The Genesis Of America: US Foreign Policy And The Formation Of National Identity, 1793–1815 110842824X, 9781108428248

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half-title page......Page 3
Series page......Page 4
Title page......Page 5
Copyright page......Page 6
Dedication......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
List of Figures......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 11
Note on Citations......Page 14
List of
Abbreviations......Page 15
Introduction......Page 17
1 Political Ideologies and American Identity in the Era of the French Revolution......Page 54
2 Foreign Policies of Unneutrality and the Jay Treaty......Page 87
3 Federalists and the Origins of the Quasi-War......Page 123
4 Disentangling America from France......Page 147
5 Republicans and the Origins of the War of 1812......Page 184
6 Disentangling America from Great Britain......Page 231
Conclusion......Page 271
Bibliography......Page 286
Index......Page 320

Citation preview

The Genesis of America U.S. Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815 The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which U.S. foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the U.S. needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, thereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans – lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights – could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Jasper M. Trautsch is a lecturer in American history at the University of Regensburg. In 2013, his dissertation was awarded the Rolf Kentner Dissertation Prize for an outstanding work in the field of American studies. He is the editor of Civic Nationalisms in Global Perspective (forthcoming), and the author of numerous articles on U.S. foreign policy and American nationalism published, for example, in Early American Studies, the Journal of Military History, National Identities, Global Affairs, and Critical Muslim.

Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations Edited by Paul Thomas Chamberlin, Columbia University Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Columbia University This series showcases cutting-edge scholarship in US foreign relations that employs dynamic new methodological approaches and archives from the colonial era to the present. The series will be guided by the ethos of transnationalism, focusing on the history of American foreign relations in a global context rather than privileging the US as the dominant actor on the world stage.

Also in the Series Hideaki Kami, Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War Shaul Mitelpunkt, Israel in the American Mind: The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations, 1958–1988 Pierre Asselin, Vietnam’s American War: A History Elisabeth Leake, The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936–1965 Tuong Vu, Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology Michael E. Neagle, America’s Forgotten Colony: Cuba’s Isle of Pines Lloyd E. Ambrosius, http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/dip lomatic-and-international-history/woodrow-wilson-and-american-internation alism?format=HB Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism Geoffrey C. Stewart, Vietnam’s Lost Revolution: Ngô Đình Diệm’s Failure to Build an Independent Nation, 1955–1963 Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution

The Genesis of America U.S. Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815

JASPER M. TRAUTSCH University of Regensburg, Germany

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108428248 doi: 10.1017/9781108635301 © Jasper M. Trautsch 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Trautsch, Jasper M., author. title: The genesis of America : US foreign policy and the formation of national identity, 1793–1815 / Jasper M. Trautsch. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: Cambridge studies in us foreign relations identifiers: lccn 2018007012 | isbn 9781108428248 (hardback) subjects: lcsh: United States – Foreign relations – 1783–1815 | Nationalism – United States – History – 18th century. | Nationalism – United States – History – 19th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 19th Century. classification: lcc e310.7 .t73 2018 | ddc 327.73009/033–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007012 isbn 978-1-108-42824-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my parents

Contents

List of Figures

page viii

Acknowledgments Note on Citations

ix xii

Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1

Political Ideologies and American Identity in the Era of the French Revolution

38

2

Foreign Policies of Unneutrality and the Jay Treaty

71

3 4

Federalists and the Origins of the Quasi-War Disentangling America from France

107 131

5 6

Republicans and the Origins of the War of 1812 Disentangling America from Great Britain

168 215

Conclusion

255

1

Bibliography

270

Index

304

vii

Figures

1 “The Contrast” 2 “Liberty in the Form of the Goddess of Youth Giving Support to the Bald Eagle” 3 “See Porcupine, in Colours just Portray’d” 4 “Property Protected à la Françoise” 5 “The Providential Detection” 6 “America! With Peace and Freedom Blest” 7 “A Scene on the Frontiers as Practiced by the Humane British and Their Worthy Allies” 8 “The Taking of the City of Washington in America” 9 “The Hartford Convention or Leap No Leap” 10 “Peace of Ghent 1814 and Triumph of America”

viii

page 63 67 100 129 137 179 234 240 249 259

Acknowledgments

The origins of this book can be traced to a graduate seminar on the early republic taught by Volker Depkat at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin more than a decade ago. While as a student I was initially more interested in the twentieth century U.S., I realized that the revolutionary and early national period was really the most significant era in American history and therefore changed my research interests after attending this mind-opening course. Volker then responded enthusiastically when I told him about my desire to pursue a Ph.D. and, as one of my dissertation advisors, he provided me with insightful advice. For his continuing support I am deeply grateful. I would also like to thank Ursula Lehmkuhl, my other dissertation advisor, for taking my project seriously from the beginning and for helping me develop its theoretical foundations. Brian Steel, too, deserves special thanks. Like Volker, he, as my MA advisor at Tulane University, nourished my newfound interest in early American history and encouraged me to write my MA thesis on the Jay Treaty and to build on it to develop a Ph.D. project. Michael Hochgeschwender and Jack P. Greene commented on my dissertation project in its early stages and have been very supportive ever since. I am very thankful for their efforts and encouragement. This book would not have been possible without the financial support I received from the Graduate School of North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, which not only funded my Ph.D. research, but also provided a stimulating intellectual atmosphere, in which I could develop my ideas about American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. Its director, Winfried Fluck, in particular has shaped my view on American history and culture. I have also profited immensely from the advice of the guest ix

