American Sphinx (13 page)

The same pattern repeated itself in the dialogue over American policy toward the vexing problem of the Barbary pirates. Several Muslim countries along the North African coast had established the tradition of plundering the ships of European and American merchants in the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, capturing the crews and then demanding ransom from the respective governments for their release. In a joint message to their superiors in Congress, Adams and Jefferson described the audacity of these terrorist attacks, pirates leaping onto defenseless ships with daggers clenched in their teeth. They had asked the ambassador from Tripoli, Adams and Jefferson explained, on what grounds these outrageous acts of unbridled savagery could be justified: “The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners. . . .”
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Jefferson found such unmitigated blackmail beyond his comprehension and beyond any recognized principle of law or justice. He initially proposed that the United States refuse to pay ransoms and instead dispatch a naval force to the Mediterranean to teach these outlaws of the sea a lesson. Later he supplemented his proposal with a comprehensive scheme whereby the United States would organize an international task force comprised of all European nations whose shipping was being victimized. “Justice and Honor favor this course,” he exclaimed to Adams, and it would probably cost less in the long run to boot.
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Adams agreed that it was impossible to negotiate with the Barbary pirates; as he put it, “Avarice and Fear are the only Agents at Algiers. . . .” But Jefferson’s accounting, Adams observed, grossly underestimated the cost. It would require at least £500,000 annually to sustain a naval force in the region. The Congress would never authorize such a sum. And the United States had nothing in the way of a navy to send over anyway. “From these Premises,” he apprised Jefferson, “I conclude it to be wisest for us to negotiate and pay the necessary Sum, without loss of Time. . . .” Adams insisted that Jefferson’s solution, while bold and wholly honorable in its own terms, was an idea whose time had not come. “Congress will never, or at least not for years, take any such Resolution,” he reminded Jefferson, “and in the mean time our Trade and Honour suffers beyond Calculation. We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” Jefferson remained unconvinced but agreed that Adams’s opinion should be the basis for the official American position: “You make the result differently from what I do,” he wrote to Adams in London, but “it is of no consequence; as I have nothing to say in the decision.”
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It is possible to detect in Jefferson an early undertone of resentment toward Adams’s realism, which consistently undercut his own grander vision. Jefferson even tried to go over Adams’s head by having his own proposal for an international naval force presented to Congress by a third party, a ploy that failed when Congress rejected the scheme outright, as Adams had predicted it would. If one were looking for early signs of the eventual clash between these longtime colleagues, one could find them in embryo here. But Jefferson’s momentary duplicities were more than overbalanced by his genuine admiration for Adams. The admiration went even deeper, to the recognition that Adams possessed a mental toughness, a capacity to flourish in the midst of innuendo and invective and high-stakes decisions. “Indeed the man must be a rock,” Jefferson wrote to Abigail, “who can stand all this.” He went on to confess his own sense of inadequacy in embattled situations and to hold up Adams as a mentor: “I do not love difficulties. I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but irritable by slander, and apt to be forced by it from my post. These are weaknesses from which reason and your counsels will preserve Mr. adams.”
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DIPLOMATIC FUTILITIES

T
HERE WAS OF
course a third American minister in France, more famous by far than the other two. Benjamin Franklin had been representing American interests abroad longer than any other diplomat, and his reputation in France had reached epic proportions. He was the visible embodiment of American values in their most seductively simple form. When Franklin and Voltaire had embraced before the multitudes of Paris, it created a sensation in the French press, the union of the two greatest champions of human enlightenment in history’s most enlightened century. Jefferson himself regarded Franklin as second only to Washington as the greatest American of the revolutionary generation, going so far as to observe that there was a discernible gap between Franklin and the next tier of American revolutionary heroes, a group in which he included Adams but modestly excluded himself.
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Unofficial rumors had it that Jefferson had been appointed Franklin’s eventual replacement. (Franklin, who was nearing eighty, had let it be known that he wished to return to America in the near future.) When Jefferson was presented to the French court soon after his arrival, legend has it that Vergennes, the French foreign minister, asked him if he was intended to serve as Franklin’s replacement, to which Jefferson allegedly replied: “No one can replace him, Sir; I am only his successor.” Adams, for his part, was far from saddened to see Franklin leave. The two men had quarreled incessantly throughout the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Paris (1783) ending the war, Adams contending that Franklin left the bulk of the work for him, shared American negotiating secrets too freely with Vergennes and too often mistook flirtatious evenings with admiring French ladies for his main diplomatic duties. Franklin in turn regarded Adams as the kind of neurotic Yankee who gave hard work a bad name and who failed to appreciate the benefits of informal associations with France’s salon society, especially the sort of harmless flirtations of an old man with the lovely and once-lovely women who helped shape the values of Parisian culture. No one, not even Jefferson, could turn a phrase as deftly as Franklin; his characterization of Adams became famous in its own day, then with posterity, as the ultimate one-sentence evisceration: “Always an honest Man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”
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For the brief time that they were together as a ministerial team, Jefferson served as a valuable buffer between the two senior members, both of whom found him likable and dedicated. Indeed, it is possible to argue, without much fear of contradiction, that during the nine months Adams, Franklin and Jefferson represented American interests in France the United States enjoyed the greatest assemblage of sheer intellectual talent in the whole subsequent history of American diplomacy. Their chief problem, then, was hardly a lack of wisdom or skill; it was simply that there was very little for them to accomplish.

When all was said and done, there were very few European countries with much interest in signing treaties of amity and commerce with the recently established American republic. Franklin possessed the most exquisite sense of timing of any member of the revolutionary era; his departure in the summer of 1785 signaled the end of prospects for the American cause in Europe. (He arrived back in Philadelphia in plenty of time to participate in the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention.) Adams complained that there was little for him to do in Paris or London. He spent the bulk of his time composing a massive three-volume study of political theory entitled
A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States.
Although Jefferson was fully engaged by routine diplomatic duties throughout his years in France, the strategic situation in which fate and the American Congress had placed him virtually precluded any significant foreign policy achievements on his watch.

