From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (15 page)

Defeated in the Senate and by the executive, the Republicans mounted a bitter rearguard effort that would delay implementation of the treaty for almost a year and raise important constitutional questions. Insisting that the House also had the power to approve treaties, a position Jefferson himself had explicitly rejected some years earlier, the
Republican-controlled lower chamber demanded that the president submit to it all documents relating to negotiation of the treaty. Washington refused, setting an important precedent on executive privilege. The House quickly approved a resolution reaffirming its right to pass on any treaty requiring implementing legislation. Some Republicans shied away from direct confrontation with the president, however, and in April 1796 the House appropriated funds to implement the treaty by a narrow margin of three votes, setting a precedent that has never been challenged.

Remarkable and fortuitous economic and diplomatic gains facilitated public acceptance of the treaty. There is no better balm for wounded pride than prosperity. As a neutral carrier for both sides, the United States enjoyed a major economic boom in the aftermath of the treaty. Exports more then tripled between 1792 and 1796. "The affairs of Europe rain riches on us," one American exulted, "and it is as much as we can do to find dishes to catch the golden shower."
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While Jay was negotiating in London and the treaty was being debated at home, Wayne settled the future of the Northwest on U.S. terms. Following the St. Clair debacle, he gathered an imposing army eventually numbering 3,500 men and prepared his campaign with the utmost care. In August 1794, he routed a small force of Indians at Fallen Timbers near British-held Fort Miami. Despite earlier inciting them to battle, the British refused to back the Indians or even allow them into the fort when Wayne had them on the run. After a tense standoff outside the fort where, perhaps miraculously, neither Britons nor Americans fired a shot, Wayne systematically plundered Indian storehouses and burned villages in the Ohio country. In August 1795, he imposed on the defeated and dispirited tribes the Treaty of Greenville that confined them to a narrow strip of land along Lake Erie. It was certainly not expansion with honor, but in the eyes of most Americans the ends justified the means. Wayne's campaign crippled the hold of Indians and British in the Old Northwest, restoring the prestige of the American government and strengthening its hold on the Ohio country. Removal of the British was the last step in completing the process Wayne had begun, a point defenders of the Jay Treaty hammered home in speech after speech.
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An unanticipated and quite astounding diplomatic windfall from the Jay Treaty also eased its acceptance. A declining power, Spain found itself in a precarious position between the major European belligerents. Allied
for a time with Britain, it changed sides when the advance of a French army into the Iberian peninsula threatened its very survival. Fearing British reprisals and suspecting—incorrectly, as it turned out—that the Jay Treaty portended an Anglo-American alliance that might bring combined expeditions against Spanish America, a panicky Madrid government moved quickly to appease the United States. The U.S. minister, Thomas Pinckney, was astute enough to seize the opportunity. In the Treaty of San Lorenzo, signed in October 1795 and sometimes called Pinckney's Treaty, Spain recognized the boundary claimed by the United States since 1783. It also granted the long-coveted access to the Mississippi and for three years the right to deposit goods at New Orleans for storage and transshipment without duties. Resolving at virtually no cost to the United States issues that had plagued Spanish-American relations and threatened the allegiance of the West, Pinckney's Treaty pacified the restless westerners and made the Jay Treaty more palatable.
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From the vantage point of more than two hundred years, the verdict on Jay's Treaty is unambiguous. Jay was dealt a weak hand and might have played it better. In seeking and pushing the treaty, Hamilton and Jay acted for blatantly partisan and self-serving reasons, promoting their grand design for foreign relations and domestic development. Their dire warnings of war may have been exaggerated. The most likely alternative to the treaty was a continued state of crisis and conflict that could have led to war. On the other hand, Republican ranting was also driven by partisanship and was certainly overstated. Diplomacy by its very nature requires concessions, a point Americans even then were inclined to forget. The circumstances of 1794 left little choice but to sacrifice on neutral rights. Jay secured concessions Jefferson could not get that turned out to be very important over the long run. Most important, Britain recognized U.S. independence in a way it had not in 1783. Rarely has a treaty so bad on the face of it produced such positive results. It initiated a period of sustained prosperity that in turn promoted stability and strength. It bound the Northwest and Southwest to a still very fragile federal union. It bought for a new and still weak nation that most priceless commodity—time.