x

Acknowledgments

professors and invited speakers at the Graduate School such as Donald E. Pease, Peter S. Onuf, Akira Iriye, and Frank Ninkovich. By accepting me as a research fellow in the “History of American Civilization” program, Harvard University enabled me to conduct my archival research in the U.S., and the advice its faculty gave me has been of tremendous help in carrying out my project. I owe a large debt of gratitude to the librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the U.S. National Archives, and the library of the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, who tirelessly accommodated my mushrooming requests for materials. Moreover, I am very grateful to the Heidelberg Center for American Studies for awarding me the Rolf Kentner Dissertation Prize in 2013, to its director Detlef Junker, and to the prize’s benefactor. Revising and publishing one’s Ph.D. thesis is a time-consuming and at times challenging process. The encouragement to proceed with this enterprise that came with the prize was therefore much appreciated. Fortunately, the efforts I put into revising my manuscript paid off. It is a great honor to have my work published by the Cambridge University Press. I am grateful to Debbie Gershenowitz for endorsing my manuscript, to Lien-Hang T. Nguyen and Paul Thomas Chamberlin for welcoming it into their distinguished book series, to Kristina Deusch for her patient editorial help in getting my manuscript ready for publication, and to Linda Randall for her meticulous copy-editing. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to the peer reviewers. J. C. A. Stagg carefully read my manuscript and gave me detailed, constructive, and engaging feedback. His suggestions on how to revise the manuscript helped me improve it markedly. The second peer reviewer of this book, who chose to remain anonymous, deserves as much praise for his valuable comments. It is customary to thank family and friends last. However, they are the ones I am most indebted to and who really should have come first. Always believing in me, my parents, Uschi and Uwe, have provided continuous, selfless, and unwavering support for my academic endeavors, thereby giving me the confidence to dare pursue such a highrisk career. This book could not have been written without their encouragement. My friend Chris Bayer has shown himself to be incredibly shortsighted when agreeing to proofread my work and exceptionally generous for keeping his word. I am thankful for his meticulousness and for his cogent criticism. Finally, my wife Harriet

Acknowledgments

xi

deserves a huge thank you not only because she proofread the manuscript carefully (as a Brit not failing to critically take note of any Americanisms I employed) and gave me well-founded and thoughtful feedback on arguments, formulations, and structure, but also because of her buoyancy, humor, and patience. Sometimes too obsessed with studying the past, I appreciate that she and our daughter Eleanor always show me how much the present has to offer.

Note on Citations

All quotations appear in their original form, even if they contained spelling or grammar mistakes. They were not changed according to modern-day punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. Due to the consistent application of this rule, the insertion of the term “sic” has not been considered necessary at specific places to indicate that mistakes or uncommon spelling were in the original material. The French sources that are cited in the book have been translated by the author.

xii

Abbreviations

AC

ASP:FR

LCRK

PAH

PJM PJM:CS

PTJ SEJ

Annals of Congress: The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 1789–1824, 42 vols. (Washington: Gales & Seaton, 1834–1856). Walter Lowrie, Matthew St. Clair Clarke, Walter S. Franklin, Asbury Dickins, and James C. Allen (eds.), American State Papers: Foreign Relations, 6 vols. (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832–1861). Charles R. King (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, Comprising His Letters, Private and Official, His Public Documents and His Speeches, 6 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1894–1900). Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (eds.), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1987). Herbert A. Johnson (ed.), The Papers of John Marshall, 12 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974–2006). William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (eds.), The Papers of James Madison: Congressional Series, 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–1977; Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977–1991). Julian P. Boyd (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 42 vols. to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950– ). Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of America, 155 vols. to date (Washington: Duff Greene (Vols. 1–3)/Government Printing Office (Vols. 4– ), 1828– ). xiii

xiv

TJW

WFA WJA WTJ

List of Abbreviations Andrew A. Lipscomb and A. E. Bergh (eds.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903). Seth Ames (ed.), The Works of Fisher Ames, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854). Charles Francis Adams (ed.), The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–1856). Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 12 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1904–1905).

Introduction

On July 1, 1776, John Dickinson – a member of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Continental Congress – explained to the assembled convention why he was opposed to a declaration of independence. “To escape from the protection we have in British rule by declaring independence would be like Destroying a House before We have got another, In Winter, with a small Family,” he told his colleagues. Before seeking separation from the mother country, “We should know on what Grounds We are to stand with Regard to one another,” he suggested, but found that “Some of Us totally despair of any reasonable Terms of Confederation.” Dickinson therefore came to the conclusion that “PARTITION of these Colonies will take place if Great Britain cant conquer Us.”1 Not only did the revolutionaries take the risk that they might lose the War of Independence against Great Britain; they also had to expect the union to fall apart if they were indeed successful, so Dickinson’s argument went. Since no American collective sense of self had yet developed, their attachment to Great Britain was all that tied the colonists to each other. Once they severed the connection to the mother country, Americans, not yet having developed a national identity, would lack the foundation for maintaining their union.2 While Dickinson failed to dissuade the Continental Congress from the ultimate break with the mother country, many revolutionaries shared his 1

2

John Dickinson, “Arguments against the Independence of the Colonies,” July 1, 1776, in: Jack P. Greene (ed.), Colonies to Nation, 1763–1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 295–296. John M. Murrin, “A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in: Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II (eds.), Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 333–348.

