Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  No one was more convinced of the inevitability of the hierarchical structure of American society than the new secretary of the treasury. While Hamilton waited for American society to mature, he and the other Federalists would have to create artificially whatever the society was lacking naturally. Hamilton believed in a social hierarchy dominated by gentlemen, men of leisure, patrons who lived off unearned income—income that came from rents from tenants, fees, or interest from bonds or money out on loan. These few were the influential men who, like William Cooper of Otsego County, New York, ruled their local communities through their wealth and power. Hamilton hoped that political leaders could be drawn from this class of gentlemen, who ideally should not have interests to support while they held public office.

  Despite having to leave office periodically to practice law, Hamilton tried strenuously to live up to this ideal. Others, like John Jay, fit the ideal more easily. They presumably had sufficient wealth and leisure to assume the burdens of public office without expecting high salaries or great monetary rewards. Still others, Hamilton knew, were speculators and stockjobbers who were eager only to make money off the government. Even though these moneyed men may have been selfish schemers, nevertheless, the new government needed their support, indeed, needed the support of all the influential people at the top of the society, whatever their character or level of virtue and disinterestedness. In traditional eighteenth-century fashion, Hamilton saw these few at the top extending their influence and patronage down through the various levels and degrees of the society. Hamilton, like most Federalists, assumed that politics was largely a matter of securing the support of these influential patrons. Capture these few, he thought, and a statesman inevitably captures the whole society.

  The way to do so was to appeal to the interests of these few influentials. Interest—there was no better or firmer bond between people: he had known that from his earliest years at King’s College and had repeated it over and over ever since. “Men will pursue their interest,” he said in 1788. “It is as easy to change human nature, as to oppose the strong current of the selfish passions. A wise legislator will gently divert the channel, and direct it, if possible, to the public good.” Although he later and rather defensively denied that he had ever made interest “the weightiest motive” behind his various programs, there is no doubt that he meant to strengthen central authority and the Union “by increasing the number of ligaments between the Government and the interests of Individuals.”22

  In effect, in the opposition language of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world, Hamilton and the Federalists set out to “corrupt” American society. In much the same way as English ministers in the eighteenth century, especially Sir Robert Walpole, had built up the power of the British crown, the Federalists sought to use monarchical-like governmental influence both to tie the leading commercial interests to the government and to create new hierarchies of interest and dependency that would substitute for the absence of virtue and the apparently weak republican adhesives existing in America. Hamilton’s financial program was designed not to make money for any particular group but to use patronage, like all the great European state-builders before him, to create a powerful nation-state.23

  Beginning in 1789 the Federalists sought to form rings of local interests throughout the country loyal to the government. In communities up and down the continent, Washington, Hamilton, and the Federalist leaders used patronage of various sorts to create hierarchies of support for the new government. Unlike the practice of the states, where thousands of state, town, and county public functionaries were elected, all executive and judicial offices in the federal government, except for the president and vice-president, were appointed. As early as 1782 Hamilton had foreseen the importance of the federal government’s having this immense power to appoint all its own officers. The goal of such appointments, said Hamilton, was “to create in the interior of each State, a mass of influence in favor of the Federal Government.” Force alone could not support the government, and besides its use was disagreeable and unpredictable. Creating influence could best be accomplished “by interesting such a number of individuals in each State, in support of the Federal Government, as will be counterpoised to the ambition of others, and will make it difficult to unite the people in opposition to the first and necessary measures of the Union.”24

  When he became head of the treasury, Hamilton had hundreds of officials to appoint and was thus in a prime position to carry out his aim. Since these customs officials, revenue agents, and postmasters were located in every large town and section of the United States and touched every aspect of economic life in America, they were important for building support for the new government, even among former opponents of the Constitution.25 In addition to the treasury officials, the Federalists had other executive and judicial offices to fill, including territorial officials, Indian commissioners, ministers at foreign posts, judges, marshals, and a wide variety of subordinate personnel. Very few former Anti-Federalists were appointed; of those whose political position can be identified, only thirty-one appointees had been opposed to the Constitution in 1787–1788. But of these Anti-Federalist officeholders, only nine later became members of the Jeffersonian Republican party that would eventually emerge to contest the Federalist government; fifteen of the former Anti-Federalists became members of the Federalist party. Holding a national office, in other words, helped to reconcile people to the Constitution.26

  Both Hamilton and Washington thought that former military officers would make particularly trustworthy supporters of the administration. Of 487 Federalist appointees old enough to have fought in the War for Independence, 134 had been officers in the Continental Army, and of these, 74 were members of the Society of the Cincinnati.27 “The idea, that my former gallant Associates in the field are now about to receive, in a good national government, some compensation for the toils and dangers which they experienced in the course of a long and perilous war,” said Washington in September 1788, “is particularly consolatory to me.”28 These were men who had demonstrated their virtue in the war and, most important, would remain loyal to him and to the new fledgling government. Indeed, so much were the members of the Cincinnati favored for appointments that the testy Senator Maclay thought that “we were to go on making Offices until all the Cincinnati were provided for.” The Cincinnati, Maclay believed, were just another one of Hamilton’s “Machines” of corruption with which he was attempting to move “heaven and earth in favor of his System.”29

