by Carol Berkin
The mood in Republican circles was glum. Few Republicans challenged the president’s decision to have Genet recalled, and fewer still were so foolish as to deny the many failings of the French minister. In Congress, they had followed Jefferson’s advice and joined in the praise of Washington for his decision to issue the Proclamation of Neutrality. The question for Republicans was this: Had pro-French sentiment evaporated as a result of the revelations about Genet? Virginia Republican Alexander White thought not. The French government, he assured his friend Madison, had only to disavow Genet’s conduct and the attachment to America’s sister Republic would surely increase.108
White’s optimism proved correct: pro-French sentiment still ran deep, especially within the Third Congress. In 1794, with Genet’s outrageous frontal attack on American sovereignty out of the way, a House of Representatives dominated by Republicans turned its attention to the economic insults of America’s other major trading partner, Great Britain. Thus, at the start of 1794, the House of Representatives began a long and heated discussion over foreign commerce.
For three months, from January 3, 1794, to March 25, the House debated the relative value of commerce with Britain and France and the relative guilt of each in ignoring American neutrality. On March 25, 1794, the House at last sent to the Senate a resolution “that an embargo be laid on all ships and vessels in the ports of the United States bound to any foreign port or place for the term of thirty days.…” Federalists would have viewed this as a minor victory, despite the serious damage it would do to US revenue, because it avoided a direct and exclusive challenge to Britain. Then, on April 17, 1794, it was agreed to continue the embargo until May 25, but only with those countries who did not have an existing commercial treaty with the United States. This, of course, meant an embargo on Britain. Politics had triumphed: on April 21, the Republicans pushed through a resolution imposing non-intercourse with Britain by a vote of 58–38.109
The fear that such a policy would be approved had left the President and his Federalist supporters with only one option: Washington must send a special envoy to London to negotiate a treaty with Great Britain. The result was the controversial Jay Treaty of 1794 that ended the embargo on Anglo-American trade. But for the rest of the decade—and into the next century—Americans would wrestle with two questions: Who is their most dangerous enemy, and how could they best protect and assert their country’s sovereignty? On the answers to these questions, Federalists and Republicans would never agree.
Epilogue
IN NOVEMBER 1794 Genet married Cornelia Clinton, daughter of the very New York governor who had once challenged Genet’s right to sell captured British goods in his state. Soon afterward, the Jacobin government was replaced by a more moderate regime, and Genet was given the opportunity to return to his homeland. But the conditions he hoped to impose—including a new diplomatic appointment—were rejected. Genet thus settled into the life of a New York country gentleman, busying himself with schemes to construct canals and prevent epidemics. He would never again involve himself directly in politics, although a scathing attack on him in 1797 by Congressman William Giles of Virginia prompted him to publish a long letter defending his career as a French minister to the United States. In it Genet placed the blame for his downfall on the former secretary of state. Jefferson had posed as his friend, Genet wrote, but had betrayed his trust; he had sabotaged Genet’s use of popular support to achieve his mission. Yet neither that betrayal nor the attacks in Congress by former friends like Giles persuaded Genet to trade his new country for his old. In 1804, at the age of forty-one, Edmond Charles Genet became an American citizen. When he died in 1834, it is said that the state papers of New York lined their columns in black, bands on steamboats passing the Genet home played dirges, and long lines of carriages followed him to his tomb.110
The country gentleman Edmond Genet became bore little resemblance to the young and brash revolutionary with the convert’s zeal for a new cause. As Citizen Genet he had embraced the Girondin mission to reshape the European world and liberate oppressed people on both sides of the Atlantic. But zeal could not achieve what finesse and skill and knowledge might have. Genet demanded when he should have suggested; he harangued when he should have bargained; he barged ahead when he should have shown patience. Genet could be many things—charming, handsome, and creative—but he could not be a diplomat.
The Genet affair exposed the difficulties a weak nation faced in attempting to regulate its relationship with far stronger nations. Neither France nor England was willing to honor Washington’s policy of neutrality; in the midst of the epic battle raging between them, they saw the United States as a supplier of goods who could not dictate the terms of exchange. It was also true that the neutrality policy itself was too nebulous and Washington’s administration was too often reactive rather than proactive in establishing its basic rules. Even when those rules were generated, the government bureaucracy was too small to enforce them. The recall of Edmond Genet did not solve these problems; American neutrality would be contested as long as the war in Europe continued.
The Genet affair did have positive effects, however. These could be found in the domestic realm. Just as the Whiskey Rebellion would do, Genet’s attack on Washington’s authority galvanized American support for the president. But in this case that support was as much for the office he held and the powers given it by the Constitution as for the man himself. The Genet affair also alerted the public to the important and far-reaching role the federal government had as the country’s representative to the wider world. Foreign diplomacy had been placed in the hands of the federal government by the Constitution; now it was widely accepted that this, in fact, was where it belonged.