1

2

The Genesis of America

fear that the union could quickly dissolve once the War of Independence was over, as the common defense against British attempts to subdue the new states back into a colonial status seemed the only tie binding them together. In 1780, when the outcome of the conflict was still doubtful, Philip Schuyler, New York delegate to the Continental Congress, worried about the consequences of a victory rather than a defeat of the United States. “I contemplate with anxious Concern that If ever the Enemy should be reduced a few Years will bring on Civil Contests which will deluge this Country in blood.”3 One year later, James Madison of Virginia told the legislature of his home state to “presume that the present Union will but little survive the present war.”4 After Great Britain had acknowledged the independence of its former thirteen colonies in North America in 1783, Nathanael Greene, Major General in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, wrote to George Washington from South Carolina in 1784 that “many people seceretly wish that every State should be completely independunt; and that as soon as our public debts are liquidated that Congress should be no more [. . .].”5 As the centrifugal tendencies became immediately evident once the common enemy had been defeated and the original purpose of the union had been fulfilled, Americans indeed began discussing the possibility of dissolving the United States as the “umbrella organization” of the thirteen newly independent states and replacing it – in view of the diverging interests of the states – with three or four regional confederations. Promoting the idea of dividing the union into a Northern, a Middle, a Southern, and a Western confederacy, the New York Daily Advertiser wrote in 1787: “This is a division that seems to be pointed out by climate, whose effect no positive law ever can surpass. The religion, manners, customs, exports, imports, and general interest of each, being then the same, no opposition arising from difference in these (as at present) would any longer divide their councils.”6 The Philadelphia Independent Gazeteer argued that the “national concerns of a people so numerous, 3

4 5

6

Schuyler to Jeremiah Wadsworth, July 16, 1780, in: Paul H. Smith (ed.), Letters of Delegates to Congress 1774–1789, 26 vols. (Washington: Library of Congress, 1976–2000), Vol. 15, 455. Madison to Thomas Jefferson, November 18, 1781, in: ibid., Vol. 18, 206. Greene to Washington, August 29, 1784, in: William W. Abbott and Dorothy Twohig (eds.), The Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–1997), Vol. 2, 60. “For the Daily Advertiser” by “Lycurgus,” March 30, 1787, in: Daily Advertiser: Political, Historical, and Commercial (New York), April 2, 1787. Also see The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), February 15, 1787.

Introduction

3

with a Territory so extensive will be proportionably difficult” and, therefore, wondered whether it would “not be preferable to distribute the States into three Republics . . . ?”7 Not only newspapers questioned whether the union should be permanent in view of the regions’ different interests and identities; even at the Confederation Congress, the institutionalization of the union, pessimism was rampant. In early 1787, William Bingham of Pennsylvania told Congress that it would be prudent to divide America “into several distinct confederacies, its great extent & various interests, being incompatible with a single Government.”8 William Blount, delegate of North Carolina, reported to the Governor of his home state that “a Dissolution of the Union was publickly and openly spoke[n of] as a thing that would and ought to happen.”9 As a member of the Constitutional Convention, called to discuss ways of consolidating the union, Blount predicted in the summer of 1787 that in “not many Years” the states would be “separate and distinct Governments perfectly independent of each other.”10 These Cassandra-like warnings about the break-up of the union and ensuing civil war so frequently expressed between 1776 and 1787 suggest that neither a strong American national identity had existed before the Declaration of Independence nor that the War of Independence produced an American nationalism robust enough to ensure the survival of the wartime union.11 Indeed, most scholars today concur that if an American national consciousness had developed at all by the time of the revolution it was rudimentary and limited at best.12

7

8

9

10

11

12

“A Thought for the Delegates to the Convention, to Be Held at Philadelphia” by “Reason,” in: The Independent Gazetteer; or, the Chronicle of Freedom (Philadelphia), March 30, 1787. Bingham, February 21, 1787, in: Department of State (ed.), Documentary History of the Constitution of the United States of America, 1786–1870, 5 vols. (Washington: Department of State, 1905), Vol. 4, 81. Blount to Richard Caswell, January 28, 1787, in: Edmund C. Burnett (ed.), Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, 8 vols. (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1921–1936), Vol. 8, 532. Blount to John Gray Blount, July 19, 1787, in: Max Farrand (ed.), The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols., rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), Vol. 4, 71. The preceding paragraphs build on Jasper M. Trautsch, “1776 as an Identity Crisis: American Nationalism and the American Revolution,” in: Jahrbuch für europäische Überseegeschichte, Vol. 14 (2014), 43–81. For an in-depth discussion of the question when an American nation came into being, see Jasper M. Trautsch, “The Origins and Nature of American Nationalism,” in: National Identities, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2016), 289–312.

4

The Genesis of America

Admittedly, a “proto-nationalism” might have started to emerge in the immediate prelude to the revolution among a select few who travelled across the colonies or realized how much they differed from Britons when fighting alongside them during the preceding colonial wars or when visiting the mother country.13 The fact that colonists were discriminated against in comparison to the inhabitants of the mother country – the latter being able to serve as political functionaries in the periphery, the former, by contrast, being barred from such positions in the metropolis – also helped foment a creole resentment against imperial authorities and reinforced a sense of colonial differentness before the revolution. Washington, whose hope to make a career as an officer in the British army was thwarted by his birth in the colonies and who would only achieve lasting military fame as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, is a case in point for the emergence of a creole nationalism before 1776.14 Moreover, several Americans such as Benjamin Franklin proudly realized that the abundance of land and natural resources in North America as well as the unceasing migration of Europeans across the Atlantic destined the colonies to one day surpass the mother country in population, wealth, and power and would make them a particularly fertile ground for the growth of republican institutions. Even though these predictions of future American glory did not necessarily go hand in hand with desires for political independence, they made eventual American separation from the British Empire conceivable.15 Some revolutionary leaders even began thinking about a unique American identity when defending the break with the mother country in the 1770s. Thomas Jefferson, for example, justified the united colonies’ declaration of independence by claiming that Americans constituted a clearly distinguishable people and by constructing their 13

