A New America: History of America's Escape from England

had inspired the French. Most Americans shared his enthusiasm for the French Revolution until it took a turn unlike anything the American Revolution brought, with escalating popular violence, the execution of King Louis XVI (1793), and the establishment not of regular constitutional government but the arbitrary violence of Maximilien Robespierre and the Terror. Events in France horrified Hamilton, who argued that the Franco-American Treaty of 1778 was with the French king and so ceased once he died. Jefferson justified the violence and declared that the treaty was with the French Nation, and so still binding. These differences widened as issues in foreign policy came to dominate Washington’s administration, and they gradually marked a division not just in the cabinet but in Congress and the electorate. In 1790, Britain and Spain seemed likely to go to war; then Britain seemed headed for the war with France that finally broke out in 1793. Jefferson argued that Britain’s situation gave the United States an opportunity to secure concessions in return for American neutrality; and several issues stemming from the 1783 Treaty of Paris needed settling. The British had never evacuated heir posts in the Northwest, and westerners suspected the British of using those bases to provoke Indian attacks on the American frontier. The United States also sought compensation for slaves the British had carried off during the Revolutionary War, and hoped to persuade Britain to open its West Indian islands to American traders. But on April 22, 1793, Washington—influenced by Hamilton, who desperately wanted to avoid any altercation with Britain—issued a proclamation that essentially announced American neutrality without even trying to secure any concessions in return. A few months later, Jefferson submitted his resignation as secretary of state, which took effect at the end of the year. He was still in office, however, when a new French minister, Edmond Genet, arrived in the United States—and promptly began hiring American privateers to sail under the French flag against British ships in the North Atlantic, attempted to raise a military expedition against Spain, and in other ways violated American territorial sovereignty. Jefferson tried to correct the situation, but what could he do with a man like Genet? Finally, on July 12, 1793, Washington’s cabinet decided to request Genet’s recall. By the time the request arrived in France, the government that had appointed Genet had fallen, and the Jacobins under Robespierre were in control. As a result, his story had an odd ending. With the support of the Washington administration, Genet remained in the United States, married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of NY’s governor, by whom he had six children, and then, after her death, five more by a second American wife. Meanwhile, American relations with Britain moved into a state of crisis over trade. New British Orders in Council (regulations issued by the Crown) undercut the old rule that “free ships make free goods,” which allowed American traders to carry goods to and from the ports of European belligerent powers. Instead, the British invoked the Rule of 1756, by which no neutral nation could engage in trade during war from which it was excluded during peacetime. Then, in December 1793, the British suddenly began seizing American ships in the West Indies. A cry went up for reprisals happened to lead to war, some Americans were ready. Mobs harassed British seamen, and volunteer corps began organizing for a possible return of the Revolutionary War. Since the Farewell Address was understood as Washington’s parting advice to his country, it was widely read and remains one of the most frequently reprinted documents in American history. It was a moving document, beginning with expressions of the sixty-four-year-old Washington’s gratitude to his “beloved country” for the honors and confidence it had invested in him and a reference to “the increasing weight of years” that admonished him “more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it is welcome.” Then the president offered advice, based on “much reflection,” that might “contribute to the permanency of your felicity as a People.” He urged his countrymen to support the public credit, to “observe good faith and justice towards all Nations” while avoiding permanent alliances with any, and to disdain “over-grown Military establishments,” which were always “inauspicious to liberty.” But the thrust of his message concerned the country’s political divisions. It seems strange in retrospect, that the Adams administration had a president from one party (Federalist) and vice-president from another (Republican). But Adams and Jefferson had been allies in the struggle for independence and, in the 1780’s, deepened their bonds while serving together as diplomats in Europe. Most important, problems with France remained pressing. After hearing about Jay’s Treaty, the French, who began seizing American ships bound for England, would not recognize the neutral rights of American ships and in December 1796 refused to accept the new American minister to France, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina (a cousin of Charles Pinckney). Finally, in May 1797, President Adams appointed a commission to France consisting of two Federalists, Pinckney and John Marshall of Virginia, as well as a Republican, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. In announcing the mission to Congress, Adams also called for defensive military preparations, which the Republicans objected to, believing they would only further antagonize France. Henceforth, foreign affairs frayed the relationship between Adams and Jefferson and rekindled old political