  Hamilton and the Federalists assumed that these appointments would work as they did in monarchical governments. Offices in the judiciary or other parts of the federal government would be offered to important and respectable local figures who could be counted on to use their influence to suppress popular passions and control the society in which they lived. Since the system worked best if the appointed official was already an important and respected local figure with an existing clientele, Washington was apprehensive. Because those excluded from office were often provoked into opposition, he realized that making appointments would be “one of the most difficult and delicate parts of my office.” Ideally what he wanted was to have one candidate for each office “of such clear pretensions as to secure him against competition.”30

  Sometimes it worked out that way, but more often the appointments aroused the resentments of those left out. This was certainly the case with Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, the wealthy New York landlord who had administered the oath of office to Washington on April 30, 1789. Two weeks after the inauguration Livingston had written to Washington asking for a high office in the new government, presumably secretary of the treasury or chief justice of the United States. But the president had Hamilton and John Jay, two other New Yorkers, in mind for these offices, and not wanting to have too many top officials from the same state, he had tried tactfully to put Livingston off. Furious at being snubbed, Livingston soon emerged as a leading opponent of the Federalist government. American society was
never hierarchical enough, the aristocratic leaders were never readily identifiable enough, and the national offices were never numerous enough for the Federalist patronage system to create the kind of order and stability that Washington and Hamilton expected.

  Nevertheless, by 1793 or so the Federalists had formed groups of “friends of government” in most of the states. The lines of connection of these centers of economic and political patronage ran from the federal executive through Congress down to the various localities. These federal-based patronage networks cut through the existing state-based patronage networks and tended to isolate those local elites who had no national connections. Indeed, much of the conflict among elites during the 1790s flowed from rivalries between national and state structures of political connections.

  There is no doubt that in the 1790s federal officeholders possessed considerable political resources, including the ability to offer favors and legal protection for clients and to influence additional appointments.31 Washington certainly saw the wisdom of relying on existing federal officials for advice. By consulting the representatives and senators from the states in which he was making appointments, he helped to keep some influential political leaders—Congressman John Steele and Senator Samuel Johnson from North Carolina, for example—tied to the Federalist cause even in the face of local popular opposition.32 Hamilton for his part tried to gain the support of commercial interests in Congress and the states that would benefit from his financial program. He was most successful with those from New England and New York, but even in the agriculture-dominated South he was able to cultivate financial interests in Charleston and Richmond and to gain the backing of South Carolinians for the federal assumption of state debts.

  Despite all these efforts, however, the Federalist structure was already anachronistic and ill-adapted to the restless democratic and capitalistic society that was rapidly emerging in America, especially in the Northern states of America. Consequently, the Federalists’ Walpolean system of influence never captured many of the most dynamic interests in American society. Hamilton and other Federalist leaders concentrated on tying to the government the holders of traditional aristocratic proprietary wealth—mostly the big moneyed men and the rich merchants in the port cities—“who,” said Hamilton, “are in every society the only firm supporters of government.” They paid almost no attention to the new multiplying interests of those ordinary men who worked for a living—commercial farmers, small manufacturers, master artisans, and proto-businessmen who were emerging, particularly in the burgeoning middle regions of the country.33

  THE FEDERALISTS REALIZED that patronage and other political adhesives would be worthless if the new national government lacked ultimate coercive power. As Washington declared in response to Shays’s Rebellion, an uprising of several thousand farmers in western Massachusetts in the winter of 1786–1787, “influence is no government.”34 Force may have been uncertain in its results and distasteful for good republicans to use, but for most Federalists the possession of military power was essential to the existence of the government. Indeed, Washington and the Federalists believed that no nation-state could exist without a powerful army. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, one-third of whom were veterans of the Continental Army, knew that force was inherent in the very nature of government, both to enforce the law and to repel foreign enemies. When Elbridge Gerry proposed in the Convention that no standing army exceed three thousand men, Washington is supposed to have made a countermotion that “no foreign enemy should invade the United States at any time, with more than three thousand troops.” In the end the Constitution granted the federal government the right to establish and to use a standing army against both foreign foes and domestic insurrections.35

  Because the idea of a standing army flew in the face of long-existing popular prejudices, the Federalists publicly avoided using the term. Nevertheless, they were committed to the peacetime maintenance of at least a small regular army not only as a model for the state militias and a nucleus for a wartime army but also as a source of security for the government.36 Certainly Hamilton believed, as he declared in 1794, that “government can never [be] said to be established until some signal display, has manifested its power of military coercion.”37 From the beginning many Federalists, including Secretary of War Henry Knox, regarded a regular army backed by a cohesive federalized militia as “a strong corrective arm” necessary for the national government to meet all crises “whether from internal or external causes.”38

  AT THE MOMENT OF THE INAUGURATION of the new government, crises from external causes seemed the most pressing. These were crises that the weak Confederation government had been unable to deal with. They flowed from the fact that the Treaty of Paris in 1783 had given to the United States territory far beyond its actual settlements. The people of the original thirteen states occupied only about half of the territory of the newly enlarged country. Not only was this new territory occupied by Indians, but the borderlands of the trans-Appalachian West were dominated by Great Britain and Spain. Indeed, these European powers actually threatened the territorial integrity of the new nation. Much of the Federalists’ diplomacy in the 1790s was devoted to removing these threats.

