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

by Gordon S. Wood

  The Directory in charge of the French government, however, was not as strong as its army’s victories on the Continent suggested. Not only was its authority shaky and increasingly dependent on the army, but it was desperate for funds and showed no interest in anything except extracting money from its client states and puppet republics. Thus when the American envoys arrived in Paris in October 1797, they were met with a series of humiliating conditions before negotiations could even begin. Agents of Talleyrand and the Directory, later referred to as “X, Y, and Z” in dispatches published in America, demanded that the American government apologize for President Adams’s hostile May 1797 speech to Congress and assume responsibility for any outstanding French debts and indemnities owed to Americans. At the same time, these French agents insisted that the United States make a “considerable loan” to France and give to Talleyrand and the Directory a large sum of money for their “private use,” that is, a substantial bribe of fifty thousand pounds. Only then might the French government receive the American commissioners.

  These requests were followed by scarcely veiled threats. America’s neutrality, the French agents said, was no longer possible: all nations must aid France or be treated as enemies. In April 1798, after months of further discussions, a disgusted Marshall and Pinckney returned to the United States. Gerry, fearful that a war with France would “disgrace republicanism & make it the scoff of despots,” remained behind.5

  In the meantime, France decreed that any neutral ship carrying any English product could be seized—in effect denying that free ships meant free goods and claiming the right to confiscate virtually all American ships on the high seas. The president had received the dispatches that Marshall had written describing the XYZ Affair and the collapse of negotiations with France. Without revealing the dispatches, Adams informed Congress in March 1798 of the failure of the diplomatic mission and called for arming America’s merchant vessels.

  Knowing nothing of the contents of the dispatches, Vice-President Jefferson was furious at what he took to be the president’s rash and irrational behavior. He thought that Adams’s message was “almost insane” and believed that the administration’s refusal to make the dispatches public was a cover-up. He continued to urge his Republican friends in Congress to delay any further moves toward war. “If we could but gain this season,” he told Madison, “we should be saved.”6

  The country teemed with rumors of war. In January 1798 a Federalist measure in Congress to fund the diplomatic missions abroad led to a proposal by Republican congressman John Nicholas of Virginia that the whole diplomatic establishment be cut back, and perhaps eventually eliminated altogether. The executive had too much power already, Nicholas said, and needed to be reduced. This set off a six-week debate that released all the partisan suspicion and anger that had been building up since the struggle over the Jay Treaty. “The legislature is as much divided and the parties in it as much embittered against each other as it is possible to conceive,” concluded Senator James Ross of Pennsylvania.7 It may not have seemed possible, but things got worse.

  The Republicans called for the release of the commission’s dispatches, unaware of how damaging they were to their cause. When the country finally learned of the humiliations of the XYZ Affair in April 1798, it went wild with anger against the French. Publication of the dispatches, Jefferson told Madison, “produced such a shock on the republican mind as has never been seen since our independence.” Particularly embarrassing were the French agents’ references to the “friends of France” in the United States, implying that there was a kind of fifth column in the country willing to aid the French. Many of the Republican party’s “wavering characters,” Jefferson complained, were so anxious “to wipe out the imputation of being French partisans” that they were going over in droves to “the war party.”8

  The Federalists were ecstatic. “The Jacobins,” as Fisher Ames and many other Federalists usually labeled the Republicans, “were confounded, and the trimmers dropt off from the party like windfalls from an apple-tree in September.”9 Even “out of doors,” reported Secretary of State Pickering, “the French Devotees are rapidly quitting the worship of their idol.” “In this state of things,” groaned Jefferson, the Federalists “will carry what they please.” Over the remainder of 1798 and into 1799 the Federalists won election after election, most surprisingly even in the South, and gained control of the Congress.10

  The president and his ministers, as a rather astonished Fisher Ames pointed out, had become at last “decidedly popular.”11 Ames was astonished because in the Federalist scheme of things the Federalists were not supposed to become popular until American society developed further and became more mature and hierarchical. But the French played into Federalist hands. The American envoys’ reply to the French demand for a bribe, as a newspaper colorfully put it, was “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!” It became their rallying cry. (Pinckney actually had said, “It is no, no, not a sixpence!”) When Marshall arrived back in the United States, he was hailed as a national hero who had refused to be intimidated and bribed. Patriotic demonstrations spread everywhere, and the Federalists’ long opposition to the French Revolution seemed to be finally vindicated. Plays and songs acclaimed the Federalists and the president as patriots and heroes. “Hail Columbia,” written by a Philadelphia lawyer, Joseph Hopkinson, and set to the tune of “The President’s March,” became an instant hit. Theater audiences that earlier had rioted on behalf of the French now sang the praises of President Adams. In one case the audience demanded that the orchestra play “The President’s March” six times before it was satisfied.

