Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (36 page)

Indeed, the Spanish authorities in Louisiana were so feeble and so fearful of American filibustering activities, especially those threatened by George Rogers Clark of Kentucky, that they thought they had better come to terms with the United States in the West or else lose everything. When it seemed possible that the Federalist government might even ally with Britain and threaten the entire Spanish Empire, the Spanish government finally decided to reverse a decade’s opposition to American demands in the Southwest. Suddenly Spain was willing to settle the boundary of its territories of Florida and Louisiana at the 31st parallel, forsaking the Yazoo lands, and to open up the Mississippi to American navigation.

In October 1795 the newly appointed American ambassador to Spain, Thomas Pinckney, former governor of South Carolina and cousin of Charles Pinckney, who had attacked Jay’s plans in 1786 to sell out the Westerners, signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo that gave the Americans pretty much all they had wanted. When news of Pinckney’s Treaty reached Kentucky, people were ecstatic. The Federalist administration had achieved a great diplomatic success and had immediately made the West far more attractive to both settlers and land speculators. Navigation of the Mississippi, observed Robert Morris, who always had his eye out for a good deal, “doubles or trebles the value of lands bordering upon the Western Waters of the Ohio.”
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But most important in stimulating support for Federalism in the mid-1790s was the increasing growth of American prosperity. Hamilton’s financial program was working wonders. The federal government’s assumption of the states’ war debts had indeed reduced the states’ need to tax their citizens, and the states lowered their taxes to between 50 and 90 percent of what they had been in the 1780s. By the mid-1790s the burden of taxation in the states had returned to pre-Revolution levels, which were
considerably lower than those of the European nations. By 1795 some states had done away with poll taxes and other direct taxes altogether.
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With more money to spend, Americans were consuming more. The value of American imported consumer goods went from $23,500,00 in 1790 to $63,000,000 in 1795. Thanks in part to Jay’s Treaty, America was well on its way to becoming Britain’s best customer. Americans were selling more goods abroad too. The value of domestic exports rose rapidly—the price of a bushel of wheat exported from Philadelphia more than doubled between 1792 and 1796. The war in Europe created an ever expanding demand for American products, especially food, and opened up new opportunities for American neutral shipping.

American ships spanned the world. They had reached China in 1783 and were now sailing all over the Pacific—to Hawaii, Indonesia, Indochina, the Philippines, and India. The
Benjamin
out of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1792–1793 made a prosperous nineteen-month voyage to the Cape of Good Hope and the Isle de France. It was no easy voyage. The ship’s captain, Nathaniel Silsbee (later senator from Massachusetts), had to carefully select ports, decide on cargos, and judge freight costs, and at the same time avoid British and French warships. Although Silsbee was only nineteen, he had been at sea for five years; his first mate was aged twenty, and his clerk was eighteen. The ship went out with a mixed cargo of hops, saddlery, window glass, mahogany boards, tobacco, and Madeira wine and brought back goods that returned almost a 500 percent profit to their owner, Elias Hasket Derby.
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“The wars of Europe,” declared the
Columbian Centinel
in May 1795, “. . . rain riches upon us; and it is as much as we can do to find dishes to catch the golden shower.” Shippers increased their profits threefold between 1792 and 1796, which in turn stimulated an extraordinary increase in shipbuilding. More ships needed more lumber, more canvas, more rope, more tar, and more workers. Daily wages for both ship carpenters and laborers in Philadelphia doubled between 1790 and 1796.

This “golden shower” of prosperity inevitably diluted much of the Republican opposition to Federalist policies. “The farmers are so intent on improving the means of getting rich,” the Federalists noted with glee, “that they can hardly be got to lend an ear to any political subject, however interesting.”
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By the end of 1795 the three dozen or more Democratic-Republican Societies
that had emerged in 1793–1794 to support the Republican cause and challenge the Federalists had disappeared as suddenly as they had arisen.

Part of the reason for the disappearance of the Democratic-Republican Societies was the Federalists’ ability to hold them responsible for the Whiskey Rebellion. In his November 1794 message to Congress Washington had condemned “certain self-created societies” for fomenting the rebellion. The president’s reference put the societies on the defensive and precipitated a debate in Congress over the right of associations to influence the people’s representatives. Although such societies might be necessary in a monarchy, said the Federalists, a republic that had numerous elected officials had no need of them. But America, the Republicans replied, had all sorts of private associations of people. The Baptists and Methodists, for example, might be termed self-created societies.

No one denied the right of people to form various associations, the Federalists retorted. It was what they did with these associations that was at issue. “Private associations of men for the purpose of promoting arts, sciences, benevolence or charity are very laudable,” declared Noah Webster, but associations formed for political purposes were “dangerous to good government.” Ambitious and desperate citizens had used the Democratic-Republican Societies to attack government with smears and slanders and had brought the authority of the governing officials into disrepute. “Citizens,” declared Fisher Ames, who made the most powerful congressional speech against the political clubs, “have thus been led by calumny and lies to despise their Government and its Ministers, to dread and to hate it, and all concerned in it.”
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The Federalists assumed in traditional eighteenth-century fashion—and it was an assumption they never lost—that no free government could long exist without the people’s confidence in the private character and respectability of the governing officials; indeed, they believed that without their personal credibility the weak national government might not have been able to sustain itself at all. Given the fierceness with which the Federalists were being criticized, many of them may have wondered whether they themselves had sufficient character and respectability left to command the people’s trust. But they had a trump card in the president’s unquestioned reputation for virtue, and they played it over and again with particular effectiveness.

