Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (105 page)

But the Federalist Morse was hardly unusual in his prophesying; indeed, there was scarcely a clergyman in these years, especially in New England, who did not read the signs of the times and predict that something momentous was happening. Baptist and Republican Elias Smith thought that the struggle for liberty and individual rights throughout the world set the present age apart from all previous ages in history. The rule of kings and priests was passing, led by the example of the republican government of the United States. In a sermon preached in the immediate aftermath of Jefferson’s second inauguration as president in 1805, Smith suggested that Jefferson’s re-election foretold the coming of the millennium. He believed that “
Thomas Jefferson is the angel who poured out his vial upon the river Euphrates, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared
.” The people of the world would know when Christ’s favorite government was upon
them. It would be America’s: it would consist of “
liberty, equality, unity and peace
.”
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Other clergy also thought that the approaching age of perfection was beginning in America. The wandering Methodist Lorenzo Dow was convinced that just as “The Dawn of Liberty” was taking place in America, so too would the millennium begin in the United States. “America lay undiscovered for several thousand years,” said Dow, “as if reserved for the era, when common sense began to awake her long slumber.” It was “as if the Creator’s wisdom and goodness” were waiting for “a ‘NEW WORLD,’ . . . for a new theatre for the exhibition of new things.”
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Since the United States was itself leading humanity toward the earth’s final thousand years of bliss, millennial hopes inevitably came to focus on contemporary events occurring in America as signs of the approaching age of perfection—a perfection that would be brought about, some said, “not by miracles but by means,” indeed, “BY HUMAN EXERTIONS.”
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Although Samuel Hopkins’s consistent Calvinism discouraged the sinner’s hope of promoting his or her own salvation, nonetheless his
Treatise on the Millennium
offered a rosy view of the future. After emphasizing the usual spiritual resurrection that would occur at the onset of the millennium, Hopkins soon got to the part of his book that must have been especially appealing to many readers—his description of the concrete earthly benefits people could look forward to during the millennium. The thousand years preceding the apocalypse, he wrote, “will be a time of great enjoyment and universal joy.” Family members will love one another, lawsuits will disappear, intemperance and extravagance will decline, and good health will be had by all. Men will learn how to farm more efficiently and smoothly. Artisans will improve their mastery of the “mechanic arts,” with the result that “the necessary and convenient articles of life, such as all utensils, clothing, buildings, etc., will be formed and made, in better manner, and with much less labour than they now are.” Men, Hopkins claimed, will learn how to cut rocks, pave roads, and build houses in new labor-saving ways. They will invent machines to level mountains and raise valleys. The millennium, he concluded, will bring about “a fullness and plenty of all the necessaries and conveniences
of life, to render all much more easy and comfortable in their worldly circumstances and enjoyments, than ever before.” Hopkins admitted that it was tricky making all these predictions, but he hoped he had not made too many mistakes. Besides, he said, he was probably erring on the side of caution. By stressing that things were likely to be even better than his predictions, Hopkins guaranteed that his millennial message would be popular.
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This new post-millennial thinking represented both a rationalizing of revelation and a Christianizing of the enlightened belief in secular progress. Hopkins’s predictions of a new world of “universal peace, love and general and cordial friendship” were not much different from those hopes for the future held by Jefferson and other secular radicals. This post-millennial thinking was optimistic and even at times materialistic; it promised not the sudden divine destruction of a corrupt world but a step-by-step human-directed progression toward perfection in this world. Every move westward across the continent and every advance in material progress—even new inventions and canal-building—was interpreted in millennial terms. Such millennial beliefs identified the history of redemption with the history of the new Republic. They reconciled Christianity with American democracy, and they explained and justified the anxious lives and the awakened aspirations of countless numbers of ordinary Americans for whom the world had hitherto never offered much promise of improvement.

17
Republican Diplomacy

The United States was born amidst a world at war. From 1792 to 1815, except for some brief armistices, Europe was torn apart by a ferocious struggle for dominance between revolutionary and later Napoleonic France and her many European enemies, especially Great Britain. It became the longest sustained global war in modern history. Before it was over, it had killed or maimed more than two million persons, overthrown numerous governments, and transformed boundaries throughout Europe. Fighting took place in nearly every part of Europe and in various regions of the world, including the Middle East, South Africa, the Indian Ocean, the West Indies, and Latin America. Almost every European country was involved at one time or another, either in alliance or at war with Britain or France.

For the new French republic the war was total. The French revolutionary leaders enlisted their entire society on behalf of the republican cause, which they said would be brought to all of Europe. With the execution of Louis XVI, exulted the radical Jacobin Georges Jacques Danton, France was flinging at the feet of monarchs “the head of a King.” The French revolutionary leaders drafted their citizens and turned them into the world’s first mass conscript army. By the end of 1794 the French army had grown to over a million men—not only the largest army the world had ever seen but one inspired by the most extraordinary revolutionary zeal. “No more maneuvers, no more military art, but fire, steel, and patriotism,” declared Lazare Carnot, the organizer of the French revolutionary armies. “We must exterminate! Exterminate to the bitter end!”
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Against such revolutionary fervor, the British realized that this struggle would be different from the many previous clashes with their ancient enemy. The day in 1793 that Great Britain declared war on revolutionary France, the thirty-three-year-old prime minister, William Pitt, the brilliant son of the great minister who had won the Seven Years’ War a generation
earlier, told Parliament that Britons were fighting not merely for a traditional balance of power in Europe but for their monarchy and their way of life, indeed, for “the happiness of the whole of the human race.” The French, said Pitt, wish to bring their brand of liberty “to every nation, and if they will not accept of it voluntarily, they compel them. They take every opportunity to destroy every institution that is most sacred and most valuable in every nation where their armies have their appearance; and under the name of liberty, they have resolved to make every country in substance, if not in form, a province dependent on themselves.” The cost in British blood and treasure of the nearly two and a half decades of war was astonishing—nearly three hundred thousand killed and over a billion pounds in money.
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Although the war took place in all parts of the world, it was not a single continuous war like the world wars of the twentieth century; instead, it was a series of wars, most of them very short and distinct. Every one of the great Continental powers—Austria, Prussia, and Russia—formed and dissolved coalitions against France in accordance with their particular interests. Being often more fearful of one another than of France, they were as willing to ally with Napoleon as to wage war against him. Only Britain, except for a year of peace in 1802–1803, remained continually at war with France throughout the period.