  Most impressive were the complimentary addresses that poured in upon the president—hundreds of them, from state legislatures, town meetings, college students, grand juries, Masonic lodges, and military companies. They congratulated the president on his stand against the French; some even warned that false patriots “who called themselves Americans” were “endeavoring to poison the minds of the well-meaning citizens and to withdraw from the government the support of the people.”12 President Adams, giddy with such unaccustomed popularity, responded to them all, sometimes with bellicose sentiments against France and charges of disloyalty among the Republicans that left even some Federalists uneasy. The president took the responsibility of answering the many addresses so seriously that his wife feared for his health; but he himself was never happier than during these months lecturing his countrymen on the basics of political science.

  Adams had called for a day of fasting and prayer on May 9, 1798, and the orthodox clergy in the North and the Middle States responded with support for the Federalist cause, especially since most of the rapidly expanding dissenting Baptists and Methodists favored the Republicans. The traditional Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian clergy clearly saw their fight against infidelity linked to the Federalist fight against France and the Jacobins in America’s midst. Jedidiah Morse, author of the best-selling American Geography (1789) and Congregational minister in Charlestown, Massachusetts, spread the theory that the French Revolution was part of an international conspiracy to destroy Christianity and all civil government. Drawing on the anti-Jacobin work of the Scot John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe (1798), Morse traced this conspiracy back to a central European society of freethinkers called the Bavarian Illuminati who had infiltrated Masonic organizations in Europe. Morse claimed that the French were now conspiring to use the Jeffersonian Republicans to subvert America’s government and religion.

  Preposterous as these conspiratorial notions may seem, at the time they were believed by a large number of distinguished and learned American clergymen, including Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, and David Tappan, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard. Not only were these beliefs in plots and plotters a measure of the Federalists’ fear that American society was badly deteriorating, but such conspiratorial notions were often the only means by which enlighte
ned people in the eighteenth century could explain a concatenation of complicated events.

  The question they asked of an event was not “how did it happen?” but rather “who did it?” The French Revolution and the upheavals in America seemed so convulsive, so complicated, and so awesome that many could scarcely comprehend their causes. But if human agents were responsible for all the tumult, they could not be a small group of plotters like those several British ministers who in the 1760s and 1770s had conspired to oppress the colonists. They had to be part of elaborately organized secret societies like the Bavarian Illuminati involving thousands of individuals linked by sinister designs. Many Americans seriously believed that such conspiracies were behind the momentous events of the 1790s.

  On the day President Adams appointed for fasting and prayer, people spread rumors that a plot was afoot to burn Philadelphia, compelling many residents to pack their belongings while the longtime Pennsylvania governor, Thomas Mifflin, took steps to thwart the plot. At the same time, riots and brawling broke out in the capital between supporters of Britain and those of France, and mobs attacked Republican newspaper editors. Federalists in the Congress warned of resident aliens who were plotting “to completely stop the wheels of Government, and to lay it prostrate at the feet of its external and internal foes.” Speaker of the House Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey announced that France was preparing to invade the United States, and the Federalist press, citing “authentic information” from Europe, confirmed this rumor.13

  Congress responded to the president’s call by sanctioning a Quasi-War, or what Adams called “the half war with France.”14 It laid an embargo on all trade, and formally abrogated all treaties, with France. It allowed American naval vessels anywhere on the high seas to attack armed French ships that were seizing American merchant vessels. In addition to laying plans for building up the army, Congress authorized the acquisition of sloops and galleys for the protection of the shallow coastal waters and approved the building of fifteen warships. The budget for the navy reached $1. 4million, more naval spending in the one year of 1798 than in all previous years combined. To supervise the new fleet, Congress created an independent Navy Department, with Benjamin Stoddard of Maryland as its first secretary. To all these Federalist measures the Republicans put up a spirited resistance, and all passed by only narrow margins.15

  The Republicans disavowed Madison’s idea of the 1780s that the legislative branch had a natural tendency to encroach upon the executive. Quite the contrary, declared Albert Gallatin, the brilliant Swiss-born congressman from Pennsylvania, who, following Madison’s retirement from Congress in 1797, had become the Republicans’ leader. The history of Europe over the previous three centuries, said Gallatin, showed that executives everywhere greatly increased their power at the expense of the legislatures; the result always had been “prodigality, wars, excessive taxes, and ever progressive debts.” And now the same thing was happening in America. The “Executive Party” was fomenting the crisis only to “increase their power and to bind us by the treble chain of fiscal, legal and military despotism.”16 Although not native to America, Gallatin had absorbed the eighteenth-century enlightened fear of high taxes, standing armies, and bloated executive authority as thoroughly as Jefferson or any other radical Whig.

