by Carol Berkin
Unlike Hammond, Genet was wholly lacking in this ability to blend, in one letter, a purported concern for America with a demand for action on the government’s part. When New York governor George Clinton informed the French minister that the brigantine mentioned in Hammond’s memorial must remain in harbor until the president decided its fate, Genet responded with obvious frustration. He had defended—“as long as I was able”—his country’s incontestable right to fit out armed vessels in US ports, based on the treaties of 1778. In the face of the president’s resistance to that right, he had conformed “as much as was in my power” to Washington’s wishes. He could do no more. “It now belongs to my country to direct me what course I am finally to pursue. It belongs to the French nation [to] determine whether, to the sacrifices they have already made to you[r] country, they ought to add that of renouncing a right, the Exerc[ise] of which alarms the Politics of your government.” Here was a hint that Genet recognized the change in regime might mean a change in his instructions, but here too was his predictable imputation that Washington and his cabinet acted dishonorably because they were pro-British. The charge had become a regular part of Genet’s repertoire. It emerged in private conversation as well as official communications, with Genet declaring to Connecticut Federalist Noah Webster that the president was “under the influence of British Gold” and warning that the administration planned to make Americans slaves of Great Britain.95
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“The people began to speak out.”
—Henry Lee to George Washington, September 17, 1793
GENET’S EARLY SEPTEMBER correspondence revealed fully his dislike of Washington and his cabinet members. Yet Washington endured Genet’s barbs with greater equanimity than he had earlier in the summer. He knew that popular opinion was now firmly behind him, for new outpourings of support were arriving regularly. Yet although most of the memorials and town resolutions Washington received focused on Genet’s insults to American sovereignty, the president’s staunchest supporters read the situation differently. For men like Governor Henry Lee of Virginia, the French minister was only a pawn in a dangerous game being played by the Republicans. In a letter to Washington, Lee laid the blame for Genet’s “mad conduct” on “the insidious & malignant councils of some perverse ambitious Americans,” including the members of Philadelphia’s Democratic Society. They had initially met with success in their attacks on the president, Lee conceded, but they had underestimated the American people. Soon enough their plan was finally understood and “consequently detested.” This interpretation reinforced Washington’s own belief that the more immediate danger came from domestic opposition; it was the opposition party and its extralegal organizations known as the Democratic Societies, not Genet’s arrogance or ignorance, that threatened the federal government. Lee would soon have more reason to be convinced of this domestic danger, as the excise tax uprising in western Pennsylvania grew more serious. In that case, too, he would see the Democratic Societies as a motivating force behind the dissent.96
As the month continued, Genet’s personal vendetta against the president only intensified. He had finally learned that his recall had been requested. Jefferson had composed a letter to Genet on September 7 informing the minister of the president’s decision, but he had delayed its delivery for several days. The tone of the letter was harsh and its message clear: because Genet had operated in opposition to the laws of the United States, the president found it necessary to demand a replacement who would respect both those laws and the authorities who enforced them. The secretary specifically mentioned Genet’s failure to restrain the consuls’ actions, pointing out that the president had found it necessary to do this himself by revoking the diplomatic privileges of the French consul at Boston. The president, Jefferson added, would allow Genet to continue his functions until a new minister arrived—providing Genet obeyed the law and behaved appropriately.97
Genet’s response was explosive. Indignant and feeling betrayed by Jefferson, Genet vented his anger in a long, accusatory letter to the secretary of state. With an abrupt salutation of “Sir,” Genet lectured Jefferson on the constitutional powers of the United States executive and legislative branches as well as the source of those powers. He insisted once again that Congress alone represented the sovereign people and thus they alone had the right to decide issues relating to treaties. The president, in short, had overstepped his powers.
Because America’s “aristocrats, partisans of monarchy, partisans of England, of her constitution” were now laboring to ruin him in his own country, Genet intended to speak out. He had no doubt that they were acting out of jealousy at his popularity with the American people and alarm at his “unshaken and incorruptible attachment to the severe maxims of democracy.” He then launched into a review of the allegations made against him, followed by a vigorous denial that he had exercised “a sovereign influence over the American people” or attempted to make them take part in the war. He cited his responses to the many addresses made to him by citizens to prove that his only goal was to obtain a “true family compact” between the two republics. He was confident, he declared, that an inquiry by the next Congress into the motives of the president for demanding his recall would vindicate him entirely. He then informed Jefferson that he intended to publish all their correspondence as well as the instructions the French government had issued to him and to the consuls. This would allow the American people to see the falsity of the accusations against him.
