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

  But Federalist elites could not be as complacent about these popular rites and rituals as their eighteenth-century colonial predecessors had been. The lower orders were not as lowly as they used to be; they were now composed of tens of thousands of those who referred to themselves as “middling sorts”—artisans, small farmers, shopkeepers, petty merchants, all those who made up the bulk of the Northern Republican party. And the Republicans seemed not at all interested in reaffirming the existing structure of authority; they meant to destroy it and bring down all of the “aristocrats” who hitherto had dominated it. This linked them with their fellow revolutionaries across the Atlantic.

  The theater became a favorite site for expressing popular feelings on behalf of the French and against the English. When an actor appeared on the stage in Philadelphia in the 1790s wearing a British uniform, he was roundly booed and hissed by the middling and lower social ranks in the gallery. In vain did the actor protest that he was merely playing the part of a coward and bully. Audiences in Philadelphia, especially those in the gallery, demanded under threat of violence that the orchestras play the popular French revolutionary song “Ça Ira.” Sometimes the passion for the French spilled over into actual violence. A Boston audience, for example, concluded that the portrayal of a comic French character in a British play was “a libel on the character of the whole French nation” and took out its anger by demolishing the theater. Theater managers elsewhere knew enough to alter lines that might be offensive to Francophiles in the audience.10

  The French Revolution seemed to be speaking for angry and aggrieved peoples everywhere. Its assault on aristocracy only confirmed that the Republicans’ struggle against Federalist monarchism and aristocracy had worldwide implications. And no Republican was a more ardent supporter of the French Revolution than the party’s emergent leader, Thomas Jefferson.

  As minister to France in the 1780s, Jefferson had been involved in the French Revolution from the outset. As early as 1788 he was convinced that the French nation, as he told Washington, had been “awakened by our Revolution.” Throughout the period of 1787–1789 he remained close to Lafayette and the other liberal aristocrats who were eager to reform the French monarchy. He sometimes met with them in his own house and advised them on constitutional politics and procedures; he even drew up a charter that might be presented to the king, and he revised Lafayette’s draft of a declaration of rights. He was not disturbed by the fall of the Bastille in July 1789; he still recognized, as he had said in response to Shays’s Rebellion in 1787, that the tree of liberty had to be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots. Before he returned from France in the early fall of 1789, he expressed his confidence in the course of the French Revolution, a confidence he never entirely lost. He was a thorough Francophile. In his Philadelphia house in the early 1790s he sought to re-create his Paris residence of the 1780s, with a French housekeeper, a French coachman, French wine, French food, French paintings, and French furniture—all of which was bound to seem sinister to Federalists.11 As a British dinner partner observed in 1792, Jefferson in conversation was “a vigorous stickler for revolutions and for the downfall of an aristocracy.. . . In fact, like his friend T. Payne, he cannot live but in a revolution, and all events in Europe are only considered by him in the relation they bear to the probability of a revolution to be produced by them.”12

  For Jefferson the stakes involved in the French Revolution could not have been higher. Not only did Jefferson believe that the success of the French Revolution would determine the fate of America’s own Revolution, but if the French Revolution succeeded, he said, “it would spread sooner or later all over Europe.” But if it failed, America was very apt to retreat “to that kind of Halfway-house, the English constitution,” and the “revival of liberty” everywhere in the world would be seriously set back.13

  Jefferson, to be sure, deplored the loss of the tens of thousands of people guillotined and killed in France’s revolutionary frenzy, 85 percent of whom were commoners; nevertheless, he believed that these executions and killings were necessary. “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest,” he said in January 1793, “and.. . . rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it is now.”14 He grew warm whenever he thought about all those European tyrants, those “scoundrels,” who were attacking France and resisting the spread of the French Revolution; he could only hope that France’s eventual triumph would “bring at length kings, nobles and priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with human blood.” Extreme as these sentiments may seem, they were, Jefferson believed, “really those of 99 in an hundred of our citizens.”15

  By 1795 he was looking forward to an imminent French invasion of England. So sure was he of French success that he was tempted, he said, to leave Monticello and travel to London the following year in order to dine there with the victorious French general and “hail the dawn of liberty and republicanism in that island.”16

  Even after the Revolution had turned into a Napoleonic dictatorship, Jefferson never lost faith that it might eventually result in the establishment of a free French republic. Bad as Napoleon might be, the Bourbon and Hanoverian kings were worse. Throughout his public life, his affection for France and his hatred of England never dimmed. France, he said, was the Americans’ “true mother country, since she has assured to them their liberty and independence.” The British, on the other hand, were “our natural enemies, and . . . the only nation on earth who wished us ill from the bottom of their souls.” That nation, Great Britain, he said in 1789, “has moved heaven, earth and hell to exterminate us in war, has insulted us in all her councils in peace, shut her doors to us in every port where her interests would admit it, libeled us in foreign nations, [and] endeavored to poison them against the reception of our most precious commodities.”17

  Jefferson seems to have generated his identity as an American from his hatred of England—understandably so, since the Americans and the English had once been one people but were now presumably two. Indeed, the fact that America’s sense of itself as a nation was created and sustained by its antagonism to Great Britain decisively affected both the country’s unity and its relation to the rest of the world over the coming decades.