Whatever its long-term benefits, the treaty afforded the United States no immediate respite. Conflict with France dominated the remainder of the decade, provoking a sustained diplomatic crisis, blatant French interference
in American internal affairs, and an undeclared naval war. The war scare of 1798 heightened already bitter divisions at home. Federalist exploitation of the rage against France for partisan advantage provoked fierce Republican reaction that could not be silenced through repression. Suspicions on each side ran wild, Federalists claiming that Republicans were joining with France to bring the excesses of the French Revolution to America, Republicans insisting that the Federalists, allied with Britain, were seeking to destroy republicanism at home. The war scare also set the Federalists squabbling among themselves, producing cabinet intrigues and rumors of plots akin to coups.

Absorbed with the European war and its own internal politics, France viewed the United States as a nuisance and possible source of exploitation rather than a major concern. The Directory then in power represented the low point of the revolution, unpopular, divided against itself, and rife with corruption. French policy toward the United States, if indeed it could be called that, reflected the whim of the moment, a need for food, a lust for money. The French naturally protested the Jay Treaty, claiming they had been "betrayed and despoiled with impunity." But the treaty was as much pretext as cause for attacks on the United States that were reckless to the point of stupidity. Flushed with victories on the Continent, France arrogantly toyed with the United States and plundered its shipping, outraging a profoundly insecure people whose nerves were already frayed from years of mistreatment at the hands of the great powers.
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Following the Jay Treaty, France retaliated against the United States. Genet's successors, Joseph Fauchet and Pierre Adet, lobbied vigorously to defeat the treaty in the Senate and House, offering bribes to some congressmen. Failing, they tried intimidation to mitigate its effects. Proclaiming that the treaty of 1778 was no longer in effect and hinting ominously at a severance of diplomatic relations, they insisted that U.S. concessions to Britain compelled them to scrap the principle of free ships, free goods. They seized more than three hundred American ships in 1795 alone. Hoping to exploit popular anger with Jay's Treaty, they used the threat of war to secure the election of a more friendly government. Adet interfered in the election of 1796 in a way not since duplicated by a foreign representative by warning that war could be avoided only by the election of Jefferson. A furious Washington denounced French treatment of the United States as "outrageous beyond conception."
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French meddling provoked a sharp presidential response in the form of Washington's Farewell Address. Drafted partly by Hamilton, the president's statement was at one level a highly partisan political document timed to promote the Federalist cause in the approaching election. Washington's fervid warnings against the "insidious wiles of foreign influence" and "passionate attachments" to "permanent alliances" with other nations unmistakably alluded to the French connection and Adet's intrigues. They were designed, at least in part, to discredit the Republicans.
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At another level, the Farewell Address was a political testament, based on recent experience, in which the retiring president set forth principles to guide the nation in its formative years. Washington's admonitions against partisanship reflected his sincere and deep-seated fears of the perils of factionalism at a delicate stage in the national development. His references to alliances set forth a view common among Americans that their nation, founded on exceptional principles and favored by geography, could best achieve its destiny by preserving its freedom of action. Although it would later be used as a justification for isolationism, the Farewell Address was
not
an isolationist document. The word
isolationism
did not become fixed in the American political lexicon until the twentieth century. No one in the 1790s could have seriously entertained the notion of freedom from foreign involvement.
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Washington vigorously advocated commercial expansion. He also conceded that "temporary alliances" might be required in "extraordinary emergencies." Influenced by experience dating to the colonial period, he stressed the importance of an independent course free of emotional attachments and wherever possible binding political commitments to other nations. When the country had grown strong and the interior was tied closely to the Union, it would be able to fend off any threat, a blueprint for future empire.
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For whatever reason, Americans heeded Washington's warnings, and France's efforts to swing the election of 1796 backfired. The Federalists took the high ground of principle and nationalism, charging their opponents with serving a foreign power. Although it is impossible to weigh with any precision the impact of Adet's interference, it likely contributed to the Federalist victory. Despite a split between those Federalists supporting Vice President John Adams and those, including Hamilton, who
preferred Thomas Pinckney, Adams won seventy-one electoral votes to sixty-eight for Jefferson. At a time when the runner-up automatically became vice president, the nation experienced the anomaly of its two top officials representing bitterly contending parties.