Madison thought he saw how the Federalists were using the president’s popularity for “party-advantage.” “The game,” he explained in a letter to Monroe in December 1794, “was to connect the democratic Societies with the odium of the insurrection—to connect the Republicans in Congress with those Societies—to put the President ostensibly at the head of the other party, in opposition to both.” Such efforts, he believed, could only wound the president’s popularity; indeed, he thought that Washington’s mention of “certain secret societies” in his message to Congress was “perhaps the greatest political Error of his life.” But Madison was not yet prepared to criticize the president directly or to admit that his own efforts on behalf of the Republican party were also a “game.”
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Political parties in any modern sense were still unacceptable to most Americans.

E
VEN POLITICS IN ANY MODERN SENSE
was not possible. Because Federalists and Republicans alike fervently believed that the very existence of the United States as an independent republic was directly related to the conflict between Great Britain and revolutionary France, some public officials in the 1790s were led into extraordinarily improper diplomatic behavior. Indeed, in this era of revolutionary passions and hatreds, proper and conventional diplomatic behavior from anyone may have been too much to expect.

In 1789–1790 Alexander Hamilton carried on private discussions with Major George Beckwith, who was acting as agent of the British government in the absence of a regular minister. He suggested to Beckwith that he, as secretary of the treasury, might be a better channel of communication to the administration than the secretary of state. He went on to tell the British agent that he “always preferred a Connexion with you, to that of any other Country,
We think in English
, and have a similarity of prejudices, and of predilections.”
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When in 1791 Jefferson as secretary of state greeted the first British minister, George Hammond, with unusually abrupt hostility, Hammond turned to Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton for discussions of Anglo-American affairs.

Jefferson and other Republican officials, of course, behaved with France as Hamilton did with England. Jefferson misled the French minister Genet into thinking that France would receive more support from the United States government than in fact it was willing to give. But the impropriety of Jefferson’s diplomatic behavior was nothing compared to that of his fellow Virginians, Edmund Randolph and James Monroe.

Secretary of State Randolph was never happy with Hamilton’s influence in the administration or with Jay’s mission to England, and he conveyed his unhappiness to Genet’s successor as French minister, Joseph Fauchet. One of Fauchet’s dispatches to the French government was intercepted at sea by a British warship and in the summer of 1795 was turned over to Oliver Wolcott, the new secretary of the treasury. Fauchet revealed that he had learned in conversations with Randolph that some members of the Federalist government were bent on absolute power; he suggested that they might have instigated the Whiskey Rebellion as a pretext for misleading the president and giving energy to the government. Worse still, Fauchet went on with an ambiguous reference to thousands of dollars that Randolph had requested from France—a reference that most assumed involved a bribe, mistakenly, it turned out.

When Washington confronted Randolph with Fauchet’s letter, the secretary of state immediately resigned, and then spent several months preparing a lengthy
Vindication
that did little to salvage his reputation. Randolph was not guilty of treason, as some high Federalists such as Secretary of War Timothy Pickering charged, but he was certainly guilty of stupidity and impropriety.
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James Monroe was likewise guilty of foolish behavior and even more partisan indiscretion during the two years, 1794 to 1796, when he was minister to France. He made no secret of his sympathies for “the fortitude, magnanimity, and heroic valor” of the French forces warring against Britain. He undermined his own government’s policies in every way, assuming, as he repeatedly told the French, that the interests of the United States were identical to those of her sister republic. He proposed that the United States make a $5 million loan to France, confident, he said, that the American people “would cheerfully bear a tax, the product of which was to be applied in aid of the French Republic.”
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Monroe kept advocating military action against Britain and continually downplayed the fact that Jay was in England trying to avoid war. When the Jay Treaty was published, Monroe was so personally opposed to it that he could never adequately explain it to the French on behalf of the government he represented. He even intimated to French officials that the election of Jefferson in 1796 would solve everything.

When some of Monroe’s private views expressed to fellow Republicans back home came to light, he was recalled. That Monroe as minister should have persisted so long opposing the government he represented is
a measure of the high stakes involved. For Monroe and other Republicans the future of liberty itself seemed to rest on French success. Such ideological passions made ordinary politics impossible.

B
Y EARLY
1796, President Washington had had enough. He was determined to escape the “serious anxiety . . . troubles and perplexities of office.” Having a thin skin and always acutely concerned with his reputation, he had suffered deeply from the criticism leveled at him. He had been “accused of being the enemy of one Nation, and the subject to the influence of another.” Every act of his administration, he said, had been tortured and misrepresented, and he himself had been vilified “in such exaggerated, and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero; a notorious defaulter; or even to a common picket-pocket.”
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He was sixty-four and tired, he said, in both body and mind.

As in the case of his career as commander-in-chief, Washington’s most important act as president was his giving up the office. The significance of his retirement from the presidency is easily overlooked today, but his contemporaries knew what it meant. Most people assumed that Washington might be president as long as he lived, that he would be a kind of elective monarch like the king of Poland. Hence his retirement from the presidency enhanced his moral authority and set a precedent for future presidents. But it also did more: that the chief executive of a state should willingly relinquish his office was an objective lesson in republicanism at a time when the republican experiment throughout the Atlantic world was very much in doubt.

Before Washington left office he wanted to say some things to “the Yeomanry of this Country” and “in language that was plain and intelligible to their understanding.”
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When he had thought of retiring in 1792, he had had Madison prepare a draft of a valedictory address. Now he altered that draft and gave the revision to Hamilton to rework into an address. Hamilton prepared two versions, one containing more of his own inclinations than Madison’s. Washington preferred that one, believing it “more dignified . . . and [containing] less egotism.”
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