14

15

See Albert J. Harkness, “Americanism and Jenkins’ Ear,” in: Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (1950), 61–90; Max Savelle, “Nationalism and Other Loyalties in the American Revolution,” in: American Historical Review, Vol. 67, No. 4 (1962), 901–923; Paul A. Varg, “The Advent of Nationalism, 1758–1776,” in: American Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1964), 169–181; Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004), 105–151. See Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 24–39, 55–58, 63–64. See Walter LaFeber, “Foreign Policies of a New Nation: Franklin, Madison, and the ‘Dream of a New Land to Fulfill with People in Self-Control,’ 1750–1804,” in: William Appleman Williams (ed.), From Colony to Empire: Essays in the History of American Foreign Relations (New York: John Wiley, 1972), 9–37; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 49–67.

Introduction

5

“national” history, which allegedly dated back to the earliest settlements.16 However, before 1776 the large majority of colonists identified as Britons rather than as Americans – their sense of Britishness actually increasing around the time of the Seven Years War – and after 1776 most revolutionaries’ allegiance shifted to the newly created states rather than the union itself.17 Not surprisingly, the Continental Congress only used the word “union” in its official communications and never employed the term “nation.” The very name of the new entity – “United States” instead of simply “America” or “Columbia” – demonstrated that an American federal state rather than a nation was being created, as “United States” was a political term and did not derive from the name of a people.18 American newspapers also referred to a “league,” the “American states,” or “Confederated America” rather than to “America” after the peace treaty of 1783.19 Consequently, the Constitution – replacing the Articles of Confederation, which had left the sovereignty within the states, and strengthening the institutional framework of the union – was hardly the result of a burgeoning American nationalism. After all, the terms “nation” and “national” appear nowhere in the Constitution: they had been deliberately avoided.20 As William Patterson, delegate from New Jersey, emphasized, the “idea of a national Gov[ernmen]t as contradistinguished from a federal one, never entered into the minds of any of them [the

16

17

18

19

20

Brian Steele, Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11–37. Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in: P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 208–230; idem, “State and National Identities in the Era of the American Revolution,” in: Don H. Doyle and Marco Antonio Pamplona (eds.), Nationalism in the New World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 61–79. Elise Marienstras, “Nationality and Citizenship,” in: Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (eds.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Malden: Blackwell, 1991), 669–670. Joseph M. Torsella, “American National Identity, 1750–1790: Samples from the Popular Press,” in: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 112, No. 2 (1988), 174. On May 30, 1787, Edmund Randolph of Virginia made the motion to establish a “national government.” The use of the term “national,” however, produced heated debate such that, on June 20, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut made a motion to expunge the word “national” from the resolution and retain the neutral title of “government of the United States.” This proposal passed unanimously in the affirmative. Farrand (ed.), The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. 1, 30, 33–34, 39, 41, 334–336, 344.

6

The Genesis of America

delegates].”21 The political scientist David C. Hendrickson, therefore, suggested that the Constitution should be interpreted as a “peace pact” between independent and sovereign states, which agreed to resolve state and sectional differences not through war but through peaceful procedures, rather than the founding document of an American nation.22 Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton argued that if the union was replaced by smaller confederacies, these would soon find themselves in a competitive and increasingly hostile relationship to each other. This would result in a replication of the European system in which states always had to be prepared to be attacked by their neighbors and thus had to entertain standing armies, which were incompatible with republican forms of government.23 A breakup of the union would also entail that European powers would play America’s rivaling confederacies against each other and turn them into protectorates, thus undermining Americans’ recently won independence and making America the staging ground for European involvement and perpetual war, as Madison warned.24 Jefferson explained that “it could not but occur to every one that these separate independencies, like the petty States of Greece, would be eternally at war with each other, & would become at length the mere partisans & satellites of the leading powers of Europe.” Only the maintenance of the union could avert war among Americans and European interference. “All then must have looked forward to some further bond of union, which would ensure internal peace, and a political system of our own, independant of that of Europe.”25 In this light, the Constitution created a security community rather than a nation-state.26 As an American sense of self had not matured before the American Revolution and since the War of Independence did not produce a potent 21

22

23

24 25 26

Patterson, June 9, 1787, in: Gaillard Hunt and James Brown Scott (eds.), The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Which Framed the Constitution of the United States of America, Reported by James Madison, 2 vols. (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1987), Vol. 1, 81. On the question of citizenship – a central indicator of nationality – the Constitution remained undecided, speaking both of “Citizens of each State” and “Citizens of the United States.” See Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union 1774–1805 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 17–18. David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). Hamilton, “Federalist No. 8,” November 20, 1787, in: Jacob E. Cooke (ed.), The Federalist (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 44–50. Madison, “Federalist No. 41,” January 19, 1788, in: ibid., 272. Jefferson, “The Anas,” in: WTJ, Vol. 1, 167. Michael McDonnell, “National Identity and the American War for Independence Reconsidered,” in: Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2001), 13.

