Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (34 page)

Suddenly in 1776, with the United States isolated and outside the European mercantile empires, Americans had both an opportunity and a need to put into practice these liberal ideas about international relations and the free exchange of goods. Thus commercial interest and revolutionary idealism blended to form a basis for American thinking about foreign affairs that has lasted even to the present.

“Our plan is commerce,” Thomas Paine had told Americans in 1776, “and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” There was no need for America to form any partial political connections with any part of Europe. Such traditional military alliances were the legacies of monarchical governments, and they only led to war. “It is the true interest of America,” said Paine, “to steer clear of European contentions.” Trade between peoples alone would be enough. Indeed, for Paine and other enlightened liberals, peaceful trade among the people of the various nations became the counterpart in the international sphere to the sociability of people in the domestic sphere. Just as enlightened thinkers like Paine and Jefferson foresaw republican society held together solely by the natural affection of individuals one to another, so too did they envision a world of these republican societies held together by the natural interest of nations in trading with one another. In both the national and international spheres monarchy and its intrusive institutions and monopolistic ways were what prevented a natural harmony of people’s feelings and interests.
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Americans had first expressed these “Liberal Sentiments,” as John Adams called them, during discussions over the proposed treaty with France at the time of Independence. There was a hope then, Adams said in 1785, that “the increasing liberality of sentiments among philosophers and men of letters, in various nations,” might lead to “a
reformation
, a kind of
protestantism
, in the commercial system of the world.”
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Many in the Continental Congress in 1776 had attempted to implement these hopes by devising a model treaty that would be applied to France and eventually to other
nations—a treaty that would avoid the traditional kinds of political and military commitments and focus instead exclusively on commercial connections.
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The model treaty, drafted mainly by John Adams in July 1776, promised the greatest amount of commercial freedom and equality possible, which, if widely achieved, would eliminate the tensions and conflicts of world politics. Were the principles of the model treaty “once really established and honestly observed,” John Adams later recalled, “it would put an end forever to all maritime war, and render all military navies useless.”
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Absolute reciprocity in trade was the guiding principle of the treaty. In duties and trade restrictions foreign merchants would be treated as one’s own nationals were treated. Even in wartime trade was to be kept flowing. Indeed, a major idea of the treaty was to lessen the impact of war on civilians. Neutral nations would have the right to trade with and carry the goods of the belligerent nations—the right expressed in the phrase “free ships make free goods.”

In retrospect the naïveté of the Revolutionary Americans seems astonishing. They were desperate for an alliance with France, yet they were willing to offer Louis XVI’s government very little in return. Since political and military cooperation with France was to be avoided at all costs, the model treaty promised only that in case the commercial alliance between the United States and France led to a French war with Great Britain, then the United States would not assist Britain in the war!

In the end the Americans’ dream was not fully realized. Although they did sign a commercial treaty with France that contained the free trade principles they had wanted, they also had to agree to a traditional political and military alliance with France that obligated the United States to guarantee “from the present time and forever . . . the present Possessions of the Crown of France in America as well as those it may acquire by the future Treaty of peace.”
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Many Americans, including John Adams, came out of their experience with European diplomacy with their enlightened ideas very much in doubt. “No facts are believed but decisive military conquests,” Adams warned in 1780; “no arguments are seriously attended to in Europe but force.” Given this reality, a balance of power might be useful after all.
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Despite these doses of realism, however, the Americans’ enlightened dream of a new world order based on commerce was not lost, and the signing of a peace treaty with Britain in 1783 seemed to make possible the revival of the dream. In 1784 the United States authorized a diplomatic commission composed of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin to negotiate commercial treaties with sixteen European states based on the liberal principles of a revised model treaty. The hope was to have America, in the commissioners’ words, lead the way to an “object so valuable to mankind as the total emancipation of commerce and the bringing together all nations for a free intercommunication of happiness.”
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Only three states, however—Sweden, Prussia, and Morocco, peripheral powers with little overseas trade—agreed to sign liberal treaties with the United States. Most European states were indifferent to the Americans’ ideas. They simply were ignorant of the importance of American commerce, said Jefferson, who had been instrumental in drawing up the new model treaty. Even someone as hardheaded as Washington reflected “with pleasure on the probable influence that commerce may hereafter have on human manners and society in general,” even leading perhaps to an end of “the devastation and horrors of war.”
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But it was Jefferson and Madison, among the Revolutionary leaders, who clung longest to the belief in the power of American trade to bring about changes in international behavior, indeed, to make commercial sanctions a substitute for the use of military force. This confidence in American commerce, which harked back to the non-importation policies against Britain in the 1760s and 1770s, became the basic premise of the Republican party’s approach to international politics. It underlay Republican policies and thinking about the world well into the early decades of the nineteenth century. Jefferson and Madison never lost hope that the United States might be able to bring about a world in which war itself would no longer be necessary.

S
INCE THE PRINCIPAL OBSTACLE
to their hopes was Great Britain, the Republican leaders aimed to use the power of American commerce to convince Britain to change its policies. Yet Jefferson and Madison were not merely interested in opening up British ports to American trade. For the Republicans the economics of America’s relationship with Britain was always less important than the politics of it. What they really wanted was to destroy Britain’s commercial hegemony in the world and end America’s commercial, and hence political, dependence on the former
mother country; and they were willing to compromise America’s commercial prosperity to bring about this crucial end.

