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

by Gordon S. Wood

  “The wars of Europe,” declared the Columbian Centinel in May 1795, “. . . rain riches upon us; and it is as much as we can do to find dishes to catch the golden shower.” Shippers increased their profits threefold between 1792 and 1796, which in turn stimulated an extraordinary increase in shipbuilding. More ships needed more lumber, more canvas, more rope, more tar, and more workers. Daily wages for both ship carpenters and laborers in Philadelphia doubled between 1790 and 1796.

  This “golden shower” of prosperity inevitably diluted much of the Republican opposition to Federalist policies. “The farmers are so intent on improving the means of getting rich,” the Federalists noted with glee, “that they can hardly be got to lend an ear to any political subject, however interesting.”73 By the end of 1795 the three dozen or more Democratic-Republican Societies that had emerged in 1793–1794 to support the Republican cause and challenge the Federalists had disappeared as suddenly as they had arisen.

  Part of the reason for the disappearance of the Democratic-Republican Societies was the Federalists’ ability to hold them responsible for the Whiskey Rebellion. In his November 1794 message to Congress Washington had condemned “certain self-created societies” for fomenting the rebellion. The president’s reference put the societies on the defensive and precipitated a debate in Congress over the right of associations to influence the people’s representatives. Although such societies might be necessary in a monarchy, said the Federalists, a republic that had numerous elected officials had no need of them. But America, the Republicans replied, had all sorts of private associations of people. The Baptists and Methodists, for example, might be termed self-created societies.

  No one denied the right of people to form various associations, the Federalists retorted. It was what they did with these associations that was at issue. “Private associations of men for the purpose of promoting arts, sciences, benevolence or charity are very laudable,” declared Noah Webster, but associations formed for political purposes were “dangerous to good government.” Ambitious and desperate citizens had used the Democratic-Republican Societies to attack government with smears and slanders and had brought the authority of the governing officials into disrepute. “Citizens,” declared Fisher Ames, who made the most powerful congressional speech against the political clubs, “have thus been led by calumny and lies to despise their Government and its Ministers, to dread and to hate it, and all concerned in it.”74

  The Federalists assumed in traditional eighteenth-century fashion—and it was an assumption they never lost—that no free government could long exist without the people’s confidence in the private character and respectability of the governing officials; indeed, they believed that without their personal credibility the weak national government might not have been able to sustain itself at all. Given the fierceness with which the Federalists were being criticized, many of them may have wondered whether they themselves had sufficient character and respectability left to command the people’s trust. But they had a trump card in the president’s unquestioned reputation for virtue, and they played it over and again with particular effectiveness.

  Madison thought he saw how the Federalists were using the president’s popularity for “party-advantage.” “The game,” he explained in a letter to Monroe in December 1794, “was to connect the democratic Societies with the odium of the insurrection—to connect the Republicans in Congress with those Societies—to put the President ostensibly at the head of the other party, in opposition to both.” Such efforts, he believed, could only wound the president’s popularity; indeed, he thought that Washington’s mention of “certain secret societies” in his message to Congress was “perhaps the greatest political Error of his life.” But Madison was not yet prepared to criticize the president directly or to admit that his own efforts on behalf of the Republican party were also a “game.”75 Political parties in any modern sense were still unacceptable to most Americans.

  EVEN POLITICS IN ANY MODERN SENSE was not possible. Because Federalists and Republicans alike fervently believed that the very existence of the United States as an independent republic was directly related to the conflict between Great Britain and revolutionary France, some public officials in the 1790s were led into extraordinarily improper diplomatic behavior. Indeed, in this era of revolutionary passions and hatreds, proper and conventional diplomatic behavior from anyone may have been too much to expect.

  In 1789–1790 Alexander Hamilton carried on private discussions with Major George Beckwith, who was acting as agent of the British government in the absence of a regular minister. He suggested to Beckwith that he, as secretary of the treasury, might be a better channel of communication to the administration than the secretary of state. He went on to tell the British agent that he “always preferred a Connexion with you, to that of any other Country, We think in English, and have a similarity of prejudices, and of predilections.”76 When in 1791 Jefferson as secretary of state greeted the first British minister, George Hammond, with unusually abrupt hostility, Hammond turned to Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton for discussions of Anglo-American affairs.

  Jefferson and other Republican officials, of course, behaved with France as Hamilton did with England. Jefferson misled the French minister Genet into thinking that France would receive more support from the United States government than in fact it was willing to give. But the impropriety of Jefferson’s diplomatic behavior was nothing compared to that of his fellow Virginians, Edmund Randolph and James Monroe.

