A Sovereign People

by Carol Berkin

  The majority of Federalists were eager to see the dispatches released to Congress, for they were confident this would increase popular support for the president and further embarrass the Republicans. But it was the Republicans themselves who made that embarrassment possible. By insisting that the president was holding back vital information, they provided an opening for Connecticut Federalist John Allen to move that Adams forward the dispatches to the House. The Republicans, still hoping to find some evidence that the administration was responsible for the failure of the mission, insisted that the instructions given to the envoys also be released. As New York Republican William Livingston put it, his constituents deserved to know that “all has been done to preserve the country in peace” before they were told that war was inevitable. On April 2, after intense debate, the House voted 65 to 27 in favor of Allen’s motion. All 27 negative votes came from Federalists who did not want the envoys’ instructions made public. But other, more savvy Federalists were willing to gamble that there was evidence of French contempt for America in the dispatches and that this evidence would do more damage than any flaws in the envoys’ instructions.60

  On April 3, twenty days before John Marshall safely boarded a ship headed for home, the president complied with the House demands. He submitted copies of several of Marshall’s dispatches. He also provided copies to the Senate. Because of his concerns about the safety of the envoys still in France, he was careful not to disclose the names of the Frenchmen who acted as Talleyrand’s agents. They were referred to simply as X, Y, and Z. Adams requested that Congress keep the dispatches confidential until they had carefully considered the consequences of their publication. The House dutifully cleared its galleries of visitors and reporters before settling in to read the chronicle of a failed mission to France. For the next few days, House members pored over John Marshall’s account of demands for a bribe, a loan, and apologies for Washington’s farewell address and President Adams’s comments in his May 1797 message to Congress. On Friday, April 6, Delaware’s James Bayard, a Federalist, moved that twelve hundred copies of the dispatches be printed. This would allow each representative a dozen copies to transmit to his constituents. Some debate followed over the number of copies that ought to be printed, although there was no challenge to making them available to the public. In the end, Bayard’s proposal was accepted. The Senate also chose to publish the dispatches, ordering five hundred copies to be printed. The public was about to see for itself the French haughtiness that had so rankled John Marshall.61

  The House then continued its debate on what defense measures the nation should take. Throughout these debates, Republicans spoke carefully: they did not want war with France, but neither did they want to appear cowardly in the face of French insults to American sovereignty. Their strategy was to focus on the cost to the nation of military preparations that they argued were unnecessary. Why burden Americans with such expenses, they asked, when no one genuinely believed France would invade America? It would be wiser to accept the French decree against American ships carrying British produce and manufactures than to declare war on France.

  Federalists responded to this call for compliance with accusations of disloyalty. Alexander Hamilton’s 1797 essays, “The Warning,” now seemed prescient. He had warned that the American “Gallic Faction” would bring down the US government in the same manner that factions in Europe had undermined their own. The gravest danger to American independence, Hamilton had written, was the presence of a party whose “servility [was] abject enough to love and cherish the hand which despoils us, to kiss the Rod which stings us with unprovoked lashes.” In the spring of 1798, representatives like John Allen took up the same theme in response to the Republican call for submission to French demands. “Is this the language of an American who loves his country?” Allen asked. “No, sir,” he declared, “it is the language of a foreign agent.” For Allen, the political apostasy of the Republicans was all too obvious. “I believe,” he said later in the debates, “there are men in this country, in this House, whose hatred and abhorrence of our Government leads them to prefer another, profligate and ferocious as it is.”62

  Republican resistance to preparedness could not withstand such attacks. Thus Congress proceeded to prohibit the exportation of arms; took steps to procure cannon, arms, and ammunition; agreed to increase the size of the artillery and engineering forces; and decided to expand harbor defenses. By April 26, a bill to create a department of the navy had passed its third reading. Although war was not declared, warfare was beginning.63