  Although the British had lost thirteen of their North American colonies in 1783, they had established a new colony, Canada, whose southern boundaries pointed like a dagger at the heartland of the United States. Moreover, the British refused to evacuate their forts in the Northwest Territory of the United States, even though they had promised to do so in the peace treaty in 1783. These forts—at Michilimackinac and Detroit in the west, at Niagara and Oswego on Lake Ontario, at Oswegatchie on the St. Lawrence, and at Dutchman’s Point and Point-au-Fer on Lake Champlain—controlled both the Indian country in the Northwest and the waterways along the American-Canadian border. Although the British had many reasons for continuing to hold these posts, they justified their action by claiming that the United States had prevented British subjects from recovering debts owed them by American citizens and thus had not fulfilled the terms of the peace treaty.

  From their positions in Canada and the Northwest forts, the British encouraged the Indians to resist American demands for land, supported the formation of an Indian confederacy under the remarkable leadership of the Mohawk Joseph Brant, who had been educated at Eleazar Wheelock’s school in Lebanon, Connecticut, and intrigued with dissident elements in the territories of Kentucky and Vermont. Levi Allen, one of the Allen brothers who had helped establish Vermont, actually tried to negotiate a commercial treaty with the British and get Britain to recognize Vermont’s independence and possibly unite it with Canada. The Northwest borderlands of the United States were extremely vulnerable to British meddling.

  The Southern boundary was even hazier and more open to exploitation by a European power. In the peace treaty the British had ceded to the United States the territory north of the 31st parallel, more or less the present boundary of Florida. But in a separate treaty in which the British returned Florida to Spain, the northern boundary of Florida was set much farther north. The Spanish claimed that the boundary ran at least as far north as the Yazoo River, which meant that much of present-day Alabama and Mississippi remained Spanish. The Spanish actually occupied Natchez, the most important settlement in the disputed region.

  More important, Spain also held New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory. In 1762 France had given these possessions to Spain as payment for Spain’s allying itself with France in the Seven Years’ War against Great Britain. Spain welcomed this territory not because it had any ambitions to populate it or to make it profitable, but simply because it wanted to use it as a barrier to protect the silver mines of Mexico from the aggressive Anglo-American colonists to the north. Spanish officials saw only too clearly that every American who crossed the Appalachian Mountains and settled along the Ohio River and its tributaries weakened this territorial buffer. Yet if these Western settlers could not move their produce down the Mississippi to the Gu
lf of Mexico, they would have no reason to keep crossing the Appalachians into Kentucky and Tennessee.

  Since the Spanish in the Southwest controlled the outlet to the sea for Western settlers seeking to market their produce, they, like the British in the Northwest, were in a position to intrigue with Indians and with dissident settlers who might be persuaded to separate from the United States. In fact, in 1784 in an effort to influence or to stop Americans moving into Kentucky and Tennessee, Spain closed the Mississippi River to American trade.

  In response to this crisis, the American secretary of foreign affairs, John Jay, in 1785–1786 negotiated an agreement with the experienced Spanish minister to the United States, Don Diego de Gardoqui. Although the Confederation Congress had instructed Jay not to surrender America’s right to navigate the Mississippi in his negotiations with the Spanish minister, Jay thought that giving up that right for twenty-five or thirty years in return for having access to Spanish markets was very attractive; and he was willing to connive with some New Englanders (who were flirting with separation from the Union) to get that access to Spanish markets. But out of fear of the Western settlers being denied an outlet to the Gulf of Mexico, Southerners led by James Monroe and Charles Pinckney prevented the nine-state majority in the Confederation Congress needed for a treaty, and the scheme failed. But the willingness of a majority of seven states to sacrifice Western interests for the sake of Eastern merchants convinced some Western leaders that perhaps they ought to listen to what Spain had to offer the Americans in the West. Hence was born what came to be called the “Spanish Conspiracy.” It continued to plague the Southwest into the early years of the nineteenth century.

  After the failure of the treaty, Gardoqui contacted some Western leaders, including John Brown, the representative of the Kentucky district of Virginia, James White, a congressman from North Carolina, and, most important, James Wilkinson, an ex–Revolutionary War officer, and tried to convince them that the future of Americans in the West belonged to Spain. Spain offered trading licenses to Kentucky settlers, negotiated with leaders in Tennessee, and sought to attract Americans to settle in Spanish territory. Spain even enlisted Wilkinson as a paid agent of its government. Wilkinson secretly swore allegiance to the Spanish crown and for fifteen years received $2,000 a year as Agent 13 of the Spanish government, an arrangement not authenticated until the twentieth century. Wilkinson remained a central figure in the Spanish Conspiracy even after he became a lieutenant colonel and later general and commander of the U.S. Army. Even without knowing that he was a paid agent of Spain, John Randolph of Virginia said that Wilkinson was the only man he ever knew “who from the bark to the very core was a villain.”39