  Secretary of State Randolph was never happy with Hamilton’s influence in the administration or with Jay’s mission to England, and he conveyed his unhappiness to Genet’s successor as French minister, Joseph Fauchet. One of Fauchet’s dispatches to the French government was intercepted at sea by a British warship and in the summer of 1795 was turned over to Oliver Wolcott, the new secretary of the treasury. Fauchet revealed that he had learned in conversations with Randolph that some members of the Federalist government were bent on absolute power; he suggested that they might have instigated the Whiskey Rebellion as a pretext for misleading the president and giving energy to the government. Worse still, Fauchet went on with an ambiguous reference to thousands of dollars that Randolph had requested from France—a reference that most assumed involved a bribe, mistakenly, it turned out.

  When Washington confronted Randolph with Fauchet’s letter, the secretary of state immediately resigned, and then spent several months preparing a lengthy Vindication that did little to salvage his reputation. Randolph was not guilty of treason, as some high Federalists such as Secretary of War Timothy Pickering charged, but he was certainly guilty of stupidity and impropriety.77

  James Monroe was likewise guilty of foolish behavior and even more partisan indiscretion during the two years, 1794 to 1796, when he was minister to France. He made no secret of his sympathies for “the fortitude, magnanimity, and heroic valor” of the French forces warring against Britain. He undermined his own government’s policies in every way, assuming, as he repeatedly told the French, that the interests of the United States were identical to those of her sister republic. He proposed that the United States make a $5 million loan to France, confident, he said, that the American people “would cheerfully bear a tax, the product of which was to be applied in aid of the French Republic.”78 Monroe kept advocating military action against Britain and continually downplayed the fact that Jay was in England trying to avoid war. When the Jay Treaty was published, Monroe was so personally opposed to it that he could never adequately explain it to the French on behalf of the government he represented. He even intimated to French officials that the election of Jefferson in 1796 would solve everything.

  When some of Monroe’s private views expressed to fellow Republicans back home came to light, he was recalled. That Monroe as minister should have persisted so long opposing the government he represented is a measure of the high stakes involved. For Monroe and other Republicans the future of liberty itself seemed to rest on French succ
ess. Such ideological passions made ordinary politics impossible.

  BY EARLY 1796, President Washington had had enough. He was determined to escape the “serious anxiety . . . troubles and perplexities of office.” Having a thin skin and always acutely concerned with his reputation, he had suffered deeply from the criticism leveled at him. He had been “accused of being the enemy of one Nation, and the subject to the influence of another.” Every act of his administration, he said, had been tortured and misrepresented, and he himself had been vilified “in such exaggerated, and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero; a notorious defaulter; or even to a common picket-pocket.”79 He was sixty-four and tired, he said, in both body and mind.

  As in the case of his career as commander-in-chief, Washington’s most important act as president was his giving up the office. The significance of his retirement from the presidency is easily overlooked today, but his contemporaries knew what it meant. Most people assumed that Washington might be president as long as he lived, that he would be a kind of elective monarch like the king of Poland. Hence his retirement from the presidency enhanced his moral authority and set a precedent for future presidents. But it also did more: that the chief executive of a state should willingly relinquish his office was an objective lesson in republicanism at a time when the republican experiment throughout the Atlantic world was very much in doubt.

  Before Washington left office he wanted to say some things to “the Yeomanry of this Country” and “in language that was plain and intelligible to their understanding.”80 When he had thought of retiring in 1792, he had had Madison prepare a draft of a valedictory address. Now he altered that draft and gave the revision to Hamilton to rework into an address. Hamilton prepared two versions, one containing more of his own inclinations than Madison’s. Washington preferred that one, believing it “more dignified . . . and [containing] less egotism.”81

  Despite all this collaboration, the final document very much represented the president’s ideas about what his administration had experienced; it also expressed his deep anxiety about the future of the new nation. After some more editing by Washington, his Farewell Address was given to the press and published on September 19, 1796. The president never delivered it orally.

  This document became one of the great state papers of American history, often read in classrooms and elsewhere well into the twentieth century. Indeed, speakers and writers at the time, both Federalists and Republicans, urged that the Farewell Address be read by all Americans. It seemed that significant to the future of the nation.

  Washington’s major theme was the importance of the Union, which alone made Americans “one people.” The national Union, he told his fellow countrymen, was what insured “your real independence.” The national government was the main “support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty which you value so highly.” He appealed to his fellow citizens to forget what divided them and to concentrate on the “sacred ties” that bound them together—their similarity of religion, manners, and political principles and, above all, their common participation in the Revolutionary cause. Although the different sections had different interests, they blended together into “an indissoluble community of Interest as one Nation.” It was true, he said, that theorists had doubted whether a republican government could embrace a large territory. But let us try the experiment, he urged.