  Benjamin Bache did his best in the Aurora to counteract the growing war spirit and the explicit condemnation of the Republican Party. His argument closely followed the argument Thomas Jefferson had been making: the French Directory was not complicit in the demand for a bribe; Talleyrand acted alone when he insulted the United States by his greed. Thus, both Jefferson and Bache argued, there was no reason to go to war over the avarice of one man. Other Republican newspapers strained to associate Talleyrand with the Federalists, pointing out that during his years of self-imposed exile in America he had been a friend of Hamilton and Rufus King. This argument gained no traction. Nor did Bache’s insistence that the envoys had acted precipitously and had never made a genuine effort to negotiate. Bache singled out Elbridge Gerry, alone in Paris, as the only envoy who attempted to negotiate in good faith. Nothing demonstrated how out of step Bache was with the mood of the country than his call for his readers to oust the president. “We are doomed to feel the horrors of war,” he wrote, “unless the People step forward with one voice and induce the chief magistrate to retire, or their Representatives in Congress to impeach him, for having provided a war.” Bache’s main Federalist rival, John Fenno, was quick to realize how dramatically popular opinion had shifted. On April 12, he published a mock obituary for the Republican Party. The French faction, he wrote, “has died, as it lived, a violent and disorderly end.”64

  Despite the revelations in the dispatches, George Washington was not as ready as Fenno to celebrate the end of the opposition party. “One would think,” he mused to Timothy Pickering, “that the measure of infamy was filled, and the profligacy of, & corruption in the system pursued by the French Directory, required no further disclosure of the principles by which it is actuated than what is contained in the… Dispatches, to open the eyes of the blindest; and yet, I am persuaded, that those communications will produce no change in the leaders of the opposition.” Only a mass desertion by their followers would force men like Madison and Jefferson to abandon their support for France.65

  The blows to the Republican Party continued with each new revelation from the president. On May 4, John Adams submitted a second set of dispatches to Congress. He released more documents on June 5, 18, and 21. In the early days of June, several of the Republican members of the House quietly left for home, resigned to the fact that anti-French sentiment dominated both in the halls of government and in the streets. Their departure allowed Congress to easily pass An Act to Suspend the Commercial Intercourse between the US and France, and the Dependencies thereof, which Adams signed on June 13. This was an embargo similar to the temporary one passed against Britain in 1795. Then, in July, the House brought to an end the years of worry over America’s treaty obligations to France. It voted to abrogate the treaties of 1778, freeing the United States of any obligation to come to the defense of France or its territories if under attack.66

  The support of Congress seemed to embolden the president. In the message accompanying the June 21 documents, Adams pledged that he would “never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored, as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.” But it was the outpouring of popular approval that most dramatically bolstered the president’s confidence in his own leadership. For the first time in his life, John Adams was a popular hero.67

  8

  “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.”


  —Robert Goodloe Harper, June 1798

  FOR A BRIEF—and for John Adams, glorious—moment American citizens showered their president with admiration and support. Memorials, signed by farmers as well as merchants, by working-class men of Boston and young elite gentlemen of Philadelphia, by local governments, churches, and individuals, poured in, each praising the president for his bold response to the French attack on American honor and sovereignty. Men who had sported the French cockade in their hats only a few years earlier now wore the black cockade that denoted their opposition to all things Gallic. Where once the “Marseillaise” was sung at public events, Americans now sang “Hail Columbia” and Robert Treat Paine’s “Adams and Liberty.” South Carolina Federalist Robert Goodloe Harper’s toast “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute,” offered at a dinner honoring the president that June, became a rallying cry as stirring as “No Taxation Without Representation” had once been.68