  The Federalists were frightened not merely by the prospect of war with France but, more important, by the way it might spark a civil war in the United States. It was the brutal and insidious manner that revolutionary France was dominating Europe and what this might mean for America that really unnerved them. France, the Federalists said, not only had annexed Belgium and parts of Germany outright but, more alarming, had used native collaborators to create revolutionary puppet republics in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and much of Italy. Might not something similar occur in America? Federalists wondered. In the event of a French invasion might not all the French émigrés and Jacobinical sympathizers in the country become collaborators?17

  “Do we not know,” said Congressman Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, who was far from the most extreme of the Federalists, “that the French nation have organized bands of aliens as well as their own citizens, in other countries, to bring about their nefarious purposes[?] . . . By these means they have overrun all the republics in the world but our own. . . . And may we not expect the same means to be employed against this country?” Were not the French victories in Europe due to France’s elaborate system of supporters and spies? Did not the mysterious voyage to France on June 13, 1798, of Dr. George Logan, an ardent Philadelphia Republican, suggest that he intended to contact the French government in order to bring about “the introduction of a French army, to teach us the genuine value of true and essential liberty”? And did not a Republican newspaper’s publication of a letter from Talleyrand to the State Department before the U.S. government released the text suggest that France had a direct line to its American agents, many of whom were editors? And were not these editors immigrant aliens, and were they not using their papers to stir up popular support for the Jacobinical cause?18

  By 1798 the Federalists were convinced that they had to do something to suppress what they believed were the sources of Jacobin influence in America—the increasing numbers of foreign immigrants and the scurrilous behavior of the Republican press.

  IN DESPERATION MANY FEDERALISTS resorted to a series of federal acts dealing with the problems they perceived—the so-called Alien and Sedition Acts. However justified they may have been in enacting them, in the end these acts turned out to be a disastrous mistake. Indeed, the Alien and Sedition Acts so thoroughly destroyed the Federalists’ historical reputation that it is unlikely it can ever be recovered. Yet it is important to know why they acted as they did.

  Because the Federalists believed, in the words of Congressman Joshua Coit of Connecticut, that “we may very shortly be involved in war” with France, they feared that the “immense number of French citizens in our country,” together with the many Irish immigrants who came filled with hatred of Great Britain, might become enemy agents. One way of dealing with this threat was to restrict the naturalization of immigrants and the rights of aliens. Unfortunately, this meant challenging the Revolutionary idea that America was an asylum of liberty for the oppressed of the world.

  It was ironic that the Federalists should have become frightened by the new immigrants of the 1790s. At the beginning of the decade it was the Federalists, especially Federalist land speculators, who had most encouraged foreign immigration. By contrast, the Jeffersonian Republicans had tended to be more cautious about mass immigration. Since the Republicans believed in a more active hands-on role for people in politics than did the Federalists, they had worried that immigrants might lack the necessary qualifications to sustain liberty and self-government. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson had expressed concern that too many Europeans would come to America with monarchical principles, a development that was apt to make the society and its laws “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” By relying instead on a natural increase of the population, America’s government, said Jefferson, would become “more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable.”19

  Still, most Americans accepted the idea that America represented an asylum for the oppressed of the world, and during the 1790s nearly one hundred thousand immigrants poured into the United States.20 During the debates in the Congress over naturalization, Americans struggled with their desire to welcome these immigrants on one hand and their fears of being overwhelmed by un-American ideas on the other.

  The radical Revolutionary commitment to voluntary citizenship and expatriation—the idea that a person could disavow his subject status and become a citizen of another country—aggravated this dilemma. Unlike the English, who clung to the idea of perpetual allegiance—once an Englishman always an Englishman—most Americans necessarily accepted the right of expatriation. But they worried that naturalized citizens who had sworn allegiance to the United States might later transfer th
eir loyalty to another country. And they were troubled by American expatriates who wanted to be readmitted to the United States as citizens. With these kinds of examples America’s concept of volitional citizenship seemed alarmingly capricious and open to abuse.21

  Although Congress in 1790 passed a fairly liberal naturalization act requiring only two years of residency for free white persons, it soon changed its mind under the impact of the French Revolution. Both Federalists and Republicans backed the Naturalization Act of 1795, which extended the time of residency to five years and required aliens seeking citizenship to renounce any title of nobility they may have held and to provide proof of their good moral character and their devotion to the Constitution of the United States.

  It was not long, however, before the Federalists realized that most of the immigrants, especially those whom Harrison Gray Otis labeled the “hordes of wild Irishmen,” posed a distinct threat to the kind of stable and hierarchal society they expected America to become. By 1798 the Federalists’ earlier optimism in welcoming foreign immigration was gone. Since these masses of new immigrants with their disorderly and Jacobinical ideas were “the grand cause of all our present difficulties,” the Federalists concluded, in the most pessimistic refrain—one that virtually repudiated one of the central tenets of the Revolution—”let us no longer pray that America may become an asylum to all nations.”22