Introduction

7

American nationalism, the period following the successful adoption of the Constitution becomes the focal point when tracing the formation of the American nation.27 This book therefore explores how an American national identity emerged in the early republic, examining how the American union – originally founded in 1776 to achieve independence for thirteen separate colonies and in 1787/88 institutionally strengthened to prevent a war between its constituent parts – evolved into a nation and how its meaning was gradually complicated connoting, to an increasing number of Americans, no longer merely a compact of states created for a specific purpose but a union of fate that existed for its own sake.28 The emergence of an American nationalism – understood as both the ideology legitimizing, mobilizing, and integrating the American nation and the political movement promoting this ideology – in the early republic is a topic that scholars have addressed from a variety of perspectives in recent decades. Some historians, for example, investigated the role that festive rituals – such as celebrations of Independence Day, Washington’s birthday, and the French Revolution – played in the formation of an American national consciousness. According to these authors, newspapers reporting about the parades and festivals taking place all over the country transformed these local events into a national experience.29 Other

27

28

29

In this book, the term “national identity” is used in two separate ways. It can mean that if a group of people have a national identity their primary loyalty is to the nation of which they are a member. The national identity competes with other identities such as those based on social class, region, or sub-states within a federally organized nation-state. Alternatively, the term can refer to the images, characteristics, and values by which the members of a nation distinguish their nation from others. The definition of a nation’s identity is usually highly contested, as it legitimizes a certain domestic order and thus promotes the interests of certain groups within the nation. See Peter Mandler, “What Is ‘National Identity’? Definitions and Applications in Modern British Historiography,” in: Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2006), 275–276; Philip Schlesinger, “On National Identity: Some Conceptions and Misconceptions Criticized,” in: Social Science Information, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1987), 244, 249–250. For the relationship between nation and union, see Paul Nagel, One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). See Albrecht Koschnik, “Political Conflict and Public Contest: Rituals of National Celebration in Philadelphia, 1788–1815,” in: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 118, No. 3 (1994), 209–248; David L. Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of

8

The Genesis of America

scholars showed that early American nationalists tried to unite the country through the creation of a national economy and the establishment of a national communication and transportation system. By promoting manufactures, installing protective tariffs, granting bounties to emerging industries, extending the postal service, and building interstate roads and canals, federal policy makers hoped to create a balanced domestic market and to increase interstate trade, thereby producing a “union bound by interest.”30 While these studies have enlarged our understanding of the institutional, economic, and technological preconditions for and the performative expressions of the emergence of an American national identity, they treat American nationalism as an introspective phenomenon and thus do not provide an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans – lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their sovereignty upon appeals to universal rights – could develop a sense of particularity. After all, Americans had not based their aspiration for independence on the claim that they constituted a united people with a distinctive culture of their own that was oppressed by a foreign power. Instead, revolutionaries had asserted God-given natural rights that applied to everyone. The “unalienable rights” which the Declaration of Independence invoked were not the rights of a particular people but were derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”31 The universalistic liberalism that revolutionaries used to justify American independence from Great Britain can be understood as an ideological intermediary between British nationalism – which in 1776

30

31

Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). See Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Politics and Economics in Revolutionary America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); Andreas Etges, “A Union Bound by Interest: Economic Nationalism in the Early American Republic,” in: Udo J. Hebel (ed.), The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 1999), 397–410; John Lauritz Larson, “‘Bind the Republic Together’: The National Union and the Struggle for a System of Internal Improvements,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No. 2 (1987), 363–387; Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence as Adopted by Congress,” July 4, 1776, in: PTJ, Vol. 1, 429.

Introduction

9

no longer had much purchase in the American colonies – and American nationalism – which had not yet evolved.32 In order to understand how Americans – despite justifying their independence by appeals to universal rights – could develop a separate identity, this book interprets American nationalism not as an introspective phenomenon, but as a process of external demarcation, emphasizing that, in its formative phase, the American nation needed external enemies to create a sense of national particularity and that early American nationalism called for violent separation from America’s European reference points.33 The claim that the emergence of an American nation required Others from which American identity could be demarcated can be easily explained by the fact that the very act of defining a community requires the imagination of its boundaries and identifying what is outside the group. In other words, the definition of what one is logically depends on the definition of what one is not.34 A collective identity is therefore established by perceiving and articulating external differences, which overshadow the internal differences between the community’s members. As John Adams described the need of America to demarcate herself from the rest of the world, the “nation must be unconnected with the rest of mankind, which can depend upon a total exemption from its feelings, and sympathies.”35 More importantly, as a nation is characterized by a deep solidarity its members feel for one another and since in times of crisis the nation demands their absolute loyalty, including the willingness to sacrifice their lives, the perception of an external threat is vital for a nation’s formation.36 “Campaigns for national unity or coherence thus achieve the greatest success

32

33

34

35

36

Timothy H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 1 (1997), 37. See Matthew Rainbow Hale, “‘Many Who Wandered in Darkness’: The Contest over American National Identity, 1795–1798,” in: Early American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003), 128; Emily S. Rosenberg, “A Call to Revolution: A Roundtable on Early U.S. Foreign Relations,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1998), 69. Reinhart Koselleck, “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts,” in: idem, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 155. “John Adams to the Citizens of Newark, in the State of New-Jersey,” in: William Austin (ed.), A Selection of the Patriotic Addresses, To the President of the United States: Together with the President’s Answers (Boston: John W. Folsom, 1798), 167. See Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9; Peter Alter, Nationalism (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 4.

