Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (107 page)

The Republicans had never been happy with the foreign policy of the Federalist administrations, which they thought were decidedly biased toward the British. They especially resented British dominance over American commerce. By restricting the commerce of the former mother country, they believed, they could thrust a dagger into the heart of Britain’s power.

Despite America’s best efforts to establish trade with other nations in the aftermath of the Revolution, the country had not been able to throw off the hammerlock Britain had over American commerce. Never mind that much of America’s prosperity rested on this commerce. They wanted to restrict it in order to enlarge it, or so they said publicly; actually they wanted much more.

The Republican leaders had multiple motives for their actions. They were actually less concerned with the country’s commercial prosperity than they were with America’s status in the world. They resented Europe’s and especially Britain’s view of the United States as a lesser nation. Not only did the Republicans dream of creating a new kind of world politics that would preclude the traditional resort to war, but, more important, as
citizens of a fledgling republic they wanted international acknowledgment of their nation’s independence and identity, particularly from the former mother country. Since a nation’s ability to exchange goods with other states in the world, along with its capacity to wage war, was a principal measure of its equal status as a sovereign state, the Republicans believed that resorting to economic coercion against Great Britain would be a fitting reminder that the United States had actually won the War of Independence.
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The Republicans came to power in 1801 very much committed to the liberal principles of international commerce that Americans had first sought to implement in the model treaty of 1776. Their ultimate aim, confused and confusing as it often was, was truly grandiose.

Although these liberal principles involved establishing free trade throughout the world, their purpose was not merely to promote commercial prosperity everywhere but to promote peace everywhere. If all nations treated foreign ships and goods as they treated their own ships and goods, commerce among nations would flow freely and dissolve the artificial mercantilist barriers the monarchies of Europe had erected. This free flow of commerce, many Republicans hoped, would tie nations together peacefully and change the way international politics had traditionally been conducted. The exchanges of commerce would substitute for the political rivalries of military-minded monarchical governments and create the possibilities for a universal peace. The secret was to get rid of monarchy and establish republics everywhere, which was why many Republicans clung so desperately to the idea of the French Republic, even when the reality of the Napoleonic dictatorship made that faith increasingly untenable.

The Republicans believed that republics were naturally peace-loving, while monarchies thrived on war-making. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” Madison had written in 1795, “war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other [enemy].” As “the parent of armies,” not only did war promote “debts and taxes,” but, he said, it also meant that “the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.”
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In 1806 the old radical Thomas Paine was still echoing these liberal sentiments. Precisely because Great Britain was a monarchy, Paine thought it would never make peace. The British government was “committed in a war system,”
he told a visitor to his lodgings in New York, “and would prosecute it as long as it had the means.”
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In contrast to the Federalists, who believed that the only way to prepare for war was to build up the government and armed forces in a European manner, Republicans thought that the United States as a republic neither needed nor could safely afford a traditional army and navy and a bloated war-making government. “Our constitution is a peace establishment—it is not calculated for war,” declared President Jefferson. “War would endanger its existence.”
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It was just this sort of thinking that lay behind the Democratic-Republicans’ excitement over the undersea warfare inventions of Robert Fulton. Fulton, who spent two decades abroad between 1787 and 1806 mingling with radicals like Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, became convinced that submarines and torpedoes could revolutionize naval warfare. By being able to destroy warships “by means so new, so secret, and so incalculable,” submarines, said Fulton, would render conventional naval warfare impossible. Not knowing where the underwater attacks would come from, sailors would be demoralized and fleets would be “rendered worthless.” Without navies, nations, in particular Great Britain, would be compelled to liberalize their trade and practice the freedom of the seas that Americans had long advocated. This in turn would lead to the universal and perpetual peace that every enlightened person, but especially Americans, yearned for. Fulton built a prototype of a submarine and called it
Nautilus
. Although he knew his submarine was but an infant, he saw in it “an Infant hercules which at one grasp will Strangle the Serpents which poison and convulse the American Constitution.”
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Fulton returned to the United States eager to demonstrate his new invention. In 1807 he used one of his torpedoes, which were actually mines, to blow up a brig in New York Harbor, an experiment that Washington Irving’s
Salmagundi
mocked as the destruction of the British fleet in effigy. Nevertheless, the Republicans were excited. In a Fourth of July address in 1809 his friend and patron Joel Barlow declared that Fulton’s submarine project “carries in itself the eventual destruction of naval tyranny” and the possibility of freeing “mankind from the scourge of naval wars.”
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With this kind of support from a leading Republican intellectual and with the publication of his
Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions
in 1810, Fulton was invited to address the Congress and to conduct further tests of his underwater devices. The Republican Congress, despite its reputation for penny-pinching, even appropriated five thousand dollars to fund his experiments. Although Fulton had many doubters, especially in the navy and among the Federalists, Jefferson had nothing but praise for his devices. In April 1810 the former president told Fulton that he hoped that “the torpedo may go the whole length you expect of putting down navies.” Indeed, he wished the scheme to succeed “too much not to become an easy convert & to give it all my prayers & interest. . . . That the Tories should be against you is in character, because it will curtail the power of their idol, England.” Although most of Fulton’s torpedo experiments were unsuccessful, the Jeffersonian Republican dream of creating the conditions for a universal peace did not die.
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When some Republicans urged that all diplomatic missions be replaced with consuls, which were all that was required to handle international trade, foreign observers were stunned. “They are singular, these people,” declared the new Russian chargé in Washington. “They want commercial ties without political ties. It seems to me however that the one necessarily depends on the other.” This may have been true for the old monarchical world, but not, in the eyes of the Jeffersonians, for the new republican world.
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Although Hamilton had thought Jefferson and Madison utopian dreamers, the Republican leaders were not completely naïve about the world. They feared, as Madison had written in 1792, that “a universal and perpetual peace . . . will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts.” Nevertheless, because war was so foolish as well as wicked, the Republican leaders still hoped that the progress of reason might eventually end war; “and if anything is to be hoped,” Madison had said, “every thing ought to be tried.”
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This deep desire to avoid a conventional war if at all possible became the driving force of Republican policy over the entire period.