The Treaty of Amiens that Britain signed with France in 1802 left France in control of Belgium, Holland, the left bank of the Rhine, and Italy. This peace could not last, for it was no more acceptable to Britain than it was to Napoleon, who began to extend his sway over more and more parts of Europe. Britain declared war against France in 1803 and formed the Third Coalition with Austria and Russia against France. Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804 and made plans to invade England. In October 1805 the British navy under the command of Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson’s victory destroyed Napoleon’s plans for invading England and guaranteed Britain’s control of the seas. Then at the end of 1805 Napoleon defeated the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz (located in the present-day Czech Republic), which led to the collapse of the Third Coalition the British had mounted against the French.

President Jefferson saw at once the implications of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz. “What an awful spectacle does the world exhibit at this
instant,” he wrote in January 1806, “one man bestriding the continent of Europe like a Colossus, and another roaming unbridled on the ocean.”
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America was caught between these two leviathans, which, involved as they were in a life-or-death struggle for supremacy, could scarcely pay much attention to the concerns of the awkward young republic three thousand miles away. Napoleon thought that it would take at least two or three centuries before the United States could pose a military threat to Europe.

Americans, however, never fully appreciated this European disdain for their country’s power. They had an extraordinary emotional need to exaggerate their importance in the world—a need that lay behind their efforts to turn their diplomacy into a major means of defining their national identity.

J
EFFERSON AND THE
R
EPUBLICANS
, in control of the national government for the first time since the European war began, put forth a peculiar conception of the United States and its role in the world. Like the Federalists, they believed that the United States had to remain neutral amid Europe’s quarrels. But more than the Federalists, they insisted, to the point of threatening war, on the right of the United States to trade with the European belligerents without restraint or restrictions. They held that free ships made free goods, which meant that neutrals had the right to carry non-contraband goods into the ports of a belligerent without their being seized by its opponent. They believed that the list of contraband articles—articles subject to seizure by the belligerents, including those owned by neutral nations—should be narrowly defined and not include, for example, provisions and naval stores. In addition, the Republicans believed that blockades of belligerent ports should be backed up by naval power and not simply declared on paper.

With the outbreak of war in the early 1790s and Britain in control of the seas, France and Spain found it much too risky to use their own ships to carry goods between their islands in the West Indies and Europe. Consequently, they had had thrown open their hitherto closed ports in the Caribbean to American commerce. American merchants as neutrals had begun developing a profitable carrying trade between the French and Spanish West Indies and the home countries in Europe, taking sugar, for example, from the French West Indies to France and returning with manufactured goods. By September 1794 Americans had completely absorbed all the foreign trade with the West Indies—British, French, and Dutch combined.
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As the European wars continued, this re-export or carrying trade became even more profitable, increasing in value from $500,000 in 1790 to nearly $ 60 million by 1807. Between 1793 and 1807 the total value of all American re-exports was $ 493million, an average of nearly $ 33 million a year.
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Not only did American merchants, especially New Englanders, dominate the re-export trade between the West Indies and Europe, but these shippers were also major re-exporters of goods from Asia. Sailing by way of Cape Horn, American merchants brought home products from Canton, China, and ports in the Indian Ocean, including teas, coffee, chi-naware, spices, and silks, before shipping them on to Europe, especially to markets in the Netherlands as well as those in France, Italy, and Spain. In fact, between 1795 and 1805 American trade with India was greater than that of all the European nations combined.
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At the same time, Americans imported the manufactured goods of Europe and Great Britain and re-exported most of them to the West Indies, South America, and elsewhere. During the crucial war years of 1798–1800 and 1805–1807 the value of goods in America’s re-export trade exceeded the value of American-made goods sent abroad.

Many of the merchants involved in this re-export trade made fortunes, including William Gray, Elias Hasket Derby, and Joseph Peabody of Salem, Nicholas Brown II and Thomas P. Ives of Providence, John Jacob Astor and Archibald Gracie of New York, and Stephen Girard of Philadelphia. At the height of his business in 1807 Gray was worth over $ 3million; he reputedly owned 115vessels, annually employed three hundred seaman, and, as his obituary said in 1825, was “probably . . . engaged in a more extensive commercial enterprise than any man who has lived on this continent in any period of its history.”
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All of this re-export trade turned the United States into the largest neutral carrier of goods in the world. In 1790 American ships had carried only about 40 percent of the value of all goods involved in America’s foreign trade; by 1807 American ships were carrying 92 percent of a much larger volume—from combined imports and exports of $ 43 million in 1790 to $ 246 million in 1807. Between 1793 and 1807, the value of American imports and exports increased nearly sixfold, and American ship tonnage tripled. Even accounting for a price inflation of 26 percent between 1790 and 1807, these were impressive figures.
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