Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (42 page)

Jefferson was deeply embarrassed by the revelation of the letter. At first the vice-president thought that in defense of his reputation he must “take the field of the public papers”; but he soon realized, as he explained to Madison, that any response would involve him in endless explanations and would bring on “a personal difference between Genl. Washington and myself,” not to mention embroiling him “with all those with whom his character is still popular, that is to say, nine tenths of the people of the
U.S.”
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Madison agreed that silence was probably Jefferson’s best alternative. Among those the vice-president consulted, only James Monroe urged him to reply publicly, as he himself was doing in an angry response to his embarrassing recall from France.

Monroe was a militant Republican and as a veteran of the Revolutionary War much more committed to the code of honor than either Jefferson or Madison. In 1798 he was angered by President John Adams’s reference to him as “a disgraced minister, recalled in displeasure for misconduct,” and he wrote to Madison for advice on how to respond within the code of honor. Monroe believed he could not simply ignore Adams’s insult, for “not to notice it may with many leave an unfavorable impression agnst me.” Yet a personal challenge to a duel seemed impossible, since Adams was “an old man and President.” He could not simply request an explanation for his recall from France, because he had already done that. Perhaps he could write a pamphlet and attack Adams, “ridicule his political career, shew it to be the consummation of folly & wickedness.” In response, Madison suggested that if Monroe were to do anything in the present heated atmosphere of partisanship, he ought to compose “a temperate & dignified animadversion published with your name to it.”
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Although Madison never fought a duel, he was well aware of the code of honor involved in these personal confrontations. He criticized Roger Griswold, for example, for not challenging Lyon to a duel. If Griswold had been “a man of the sword” he would never have allowed the House to intervene in his conflict with Lyon. “No man,” he said, “ought to reproach another with cowardice, who is not ready to give proof of his own courage.”
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Hamilton, as a Revolutionary War veteran, was very much a man of the sword—as a confrontation he had with Monroe in 1797 showed. Five years earlier, in 1792, Hamilton when he was secretary of the treasury had engaged in adultery with a woman named Maria Reynolds and had actually paid blackmail to her husband in order to keep the affair quiet. When privately challenged in 1792 by several suspicious congressmen, including Senator James Monroe, for misusing treasury funds, Hamilton confessed to the affair and the blackmail, which had nothing to do with treasury business. The congressmen, who were embarrassed by this
revelation, seemed to accept Hamilton’s explanation and dropped their investigation.

Rumors of Hamilton’s involvement with the Reynoldses circulated over the next several years, but it was not until 1797 that James Thomson Callender, a Scottish refugee and one of the new breed of unscrupulous journalists who were spreading scurrility everywhere, used documents that he had acquired to charge Hamilton publicly with speculating in treasury funds. Although it was probably John Beckley, a loyal Republican and recently dismissed clerk of the House of Representative, who had supplied Callender with the documents, Hamilton suspected that it was Monroe, and he pressed Monroe to make a public statement avowing his belief in Hamilton’s explanation of five years earlier. The quarrel between the two men became so heated that only an exchange of letters and some complicated negotiations, including the intervention of Aaron Burr, averted a duel. The code of honor, however, required that Hamilton defend his reputation somehow, and therefore he published a lengthy pamphlet laying out all the sordid details of the affair with Mrs. Reynolds. Better to be thought a private adulterer than a corrupt public official. The pamphlet was a disastrous mistake, and it led Callender to gloat that Hamilton had done himself more damage than “fifty of the best pens in America could have said against him.”
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Hamilton was unusually intense and thin-skinned and sensitive to any criticism, but his experience with Monroe in 1797 was not unusual. Dueling was part of the politics of the day—a sign of how much aristocratic standards still prevailed even as the society was becoming more democratic. Men engaged in duels were not simply trying to maim or kill their adversaries; instead, they were seeking both to display their bravery, military prowess, and willingness to sacrifice their lives for their honor and to conduct partisan politics. Dueling was part of an elaborate political ritual designed to protect reputations and affect politics in what was still a very personal aristocratic world.

The challenges and responses and the negotiations among principals and their seconds and friends often went on for weeks or even months. The duels were often timed for political effect, and their complicated procedures and public exchanges in newspapers were calculated to influ-ence a broad public. There were many duels, most of which did not end in exchanges of gunfire. In New York City between 1795 and 1807, for example, there were at least sixteen affairs of honor, though few resulted in anyone’s death. Hamilton was the principal in eleven affairs of honor
during his lifetime, but he actually exchanged fire in only one—his last, fatal duel with Aaron Burr.
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During the 1790s this politics of reputation and individual character was rapidly being eroded in a number of ways, especially through the growth of political parties and the proliferation of scandal-mongering newspapers that were reaching out to a new popular readership. Indeed, the clash between an older aristocratic world of honor and the emerging new democratic world of political parties and partisan newspapers lay behind much of the turbulence and passion of the 1790s. Under these changing circumstances newspapers became weapons of the new political parties, to be used to discredit and demolish the characters of the opposing leaders in the eyes of unprecedented numbers of new readers. Since the lingering code of honor was designed for gentlemen dealing personally with one another, it was incapable of handling the new problems created by an ever growing and more vituperative popular press, especially in a time of great crisis.

With the inauguration of John Adams as president and the spread of the French Revolution throughout the Western world, America was heading for just that kind of crisis.