Genet might have stopped there, but his indignation led him to press on with a litany of accusations against the president. These ran the gamut from Washington’s failure to utter a personal greeting when the two men first met, to the president’s continuing display of medallions of the former king, to the alleged persecution and arrest of Americans who had volunteered to serve the French cause and infringements of French rights under the treaties of 1778. But the president’s greatest crime was his refusal to immediately call a session of Congress “to take the true sentiments of the people.” Against all these insults to France and to its representatives, Genet declared, “It was indispensable that my resistance should be equal to the oppression.”98
The September 18 letter amounted to a declaration of innocence, a vindication of behavior, and a condemnation of Washington and his administration. Its impact was muted by the fact that Jefferson, along with most of the government, had fled the Yellow Fever epidemic then raging in Philadelphia and did not return until the end of November. By the time the secretary of state read the letter on December 2, the Jacobin government had already determined to replace Genet with four commissioners.
On October 18, as the epidemic at last showed signs of ending, Gouverneur Morris sent two important dispatches to the president. The first reported that the request for Genet’s recall had been delivered to the French government. But Morris devoted the bulk of this letter to the political situation in France. The Jacobin government, he said, was despotic in principle and in practice. They were arresting former allies and imprisoning many men on mere suspicion. The “emphatical Phrase in Fashion among the Patriots,” he continued, is that “Terror is the order of the Day.” The queen had been executed a few days earlier, and this act, Morris believed, would silence the opposition to the regime. He predicted that France “must soon be governd [sic] by a single Despot.” Only a day later, Morris wrote once again, this time to report details of the French government’s plan for the replacement of Genet. They will probably send over three or four commissioners, he told Washington, and these men will ask the president to assist them in securing the “person and Papers” of Genet. The implication was that Genet would be another victim of the Terror. Morris hoped Genet would indeed be arrested. The seizure of Genet and his papers, he believed, would make his successors afraid to insult the US government lest they meet a similar fate. Morris’s dispatches did not arrive in Philadelphia until January 1794. By that time, the new chief minister, Joseph Fauchet, and his commissioner colleagues were on
board the frigate La Charente, bound for America.99
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“It is with extreme concern I have to inform you…”
—George Washington to the Senate and House of Representatives, December 2, 1793
BY DECEMBER 1793, Genet was no longer the instigator of diplomatic crises; he was merely a pest. Yet even his pestering could occasionally create problems for the administration. Eager to remove one of the most serious blemishes on his record, Genet decided to charge Rufus King and John Jay with libel. He demanded that the attorney general prosecute the two men. Edmund Randolph asked Jefferson for guidance on the matter. Perhaps inadvertently—or perhaps to drive a wedge between Washington and two influential New York Federalists, Jefferson poured oil on the fire, telling Randolph that the president recommended considering Genet’s request. In the end, Randolph rejected Genet’s demand, but he attempted to soften the blow by suggesting the minister could find lawyers in private practice willing to pursue the suit. A thwarted Genet decided on a more dramatic alternative: he would publish his exchange of letters with the attorney general in the local press. A furious Rufus King wrote to the president, criticizing the administration for encouraging Genet’s attack on his veracity. King demanded that Jefferson turn over his memo of July 10 that would vindicate the two New Yorkers. Washington rejected this demand, concerned that King would publish a cabinet document in the newspapers. The resulting breach in the friendship of Washington and King was not healed until the spring of 1794, when the president agreed to give King a certificate containing the relevant section of Jefferson’s memo and King pledged not to publish it unless “very imperious circumstances” made it necessary. Fortunately no imperious circumstances arose, for the arrival of the four French commissioners ended Genet’s interest in a libel suit.100
When the First Session of the Third Congress opened on December 3, Washington took the final steps to effectively neutralize the French minister. The president began by laying out the circumstances that compelled him to “admonish our citizens of the consequences of a contraband trade, and of hostile Acts to any of the parties” mentioned in his Proclamation of Neutrality. It was now up to Congress, he declared, to “correct, improve, or enforce” the admonitions and penalties he had set down. He concluded with a somber warning that America must arm itself and be prepared to defend itself against assaults by European powers. “There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it.”101
Two days later, on December 5, the president sent a second message to Congress in which he formally announced the request for Genet’s recall. He left no room for doubt that the request was justified. Genet’s actions had involved America in a war abroad and created “discord and anarchy” at home. As supporting documents, Washington sent Congress the correspondence between Jefferson and Genet, sworn affidavits relating to seizures of ships, and French government documents relating to the United States.102