10

The Genesis of America

when the majority of a national population agrees that they face dangerous enemies,” as the nationalism scholar Lloyd Kramer explained.37 This is why Jefferson – aware that the heterogeneous American union was held together primarily by the perception of British animosity – told Abigail Adams that the British King – by pursuing hostile policies towards the U.S. – actually did Americans a favor, as he knit them together: “He is truly the American Messias . . . Twenty long years has he been labouring to drive us to our good and he labours and will labour still for it if he can be spared . . . We become chained by our habits to the tails of those who hate & dispise us.”38 This book, therefore, argues that Americans, having no shared history or unique culture, not to speak of a common ancestry, were in need of external enemies and foreign threats to invent America as a separate nation and to forget what set them apart from each other, analyzing the emergence of American nationalism within an international rather than merely a domestic context.39 Consequently, it identifies foreign policy as a vital instrument of nation building. On the international stage, the U.S. would in fact act as a clearly delineated entity toward its Others. U.S. foreign policy would therefore promote and bolster the notion that Americans formed a community. Moreover, as foreign powers also treated the U.S. as a separate state, they reflected the image of America as a distinct nation back to them in a mirror effect.40 “The more we are ill-treated abroad the more we shall unite and consolidate at home,” as John Jay, Secretary of Foreign Affairs under the Confederation Congress, explained in 1785.41 Diplomatic decisions could therefore foster the perception that America was different from her European reference points. Most importantly, by provoking, declaring, and waging war, the federal government could unite the nation through the creation of a foreign threat. Usually, “war will be looked upon as the scourge and calamity of mankind,” the

37

38 39

40

41

Lloyd S. Kramer, Nationalism in Europe & America: Politics, Culture, and Identities since 1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 21. Jefferson to Adams, August 9, 1786, in: WTJ, Vol. 5, 146. After all, Americans declared themselves independent not because they wished to recede from the European state system but rather because they hoped to become an equal member of it. Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1815 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), xiv. Jay to the President of Congress, October 13, 1785, in: William Jay, The Life of John Jay, with Selections from His Correspondence, 2 vols. (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), Vol. 1, 203.

Introduction

11

Boston Gazette noted in 1790. Yet, one could “discover real utility, real advantages in war,” the newspaper explained, since it promoted nationalism. “The love of country (if it existed) with no perils to try it, with no rewards to excite,” by contrast, “must have laid dormant and inactive.” It concluded that “Wars are of service to a nation.”42 As the U.S. was primarily held together by the threat of foreign nations against which a common defense was necessary, continued dangers from abroad were the best means to perpetuate the union. An aggressive foreign policy also offered a way out of the conundrum that, as a post-colonial people, Americans “placed a premium on adopting elements of European culture as a way of establishing their own legitimacy,” which in turn however “fueled insecurities about the derivative nature of what was ostensibly an independent society,” as the cultural historian Kariann Akemi Yokota put it.43 If they took an uncompromising stance on diplomatic issues and thereby asserted their political independence, Americans could still import refined goods and prefer cultural products from the former mother country to their own creations without undermining their sense of particularity. American foreign-policy makers, therefore, did not seek to politically isolate the U.S. from European affairs. On the contrary, they tried to become an active player in international relations in order to define the U.S. as a nation and – rather than staying aloof from the wars raging in Europe almost uninterruptedly between 1793 and 1815 – chose to become involved in them by embarking upon actual armed confrontation against France in 1798 and Great Britain in 1812. The very nature of the American union would ensure that foreign policy would be used as an important tool to boost the burgeoning American nationalism. Not only was the union originally founded to organize a common defense of the thirteen colonies that wished to achieve independence. The union was also strengthened for the express purpose of uniting the American states against possible European threats.44 After all, the U.S. was incapable of meeting a wide array of foreign-policy 42

43

44

“WAR HAS ITS BENEFITS,” in: The Boston Gazette, and the Country Journal, December 13, 1790. Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8–9. Robbie J. Totten, “Security, Two Diplomacies, and the Formation of the U.S. Constitution: Review, Interpretation, and New Directions for the Study of the Early American Period,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2012), 77–117.

12

The Genesis of America

challenges following the conclusion of the War of Independence. Britain discriminated against American shipping, excluded most of American trade from its West Indies, and – in violation of the terms of the Paris peace treaty – maintained its forts in the U.S. Northwest, by their mere presence on American soil encouraging Indian tribes to resist further advancement by white settlers. The former mother country also refused to send a minister to America, de facto not recognizing the U.S. as a fully independent nation. Moreover, Barbary pirates attacked American merchantmen in the Mediterranean once they lost their protection through the Royal Navy. France also discriminated against American commerce and did not open its West Indian ports to U.S. trade as Americans had hoped. Spain withdrew Americans’ right to free navigation on the Mississippi River and lay claim to parts of the territory Britain had ceded to the U.S. in the peace treaty of 1783, supporting secessionist movements in the Southwestern U.S. Large parts of the area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, moreover, had not been settled yet and were held by Native American tribes resisting white American expansionism.45 The American government, however, could not respond effectively to these foreign challenges under the Articles of Confederation. For one, it was practically bankrupt as a result of its lack of taxing power and the necessity of unanimity for decisions on customs duties and was thus no longer able to pay the interest on America’s foreign debt. Also, the Confederation Congress could not prevent the individual states from pursuing independent commercial policies of their own. Moreover, the Congress had no power to compel the states to comply with the terms of the peace treaty, as, for example, when some Southern states made it impossible for British creditors to recover their pre-war debts from Americans. Having no judiciary, it was even unable to enforce the application of the law of nations on U.S. soil and guarantee the safety of foreign diplomatic and consular personnel, as became evident when the French consul was attacked in Philadelphia and subsequently found out that there was no federal court in which his assailant could be tried. The case,

45

For the foreign-policy challenges the U.S. faced in the Confederation period and the failure to meet them, see Frederick W. Marks III, Independence on Trial: Foreign Affairs and the Making of the Constitution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Richard B. Morris, The Forging of the Union, 1781–1789 (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 194–219, 232–244; Norman A. Graebner, Richard Dean Burns, and Joseph M. Siracusa, Foreign Affairs and the Founding Fathers: From Confederation to Constitution, 1776–1787 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 21–40, 63–83.

