to go with him. “Considering the mortality of man, and my time of life,” Sally’s loving father wrote her, “it is probable I may never see you again. O may God Almighty keep you in his holy Protection, & if it should please him to take you out of this World, receive you into a better!”69

  That very nearly happened. Eighteen days out of Philadelphia, their 185-foot frigate sailed into a winter gale that tore away her masts and bowsprit, and damaged her rudder. The falling spars had injured two sailors, Sally told her mother in a long and typically vivid letter. One, “poor fellow! surviv’d not many days the amputation of his arm.” By no possibility could the jury-rigged ship reach Europe, her officers concluded, though Gérard, who was on board, demanded they continue eastward. Jay, in his first diplomatic negotiation, got the ambassador to agree to head south to Martinique. Sally marveled at her husband’s “firmness & serenity of mind.” As she wrote her mother: “Your whole family love Mr. Jay, but you are not acquainted with half his worth, . . . for his modesty is equal to his merit. It is the property of a Diamond (I’ve been told) to appear most brilliant in the dark; and surely a good man never shines to greater advantage than the gloomy hour of adversity.”

  Now, wrote Sally, as the frigate rolled and fellow passengers played checkers at her cramped table, she is dreaming of Martinique’s fruit, “&, if what I hear of crabs, fresh fish, & Oysters be true, I’ll make papa’s mouth water, & make him wish to forego the pleasures of pruning trees, speechifying Assemblies, & what not for the greater pleasure of messing with us.” A few days later, she added, “A land bird! A land bird! Oh! the pleasure of being near land!”70

  Ashore, she set off to explore the exotic island, which she described with characteristic verve and economy. She always noticed and praised landscapes cultivated and improved by labor. “It is really surprising to trace the effects of industry on the very summits of the hills which are covered with coffee, coconuts, and cane,” she remarked, and went on to describe, with her lifelong delight in how things work, the island town’s ingenious plumbing system. To her father-in-law, once the Jays had left Martinique and were “sweetly sailing before the wind” toward Europe, she wrote two observant paragraphs describing with crisp precision how a sugar mill turns cane into sugar and molasses.71

  JAY’S MISSION to Spain was doomed from the start. With a colonial empire in the New World, the Spanish king, who had his own imperial ambitions in North America that competed with American claims, shuddered at the idea of colonial rebellion and would never officially support one, even to harass Britain. Making matters worse, Spain and France were conspiring behind America’s back. While Congress dithered about whom to send abroad, the two Bourbon powers secretly revived their decades-old Family Compact in the Treaty of Aranjuez, which bound Spain to join the war against Britain in exchange for France’s pledge not to make peace until the Spanish got Gibraltar back—a deal that not only ignored America’s claims but also violated France’s treaty with America by its clandestine change in the peace requirements. Also unfriendly to America, France agreed to let Spain share the Grand Banks fishery, long an American fishing ground, if France could wrest Newfoundland from Britain. And there was one more thing Jay didn’t know: though Spain had helped America with money and supplies early in the Revolution, now that she was herself at war, for goals having nothing to do with American independence, she had no money to spare, despite the legends about her wealth.72

  Jay might have figured out the economic truth beneath the façade early on. The first leg of his trip from Cadiz, where he landed in January 1780, to Madrid, was pure pomp, with sixteen or twenty oarsmen rowing “a very handsome Barge . . . ornamented by a crimson damask canopy handsomly fringed,” Sally wrote in one of her letters, which provide the best account of the Jays’ day-to-day life in Europe. But soon the travelers transferred to something “they’ve the impudence to call . . . Coaches, it’s true they are made of wood and have four wheels, but there the resemblance ceases.” As for the inns, “the awkwardness and filth of every thing exceed description. . . . The very first evening we found that a broom was absolutely essential,” for sweeping out “several loads of dirt in which were contain’d not [less] than two or 3000 fleas, lice, buggs, &c.” Their mules occupied the next room. To add insult to injury, her husband wrote, the landlord charged their party of eight for the fourteen beds in their rooms, observing “that we might have used them all if we pleased.”73 Hardly signs of a rich country.