Federalists like Hamilton and Knox were justified in celebrating both the new support for the federal government and their success in withstanding France’s frontal attack on American autonomy. But the Genet affair was only the first challenge their government would face from France in the 1790s. The next one was less intrusive, but it inflamed Americans even more.
Part III
THE XYZ AFFAIR
LIKE ALL NATIONAL histories, ours has provided memorable and inspiring slogans. “Give me liberty or give me death” and “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” are exclamations that still have the power to evoke patriotic indignation and defiance. The slogan of the XYZ affair—“Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute”—has similar power. In the context of the 1790s, when the United States was young and eager for respect from the more established, and more powerful, nations of Europe, it is often seen as the nation’s first diplomatic line in the sand. The slogan captured America’s determination to assert its sovereignty and its refusal to bow to foreign demands. Like the Genet affair, the XYZ episode involved France, but this time the conflict was more dramatic.
Historians have had little difficulty reconstructing the long and ultimately unproductive negotiations between Elbridge Gerry, John Marshall, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and the wily French minister Charles Talleyrand. John Marshall’s dispatches, Elbridge Gerry’s written accounts, French government records, synopses of cabinet meetings, the personal correspondence of American political leaders, and the many pages of debate and discussion preserved in the Annals of Congress all allow us to tell the story of what came to be known as the XYZ affair. But interpreting the significance of the XYZ affair has proven more difficult.
Here, just as in the Whiskey Rebellion and the Genet affair, most historians of the era have located the importance of the XYZ affair in the domestic party politics of the final years of the decade. From this perspective, the heart of the story lies in the nation’s repudiation of the Federalists and the triumph of the Republican Party. In the aftermath of the XYZ affair, a fatal combination of war preparedness without a declaration of war and a futile effort to silence criticism and opposition in the nation’s newspapers left the Federalist Party divided and with dwindling popular support. Together, the policies of prepa
redness and suppression eroded the popularity that President John Adams had enjoyed immediately following the revelation of French insults to America and led to the Republican victory in 1801.
This charting of the rise and fall of the Federalists is broadly accurate. But perhaps too narrow a focus on the impact of the XYZ affair in party politics eclipses another, equally significant outcome: the emergence of loyalty to the federal government and the Constitution as the sine qua non of patriotism. The XYZ affair quickened the processes set in motion by the federal government’s response to the Whiskey Rebellion and the Genet affair. Again, a Federalist administration faced a dire threat to the country’s legitimacy and sovereignty. Again, the members of the administration worried that the American experiment in representative government might fail. And, again, despite partisan divisions, the nation’s leaders managed to win the devotion of the people of the disparate states and bind them ever more to the vision of government they had ratified.
1
“The conduct of the French Government is so much beyond calculation.”
—George Washington, April 1797
GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS carried into the presidency by a unanimous vote, but his successor John Adams won his election in 1797 by the slimmest of margins: only three votes stood between the feisty, fussy Massachusetts revolutionary and his opponent, the Virginian Thomas Jefferson. Adams, however, probably considered the underwhelming support for his candidacy just another example of the failure of his fellow Americans to appreciate his contributions to the nation. He knew he lacked the charisma of the other members of the revolutionary cohort. He was short and stout, without the military bearing of a Washington or the grace and physical beauty of a Hamilton. He was neither a fiery orator like Patrick Henry nor a master of prose like Jefferson. He was argumentative, often suspicious, and lacked the easy amiability of an Edmund Randolph or the elegant manners of a Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. In a moment of brutal self-evaluation, he had ceded writing the Declaration of Independence to Jefferson, declaring himself too “obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular” for the task. Over the years, Adams had frequently bemoaned the fact that his position in the pantheon of revolutionary heroes was not secure. Despite all he had done—despite his early and fervent call for independence, despite his sacrifice of family and fortune during years of service as a diplomat and treaty negotiator, despite his intellectual contributions to republican political theory—John Adams remained unsung. Yet, in 1797, here he was, the second president of the United States, being asked to follow a man lauded as the father of his country.1
Even had Adams been widely admired and liked, the problems before him as he entered the presidency would have been daunting. When Washington left office, an opposition party that took shape in the wake of Hamilton’s fiscal policies was steadily expanding its reach, aided by the Republican press and brilliantly guided by Adams’s own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. The new president had also inherited the tensions arising from the lines of political fracture, North and South as well as East and West, that played out in bitter debates in Congress and, during the Whiskey Rebellion, in open resistance to federal laws. Indeed, the close vote that carried Adams into the Executive Office was testimony to the tensions between the centripetal and centrifugal forces simultaneously shaping the early Republic: Adams carried New England, New York, and New Jersey while Jefferson carried the southern states and the Whiskey Rebellion strongholds of Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
The Federalist Party was still powerful enough in 1797 to elect a president, but the man it had put in office did not control the party; if anyone did, it was Alexander Hamilton. The majority of Adams’s cabinet, carried over from Washington’s second administration, looked to the former secretary of the treasury for direction in both domestic and foreign affairs. This bred a resentment and frustration in the president that grew into a deep hatred for his rival, Hamilton. The sensible thing for Adams to do was dismiss the cabinet and begin anew, with men loyal to him. But Adams, who had legislative and diplomatic experience but was a novice administrator, seemed strangely blind to the value of assembling such a cabinet. Even worse, he seemed reluctant to use patronage to win the support of important Federalists for his policies. Even if he knew how to wield patronage, however, he would have hesitated, for Adams did not identify himself as the leader of a political party. Instead, he saw himself as that republican ideal, the disinterested, independent statesman, a leader above “faction” who served the best interests of the citizens. It was a romantic vision in an era when ideological differences were impossible to ignore.
