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

by Gordon S. Wood

  British actions certainly appeared to support this Republican view of a deep-seated monarchical antagonism toward the United States. Before the debate over trade restrictions could be resumed in March 1794, news arrived of the new British policy to seize all American ships trading with the French West Indies. Not only had over 250 American ships already been seized and American sailors mistreated, but also rumor spread that Sir Guy Carleton, the governor-general of Canada, had made an inflammatory speech inciting the Indians in the Northwest against the Americans.

  In response, Congress immediately passed a thirty-day embargo on all shipping. War with Britain seemed inevitable. Even many Federalists were angry at English arrogance; Hamilton himself was ready to fight if necessary. “To be in a condition to defend ourselves, and annoy any who may attack us,” he told the president, “will be the best method of securing our peace.”54

  The Federalists’ approach to the crisis with Britain was to arm in preparation for war while attempting to negotiate peace. This policy grew out of their basic understanding of the world and the United States’ role in it. Hamilton and most Federalists never accepted the premise of the most utopian Republican thinking—that once the European monarchies were eliminated and republics established, peace and the free flow of commerce would reign throughout the world. Hamilton saw the world made up of competing nation-states, with republics being no more peace-loving than monarchies. The sources of war, he said, did not lie in the needs of funding systems, bureaucracies, and standing armies, as the Republicans assumed; they lay in the natural ambitions and avarice of all human beings. “The seeds of war,” he wrote in 1795, “are sown thickly in the human breast.”55 Although in such a hostile world commerce admittedly had a “softening and humanizing influence,” the only real way for a nation to guarantee peace was to prepare for war.56

  Unfortunately, said Hamilton, the United States, though growing, was not yet strong enough to assert itself as an equal in international affairs. But give the country time, perhaps as much as forty or fifty years, and it would be as powerful as any nation in the world. In the meantime the United States needed to maintain its credit and prosperity through trade with Great Britain. When British actions threatened that relationship in the spring of 1794, the Federalists prepared for war but, conscious of American weakness, hoped for negotiations.

  The Federalists proposed raising between fifteen and twenty thousand troops, fortifying harbor defenses, and establishing a naval force. The Republicans were bitterly opposed to these military measures, which seemed to be part of a Federalist plot to build up the executive at the expense of the people’s liberty. Had not Madison warned in his “Helvidius” essays that war was “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement”? “In war,” he had said, “the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”57

  Fear of the way war could transform a republican government was fundamental to Republican thinking. James Monroe believed that the Federalist military measures were designed to create a military establishment that would suppress the Republican opposition to the government and were thus a far greater danger to the public liberty “than any now menac’d from Britain.”58 If America had to fight, the Republicans preferred to do it with privateers and militia.

  News that Britain had changed its policy and had ceased its wholesale seizure of American shipping to the West Indies eased the crisis and gave the Federalists an opportunity to try negotiations. Washington took advantage of the apparent change in British attitude to name Chief Justice John Jay as a special envoy to Great Britain in order to head off war. It was one of Washington’s most courageous actions as president.

  The Republicans were outraged at Jay’s appointment and the possibility of a negotiated treaty. They believed that the Federalists were conspiring to deny the popular will of the House of Representatives by using the treaty-making powers of the president and Senate to settle the British crisis. But they predicted that the Federalists would not get away with this ploy. Not only were “the Democratic Societies . . . beginning to open their batteries upon it,” but, Madison told Jefferson on May 11, 1794, most Americans were furious as well. Indeed, the response to Jay’s appointment, he said, was “the most powerful blow ever suffered by the popularity of the President.”59

  Yet scarcely two weeks later Madison was moaning to Jefferson, who had retired as secretary of state at the end of 1793, that all the Republicans’ attempts to attack Britain “thro’ her commerce” were defeated and that the president’s policy “to supplicate for peace and, under the uncertainty of success, to prepare for war by taxes & troops” was carrying the day. In fact, Madison now saw more clearly than ever before that the presidency was the principal source of governmental power. “The influence of the Executive on events, the use made of them, and public confidence in the President,” he told Jefferson, “are an overmatch for all the efforts Republicanism can make.” All his Republican colleagues in the Congress were confused and dismayed.60

  The outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion in the summer of 1794 only aggravated these Republican fears of enhanced executive power. Madison said the talk in Philadelphia was running “high for a standing army to enforce the laws.” He had “no doubt that such an innovation will be attempted in earnest during the session [of Congress], if circumstances should be favorable.” But he admitted that the president would probably not take such a step.61

  If the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion strengthened the popularity of the Washington administration, the treaty that Jay brought back to the United States in 1795 had the opposite effect. It invigorated the Republican party and initially turned much of the country against the Federalists. In the treaty Britain finally agreed to evacuate the Northwest posts, to open the British West Indies to some American trade in ships of small tonnage that could not easily or profitably sail the Atlantic (but at the price of forbidding American re-export of some tropical produce, including cotton), and to set up joint arbitration commissions to settle the unresolved issues of pre-war debts, boundaries, and compensation for illegal naval seizures of goods.

