THIRTY-SIX
Earthquake Faults
(1793 and thereafter)
France and England were fighting. Thus were created the underlying situations that, whatever the surface developments at home or abroad, caused the political earthquakes which rocked Washington’s second term as President.
The conflict between American adherents of the rival powers now moved from purely emotional expression to very painfully practical considerations. Involved were not only American prosperity and unity, but also whether the United States, which had during its colonial past been drawn into every general European war, could and should keep from becoming a belligerent on one side or the other.
Washington was convinced that the nation should stay neutral at almost any cost. As he put it, “If we are permitted to improve without interruption the great advantages which nature and circumstances have placed within our reach, many years will not revolve before we may be ranked not only among the most respectable [worthy of respect] but among the happiest people on this globe. Our advances on these points are more rapid than the most sanguine among us ever predicted. A spirit of improvement displays itself in every quarter, and principally in objects of the greatest public utility, such as opening the inland navigation … improving the old roads and making new ones, building bridges and houses, and in short pursuing those things which seem most eminently calculated to promote the advantage and accommodation of the people at large. Besides these, the enterprises of individuals show at once what are the happy effects of personal exertions in a country where equal laws and equal rights prevail.”
Most Americans agreed, at least in abstract terms, that the United States would be better off if she kept out of the war. This conclusion carried with it a fundamental straining paradox. Secretary of State Jefferson and the majority of the people were pro-French, but pacifism on the part of the United States was irrevocably to the advantage of Britain. Since Britain possessed the greater sea power, it was France that needed reinforcing on the ocean. And England had in Canada a North American base, with many strong harbors, which France could not rival unless she could induce the United States to serve as her naval base.
Both Britain and France depended on seaborne commerce for food and war materials at home and also in their colonies. The United States possessed a large merchant marine which in peacetime traded primarily with England, the variously owned West Indian islands, and also directly with France. Since it was to the advantage of each combatant to force this commerce into channels that nation found most satisfactory, American skippers had reason to quail when they saw armed vessels on the horizon. Unless the American vessels were also to be armed and permitted by national policy to fight, their only protection from violent interference (apart from superior speed in escape) lay in rights granted to neutrals by specific treaties or generally by international law.
During the passionate years of Washington’s second term, two definitions of neutral rights had major currency. One, known as “free ships make free goods” provided that, except for objects like cannon directly intended for making war, and also except when a port was tightly sealed by an effective blockade, neutral shipping could carry anything unimpeded anywhere. However, the maritime code known as Consolato del Mare defined as contraband—cargo which might legally be removed from neutral ships—any goods that could be construed by one belligerent as the property of the other. Beyond these conventions lay the possibility that, when a neutral merchantman was overhauled, more would be done, on one pretext or another, than merely removing contraband: the ship would be confiscated and its sailors made captive. Of course, vessels flying the flag of any active belligerent were fair game, with no reservations, for vessels commissioned by the enemy.
This type of warfare was entirely apart from the movements of fleets and all formal naval battles. Encounters were (long before the days of radio) solitary meetings on the vast ocean under no eyes but the sun and the moon and the stars. Activity and severity were encouraged by the fact that making captures greatly enriched the captors. Any contraband removed or any ship impounded was regarded as a “prize.” If a “prize court” set up by the side that had made the capture ruled that the capture was legal under whatever rules that belligerent was then observing, the prize was considered “condemned” and the captured property (often including the very clothes the sailors wore) was sold at auction. The proceeds were divided between the owners and the crew of the vessel that had made the capture.
Should the captor be a naval vessel, the owner’s share went to the government. But most of the raiders were “privateers.” Privateering was legalized piracy. Any ship which could secure an official commission—known as a “letter of marque”—from a representative of a belligerent government could go a-raiding. No quicker way of making money existed than to have a privateer in which you were concerned bring in a rich prize that was satisfactorily condemned by a friendly prize court.
Since France, the weaker sea power, could not keep the sea-lanes open by force, she was eager to keep them open by interpretations of international law favorable to her. She was all for the doctrine that free ships made free goods. But England had no intention of sacrificing the rewards for her greater maritime strength. She insisted on that narrower interpretation of neutral rights, the Consolato del Mare, and found excuses for going further, seizing, when her interests seemed to make this imperative, all American ships bound for French possessions.
Pro-French sentiment in the United States was strongly in favor of the doctrine that free ships made free goods. The Francophiles argued that for American vessels to be able to trade almost as they pleased was greatly to America’s economic advantage. Jefferson, as Secretary of State, with the support of the President, tried to make the free doctrine stick. Yet no one should have been surprised that Great Britain merely shrugged.