The Republicans did concede that even republics might occasionally have to go to war. But if wars were declared solely by the authority of the people, and, more important, if the costs of these wars were borne directly and solely by the generation that declared them, then, Madison had
written in 1795, “ample reward would accrue to the state.” All “wars of folly” would be avoided, and only brief “wars of necessity and defence” would remain, and even these might disappear. “If all nations were to follow [this] example,” said Madison, “the reward would be doubled to each, and the temple of Janus might be shut, never to be opened again.”
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This was an aspect of the liberal dream of a universal peace shared by the enlightened everywhere.

In a world of monarchies, however, the Republicans concluded that the best hope for the United States to avoid war was to create some sort of peaceful republican alternative to it. “War is not the best engine for us to resort to,” said Jefferson; “nature has given us one
in our commerce
, which, if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.”
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Peaceful coercions, using commercial discrimination against foreign enemies and backed ultimately by the withholding of American commerce, were, said Madison, “the most likely means of obtaining our objects without war.”
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In other words, most Republican leaders, especially Jefferson and Madison, believed in the use of economic sanctions—something that even today is often invoked as an alternative to the direct use of military force.

B
EFORE
J
EFFERSON COULD ATTEMPT
to use this powerful weapon against the former mother country, however, he needed to deal with the long-standing problem with the Barbary pirates.
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In Jefferson’s mind this was linked to the main problem with England itself, and that linkage made him much more eager to resort to military force in dealing with the Barbary States than he otherwise might have been.

Actually, when it came to promoting American interests, Jefferson was quite willing to put aside his most deep-rooted prejudices. In the summer of 1805 he even toyed with the possibility of forming an alliance with Britain in order to show both France and Spain (the latter had declared war on Britain in December 1804) that the United States could not be pushed around, especially on the issue of America’s expansive boundaries of
Louisiana. It was unlikely that he ever would have gone that far. But dealing with the Barbary States was another matter. Since neither he nor Madison wanted the European states to take advantage of “the presumed aversion of this Country to war,” the Republican leaders were certainly not going to let the “petty” tyrants of North Africa get away with anything.
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By the end of the eighteenth century the Barbary States of North Africa—Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—had lost much of their former power in the Mediterranean world. They were no longer a threat to the great powers of Britain and France, which simply bought them off with annual tributes and used them to rid the Mediterranean of smaller rival trading peoples, such as the Danes or the Italian city-states. These smaller nations, without powerful navies or the resources to buy off the North African pirates, were vulnerable to having their ships and sailors seized and thus tended to leave the bulk of the Mediterranean trade to the great powers. The newly independent United States found itself in this vulnerable position.

As long as the American merchantmen had remained colonists of Great Britain, they had been protected by the British flag. But with independence, America’s merchant ships became easy prey for these Barbary pirates, or privateers, which is the legal status most Europeans gave to the Muslim raiders. (Privateers had commissions from their governments and presumably only attacked ships belonging to states against which their governments had declared war.) The British government was delighted that commercial competition from the United States would be thwarted. “It is not probable the American states will have a very free trade in the Mediterranean,” declared Lord Sheffield in 1784 on behalf of the British ministry; “it will not be in the interest of any of the great maritime powers to protect them there from the Barbary States.”
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In 1784 Morocco captured an American ship but did not enslave its sailors; instead, in 1786 it signed a peace treaty with the United States, which still exists, making it the longest-standing treaty in American diplomatic history.
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In 1785Algiers, encouraged by Great Britain, captured two American ships and did enslave their crews. Lacking any resources, financial or otherwise, to retaliate, the Confederation Congress remained helpless, angered by the belief, as one American newspaper reported, that “those Barbarians are countenanced in their Depredations upon our
Commerce by the British Court.” Americans were convinced that the British government had the ultimate aim of making British ships the “Carriers of all the Property imported and exported between Britain and America.”
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Not only did this humiliation at the hands of these Muslim pirates contribute to the Americans’ willingness to create a much stronger national government in 1787, but it intensified the rage many Americans felt toward the former mother country.