  Although the treaty did not explicitly compel Americans to abandon their principles of freedom of the seas and neutral rights that they had supported since 1776—the idea of free ships, free goods, and the narrow definition of contraband—it did so implicitly. (Jay agreed, for example, to allow the English seizure of enemy food as contraband.) Although the treaty declared that none of its provisions should violate previously established treaties, its abandonment of long-standing liberal principles of neutral rights seemed to betray the Franco-American alliance of 1778, which had specifically recognized these liberal principles. Not only did the treaty tacitly accept British notions of neutral rights, but it also forbade the United States from discriminating against British trade for ten years, thus surrendering the one great weapon the Republicans were counting on to weaken the former mother country’s hold on American commerce and society.

  The Republicans were opposed to the treaty even before they learned of its terms. The very idea of the United States arranging any sort of friendly connection with Great Britain was detestable to the Republicans, who believed anything that favored the British monarchy necessarily undermined the French revolutionary cause. Some Republicans even suggested that the more favorable the treaty, the worse it might be for the Republican party.

  The terms of the treaty were kept secret for months while the Senate considered it. After throwing out the article that limited American trade to the British West Indies (with the expectation that it could be renegotiated), the Senate on June 24, 1795, finally ratified the treaty by the barest two-thirds majority required. Acceptance was now left up to Washington.

  When the terms of the trea
ty were prematurely leaked to the press, the country went wild. Jay was burned in effigy in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Lexington, Kentucky; in Charleston the public hangman burned copies of the treaty. Hamilton was stoned in New York when he tried to speak in favor of the treaty. Petitions and resolutions from every state inundated the president, all begging and even demanding that he refuse to sign the treaty. When resolutions from some states even threatened secession, Washington expressed concern over the possibility “of a separation of the Union into Northern & Southern.”62 Although the Federalists attempted to match the Republicans in organizing meetings and petitions, they were most effective in the press, Hamilton himself becoming what Jefferson described as a “host within himself” and “a colossus to the anti republican party.”63

  Washington regarded the growing popular opposition as all the more reason to sign the treaty and put an end to these threats to his government. In light of the Whiskey Rebellion, the spread of the Democratic-Republican Societies, and the increasing attacks on him personally, Washington could only conclude that more was involved than just the treaty with Britain. The future of an ordered society in the United States seemed at stake. When he learned that his new secretary of state, Edmund Randolph, who had replaced Jefferson, had communicated indiscreetly with the French minister Joseph Fauchet, he abruptly decided to accept the treaty without the further delay that Randolph had advocated.

  Washington’s signature in August 1795, however, did not end the public clamor. Most Republicans remained adamant in opposition. They criticized Washington as never before, charging him with violating the spirit of republicanism and promoting English-style corruption. Detractors accused Washington of being “the head of a British faction,” an embezzler of public funds, a military incompetent, a “usurper with dark schemes of ambition,” and even a traitor who had actually “labored to prevent our independence.”64 Some hotheads called for the president’s impeachment. Jefferson dismissed the treaty out of hand and remained confident that the popular branch of the government, the House of Representatives, which controlled the appropriation of funds needed to implement the treaty, “will oppose it as constitutionally void . . . and thus rid us of this infamous act, which is really nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against the legislature & people of the United States.”65

  When in March 1796 the House called on the president to send it all the papers involved in the treaty negotiations, Washington refused, saying that treaties duly ratified by the Senate and signed by the president were the supreme law of the land. Recognition of any role for the House not only “would be to establish a dangerous precedent” but also would be unconstitutional. The Constitutional Convention over which he had presided, he said, had “explicitly rejected” the House’s role in treaty-making.66 Nevertheless, Madison and the Republicans in the Congress refused to back down and pushed to destroy the treaty once and for all. With both parties caucusing and disciplining their members, partisanship was at an all-time high.

  Eventually, however, growing support for the treaty in the nation at large began to make itself felt, and following a stirring speech by a very ill Fisher Ames in April 1796 the Republicans were unable to muster a majority for their cause. This was a stunning defeat for Madison, who contemplated retiring from the House and returning to Virginia. His earlier friendship with the president was over. Washington never forgave him for his attempts to undermine the treaty and never consulted him again.

  Already, a series of developments throughout the country were reinforcing support for the Federalists and their policies. With the appearance of the first part of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason in 1794 Protestant ministers and other conservatives, who had initially welcomed the French Revolution, became increasingly alarmed at the threats that the upheaval in France had come to pose for revealed religion. Paine’s book, which went through eight American editions in 1794, seven in 1795, and two in 1796 (making it the most widely published religious work in eighteenth-century America), attacked the scriptural truth of the Bible and all organized religion. Its publication set off a flood of similar radical anti-religious works, including Baron Holbach’s Christianity Unveiled and Common Sense; or, Natural Ideas Opposed to Supernatural, Count Volney’s Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolution of Empires, William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, the first edition in translation of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique, and the second part of Paine’s Age of Reason, in which Paine declared that “of all the systems of religion that were ever invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity.”