  FRANCE’S DECLARATION OF WAR against England on February 1, 1793, seemed to compel Americans to choose sides.

  Jefferson and his Republican followers were naturally sympathetic to “our younger sister,” the new French republic.18 The position of Hamilton and the Federalists was more complicated. Certainly, many of the Federalists and especially Hamilton admired Great Britain and its institutions, and the increasing radicalism of the French Revolution made them even more fervent supporters of England as a bastion of stability in a world that was going mad. In addition, Hamilton in 1793 was still largely concerned with maintaining good commercial relations with Britain, since the duties from that trade were necessary for the success of his financial program. Ultimately, however, for all their differing sympathies for the two belligerents, both Jefferson and Hamilton remained convinced that the United States had to remain neutral in the European war.

  How to maintain this neutrality? What were the nation’s obligations under the French treaties of 1778? Did the alliance with France require the United States to defend the French West Indies? Should the United States recognize the new French republic and receive its minister, Citizen Edmond Charles Genet, already en route to Philadelphia? Although Hamilton argued that the terms of the French treaties should be “temporarily and provisionally suspended” on the grounds that the outcome of the French civil war was still in doubt, Washington decided that the treaties were still in effect and that Genet would be received, which would make the United States the first nation in the world to recognize the new French republic. But Jefferson, like Hamilton, did not want the United States to be bound by
the French treaties in any way that would endanger the nation’s security. Thus both advisors recommended that the president issue a proclamation of neutrality, which he did on April 22, 1793. The proclamation did not use the word “neutrality,” but it did urge Americans to “pursue a conduct friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers.” Jefferson had not realized that Edmund Randolph had slipped the word “impartial” into the final draft.19

  Despite his desire to avoid a war, Jefferson was aware that such a policy of “fair neutrality,” as he told Madison in April 1793, “will prove a disagreeable pill to our friends, tho’ necessary to keep us out of the calamities of a war.”20 With his Republican followers enthusiastic in support of France, Jefferson was embarrassed by the policy of neutrality that he had supported, especially since France and the United States had an alliance dating from 1778; consequently he immediately began to distance himself from the proclamation. Jefferson, who, as one British observer noted, had “a degree of finesse about him, which at first is not discernable,” took great pains to tell his friends that he had not written the proclamation, explaining that at least he had been able to have the word “neutrality” omitted from it.21 Yet this Jeffersonian nicety scarcely satisfied the most avid Republicans.

  Although most Republicans had no desire to go to war, they were not at all willing to remain impartial. “The cause of France is the cause of man,” declared Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a Republican leader of western Pennsylvania, “and neutrality is desertion.” Other Republicans agreed; everywhere they held public dinners and civic feasts to celebrate French victories in Europe.22 Some Republicans even rejected the aristocratic queues, knee britches, and silver-buckled shoes of the Federalists and began adopting the cropped hairstyle and sans-culotte dress of the French revolutionaries.23 The Republican press heatedly condemned the proclamation and declared that the great mass of the people was outraged at the ingratitude shown to America’s former revolutionary ally.

  Although Madison was not given to outbursts of emotion, even he thought the proclamation was “a most unfortunate error” that wounded the national honor by seeming to disregard America’s obligations to France and provoked “popular feelings by a seeming indifference to the cause of liberty.” Madison was as much of a liberal enthusiast for the French Revolution as his friend Jefferson. He had no qualms about accepting honorary French citizenship and did so with a hearty cosmopolitan declamation against “those prejudices which have perverted the artificial boundaries of nations into exclusions of the philanthropy which ought to cement the whole into one great family.” He went on to tell Jefferson that the president’s issuing of the proclamation not only usurped the prerogative of the Congress in violation of the Constitution but also had “the appearance of being copied from a Monarchical model.” Still, Madison was very cautious in criticizing Washington himself, suggesting that the president “may not be sufficiently aware of the snares that may be laid for his good intentions by men whose politics at bottom are very different from his own.” He told Jefferson, however, that if the president continued to conduct himself in the same manner, he would suffer more criticism that would permanently harm his reputation and that of the government.24

  In an effort to win support for the proclamation, Hamilton in the summer of 1793 wrote seven powerfully argued newspaper essays under the name “Pacificus.” These became the classic constitutional justification of the president’s inherent authority over foreign affairs. Hamilton contended that not only did the United States have the right to declare its neutrality, but the president was the proper official to make such a declaration, since the executive department was the “organ of intercourse between the Nation and foreign Nations.” Moreover, the United States had no obligation under the 1778 treaties to come to the aid of France, since those treaties provided for only a defensive alliance and France was engaged in an offensive war. Besides, said Hamilton, the great contrast between the situation of France and that of the United States by itself rendered foolish any obligation to go to France’s aid.