At the same time that Congress was validating Washington’s decisions, officials in the West and the South were taking steps to ensure that Genet’s Spanish expeditions were aborted. Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory, issued a proclamation enjoining all the inhabitants of the territory to “abstain from every Act of hostility against the Subjects and Settlements” of Spain. And in South Carolina, a report by an investigative committee of the state’s House of Representatives named five men, along with “other Persons unknown to your Committee,” who were guilty of receiving and accepting commissions from Genet to “raise, organize, train and Conduct Troops within the United States of America.” The committee took pains to condemn Edmond Genet for masterminding this “daring and dangerous attempt by a Foreign Minister to intermeddle in the Affairs of the United States.” Genet, they said, used the men’s affection for the French Republic to draw them into this nefarious scheme. The committee recommended that the Americans guilty of succumbing to Genet’s “insidious Arts” should be tried for high crimes and misdemeanors. The South Carolina legislature unanimously concurred. William Moultrie, the man who had informally assisted Genet in the initial stages of this recruitment, now formally transmitted the legislative resolves to the president. His own links to the plot appeared nowhere in the committee report. After receiving the South Carolina report, the president debated whether to immediately revoke Genet’s credentials. The question proved moot when the American ship carrying official French assurances of Genet’s recall arrived in port.103
As for Genet, he declared himself ready to go home. His plans for the future were uncertain, but he thought perhaps he would start a new career in the military. It quickly became clear, however, that a very different fate awaited him. On his arrival, the new minister, Jean Antoine Joseph Fauchet, immediately demanded that Washington turn Genet over as a prisoner of the French Republic. The Jacobins, who had executed many Girondins as treasonous plotters against the Revolution, had concluded that Genet shared their guilt. He was no longer the zealous patriot; he was a counterrevolutionary traitor.104
Despite all the difficulties Genet had caused the president, Washington was not ready to hand the young Frenchman over to his new masters. As long as the United States had been “in danger from his Intrigues,” Washington told Rufus King, the administration was justified in wishing him ill; but, now that he was deprived of his position and fated for the guillotine, the president admitted he felt compassion for Edmond Genet. That compassion led him to grant Genet asylum in America.105
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“I augur more good than evil.”
—Alexander White to James Madison, December 28, 1793
FEDERALISTS HAD MUCH to celebrate that winter. Congress had approved the policy of neutrality set down in President Washington’s proclamation. The president’s popularity had soared. Pro-French sentiment had ebbed. As Robert Troup would put it to Hamilton, “It is the general opinion of the friends of the government here that the President has never appeared to greater advantage than in his last Speech to Congress.… Genet is completely on his back & I cannot now hear of any person who attempts seriously to defend his conduct.” On December 15, former New York senator Philip Schuyler told his son-in-law that he rejoiced that the president’s December 5 message to Congress had been “so explicit relative to the french [sic] Anarchist.” Most Federalists would have agreed with Schuyler that “Genets [sic] intemperance has served the federal interest, instead of Injuring it.” Others stressed the equally positive result that the “madness of Genet” had “silenced the declamations of our Demagogues.”106
The Adams family, who were unsparingly anti-French, parsed out the personal and diplomatic failings of Genet as well as the motives of the French government. In their various commentaries on Genet’s character flaws or on French deceitfulness or the poor judgment and fickleness of the American public, the Adamses revealed the Federalists’ often contradictory efforts to identify the lessons to be learned from their year with Edmond Genet. John Adams boasted to his wife, Abigail, that he had taken the measure of the young Genet long ago, while serving as an American commissioner to the peace treaty negotiations that ended the Revolution in 1783. Then, as now, Adams declared, “He appears a Youth totally destitute of all Experience in popular Governments popular Assemblies or Conventions of any kind; very little accustomed to reflect on his own or his fellow Creatures hearts; wholly ignorant of the Law of Nature & Nations, the civil Law, and even of the Dispatches of ancient Ambassadors with which his own Nation and Language abound. A declamatory Style, a flitting fluttering Imagination, an Ardour in his Temper, and a civil Deportment are all the Accomplishments or Qualifications I can find in him.” Adams’s son, John Quincy, considered Genet “the most implacable and dangerous enemy to the peace and happiness of my country,” yet he insisted that, fundamentally, Genet was no different from other French ministers to the United States. They were all equally contemptuous of
Americans. “They have interspersed numerous menacing insinuations amid their warmest pretences of friendship,” he declared, adding that “the murderous fangs of the tiger, peep through the downy velvet of her paws, at the moment when she fawns the most.” John Quincy’s younger brother, Thomas Boylston Adams, viewed Genet more sympathetically. The young Frenchman was nothing more than the unlucky agent of the French government’s imperialist ambitions. “The Minister of the French Republic,” he wrote, “has litterally [sic] pursued the Instructions of his Masters, the Executive Council of France.” Abigail Adams proved the most pessimistic of all. Despite the blow dealt to the pro-French party by Genet’s recall, she recognized that partisanship in America remained strong. “Partizans are so high respecting English and French politicks,” she told her husband, and men “argue so falsly and Reason so stupidly that one would suppose they could do no injury, but there are so many who read and hear without reflecting and judging for themselves… that if we are preserved from the Calamities of War it will be more oweing [sic] to the superintending Providence of God than the virtue and wisdom of Man.”107