Introduction

13

therefore, ended up in a Pennsylvanian court over which Congress had no control and which was not even sure whether the law of nations applied within its jurisdiction at all.46 Finally, most warships used in the War of Independence had been sold at the war’s end such that the U.S. was basically without a navy. The American army was also in no position to be used against foreign powers. Not only did the efforts of the American envoys in Europe to negotiate commercial treaties with Great Britain and France and to protect American seamen from the Barbary corsairs therefore come to naught; in 1786, Jay even bartered away Americans’ right to use the Mississippi (in exchange for a commercial treaty with Spain), since he realized that Congress was too weak and divided to force the Spanish to open the river to American commerce again.47 As a result of the Confederation Congress’ failure to meet the foreignpolicy challenges, Federalists called the Constitutional Convention primarily to strengthen the powers of the central government in the area of America’s external relations.48 In the deliberations, delegates agreed that Congress – in consequence of the problems the American union had faced under the Articles of Confederation – should have the power to declare war, conclude treaties with foreign nations, regulate America’s foreign commerce, to lay and collect taxes, and to maintain an army and a navy. The Constitution also explicitly prohibited the states from establishing import or export duties or laying tonnage duties on foreign ships, from concluding treaties with foreign powers, and from maintaining troops in peacetime. Finally, the responsibility to enforce the law of nations was assigned to an independent judiciary, and international treaties concluded

46

47

48

G. S. Rowe and Alexander W. Knott, “The Longchamps Affair (1784–1786), the Law of Nations, and the Shaping of Early American Foreign Policy,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1986), 199–220. The Jay–Gardoqui Treaty was never ratified but Southerners were so incensed that Jay was willing to sacrifice the interests of the South, which had the largest economic stakes in the West, in order to advance the shipping and trading interests of the Northeastern states that at the Constitutional Convention they made sure that a two-third majority in the Senate would be needed for the ratification of treaties such that no international agreement could be made against the opposition of the South. Michael Allen, “The Mississippi River Debate, 1785–1787,” in: Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 4 (1977), 447–467; Eli Merritt, “Sectional Conflict and Secret Compromise: The Mississippi River Question and the United States Constitution,” in: American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1991), 117–171. Frederick W. Marks III, “Power, Pride, and Purse: Diplomatic Origins of the Constitution,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 11, No. 4 (1987), 318; Walter LaFeber, “The Constitution and United States Foreign Policy: An Interpretation,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No. 3 (1987), 697.

14

The Genesis of America

by the federal government were declared supreme law of the land, which no state law could compromise, alter, or nullify, in order to prevent local interests from sabotaging a national foreign policy. In order to achieve international recognition and establish the U.S. as an equal member of the European state system, the framers of the Constitution hence ensured that the federal government would be powerful enough to enforce America’s treaty obligations and the application of the law of nations at home.49 Defending the Constitution in 1787, Hamilton praised its ability to reconcile a maximum amount of domestic liberties, ensured by the existence of the several states, with the need to establish a maximum amount of foreign-policy power vested in the federal government. “As this government is composed of small republics it enjoys the internal happiness of each, and with respect to its external situation it is possessed, by means of the association of all the advantages of large monarchies.”50 Madison, who co-authored the Federalist Papers with Hamilton, also made clear that “If we are to be one nation in any respect, it clearly ought to be in respect to other nations.”51 While Federalists and Anti-Federalists could not agree as to what powers the federal government as the incarnation of their union should assume during the ratification debates in 1787–1788, they all concurred that the U.S. should pursue one common and effective foreign policy, not hampered by the interests of the individual states. Leading Anti-Federalist Luther Martin made clear at the Constitutional Convention that – while the Declaration of Independence had established “thirteen separate sovereignties” – the federal government was created in 1776 “to defend the whole ag[ain]st foreign nations.”52 Neither Anti-Federalists in 1787 and 1788 nor Republicans in the early republic, who were generally hostile to the extension of the powers of the federal government at the expense of the states, challenged the exclusive power of the central government to conduct external relations, as they acknowledged that a common foreign policy formed the basis of the union. Jefferson – who, in the 1790s, would become the leader of the Republican Party, which wished to keep as many domestic powers in the

49

50

51 52

David M. Golove and Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “A Civilized Nation: The Early American Constitution, the Law of Nations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition,” in: New York University Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 4 (2010), 932–1066. Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 9,” November 21, 1787, in: Cooke (ed.), The Federalist, 54. Madison, “The Federalist No. 42,” January 22, 1788, in: ibid., 279. Martin, June 20, 1787, in: Hunt and Scott (eds.), The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. 1, 136.