  The president seemed to relish the opportunity to lambast the Republicans in his replies to the memorials flooding his office. After almost two years of constant assault and insult in the Republican press, Adams allowed himself the satisfaction of venting against his critics and their party. “Woe to that country,” he declared to the inhabitants of Harrison County, Virginia, “which supinely suffers malicious demagogues to excite jealousies, ferment prejudices, and stimulate animosities between [political parties].” Responding to a memorial from the mayor, aldermen, and citizens of Philadelphia, he pointed to the domestic dangers “when these Agitations of the human Species, have affected our People, and produced a Spirit of Party, which Scruples not to go all Lengths of Profligacy, falsehood, and malignity in defaming our government.” James Madison considered the president’s replies to his admirers “grotesque.” Even Alexander Hamilton, not known for measured views of a party that had opposed every facet of his economic and fiscal plan for the country, worried that Adams had gone too far. But other Federalist leaders offered their own lavish praise for the president. From Massachusetts, for instance, George Cabot found the president’s replies to the memorials “manly, just, spirited, and instructive.”69

  For the moment, even in the stronghold of Jefferson and Madison, anti-French sentiment predominated. Although a war with Virginia planters’ best customer, France, would wreak havoc on tobacco prices, Virginians as much as Connecticut men resented the French contempt shown to their country. The old Antifederalist firebrand Patrick Henry urged unity in the wake of the XYZ affair. Many Virginians joined the rush for war preparedness, fearful that a war with France would mean an invasion from the Caribbean by black revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture and a wave of slave revolts throughout the southern states. Cities in the Old Dominion raised private funds to build frigates and sloops of war, and voluntary militia brigades were formed in the coastal city of Norfolk. Similar support for defense measures prompted South Carolina to build a fort that it named in honor of its native son, the envoy Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.70

  Despite the bellicose posturing in his replies to the memorials, Adams remained reluctant to act. He shared with his predecessor a firm belief that France would not attempt to invade America. Although Washington had no doubt that France was capable of “any Species of Despotism and Injustice,” he insisted that, in the face of a nation whose citizens were united to oppose it “with their lives & fortunes,” an invasion would be folly.71

  But if Adams was hesitant to declare war, members of his cabinet and the Congress were not. By May, war hawks like Pickering and Secretary of War James McHenry had seized control of military preparations. Ignoring the president’s conviction that a buildup of naval forces was essential, these men pressed for the increase in ground troops that Alexander Hamilton desired. Federalists in the Senate were eager to comply with the hawks’ requests. On Tuesday, April 24, the House read for the first time a Senate bill that authorized the president to raise a provisional army of 20,000 men. This triggered a fierce debate over the dangers Republicans saw in this move. Granting the president this authority, they argued, was unconstitutional; raising an army was a legislative, not an executive, power. If this bill were passed, what, Albert Gallatin asked, would prevent the president’s co-optation of other legislative powers? Running through the debate was the fear of a standing army that lay deep in the American psyche and had prompted an earlier Congress to include the preservation of state militias in the Bill of Rights. Despite Gallatin’s concerns that such a large federal army might be used domestically “for dangerous purposes,” the Federalist-dominated Congress approved its creation.72

  There was some basis for Gallatin’s concern, for by July the new army was effectively under the control of Alexander Hamilton. Although Washington had been chosen to command the provisional army, it was understood that his participation would be minimal. Actual army leadership was to fall on three major generals. For these posts, the former president recommended Hamilton, Pinckney, and Henry Knox. Both Knox and Pinckney had outranked Hamilton in the Revolutionary War, yet Pickering and other cabinet members pressed Adams to give Hamilton ultimate authority with the rank of inspector general. In the face of secret maneuvering and overt pressures from his cabinet, Adams bowed to their demand that the man he most hated, Hamilton, take pride of place over the other major generals.73