  “The United States,” wrote Hamilton, “are a young nation.” (Note the use of the plural verb, which remained common usage until after the Civil War.) Hamilton went on to express the basic assumption of relative American weakness that lay behind all his policies. “Their population though rapidly increasing, still small—their resources, though growing, not great; without armies, without fleets—capable from the nature of their country and the spirit of its inhabitants of immense efforts for self-defense, but little capable of those external efforts which could materially serve the cause of France.” Finally, Hamilton dismissed the idea that gratitude should dictate America’s helping France. Gratitude, he said, should have no bearing on relations between states; national interest ought to be the only consideration. France, after all, came to America’s aid in 1778 only out of its own national interest in defeating Britain.25

  Jefferson, believing that American neutrality was coming to mean “a mere English neutrality,” was alarmed at the influence Hamilton’s writings were having.26 “Nobody answers him,” he warned Madison, “and his doctrine will therefore be taken for confessed. For god’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him.”27

  Madison with great reluctance agreed to reply, unsure that he could match the secretary of the treasury in knowledge or energy. He found the task, he confessed, “the most grating one I ever experienced.”28 And the resultant “Helvidius” essays, published in August and September 1793, revealed his difficulty. Madison knew he would have to set forth some intricate details, but he assumed, as most essayists of the 1790s did, that “none but intelligent readers will enter into such a controversy, and to their minds it ought principally to be accommodated.” He avoided the larger questions involving America’s neutrality and focused instead on the constitutional limits of executive power, thus contributing further to what would become the peculiar American tendency to discuss political issues in constitutional terms—a tendency that had the effect of turning quarrels over policy into contests over basic principles. In an uncharacteristically long-winded argument Madison concluded that “Pacificus” could only have borrowed his peculiar notions of executive power from “royal prerogatives in the British government.”29 Each of the two American parties was now unambiguously identified with one or the other of the two great belligerents.

  THE ACTIVITIES IN AMERICA of the twenty-nine-year-old French minister Citizen Edmond Charles Genet further excited public opinion—his title a sign of the new egalitarian order in France. No one could have been more ill suited for his diplomatic mission. As the minister of one of the two most powerful nations in the world, Genet was cocky, impulsive, and headstrong, with little or no understanding of the American government he was supposed to deal with. He landed in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1793, and in his monthlong journey north to Philadelphia he was everywhere greeted with warmth and enthusiasm. Americans sang the “Marseillaise,” waved the French revolutionary flag, and passed liberty caps around. Some Federalists thought the French Revolution was being brought to America. Late in his life John Adams still vividly recalled the frenzied atmosphere of “Terrorism, excited by Genet,” that ran through the nation’s capital in the late spring of 1793. “Ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compel it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution, and against England.”30

  Genet was instructed to get the Americans to recognize their treaty obligations and allow the outfitting of French privateers in American ports. He was also to seek American assistance in the conquest of Spanish and British possessions in America and help to expand what the French revolutionary government called the “Empire de la Liberté.”31 When he was in Charleston, he began organizing filibustering expeditions against
the Spanish in the Southwest. He even told his government that he planned to “excite the Canadians to free themselves from the yoke of England.” He persuaded the French immigrant and naturalist André Michaux to abandon his plans to travel overland to the Pacific, which had been supported by Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society, and instead aid his native France by joining up with George Rogers Clark and Benjamin Logan in Kentucky and using soldiers they recruited to attack the Spanish in Louisiana. If this impetuous French minister had his way, America would soon be at war with both Great Britain and Spain.32

  Seeing himself as a revolutionary agent on behalf of the international cause of liberty, Genet mistook the enthusiastic welcome he received in America as a license to promote the French Revolution in any way he could; indeed, initially Jefferson seems to have encouraged Genet in his ambitious plans to gather armies on American soil in order to attack Spanish possessions in the West and Florida. When Michaux changed his plans in order to rendezvous with Clark and the Kentuckian soldiers, Jefferson more or less supported him, but he informed Genet that Michaux had to travel as a private citizen and not as a French consul, as Genet wanted. The secretary of state warned Genet that if Michaux and the Kentucky soldiers were caught taking up arms against a friendly country, they might be hanged. “Leaving out that article,” he blithely told Genet, he “did not care what insurrection should be excited in Louisiana.”33