by Simon Schama
Caught in the middle of that debate, the first commander in chief was himself much conflicted about how a nation born in war should handle the matter in its future. Washington’s baptism by fire as a young man had been in the British Army’s campaigns against the French and their Indian allies, but there he had witnessed at close hand the habitual contempt that officers like General Braddock had shown for colonial militiamen and volunteers, many of whom had laid out their own money for equipment to defend the British Empire. Washington’s disdain, on the contrary, had been for the mercenary regiments through whom British parliaments and governments meant to enforce unpopular laws and taxes in America. It was a commonplace among American Patriot politicians, inherited from seventeenth-century English Commonwealth writers, that “ministerial armies,” in the phrase of the time, were the tools of despots, servile to their masters and brutal to everyone else. To defeat them was to do good work, not only for America but for the liberties of the world. The opposite of the “ministerials” were grievously provoked citizen-volunteers who would only take to their muskets in defense of hearth and home. Such men, in their own minds, were always citizens first and soldiers second. Their fight was ultimately against soldiering, and only entered into for the express purpose of getting troops quartered on the citizenry out of their peaceable towns and villages. Once that had been accomplished, no further purpose was to be served by remaining in arms. But the trusty flintlock had always to be kept in working order so that the contemptible ministerials would never be tempted to try their luck again.
Hence the symbolic, rather than military, importance of the initial “shot heard round the world” on 19 April 1775, when hostilities began in earnest in the small towns of Lexington and Concord west of Boston. There, the heroic tableau of locals—farmers, smiths, and innkeepers—mustering on the village green and at Concord Bridge to thwart ministerial attempts to seize munitions was literally enacted. It was that news that brought Return Jonathan Meigs among thousands of others riding hard to Boston in 1775. So it ought to have been natural for Washington to have celebrated the Massachusetts Minutemen or their Virginia counterparts, the Shirtmen, as the patriots who won the war. But much of his experience as commander during the Revolutionary War belied that myth. Militias had been notoriously hard to discipline; quick to mobilize but even quicker to disappear. Alexander Hamilton, who was a favorite member of Washington’s personal staff, the group that he called his “family,” conceded in his “Federalist Paper 25” that “the American militia, in the course of the late war have by valor on numerous occasions erected eternal monuments to their fame.” But, he added, “the bravest of them feel and know that the liberty of their country could not have been established by their efforts alone.” Hamilton knew that Washington’s strategic genius and the French alliance had ultimately counted for more than raw patriotic ardor. He had had close ties with many of the foreigners who had come to America. His admiration extended not just to the most famous of them, the marquis de Lafayette, but to figures schooled in European arms like the Prussian baron General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben who had published the first manual of drill and exercises for American troops. At Yorktown—the battle that ended the war—Hamilton knew from personal experience how much was owed to the excavation of mines and tunnels drawn straight from Old World texts and which had allowed American troops to move in close to the besieged British. “War,” he wrote in the same Federalist Paper, “is a science.” It would not be un-American to go to school to learn it.
Even some of those personally cool to Hamilton agreed with him about this. As early as 1776, a more unlikely warrior, John Adams—who, however, could see in his native Massachusetts how tough a fight the war for independence would be—made a proposal to establish a military academy, meant to train officers who might be called on in times of emergency. No one—at least no one in Congress in a position to fund the idea—paid much attention, and some attacked it as incompatible with American liberties. After the war was over, in 1783, Hamilton chaired a committee to study the new republic’s military establishment in peacetime but knew that he would always run up against solid congressional opposition for anything ambitious. The volunteer army was stripped back to barely a thousand. But President Washington and more his brigadier general of artillery and first Secretary of War, the sometime Boston bookstore owner Henry Knox, continued to brood darkly on what the country might need for future preparedness. And much as they hated to admit it, American security began to face domestic as well as foreign challenges. The next five years put the reality of American federal government to the test by attacking its tax collectors and arsenals—in Daniel Shays’s 1786 rebellion in western Massachusetts, and in 1791 in the Whiskey Rebellion west of the Alleghenies where excisemen attempting to collect taxes on spirits were the target. Washington called out the militia to put them down but was not very confident about the loyalty of troops from the disaffected regions. It took militia from other states to deal decisively with the rebels. The president gloomily recognized the ironic parallel with what had happened before the revolution, with his bluecoats now playing the role of oppressor. The difference, he assured himself and the country, was that this time the taxes were being levied in the name of an elected government. (But of course the same thing was being said by British parliaments in the 1760s and 1770s.)