  Paine’s inexpensive work sold widely—Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of his namesake and virulent foe of the Federalists, sold fifteen thousand copies of the second part of the Age of Reason in his Philadelphia bookstore—and it was read by huge numbers and discussed in taverns and on street corners everywhere. College students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, infected with what was recalled as an “infidel and irreligious spirit,” especially liked Paine’s work and enjoyed throwing its heresies in the faces of their bewildered clerical teachers.67

  Since no one known to Americans was more identified with the turmoil in France than Thomas Paine, his “blasphemous” ideas were seen as the by-products of the French Revolution and what Noah Webster called its “atheistic attacks on Christianity.” The orthodox Christian clergy suddenly lost their earlier enthusiasm for the French Revolution and in 1794–1796 turned on Paine, the Revolution, and the Republican party with a vengeance. All at once the Federalist leaders discovered that they had acquired important clerical allies in their struggle with the revolutionary-minded Republicans. “Tom Paine,” Fisher Ames noted, “has kindly cured our clergy of their prejudices.”68

  MORE LAY BEHIND THE REVIVAL of the Federalists than the support given them by frightened clergymen. Circumstances everywhere in America were better, and the pursuit of happiness for more people had never seemed more promising. By 1795–1796, with General Anthony Wayne’s victory over the Indians in August 1794 and the imminent British return of the Northwest posts, Americans were ready and eager to exploit the territory north of the Ohio River. Towns were sprouting up all over Kentucky, and wagonloads of consumer goods from the East were pouring over the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio Valley.69

  At the same time, the situation in the Southwest was dramatically transformed. In 1791 the ideals of liberty and equality coming out of the French Revolution had spread across the Atlantic to the rich French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue and inspired a bloody slave revolt, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, that lasted a dozen years. Before this rebellion ended in 1804 with the establishment of the republic of Haiti, thousands of refugees, whites and free and enslaved blacks alike, had fled to other Caribbean islands and to cities in North America, including New Orleans. Spanish officials became increasingly apprehensive that revolutionary sentiments might spread to Louisiana. After all, most of the six thousand people in New Orleans were French, France having owned Louisiana until 1763, and Spanish military authority in the colony was notoriously weak.

  Indeed, the Spanish authorities in Louisiana were so feeble and so fearful of American filibustering activities, especially those threatened by George Rogers Clark of Kentucky, that they thought they had better come to terms with the United States in the West or else lose everything. When it seemed possible that the Federalist government might even ally with Britain and threaten the entire Spanish Empire, the Spanish government finally decided to reverse a decade’s opposition to American demands in the Southwest. Suddenly Spain was willing to settle the boundary of its territories of Florida and Louisiana at the 31st parallel, forsaking the Yazoo lands, and to open up the Mississippi to American navigation.

  In October 1795 the newly appointed American ambassador to Spain, Thomas Pinckney, former governor of South Carolina and
cousin of Charles Pinckney, who had attacked Jay’s plans in 1786 to sell out the Westerners, signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo that gave the Americans pretty much all they had wanted. When news of Pinckney’s Treaty reached Kentucky, people were ecstatic. The Federalist administration had achieved a great diplomatic success and had immediately made the West far more attractive to both settlers and land speculators. Navigation of the Mississippi, observed Robert Morris, who always had his eye out for a good deal, “doubles or trebles the value of lands bordering upon the Western Waters of the Ohio.”70

  But most important in stimulating support for Federalism in the mid-1790s was the increasing growth of American prosperity. Hamilton’s financial program was working wonders. The federal government’s assumption of the states’ war debts had indeed reduced the states’ need to tax their citizens, and the states lowered their taxes to between 50 and 90 percent of what they had been in the 1780s. By the mid-1790s the burden of taxation in the states had returned to pre-Revolution levels, which were considerably lower than those of the European nations. By 1795 some states had done away with poll taxes and other direct taxes altogether.71

  With more money to spend, Americans were consuming more. The value of American imported consumer goods went from $23,500,00 in 1790 to $63,000,000 in 1795. Thanks in part to Jay’s Treaty, America was well on its way to becoming Britain’s best customer. Americans were selling more goods abroad too. The value of domestic exports rose rapidly—the price of a bushel of wheat exported from Philadelphia more than doubled between 1792 and 1796. The war in Europe created an ever expanding demand for American products, especially food, and opened up new opportunities for American neutral shipping.

  American ships spanned the world. They had reached China in 1783 and were now sailing all over the Pacific—to Hawaii, Indonesia, Indochina, the Philippines, and India. The Benjamin out of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1792–1793 made a prosperous nineteen-month voyage to the Cape of Good Hope and the Isle de France. It was no easy voyage. The ship’s captain, Nathaniel Silsbee (later senator from Massachusetts), had to carefully select ports, decide on cargos, and judge freight costs, and at the same time avoid British and French warships. Although Silsbee was only nineteen, he had been at sea for five years; his first mate was aged twenty, and his clerk was eighteen. The ship went out with a mixed cargo of hops, saddlery, window glass, mahogany boards, tobacco, and Madeira wine and brought back goods that returned almost a 500 percent profit to their owner, Elias Hasket Derby.72