divisions. The French minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, refused for several weeks to receive the American commissioners. Then, to their surprise, three agents of Talleyrand (described subsequently only as X, Y, and Z) visited the commissioners and demanded an American loan to France and a bribe for Talleyrand of $250,000. “Not a sixpence,” Pinckney was said to have replied; and he and Marshall set out for home, leaving Gerry to represent the United States. Outrage greeted Adams’s announcement of the transaction. Republicans in Congress demanded to see the diplomatic papers, which Adams—unlike Washington after Jay’s Treaty—supplied; after all, they fully supported his administration’s position. Congress repealed the treaty negotiated with France in 1778 and took additional steps to increase American military strength. Republican fears escalated as Congress and the administration built up the army. But the results of that policy, and particularly of military contracting, were sometimes far different from what the Republicans expected. When Benjamin Stoddert took office in June 1798, the United States had only one ship at sea, but more were on the way. In 1794, in an effort to check the attacks of the Barbary pirates on American shipping, Congress had authorized the construction of six new frigates—smaller than the ships of the line, the largest and most powerful ships in the great navies of the era, but faster and more maneuverable. Part of the order was canceled the next year, when the United States signed a peace treaty with Algeria, but three ships remained in production. They were built according to technologically innovative plans that are generally attributed to Philadelphia master shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys, although others contributed to the designs. According to Humphreys, that design would make the American ships “superior to any European frigate” and allow them to avoid action except “on their own terms.” Stoddert worked to acquire by one means or another, an additional six frigates as well as some forty smaller ships. Stoddert built, virtually from scratch, a respectable naval officers corps and established a program for the recruitment and training of promising young midshipmen. Within a relatively short period of time, the United States possessed a navy capable of providing American merchant ships substantial protection and offsetting wildcat fears of a French invasion, mounted from the West Indies, of the American southern seaboard. All this Stoddert accomplished during a trying two-year period, from 1798 to 1800, while American and French ships engaged in an undeclared war on the seas that threatened continually to blossom into a regular declared war. As the war fever grew, Adams fell into Washington’s old position, regarding critics of his government as seditious people who put their confidence in France rather than their own government. Federalists in Congress went further, passing a series of laws for the suppression of the Republicans and the Republican press. Three Alien Acts, passed in June and July of 1798, moved against immigrants, who were often members of the Republican Party. The first, an Alien Enemies Act that allowed the president to arrest or banish enemy aliens, would rake effect only if war was declared. Another Alien Act allowed the president to deport any foreigners he considered dangerous to the public peace and safety, and a Naturalization Act increased the time of residence before immigrants could become citizens—and thus acquire voting rights—from five to fourteen years. Both of those laws would expire in 1802. Finally, a Sedition Act provided punishments including imprisonment for persons who combined “to oppose any measure or measures of the government of the United States” or who wrote, printed, spoke, or published “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intention to defame…or to bring them or either of them, into contempt or disrepute.” That law would expire on March 3, 1801, when the next presidential administration took power. As America’s population grew and increasing numbers of white settlers looked westward for affordable land, events were unfolding that would dramatically change the map of America and influence the nation’s political, economic, and social development for much of the nineteenth century. At issue was the so-called Louisiana Territory, a vast area that stretched from the Mississippi River in the East to the Rocky Mountains in the West and north to Canada. Like most Americans, Jefferson harbored the belief that Louisiana would some day belong to the United States. It was thought that control of Louisiana, long considered a natural extension of the United States, loomed critical in defending the country’s expanding frontier against Indian raids and foreign adventurers as well as serving as a valuable source of raw materials—most notable the lucrative western fur trade. Most important, in Jefferson’s view, the Louisiana Territory would be America’s ultimate safety valve: a seemingly limitless territory to which Indians could be removed ahead of white settlement and, above all, a place where landless immigrants from the East might move to carry on the American agrarian tradition that he deemed so essential to the well-being of the Republic. Altogether, a new American nation emerged solely on these incidences in history. They helped pave the way for future and current political parties, and influenced their beliefs in domestic and foreign issues. Though these perspectives are represented on a wide scale, they are related in that all Americans seek perfection whether it is concerning domestic and foreign policies, and how that relation is always connected to our supreme United States Constitution.