Apart from what American trade the British should permit with French possessions, an extremely sore point was British impressment of American seamen. Most of the common sailors in the Royal Navy had been brutally forced into service and were brutally treated. At foreign ports, they scurried across wharves at midnight and enlisted on American merchantmen where, because of the similarity of language, they were indistinguishable from native sailors. No one denied that when an American ship was stopped on the high seas, the British had the right to take their own deserters back. The difficulty was that British captains, who admittedly suffered from the confusion, took advantage of it and impressed at gunpoint squads of American citizens.
As it exacerbated Anglo-American relations, the situation eluded solution. The Anglophobe Jefferson considered that giving American seamen certificates of citizenship would only make matters worse since the certificates would be lost or stolen, and their absence would be considered ipso facto proof that the seamen were British deserters. Jefferson’s suggestion was that, unless an American ship was found carrying an obviously inflated crew, all should be assumed to be Americans. This meant, in effect, that free ships made free sailors. To this the British could not agree as it would soon have left their naval vessels unmanned.
Significantly it was the agrarians who got most excited about the rights of American merchants and their crews. The merchants themselves wanted to help England, and they accepted the fact that American trade was at the British mercy. Better to take advantage of what practices Britain would encourage and accept than to incite that naval power into wielding with greater violence a whip which the United States, possessing no warships, could not take from her hands. If that proved the only available way, the merchants could prosper from trading, under British protection, with British possessions alone.
The strongest partiality for the French and their revolution could not blunt the hard fact that, should the United States be drawn into the war, she would be much safer on the side of Britain than on the side of France. Francophiles might argue that France would eventually conquer Europe and then be a valuable friend or a dangerous enemy, but in any
situation immediately foreseeable her friendship could do little to help the United States, and her enmity could find little way to express itself across a British-dominated ocean. Since the United States possessed no navy, throwing what sea power she could raise—refitted merchantmen—into the French scale would not change the British domination of the ocean. Against the British the American seacoast would be as painfully vulnerable as it had been during the Revolution. And the British bastion of Canada had recently become doubly menacing.
Up until the French Revolution, Spain had been on the opposite side from England in the European balance of power: there had thus been no danger of cooperative action between Canada and Louisiana. But mutual hatred for the French regicides had brought the kings of England and Spain into alliance. Washington now had to fear a pincer movement up and down the Mississippi and Ohio River systems. The armies of England and Spain would be strengthened by clouds of Indian allies.
That the United States did possess weapons against Britain in some ways further complicated the situation, since it raised the question of how far these weapons could be used without bringing on war. To begin with, trade with the United States was of great importance to England’s beleaguered isle. This trade could be impeded or stopped in American ports by such tariff legislation as Washington and Jefferson had long vainly supported, or, in extreme instances, by an actual embargo on vessels owned by England or intending trips to British possessions. Furthermore, although the United States could not change the balance of navies, her privateers could harass the British sea-lanes. A continuing pro-French argument ran that war with the United States would be so disadvantageous to Britain that in helping France the United States could go very far. How far?
Britain desired no more from the United States than passive acceptance of the rulings her government made. France desired active help, and she had trump cards to play.
There were hangovers from the treaties negotiated during the American Revolution in return for French aid. The Treaty of Alliance committed the United States—this was known as “the guarantee”—to protect the French West Indies should the French call for such assistance. The Commercial Treaty provided that French privateers could bring their prizes to American ports and that powers hostile to France were forbidden to fit out privateers in the United States.
The guarantee had continuing value for pro-French propaganda, but invoking it was not, at least for the time being, to the French advantage. Without a navy, the United States could do little as an active belligerent towards protecting the French West Indies. Better to have America supply the islands (which were cut off from the homeland) as a neutral. British sea power could then be counteracted by having American diplomacy extend neutral rights to the ultimate possibility.
The second French advantage was the popularity of their cause in the United States. The revolutionaries in Paris, insisting that they were fighting for the rights of all men, considered one of their most valuable weapons the ability to appeal to the people of other nations in opposition to rulers who were in opposition to France. No population seemed more promisingly pro-French than the American.
The French liked the idea of inspiring American frontiersmen to attack Spanish Louisiana, but the truly magic word in their American policy was “privateering.” Under a broad interpretation of the Commercial Treaty, the United States could give invaluable assistance to French privateers. France had her diplomatic representatives in the United States. They could set up prize courts on American soil, removing any necessity for French privateers operating in the western Atlantic to brave the British navy by carrying their prizes across the ocean to French soil. French privateers could be fitted out in the United States and manned by American seamen eager for prize money and anxious to serve what they considered the cause of freedom. Best of all, the diplomatic representatives could give French letters of marque to American shipowners, creating a legal fiction that would allow American boats to go raiding on the ocean in the French service.