In 1789 Madison had sought unsuccessfully to levy discriminatory tariffs on British imports in order to force Britain to open its ports in the West Indies and Canada to American shipping. Although the British West Indies remained legally closed, American merchants continued to trade illegally with them. Indeed, American commerce with Britain was flourishing; three-quarters of all American exports and imports were exchanged with the former mother country.
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Precisely because of all this trade, the Republican leaders thought the British were susceptible to American pressure; the time seemed ripe for using trade restrictions to break up Britain’s navigation system. Relying on the arguments set forth by Jefferson in his December 1793 report to Congress on the state of America’s foreign commerce, Madison in January 1794 introduced resolutions in the House calling for commercial reciprocity with all nations with which the United States did not have commercial treaties, the only important one, of course, being Great Britain. If that reciprocity were not forthcoming, the United States would retaliate with tariffs and trade restrictions against a nation that had already showed its hostility toward the United States by refusing to vacate American territory.

Although trade with America constituted only one-sixth of Britain’s total commerce, the Republican leaders nevertheless assumed that American trade was absolutely vital to Great Britain. If Americans ceased buying luxuries from Britain, British manufacturers would be thrown out of work, riots would follow, and the British government would be compelled to capitulate. The Republican leaders did not expect their commercial retaliation to result in war. “If it does,” said Jefferson, “we will meet it like men: but it may not bring on war, and then the experiment will have been a happy one.” And America will have given “the world still another useful lesson, by shewing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as the sufferer.”
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Naturally, the Federalists opposed these measures, which would have unsettled the economy and undermined Hamilton’s entire financial program. Financing the funded national debt depended on the customs duties levied on foreign imports, most of which were British. Indeed, it was the extraordinary growth of federal customs revenue in the 1790s that enabled the state governments to lower their taxes, which of course enhanced the reputation of the Washington government.

In the Congress William Loughton Smith of South Carolina and Fisher Ames of Massachusetts took the lead in exposing the harmful consequences of destroying trade with Great Britain. American producers and consumers would suffer far more than the British from these proposed trade restrictions. No American merchant, no trading state in the Union, favored Madison’s measures, said Ames in the Congress. We are asked “to engage in a contest of self-denial. For what?” In a letter in January 1794 Ames went on to inform his friend Christopher Gore of the progress of the debate and the strange nature of the Republicans’ thinking. “The ground is avowedly changed,” he told Gore. “Madison & Co. now avow that the political wrongs are
the
wrongs to be cured by commercial restrictions.” In other words, “in plain English,” the Republicans “set out with a tale of restrictions and injuries on our commerce.” When that was “refuted solidly,” and they were “pressed for a pretext,” they declared “that we will make war, not for our commerce, but with it; not to make our commerce better, but to make it nothing, in order to reach the tender sides of our enemy, which are not to be wounded in any other way.”
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In his response to the Federalists’ arguments the best that Madison could do was emphasize the great political danger that America’s extraordinary dependence on British trade and capital posed for the fledgling republic. That dependence, he told the Congress in January 1794, created an “influence that may be conveyed into the public councils . . .and the effect that may finally ensue on our taste, our manners, and our form of Government itself.” In Republican eyes the Revolution against the British monarchy was far from over: a decade after the treaty of peace, England and English ways still seemed capable of destroying the young Republic.
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British actions certainly appeared to support this Republican view of a deep-seated monarchical antagonism toward the United States. Before the debate over trade restrictions could be resumed in March 1794, news arrived of the new British policy to seize all American ships trading with the French West Indies. Not only had over 250 American ships already been seized and American sailors mistreated, but also rumor spread that Sir Guy Carleton, the governor-general of Canada, had made an inflammatory speech inciting the Indians in the Northwest against the Americans.

In response, Congress immediately passed a thirty-day embargo on all shipping. War with Britain seemed inevitable. Even many Federalists were angry at English arrogance; Hamilton himself was ready to fight if
necessary. “To be in a condition to defend ourselves, and annoy any who may attack us,” he told the president, “will be the best method of securing our peace.”
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The Federalists’ approach to the crisis with Britain was to arm in preparation for war while attempting to negotiate peace. This policy grew out of their basic understanding of the world and the United States’ role in it. Hamilton and most Federalists never accepted the premise of the most utopian Republican thinking—that once the European monarchies were eliminated and republics established, peace and the free flow of commerce would reign throughout the world. Hamilton saw the world made up of competing nation-states, with republics being no more peace-loving than monarchies. The sources of war, he said, did not lie in the needs of funding systems, bureaucracies, and standing armies, as the Republicans assumed; they lay in the natural ambitions and avarice of all human beings. “The seeds of war,” he wrote in 1795, “are sown thickly in the human breast.”
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Although in such a hostile world commerce admittedly had a “softening and humanizing influence,” the only real way for a nation to guarantee peace was to prepare for war.
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Unfortunately, said Hamilton, the United States, though growing, was not yet strong enough to assert itself as an equal in international affairs. But give the country time, perhaps as much as forty or fifty years, and it would be as powerful as any nation in the world. In the meantime the United States needed to maintain its credit and prosperity through trade with Great Britain. When British actions threatened that relationship in the spring of 1794, the Federalists prepared for war but, conscious of American weakness, hoped for negotiations.