  Hamilton had been a steady voice of moderation in the XYZ crisis, opposing both a declaration of war against France and a formal alliance with England. But his appointment as inspector general of a greatly expanded army prompted visions of empire in his head. Sounding disturbingly like an American version of Citizen Genet, Hamilton suggested using the army for an invasion of Louisiana and Florida, both still held by France’s ally Spain. He saw other uses for the army as well: it could be an effective weapon against future domestic insurrections. In short, Hamilton and his supporters were willing to use preparedness as an excuse not only for conquest but also for the very suppression of protest that Gallatin feared. John Adams wanted nothing to do with Hamilton’s ideas. Later, Adams would describe the difference between Hamilton and him by declaring, “This man is stark mad or I am.”74

  Despite the war hawks’ enthusiasm, neither the president nor the Congress proved willing to issue an official declaration of war. In July, at the height of popular anti-French feeling, Fisher Ames advised Secretary of State Pickering that it would be best to simply proceed “as if we were in war.” Whether this was the best strategy remained to be seen. How long could the American public accept the costs of preparedness when its government seemed content with a mere approximation of war?75

  9

  “There is reason to believe that the XYZ delusion is wearing off.”

  —Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1799

  POPULAR PATIENCE, IT turned out, was not infinite. As summer turned to autumn and no declaration of war was made, war fever began to fade. The price of indecision was dramatized that winter as news was released of the bizarre actions of a private citizen, Dr. George Logan, who had gone to France on an unauthorized peace mission. Armed with a certificate of introduction from his good friend Thomas Jefferson and carrying letters from the French consul in Philadelphia to members of the Directory, Logan, a Pennsylvania Republican, had somehow managed to meet with Lafayette in Hamburg and to talk with members of the Directory and Talleyrand in Paris. In these conversations, Logan had urged the French to lift their embargo on US vessels and release the imprisoned American sailors captured by French privateers. These steps, he assured them, would make the renewal of cordial relations between the two countries possible.76

  Philadelphia’s Federalist press had learned of Logan’s “mission” when he departed for Europe in June, responding to it with indignation and horror. The Philadelphia Gazette labeled the doctor “a noted and violent democrat” and condemned his mission as “a species of conspiracy, most fatal to freedom.” The Gazette warned that Logan’s goal was to see France forcefully—“with bayonet and guillotine”—reorganize America
’s government. On his return that September, Logan faced a second firestorm of criticism. Pickering condemned Logan’s actions, and Washington treated the doctor with icy restraint when Logan visited to pay his respects. Logan’s supporters, however, praised him for his efforts to lay the foundation of peace between France and America that the Adams administration had failed to do. At the end of January 1799, Federalists passed legislation forbidding unauthorized citizens from negotiating with any foreign governments involved in a dispute with the United States. The act quickly became known as the Logan Act.77

  Logan was not alone in his frustration with the government’s indecision about war with France. Complaints about the cost of preparedness grew as government spending nearly doubled, and there was palpable anger at the direct property tax on houses and slaves passed by Congress to cover military and naval expansion. In early 1799, this discontent would lead to violence in Pennsylvania once again, as hundreds of armed German farmers from the eastern part of the state, led by John Fries, freed a dozen men held as tax evaders. As the rebellion spread, both the governor and the president hurried to act. The uprising, like the Whiskey Rebellion, which it closely resembled, ended only in the face of state militia and a federal military force.78

  Concern about the presence of an idle but greatly expanded army was also spreading. In Kentucky, where resistance to federal government had begun with the excise tax, “A Friend to Peace” tapped into the pervasive fear of a standing army. He warned that these newly assembling troops would be used not to defend the country against France but to oppress American citizens. They would “dragoon the… multitude” and “force them to bend their necks to the yoke.” By January 1799, Jefferson, who had continued to believe that the XYZ affair was a “dish cooked up by Marshall,” urged Republicans in Congress to distribute thousands of handbills exposing the “dupery” practiced on the public. Included in this “dupery” was most of the legislation passed by the Federalist Congress, including the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts, the Stamp Act, the direct tax, the additional army, a huge navy, and the millions of dollars used in the name of preparedness. It was clear that a policy of preparedness no longer convinced: the president either had to declare war or seek a new peace.79