That such action would greatly endanger the neutrality of the United States the French realized, but they considered the advantages to their war effort so great that they were willing to jeopardize the lesser advantages they would achieve by having American shipping able to claim neutral rights in the face of British naval power. If Washington’s priorities were otherwise, if he were to consider American neutrality more important than filling the western Atlantic with pro-French privateers, why they would have to use their popularity with the American Republicans to brush Washington aside.
THIRTY-SEVEN
A French Bombshell
(1793)
During Washington’s Presidency, news of European happenings reached the government and the people simultaneously and in the identical manner: through intelligence brought into seaports by the casual arrival of merchantmen. First there would be rumors, often the result of gossip exchanged when ships out of various foreign ports met in mid-ocean, and then there would be solid accounts, usually copies of foreign newspapers which skippers waved excitedly as their vessels tied up to American wharves. Newspaper editors began setting up type even as government officials began exchanging dispatches.
At the very moment when Washington learned of the outbreak of war between England and France, the maritime community reacted to the same news. This was followed by a further thundering of hooves in the Mount Vernon driveway. At the very first glance, the President recognized the information brought him as extremely grave. French consuls were giving American shipowners letters of marque and American vessels were fitting out with cannon so that they could seize British merchantmen plying the nearby waters.
It was impossible to believe that the British would accept the veneer of legality that made these American ships seem French ships or would sit quiet while their vessels and sailors were brought as captives into American ports. Motivated by a combination of greed for prize money and pro-French idealism, a small group of private citizens were preparing, in effect, to bring the United States into the war with England. They would have to be stopped—but how?
Congress was not in session, yet the Constitution provided that the President could act in foreign policy matters only with the “advice and consent” of the Senate. Wide geography and slow transportation dictated that a special session could not be convened in less than six weeks or perhaps two months. By then, the ocean would be aflame.
Washington decided that, whatever the legal niceties, the executive would have to strike fast and hard. As horses were prepared for the dash of his carriage to Philadelphia, he wrote Jefferson and Hamilton to draw up plans for measures that would prevent American citizens from embroiling the United States with either England or France. War with France was included in the request in order to keep a neutral balance. The actual need was to keep the United States from being drawn by France into war with England. That this was the case filled Washington with concern as he rumbled northward through the tender green of early spring. What would be the reaction of the strongly pro-French Secretary of State?
Jefferson was thrown into the quandary that was for the rest of his service in the cabinet to tear at his nerves—and his candor. It was contrary to his principles to help the British; it was contrary to his principles for the executive to override a constitutional prerogative of the Senate. But he could not deny it was to the interest of the United States not to fight England. When the cabinet met, he voted with the other ministers for an executive proclamation. His face-saving proviso (tactfully prepared for him by Hamilton) was to insist that the statement should not define American policy towards the European conflict as “neutrality.” This proved so flimsy a cover that the presidential fiat was known, then and ever after, as the Neutrality Proclamation.
The proclamation, published on April 22, 1793 (ten days after firm news had reached Washington of war between England and France), warned that citizens who contributed to hostilities on the ocean would receive no protection from the United States and would be pro
secuted whenever their acts were within the jurisdiction of American courts. “The duty and interest of the United States,” the President stated, “require that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers.” Washington was to assert that throughout the rest of his Presidency, he pursued without deviation the policy thus laid down.
As soon as the proclamation was published, the Republican press howled that France and freedom had been betrayed. The executive had finally revealed its itch for monarchy. These attacks deeply disturbed Washington. Jefferson’s reactions were confused. He could not resist writing ecstatically to Senator Monroe, “All the old spirit of ’76 is kindling.” Yet the fact remained that he had voted for the proclamation.
Madison, who was vacationing in Virginia during the recess of the House, sent Jefferson angry blasts. Since Madison wanted no more than did Jefferson an all-out war with England, Jefferson could have replied that if it had been his friend who was Secretary of State, saddled with unavoidable responsibility, Madison would have been forced to vote as Jefferson had. Instead Jefferson inaugurated his continuing practice of pretending to his correspondents that he behaved at the cabinet sessions as he would actually have done had he been free to respond to his emotions rather than to practical necessity. In writing to Madison, Monroe, and others, he denounced the proclamation as a pro-British plot fomented by Hamilton, and explained away his own support under a web of various pretexts.
Freneau, flying ever higher on the wings of vituperation, published that Washington had signed the Neutrality Proclamation because the Anglophiles had threatened otherwise to cut off his head. Jefferson noted that this made Washington “sore and warm.… I took his intention to be that I should interpose in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk in my office. But I will not do it! His paper has saved our Constitution which was galloping fast into monarchy.”
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 31