Failing to "revolutionize" the U.S. government, France sought to punish the upstart nation for its independence. Proclaiming that it would treat neutrals as neutrals allowed England to treat them, Paris officially sanctioned what had been going on for months, authorizing naval commanders and privateers to seize ships carrying British property. They quickly equaled the haul of 1795. Atrocities sometimes accompanied the seizures—one American ship captain was tortured with thumbscrews until he declared his cargo British property and liable for seizure. By 1797, French raiders boldly attacked U.S. ships off the coast of Long Island and Philadelphia. France also refused to receive the newly appointed U.S. minister, Charles C. Pinckney, insisting that an envoy would not be accredited until the United States redressed its grievances.
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In seeking to intimidate the United States, France badly misjudged the mood of the nation and the character of its new president. Sixty-one years old, vain, thin-skinned, and impulsive, John Adams was also a man of keen intelligence and considerable learning. In many ways, he was the most stubbornly independent of the Founders. Pessimistic in his view of human nature and conservative in his politics, he had been skeptical of the French Revolution from the outset.
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A staunch nationalist, he reacted indignantly to French high-handedness. And some of his advisers would have welcomed war. In awe of his predecessor, he retained not only the cabinet system but also Washington's cabinet: the querulous and narrow-minded Timothy Pickering as secretary of state and Oliver Wolcott, the mediocre Hamilton confidant, as secretary of the treasury. Adams never shared the pro-British sympathies of his colleagues. Short and plump, by his own admission "but an Ordinary Man," he lacked his illustrious predecessor's commanding presence. Unsure of himself in the presidency and deeply angered by France, he tolerated his advisers' virulently anti-French policies to the brink of war.

Adams's initial approach to France combined a willingness to employ force with an openness to negotiations. Shortly after taking office, he revived long-dormant plans to build a navy to protect U.S. shipping. Still
hoping to avert war, he emulated Washington's 1794 approach to England by dispatching to France a special peace mission composed of John Marshall, Elbridge Gerry, and Charles C. Pinckney. He instructed his commissioners to ask compensation for the seizures of ships and cargoes, secure release from the articles of the 1778 treaty binding the United States to defend the French West Indies, and win French acceptance of the Jay Treaty. They were authorized to offer little in return.

Given American terms, a settlement would have been difficult under any circumstances, but the timing was especially inopportune. Revolutionary France was at the peak of its power. Napoleon Bonaparte had won great victories on the Continent. Britain was isolated and vulnerable. France was willing to settle with the United States, but it saw no need for haste. In need of money and accustomed to manipulating the small states of Europe through a "vast network of international plunder," the Directory set out to extort what it could from the United States. Its minister of foreign relations, the notorious Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, an aristocrat, former Roman Catholic bishop, and notorious womanizer, had lived in exile in the United States and had little respect for Americans. Certain that the new nation "merited no more consideration than Genoa or Geneva," he preferred at least for the moment a condition he described as "half friendly, half hostile," which permitted France to enrich itself by looting U.S. ships.
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A master of survival in the hurly-burly of French politics, conniving, above all venal, Talleyrand also hoped to enrich himself at American expense. He treated Adams's commissioners as representatives of a European vassal state. When the delegation arrived in France, it was told by mysterious agents identified only as X, Y, and Z that negotiations would proceed more smoothly if the United States paid a bribe of $250,000 and loaned France $12 million.
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