Although there were, in fact, several overlapping layers of insurmountable difficulty, the chief problem lay back in Philadelphia. To put it most concisely, the federal Congress created under the Articles of Confederation lacked sufficient authority to oversee American foreign policy. A typical letter from John Jay, who had responsibility for foreign affairs, reported the chronic condition of gridlock. “It has happened from various Circumstances,” Jay wrote to Jefferson, “that several Reports on foreign Affairs still lay before Congress undecided upon. The want of an adequate Representation for long Intervals . . . has occasioned Delays and Omissions which however unavoidable are much to be regretted.” Jefferson was particularly incensed when the Congress dismissed his plan for a naval force to destroy the Barbary pirates as impossibly expensive. “It will be said,” he wrote to Monroe, “there is no money in the treasury. There never will be money in the treasury till the confederacy shows its teeth. The states must see the rod.” But Madison informed him that the will to pass revenue bills was simply nonexistent. The current revenue in the treasury amounted to less than $400,000, which was not enough to pay off old debts, much less take on new ones. Madison agreed that it was a lamentable situation that would “confirm . . . all the world in the belief that we are not to be respected, nor apprehended as a nation in matters of Commerce.” The outstanding debt to France particularly grated on Jefferson, since he was constantly besieged by French veterans of the American Revolution for the back pay owed them. But apart from shaking his head in a gesture of consolation and disbelief, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
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Then there was the intractable problem of English arrogance. David Hartley, an English diplomat more disposed toward America than his colleagues, put the matter squarely to Jefferson: “An English proverb says Losers have a right to complain,” wrote Hartley. “After a storm the waves will continue to roll for some time.” In short, having lost half its empire in a long and unsuccessful war, England was not about to render one iota of economic assistance to its former colonies. During his visit with Adams in London in the spring of 1786 Jefferson confirmed this prevailing attitude: “With this nation nothing is done; and it is now decided that they intend to do nothing with us. The king is against a change of measures; his ministers are against it . . . ; and the merchants and people are against it. They sufficiently value our commerce; but they are quite persuaded they shall enjoy it on their own terms.” Sadly enough, English presumption was proving correct, since the British continued to control more than 80 percent of America’s foreign trade. Why should they negotiate new commercial treaties with the Americans when they already enjoyed a monopoly on their own terms? To make matters worse, the English were fond of raising awkward questions about the power of American diplomats to negotiate on behalf of the United States, asking rhetorically and mischievously if the federal government actually possessed sovereign power over the respective states. Meanwhile the English press kept up a steady stream of anti-American sentiment, suggesting that the former colonies were in a condition of near anarchy. (Jefferson was especially amused by false reports in the London papers that Franklin had either been captured by Algerian pirates on his return voyage or had been stoned by mobs upon landing in Philadelphia.) The dominant opinion among the English aristocracy in their private clubs, Jefferson observed cynically, was that America was poised to petition for readmission into the British Empire. One could hardly expect any cooperation from this quarter.
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By all accounts, and certainly by Jefferson’s initial reckoning, France should have been different. France, after all, was America’s major European ally, its source of salvation in the war for independence, the inveterate enemy of England, and home for philosophes who shared Jefferson’s liberal faith in open markets and free trade. Jefferson drafted many lengthy memoranda designed to persuade the French ministry that if the United States and France could reach reciprocal agreements whereby all tariffs and duties were abolished between their respective countries, the net result would be a bonanza of cheaper raw materials for France and an equivalent cornucopia of cheaper manufactured goods for America. Moreover, the chief victim of this new arrangement would be their common enemy, England. But once again the theoretical beauty of Jefferson’s liberal vision ran afoul of mundane realities, this time in the court politics of Paris and Versailles and the entrenched bureaucracies of French provincial governments. Despite the rational appeal of Jefferson’s vision of open markets, he was forced to acknowledge that “it seems to walk before us like our shadows, always appearing in reach, yet never overtaken.”
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The best example of the problem was the tobacco monopoly maintained by the highly organized and deeply entrenched agricultural lobby known as the Farmers-General, which insisted on high duties for foreign imports in order to protect its own domestic products, as well as line the pockets of its many customs officers. “The abolition of the
monopoly
of our
tobacco
in the hands of the
Farmers General
will be pushed
by us
with all
our
force,” Jefferson wrote in coded language to Monroe, “but it is so interwoven with the very formulations of
their
system of
finance
that it is of
doubtful
event.” John Jay wrote from Philadelphia to commiserate with Jefferson, recalling that during his own service in France he had heard the system of complex regulations and clandestine payoffs “censured by almost every Gentleman Whom I heard speak of it, and yet it seems so firmly fixed, perhaps by golden Rivlets, even of Sovereignty itself, as that the speedy Destruction of it seems rather to be wished for than expected.”
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Even when Jefferson was able to persuade the French ministry to agree to modest reductions in the duties on tobacco, the political power of the Farmers-General blocked implementation. “I am unable to answer those agents,” Jefferson complained, “Who inform me that the officers of the customs and farms do not yet consider themselves bound to the new regulations.” The bureaucracy, not the government, seemed to be in charge. Throughout his tenure in Paris Jefferson continued to draft lengthy and elaborate proposals condemning the inherent irrationality of the established system and describing in considerable detail the mutual advantages of a free trade policy. But like a Socratic argument for justice made to representatives of the Mafia, it all came to nothing. His only success after five years of relentless effort was a slight reduction in the tariff on American whale oil.
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