  For the two and a half years of his “honorable Exile,” as he called it, Jay fruitlessly trailed after the Spanish court as it accompanied the king from palace to palace. Given his paltry salary, Jay lived in furnished single rooms with one servant and could barely afford to hire mules and a chaise to follow the monarch. “So circumstanced[,] I cannot employ Couriers to carry my Dispatches to the Sea Side or to France. My Letters by the Post are all opened”—and indeed the Spanish secretary of state once handed over a top-secret letter that Congress had sent Jay, without bothering to conceal that he’d intercepted and read it. Lack of funds obliged Jay to leave Sally in Madrid, where, as the court had never officially recognized him as an ambassador, she knew almost no one. When a daughter, conceived on shipboard, was born in July 1780, Sally’s “whole heart o
verflowed with Joy & gratitude.” But the baby died three weeks later. “Excuse my tears,” Sally wrote—“you too mamma have wept on similar occasions, maternal tenderness causes them to flow & reason, tho’ it moderates distress, cannot intirely restrain our grief, nor do I think it should be wish’d.”74

  JAY’S FINANCIAL PROBLEMS weren’t just domestic. In its desperation for funds, Congress began spending the money it hoped he could raise from Spain, drawing bills of exchange on him for £200,000 (these typical financial instruments of the time order a second person—Jay—to pay a supplier or lender a specified amount by a given date). Though at first Spain’s minister of state, the Count of Floridablanca, came up with funds when pressing bills came due, and hinted further help, the flow trickled off, the count temporized, and Benjamin Franklin, America’s ambassador to France, had to raise money there to pay both the bills and Jay’s salary.75

  After nearly two years in Spain, Jay diplomatically told Floridablanca to put up or shut up. Was an “intimate union” possible or not? The count told him to outline a treaty, and three days later Jay came back with an offer to let Spain have the exclusive right to navigate the lower Mississippi River in exchange for an alliance, most-favored-nation commercial status, and financial aid—an offer, Jay shrewdly stipulated, that would expire if Spain didn’t sign the treaty before Britain made peace. As always, Spain shied away from accepting American independence. A disgusted Jay wrote to Gouverneur Morris in code: “This government has little money, less wisdom, no credit, nor any right to it.” And he added in his draft but didn’t send, “They have Pride without Dignity, Cunning without Policy, Nobility without Honor.” Seven months later—and six months after Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown and the fighting ended—Franklin wrote Jay to come to Paris and help him negotiate the peace treaty with Britain. “Spain has taken four years to consider whether to treat with us or not,” Franklin wrote. “Give her forty, and let us in the mean time mind our own business.”76

  While from the moment of the Jays’ arrival in Spain, Sally wrote her usual dazzling descriptions, Jay himself, always prudent, waited until they were about to leave before he offered a portrait. No doubt, he wrote, the palace of Aranjuez, south of Madrid, was a charming place, with the king’s parks, meadows, and woods. But “it is not America. A Genius of a different Character . . . reigns over these. Soldiers, with fixed Bayonets, present themselves at various Stations in these peaceful Retreats; and tho’ none but inoffensive Citizens are near, yet Horsemen with drawn swords guarding one or other of the royal Family . . . , renew and impress Ideas of Subjection. Power unlimited, and Distrust misplaced, thus exacting Homage & imposing awe, occasion uneasy Reflections. . . . Were I a Spaniard, these decorated Seats would appear to me like the temporary Enchantments of some despotic Magician, who, by re-extending his wand, could at pleasure command them to vanish, and be succeeded by Presidios, Galleys and Prisons.” All human relations in Spain, and indeed people’s inner souls, catch a tinge of the same despotic spirit. “This is a kind of Prudence which naturally grows out of a jealous and absolute Government, under which the People have, for many Generations been habituated to that Kind of Dependence, which constrains every Class to watch and respect the opinions and Inclinations of their Superiors in Power.” No European splendor can equal “the free Air, the free Conversation, the equal Liberty, . . . which God & Nature, and Laws of our making, have given and secured to our happier Country.”77

  IN MAY 1782, Jay, Sally, and their new baby, three-month-old Maria, left for Paris, with Sally brightening up as they traveled through what struck her as “one of the favorite spots of Nature,” which “the gaiety & industry of the inhabitants” had adorned everywhere with gardens and bowers.78 Admired for her beauty and modishness—a Paris theater audience once mistook the dainty blonde for Marie Antoinette—and with friends like Franklin and the Marquise de Lafayette, Sally flourished. So did Jay, who met his toughest challenge and won his greatest triumph.

  Right after he arrived on June 23, he emerged as the chief American peace negotiator, and the task first looked to him something like a game of pool, with four balls on the table—Britain, France, Spain, and the Continental Congress—except that the balls moved of their own accord, he quickly saw, and didn’t obey the laws of physics when hit. But within weeks he grasped that he was playing a different game entirely, a game of poker for global stakes against the sharpest diplomatic cardsharper of them all, French foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. At sixty-three, the worldly aristocrat, with the star, sash, and haughty bearing of the ancien régime, could draw on over forty years’ experience in foreign affairs, as ambassador to Trier, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire, where he had himself painted lounging on silk cushions in a sultanic turban and fur-trimmed caftan. By the time of the Franco-American alliance, he had conceived a grand global strategy, whose finishing touches he planned to complete in the negotiations at Paris.