  Most dangerous to this experiment in an extended republic, he declared, was the spirit of party and faction that had recently arisen to unsettle American politics. Parties were the tools that “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” used “to subvert the Power of the People and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government.” The spirit of party agitated the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; it turned one part of the society against another; it even fomented riots and insurrections; and it offered the opportunity for foreigners to influence and corrupt the government itself. In all of these warnings Washington was, of course, thinking of the recent events of his administration. He conceded a possible role for this spirit of party in monarchies, but popularly elective republics had to be constantly vigilant against its rise.

  Probably nothing in Washington’s Address reveals the traditional nature of his thinking about politics more than this lengthy heartfelt condemnation of parties. Of course, he was striking out against the Republican party without conceding that the Federalists, of whom he was the leader, were in any way a party. This was not confused hypocrisy on Washington’s part, but simply an example of how much conventional thinking continued to abhor partisan division in the state. Washington always sincerely saw himself as acting above partisan passions and, of course, could scarcely have imagined the nineteenth-century development of political parties normally contesting with one another.

  After stressing the importance of religion, morality, a general diffusion of knowledge, and public credit, Washington concluded his valedictory with a long discussion of foreign policy. Here again he had recent experience, especially the behavior of the Republican party, very much in mind. He urged that the United States avoid all “permanent, inveterate antipathies” and all “passionate attachments” to particular nations. He was especially concerned that relatively small and weak nations, like the United States, not become satellites of great and powerful nations. Like many other Americans, including many Republicans, he advocated the extending of commercial relations to foreign nations and having “as little political connection as possible.” America was in a fortunate situation, separated by an ocean from the vicissitudes of European politics to which it had very little, if any relation. Although “temporary alliances” with foreign nations might be necessary in “extraordinary emergencies,” it was America’s “true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” It was “folly in one Nation to look for disinterested favors from another.”82

  Beneath Washington’s idealistic picture of America as a uniquely situated experiment in republicanism lay a strong base of realism. All these principles, he said, were what had guided the policies of his own administration, in particular the Proclamation of Neutrality of 1793. All he ever wanted for America, he declared, was time for its institutions to settle and mature, time for it to progress in strength and become master of its own fortunes.

  He ended by looking forward to the sweet enjoyment of retirement under the benign influence of the free government that he had done so much to bring about. And he surely yearned for an end to the partisan fighting that marred the last years of his presidency. As anxious as he was about the future, he scarcely foresaw how unsettled and disturbing, and how partisan, the remaining years of the 1790s and of his life would be.

  6

  John Adams and the Few and the Many

  Except for the era of the Civil War, the last several years of the eighteenth century were the most politically contentious in United States history. With no George Washington in office to calm the emotions and reconcile the clashing interests, sectional antagonisms became more and more bitter. Some leaders began predicting a French invasion of the United States and envisioned once again a breakup of the Union. As the Federalist and the Republican parties furiously attacked each other as enemies of the Constitution, party loyalties became more intense and began to override personal ties, as every aspect of American life became politicized. People who had known one another their whole lives now crossed streets to avoid confrontations. Personal differences easily spilled into violence, and fighting erupted in the state legislatures and even in the federal Congress. By 1798 public passions and partisanship and indeed public hysteria had increased to the point where armed conflict among the states and the American people seemed likely. By the end of the decade, in the opinion of the British foreign secretary, the “whole system of American Government” seemed to be “tottering to its foundations.”1

  DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1796 few Americans foresa
w how bad things would become. With Washington retired, for the first time political leaders were confronted with the prospect of actually choosing someone to be president, and no one was sure how this should be done. According to the Constitution, presidents were elected by the Electoral College, in which each state had the same number of electors as it had congressmen and senators. The Electoral College had been the product of long agonizing debate in the Constitutional Convention. Some delegates, including James Wilson, had proposed direct election by the people. But others wondered, once Washington had served, how the people would know whom to vote for outside of the notables in their own state. The delegates, of course, did not anticipate political parties that would propose tickets or mass media that would create national celebrities. Other delegates suggested that Congress, which would know who was qualified nationally, should elect the president. But when it was pointed out that this would make the president dependent on the Congress, others suggested that the president be elected for a single term of seven years and not be eligible for reelection: by not having to seek re-election, the president would not have to kowtow to the Congress. Others, however, feared that seven years was too long a term. And so the debate went, until someone suggested creating an alternative Congress of independent electors that would have the sole and exclusive responsibility for electing the president every four years. Thus the Electoral College was born.