Washington had no intention of using American soldiers against their own fellow citizens unless they had cast off their allegiance to the elected government of the United States. And he was sufficiently exercised about the threat to liberty posed by “standing armies” to hope that the foreign policy of the United States would stay aloof from Europe’s wars, so that the temptation to create a large army would forever be avoided. This instinct was Jeffersonian: the belief that if somehow Americans could turn west and mind their own farms, they would forever enjoy uninterrupted blessings of peace and liberty. But the pragmatic, Hamiltonian side of Washington knew this was just a pious hope, for the Machiavellianism of the European powers was unlikely to abate just because the United States had grandly declared a Novus Ordo Seclorum (a New Order of the Centuries) on the Great Seal. Nor were the Europeans likely to confine their machinations to the old continent since there was too much at stake in the way of money in the new, where they were firmly lodged in Canada, Mexico, Florida, and Louisiana, not to mention the sugar-rich Caribbean. Even supposing the United States remained for a while in a purely defensive posture (and there were many, including Henry Knox, who felt that, ultimately, British and American co-occupancy of the land mass was unrealistic), the natural demographic increase of the country was bound to provoke friction with the other powers on the continent. Sizable French and British armies were already invested in their West Indies, attempting to put down slave rebellions and Creole discontent; their navies were still formidable presences on the oceans, capable of locking down American trade and blockading harbors should they choose.
Though financially shackled by Congress, Henry Knox was all in favor of military readiness, starting with a school that would make future generations of skilled artillerymen, engineers, and officers of horse and foot. The two colonels—Hamilton and Knox—indulged in petty rows about ranking order, but they both thought that their personal military experience made them better judges of what was needed for America’s survival than the penny-pinchers of Congress. Hamilton and Washington worked together on the last speech that the president delivered to Congress in December 1796, which included his wish that both a national university and a national military academy be established. Privately Washington doubted Congress would ever fund it.
He was right. But the idea didn’t vanish altogether. Already, in the early 1790s, West Point was being mentioned as a possible site for such a school. Knox had commanded the artillery bastion there, and Alexander Hamilton had actually been at the fort when Benedict Arnold’s conspiracy had been thwarted. For Hamilton, then, it was entirely right that this should be the place where generations of Am
erican cadets would be instilled with the imperative of vigilance. Where better to professionalize the need for military readiness, the virtue without which Hamilton feared the republic’s independence would be little more than a paper declaration? Should Congress ban the establishment and training of a peacetime army, Hamilton wrote, the United States “would then exhibit the most extraordinary spectacle the world has yet seen, that of a nation incapacitated by its Constitution to prepare for defense before it was actually invaded.” He had a point, but it’s also true that temperamentally Hamilton was trigger-happy. As a boy in the West Indies, he had dreamed of soldiering for the empire and throughout his life had the impulsive streak that made his eventual death in a duel not altogether surprising. The avuncular Washington was not blind to Hamilton’s tripwire devilry, but it was hard for him to take against the lieutenant colonel who, bayonet in hand, had led the storming of the British redoubt at Yorktown, a maneuver that arguably ended the war.
Alexander Hamilton was not just dash and danger. His postwar career, whether in office as Washington’s secretary of the treasury, or out of it, was spent thinking what kind of figure the United States (the two words of which for Hamilton were problematically weighted) would cut in the world. For Jefferson, the republic was supposed to be a marvelous new organism utterly unpolluted by the atavistic habits and warped customs of the old. It would resist the tendency that states, even those boasting parliamentary pedigree like Britain, had of sliding inexorably into oligarchic corruption and tyranny. And that meant it would have no need for professional armies of any size and should indeed always suspect their potential for political mischief. Pay no heed to jaded lessons from the past that insisted that states, like men, could never wean themselves from their habitual savagery. The United States had been born to refute the cynicism that a fresh start was not utopian, and to prove that it was entirely possible to live as a republic of free men and yet be a moral force in the world. War was at once the functional need and customary habit of aristocracies and despots. Do away with the latter, and you did away with the former. The coming of the French Revolution and Jefferson’s own witness of it in Paris only confirmed his belief that the mighty shift from despots to democracies would obviate the habitual need for war—except as a last resort to defend liberty.
Hamilton heard what he considered all this naive Jeffersonian optimism and rolled his eyes. Let Jefferson indulge himself in philosophical entertainment if it amused him, but let him not do so, Hamilton thought, at the expense of American security. It was childish folly to pretend that the political virginity of the United States would be sufficient protection against the predators who prowled the oceans and swarmed across continents with armies numbering tens, hundreds, of thousands. Had not Jefferson and the gentlemen who thought in his fashion observed what had become of the professedly peaceful pretensions of the revolutionary “République une et indivisible,” the “grande nation” that, while disclaiming conquest as the obsolete sport of tyrants, somehow had managed to occupy—and plunder—most of western Europe. Their war to “defend liberty” had become a transparent pretext for empire.