7
The Crisis of 1798–1799

When the French learned of Jay’s treaty with Great Britain, they immediately began seizing American ships and confiscating their cargoes. Actually, ever since the European war had broken out in 1793, the French treatment of American neutral shipping had not been all that different from that of the British, despite the stipulations of “free ships, free goods” in the French-American treaty of 1778. But throughout all its erratic seizing of American ships France at least had pretended to respect American neutral rights.

The Federalists were primed to be suspicious of anything France did. The president’s son John Quincy Adams, minister to the Netherlands, which had recently become a French satellite, fed Federalist fears. France, he reported to his father in 1796, was working to undermine the Federalists and bring about the “triumph of the French party, French principles, and French influence” in American affairs. France believed that “the
people
of the United States had but a feeble attachment to their government and will not support them in a contest with that of France.” Young Adams even suggested that France planned to invade the South and with the support of sympathizers there and in the West break up the Union and create a puppet republic. Revolutionary France and its armies were, after all, doing just that—setting up puppet regimes—throughout Europe. Such a conspiratorial and fearful atmosphere seemed to make any sort of normal diplomatic relations impossible.
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In 1797, after Adams’s presidential victory, France abandoned its earlier efforts to divide Americans politically and decided to confront the United States directly. Not only did France’s Directory government refuse to receive Thomas Pinckney’s elder brother Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, whom Washington had sent to Paris to replace Monroe, but it also announced that all neutral American ships carrying British goods were now liable to seizure and that all American sailors impressed onto British ships would be treated as pirates.

In response, President Adams called a special session of Congress for May 1797, the first president to do so. After Adams urged a buildup of American military forces, especially the navy, Congress authorized the president to call up eighty thousand militiamen, provided for harbor fortifications, and approved the completion of three frigates still on the ways. At the same time, the president criticized the French for trying to divide the people of the United States from their government, declaring that “we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence.”
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By the middle of 1797 the United States and France were on the verge of war with one another in much the same way that the United States and Britain had been in 1794. Since Washington had earlier headed off war with Britain by sending Jay on his diplomatic mission, Adams decided to follow his predecessor’s example and send a similar mission to France.

At first, Adams toyed with the idea of sending Madison, but his cabinet, composed of Washington appointees Timothy Pickering (State), Oliver Wolcott Jr. (Treasury), and James McHenry (War), was decidedly hostile to this suggestion. Hamilton, on the other hand, favored sending Madison, confident that Madison would be unwilling to sell out the United States to France. America, Hamilton believed, still needed peace; it was not yet mature or strong enough for out-and-out war with any of the European states. But other Federalists wanted no capitulation to French pressure; the extreme hard-liner Pickering, in fact, urged a declaration of war against France and an American alliance with Britain.
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For their part, the Republican leaders doubted that France wanted war with the United States and urged that America delay any action. They were not at all eager to get involved in peace-making efforts with France that might mean endorsing the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Jefferson and other Republicans believed that a French invasion of Britain was imminent and that its success would solve all the problems. Since the coalition massed against the revolutionary regime had fallen apart, France now dominated Europe. Napoleon had defeated the Austrians in Italy and looked to crush France’s one remaining enemy. It was rumored that the Dutch, in their French-dominated Batavian Republic, were preparing an invasion force. In fact, fourteen hundred French banditti did manage to land on the British coast, though they were quickly surrounded by local militia.

Britain seemed quite plausibly to be on the verge of collapse. Bread was scarce and famine threatened. Mutinies rocked the Royal Navy. Stocks on the British exchange fell to a record low, and the Bank of England was forced to suspend gold payments to private persons. General Cornwallis, the Yorktown loser who had become governor-general of British India, was deeply alarmed. “Torn as we are by faction, without an army, without money, trusting entirely to a navy whom we may not be able to pay, and on whose loyalty, even if we can, no firm reliance is to be placed, how,” he asked, “are we to get out of this accursed war without a Revolution?”
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To Jefferson and the Republicans, war with France was inconceivable and had to be avoided at almost any cost. War would play into the hands of the Federalist “Anglomen” in America and destroy the republican experiment everywhere. In this confusing and emotional atmosphere Adams appointed a three-man commission to France to negotiate peace—Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the minister whom the French had refused to receive; John Marshall, a moderate Virginia Federalist; and Elbridge Gerry, Adams’s quirky Massachusetts friend who was even more anti-party than Adams himself.

The French foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, was, like Jefferson, known for his finesse and his ability to hide his feelings. At this moment he was in no hurry to negotiate with the United States and did not believe he had to. America posed no threat to France, he thought, and most of its people seemed to be sympathetic to the French cause. In fact, Jefferson had been advising French diplomats in America that delay was the best line for the French to take, because, as he and many others assumed, the war between monarchical Britain and revolutionary France would not last much longer. France would conquer Britain as it had conquered other nations in Europe.

The Directory in charge of the French government, however, was not as strong as its army’s victories on the Continent suggested. Not only was its authority shaky and increasingly dependent on the army, but it was desperate for funds and showed no interest in anything except extracting money from its client states and puppet republics. Thus when the American envoys arrived in Paris in October 1797, they were met with a series of humiliating conditions before negotiations could even begin. Agents of Talleyrand and the Directory, later referred to as “X, Y, and Z” in dispatches published in America, demanded that the American government apologize for President Adams’s hostile May 1797 speech to Congress and assume responsibility for any outstanding French debts and
indemnities owed to Americans. At the same time, these French agents insisted that the United States make a “considerable loan” to France and give to Talleyrand and the Directory a large sum of money for their “private use,” that is, a substantial bribe of fifty thousand pounds. Only then might the French government receive the American commissioners.