  With the privilege of historical hindsight, let’s peek over the count’s shoulder and see what cards he was holding. He had predicted when the French and Indian War ended in 1763 with Britain having driven France out of North America that “England will ere long repent of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. They stand no longer in need of her protection,” and they will respond “by striking off all dependence.”79 Smarting at France’s defeat, he saw that he could punish and permanently weaken France’s most formidable rival by patiently helping the colonists in their inevitable rebellion, amputating a rich and important limb of the British Empire.

  To produce a balance of power advantageous to France, though, he also had to control the shape that a newly independent America would take. She mustn’t be strong or rich enough to be a global power in her own right, and she certainly must not end up allied with Britain. A weak America, squabbling with and distracting England, hemmed in narrow geographical boundaries by foreign powers, and dependent on French protection, would be the best of all possible worlds for Versailles, and it was his task as foreign minister to bring that world into being. Here Spain, his secret ally, could serve as a useful and willing tool, blocking American control of the Mississippi River—barring her westward expansion and hampering her economic growth by cutting off a key trade route.

  Vergennes had begun laying the groundwork for this strategy in 1779, when he sent Ambassador Gérard for his late-night talks urging President of Congress Jay to entice Spain into the war by offering to give up American claims to navigate the Mississippi—a deal that Jay favored until Spain joined the war for goals separate from American independence. Without missing a beat, at the very moment that Jay landed in Spain, Gérard’s successor, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, pressured Congress to change Jay’s instructions and order him to give up America’s claim on the Mississippi, which Jay did, but with the escape clause he had added on his own initiative, voiding the offer if Spain failed to recognize America before peace came. Finally, Vergennes dealt himself an ace in the hole when he persuaded Congress in 1781 to instruct its peace commissioner to hide nothing in his negotiations from “the ministers of our generous ally the King of France; to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge or concurrence; . . . and ultimately govern yourself by their advice and concurrence.”80

  “OUR WAY OF THINKING,” Vergennes wrote Luzerne as the peace negotiations began, “must be an impenetrable secret from the Americans.”81 Certainly Jay’s co-commissioner Franklin, now seventy-six and a Parisian celebrity who had found the French nothing but generous allies, understandably credited their goodwill. But Jay smelled a rat. As Spain, which he despised, would be a party to the treaty, he called first on her ambassador to France, the immensely rich Count d’Aranda, who, like Jefferson, combed the vineyards to stock his cellars with treasures, who employed a full-time silversmith to shine his magnificent plate, and who became Jay’s friend.82 The count unrolled a map of North America and asked Jay where he thought Ame
rica’s western border was. The Mississippi, Jay replied; where did the count think it was? Would he draw it on the map? The count replied that there was no point quarreling about a few acres and he would send Jay the map with his proposed border in a day or two. When it arrived around August 6, 1782, Jay found Aranda had lopped off all the land north of the Ohio, plus what became Alabama and Mississippi, along with part of the future Kentucky and Tennessee.83

  Flabbergasted, Jay and Franklin rushed to tell Vergennes of Aranda’s “utterly inadmissable” landgrab, Jay recounted in his official report of the negotiations. Instead of sympathetic reassurance, they met with unexpected reserve, with Vergennes’ secretary, Joseph-Matthias Gérard de Rayneval, hinting that “we claimed more than we had a right to.” A few weeks later, Rayneval sent Jay a pettifogging memo, backing up the Spanish by saying that, as England never owned the territory just east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio, America could have no claim to it either—and with no territory adjoining much of the river, America also had no navigation rights to it. As for the territory north of the Ohio, America would have to sort out with Britain whether or not that should be part of Canada. When Jay protested that, when he had negotiated with Count Floridablanca in Madrid, the Spanish had taken for granted that America owned much of the east bank of the Mississippi, the French official casually replied that Floridablanca hadn’t then understood the matter.

  “Hence it became evident,” Jay concluded, “from whom [the Spanish] had borrowed their present ideas.” And it became evident to him as well that, when the final negotiations took place, France, for all its protestations of goodwill, “would oppose our extension to the Mississippi” and “our Claim to the free navigation of that River,” and also would back Spain’s right to divvy up the lands east of the Mississippi with Britain.84