Hamilton urgently wanted his nation to grow up. Unlike his reluctant co-Federalist John Adams and his bitter political foe Jefferson, he had no qualms about looking to the biggest success story of all, the British Empire, as an exemplary model of power. What—other than its unfortunate moment of American coercion and the tendency of its ruler to lose his wits now and then—was actually wrong with the British state? The answer was nothing! Britain had had the wisdom to accept its defeat and concentrate on consolidating its power where it mattered—against the French in Canada and India, on the oceans. Good for Mr Pitt! For Hamilton, it went without saying that there were certain instruments of economic and military heft without which a stance as a great power was unthinkable or at any rate unfeasible: a national debt and a bank of issue, which, as Washington’s secretary of the treasury, he resolved to establish in the United States. Hamilton noticed as well that although many commentators characterized old-regime France as top-heavy, the real machine of pure state power was in Britain. Its officers of revenue and excise—resources without which even the most virtuous of republics could not survive—swarmed over the country, virtually an army unto themselves.
And then there was the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich—a mean and skimpy thing as military schools went and nothing at all to give the impression of a Britannic Prussia. But Woolwich still offered the rudiments of instruction in the military sciences, and it may be that Hamilton had heard of steps afoot to expand the education of arms more systematically. Or perhaps Hamilton looked at the breathtaking aggression of the French Republic and knew that it had nothing to do with the republican élan (as Thomas Jefferson, who had never fired a gun in anger, fondly imagined) and a lot more to do with the incentive of loot and power that Bonaparte nakedly held out to his soldiers. At least, he might have said, there is one citizengeneral who doesn’t speak humbug. But from his French friends in the Revolutionary War, he would also have known that none of the spectacular successes of the French Republic in the field could have happened without a prerevolutionary officer class intensively educated in military technology. Why should the United States, blessed as it was with all manner of such practical learning, deny itself a college where young men of aptitude could create a comparable elite of scientifically minded officers? Meritocracy was power. On that, at least, Jefferson and Hamilton could agree.
But Congress continued to rule that such places were inconsistent with the “principles of republican government.” (And they would cost the nation money it could ill afford.) Instead of being an academy of virtuous, democratically minded citizen-soldiers, such a school was far more likely to breed a military caste, aristocratic in demeanor, separate from, and contemptuous of, civilian society. Worse, such a place might put itself into the hands of some self-appointed hero who had evil designs on the republic. Such horrified imaginings, which seem so far-fetched now, were part of the hot war of principles dividing the politicians of the young United States. Federalists like Hamilton were unafraid of power and believed that the nation could never survive without its vigorous and unapologetic exercise. Anti-Federalist Republicans, champions of states rights like Jefferson, believed that if the power of the government were not strictly confined by the Constitution, it was all up with democracy. For both opposing groups, the fight over the citadel on the Hudson River was a fight over the future of America.
And then, quite suddenly, the debate became less like a seminar where abstract theories contended for America’s future, and more like a crash course in the thorny realities of foreign policy. This loss of innocence began with a development that should hardly have come as much of a surprise. The Jay Treaty regularizing relations with Great Britain, signed on 19 November 1794, had been taken by republican France, then fighting a ferocious war against the British, as an ungrateful repudiation of the alliance that had created the United States in the first place. The Americans did what they could to represent the Jay Treaty as a disentanglement. But in the French government’s view it was a shocking violation of republican solidarity. Since the directors in Paris believed that in this life-and-death struggle for the survival of popular revolutions, all who were not with them were against them, the Jay Treaty was not just the betrayal of American promises never to negotiate a separate peace but, in effect, an alliance with their deadliest enemy.
This was a moment when what had been assumed by Washington to be America’s blessing of distance did not serve diplomatic understanding well. Had the United States a better grasp of the impossibility of neutrality in what had become a world war of ideologies, it might have had some pause in its rush to disarm. On the other hand, in justice to Washington and to John Adams, who succeeded him as president in 1797, given the relentlessness of that total war, was the diplomatic freedom of the United States to be held forever hostage to those earlier engagements? If so, the Federalists pointed out, they
would have merely exchanged colonial masters. Threats and bluster coming from the French in the wake of the Jay Treaty made the scales fall from American eyes. Illusions about the altruism with which France had undertaken to liberate America were now judged sentimental. Instead, that entire enterprise seemed less a disinterested expedition for liberty and more an exercise in French imperial gamesmanship.
The ways in which France then proceeded to make the United States pay for its temerity only confirmed to Hamilton, Adams, and the Federalists that they had done the right thing by signing Jay. While they were frantically attempting to build the first ships for a United States Navy, they banked on the Royal Navy getting the better of the French marine in American waters. This turned out to be a poor wager, for the Royal Navy was not about to put itself to the trouble of protecting American merchantmen from the attacks of the French. If it was the armed benevolence of the Crown that Americans sought, they ought not to have sundered themselves from it in the first place. What then followed was a savage yet undeclared war at sea between France and the United States, and on a scale that the United States government could hardly have anticipated. From May 1796 to March 1797 over 300 merchantmen were taken by French privateers and naval vessels.