Yet Adams’s problems went far beyond how to develop a governing style that would bring the Federalist Party under his control. And, to be fair, the problems were not of his own making. He had inherited the resentment of western farmers and southern slave owners that had emerged during Hamilton’s tenure as secretary of the treasury. And he had inherited the Gordian knot of American neutrality in a still-raging European war. Throughout the 1790s, and beyond, England and France simply continued to redefine American neutrality as they wished, ignoring explicit policy when it was convenient and applying steady pressure on the US government through their own policies. They would sometimes woo the United States with offers to lift trade restrictions or to provide trade advantages, but just as often they disrupted American trade or devised strategies to provoke the United States into war with their enemy. The French had been the most blatant manipulators. A long line of French ministers to the United States, from Genet to Pierre-August Adet, followed policies that showed contempt for American sovereignty. Yet Britain also insulted American sovereignty. Throughout the 1790s, and into the next century, Britain refused to accept that sailors born in England or its territories could ever transfer their citizenship to the United States. No matter how assertive Washington’s proclamation and Congress’s Neutrality Act appeared, in reality America’s foreign policy remained in 1797 just as it had been in Washington’s administration—largely reactive.
For Adams, as for Washington, France would prove a far more serious challenge than Britain. By mid-decade, the French government had emerged as Europe’s bully, treating all neutral nations, not just the United States, with open contempt for their sovereignty. American diplomats reported that the French intervened in the domestic politics of other countries, openly supporting men and parties who would be more responsive to French demands and more amenable to French needs. As Alexander Hamilton would put it in “The Warning, No. I,” a newspaper essay of 1797, “The complaints of France may be regarded principally as weapons furnished to her adherents to defend her cause notwithstanding the blows she inflicts. Her aim has been in every instance to seduce the people from their Government, and by dividing to conquer and oppress.”2
John Adams was no stranger to this French strategy. The French minister Pierre-Auguste Adet had openly supported the Republicans in the 1796 election campaign, asserting, as Oliver Wolcott Jr. put it, that “the election of Mr. Jefferson was necessary to prevent a rupture with France.” Among other things, Adet had published the blistering attack on the Washington administration and the Jay Treaty of 1794 that he had originally sent to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering. Wolcott had feared the impact of this written attack; he assured his father that “if Mr. Jefferson is elected it will be owing entirely to the influence of this paper.” Hamilton did his best to counter Adet’s propaganda, publishing an essay called “The Answer” that criticized what he called Adet’s “menacing tone.” The French goal was clear, Hamilton declared: it was “to influence timid minds to vote agreeable to their wishes in the election of president and vice-president.” This meddling, Hamilton added, “is certainly a practice that must not be permitted.” If it led, as it might, to other ministers campaigning openly for candidates, America was certain to suffer the same fate as Poland, that “melancholy example of the danger of foreign influence in the election of a chief magistrate.” Adet’s less-than-subtle—and ultimately unsuccessfu
l—actions prompted his recall by the French government, but his undisguised partisanship and his close relationships with Jefferson, Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin, and other leaders of the Republican Party suggested a continuation of the French tendency to see the United States as a useful, if reluctant, satellite.3
Franco-American relations had deteriorated significantly since the signing of the Jay Treaty between the United States and Britain in 1794. The French voiced strong opposition to the treaty. They claimed it negated many of the promises in the treaties of 1778, and they insisted that it revealed America’s return to British domination. Washington had relied on the American minister to France James Monroe to defuse the situation, but, as a Republican, Monroe seemed unwilling to support a treaty that mended relations with the English. Monroe’s failure to defend the Jay Treaty led Washington to recall him, and this, in turn, provided the French an opportunity to openly criticize US foreign policy.4
The attack on US policy came when Monroe gave his farewell address to the French government, the Directory, in 1796. Monroe spoke of France in friendly and even laudatory terms but the Directory president, Paul Barras, responded with an explicit insult to American sovereignty. Dismissing America as a mere tool of the English, Barras declared that France “would not abase herself by calculating the consequences of the condescension of the American government to the suggestions of her former tyrants.” This could be read only as a warning that retaliatory measures would be taken now that America had allegedly submitted, with the Jay Treaty, to the will of its former masters.5