Introduction

15

states as possible – was in perfect agreement with Federalists that the states should be bound in a national union through a strong and assertive foreign policy: “To make us one nation as to foreign concern, and keep us distinct in domestic ones,” as he described his general view of the union’s nature to Madison in 1786.53 As the desire to allow for a common and effective U.S. foreign policy had been the most important reason for strengthening the union in 1787 and since the new Constitution enabled the U.S. to pursue a robust and coherent diplomacy, foreign policy would become a significant means to promote an American national consciousness. Not only could federal office-holders employ foreign policy to foster the development of an American national identity after the adoption of the Constitution; the fact that they were nationalists also ensured that they would indeed use their power to unite the nation. While the American Revolution did not create an American nation, it did produce the beginnings of a national consciousness among those who were involved in its operation on a continental scale and who were still fairly young when the break with Great Britain occurred. The American Revolution had started as a number of local revolts in several of the colonies. In order to gain independence for their own colony, many men advocated forming a union with the other colonies for no other reason than to achieve this end. These men, whose identity had fully formed before the American Revolution and who were mostly engaged in positions in their respective states during the war, would form the bulk of the Anti-Federalists in the struggle over the Constitution. For some of the revolutionaries, however, the War of Independence “left a deep imprint” on their identity and this was particularly true for those who came of age during the Revolution and who were involved in the continental aspects of the war effort – be it in the Continental Army, in the Continental Congress, or as representatives of the United States abroad. Through their participation in the American Revolution, these men came to identify strongly with the continental union. “A significant proportion of relative newcomers, with prospects initially modest, happened to have their careers opened up at a particular time and in such a way that their very public personalities came to be staked upon the national quality of the 53

Jefferson to Madison, December 16, 1786, in: TJW, Vol. 6, 9. Also see Jefferson to Edward Carrington, August 4, 1787, in: ibid., Vol. 6, 227. Jefferson to John Blair, August 13, 1787, in: PTJ, Vol. 12, 28.

16

The Genesis of America

experience which had formed them,” as Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick concluded.54 These men, who had been engaged in the War of Independence in its continental dimension, felt that their fortunes were inextricably tied to the union and, therefore, pushed for a stronger federal government in 1787 and 1788, and once the new federal government was installed in 1789, they took leadership positions within it. In the Cabinets of Washington and Adams, there was not one member who had opposed or remained neutral in the American Revolution.55 In Washington’s Cabinets, all except Oliver Wolcott Jr., had been involved in the continental parts of the revolution. They had either served in the Continental Army (6), the Continental Congress (2), or as U.S. ministers abroad (2). Most early Cabinet members, moreover, had supported the ratification of the Constitution. With their careers and fame tied to the survival of the United States, and their political power based on the newly established federal institutions, early federal policy makers had a strong interest in promoting American nationalism and transforming the union into a fully fledged nation.56 Jay told Adams in 1786 that it was one of his greatest wishes “to see the people of America become one nation in every respect.”57 Gouverneur Morris, whom Washington would later appoint minister to France, wanted Americans to renounce their loyalty to the states and become “a race of Americans” instead.58 Hamilton’s political agenda was “to establish in this country principles more and more national.”59 Jefferson wished that “the interests of the states . . . ought to be made joint in every possible instance in order to

54

55

56

57 58

59

Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution,” in: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 2 (1961), 202–203, 205–206. Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 261, 271. As the new government consolidated and time progressed, the requirement of having served in the revolution slowly lost importance, as a new generation gradually took over leadership positions. Diplomats under Madison such as Jonathan Russell (1771), William H. Crawford (1772), and Henry Clay (1777) had only been born when the American Revolution was beginning or the war had already commenced. Military service during the Revolution, however, continued to be an asset when applying for positions in the federal government during the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison. Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 359–360. Jay to Adams, May 4, 1786, in: Jay, The Life of John Jay, Vol. 1, 249. Gouverneur Morris to John Jay, January 10, 1784, in: Henry P. Johnston (ed.), The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 4 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1890–1893), Vol. 3, 105. Hamilton to Rufus King, December 16, 1796, in: PAH, Vol. 20, 446.

Introduction

17

cultivate the idea of our being one nation.”60 Madison complained about the “want of a due sense of national character” hoping that an American national identity would form soon.61 Foreign-policy makers were thus promoters of early American nationalism. Tracing the role of foreign policy for the formation of an American national identity in the aftermath of the American Revolution, this book focuses on America’s relations to Great Britain and France. First, as perceptions of threat are integral to processes of national integration, it is usually the most powerful nations and neighbors that are the most meaningful Others. While the menace these foreign adversaries represent is often exaggerated, it is usually based on “hard facts.” In other words, at least to an extent the perceived threat has to be “real” and, consequently, plausible.62 In the early republic, both Great Britain and France frequently challenged American sovereignty, interfered with America’s international trade, and were in a position to endanger American security on the North American continent. For the American republic, Great Britain and France were therefore the essential foils against which America’s national identity could be forged. By contrast, Spain and the so-called Barbary States in North Africa – the other foreign powers that the U.S. had a conflict-ridden relationship with following the American Revolution – did not pose an immediate danger strong enough to create a sense of national solidarity. Spain, while temporarily clashing with the U.S. over the Mississippi question and the dispute over the border of Florida, was generally viewed as a decaying empire whose weakly defended and sparsely populated colonial possessions in North America would be gradually taken over by the expanding U.S.63 The Barbary States also represented a foreign-policy problem, since – once the U.S. lost British protection after attaining independence – they started 60 61

62

63

Jefferson to James Monroe, June 17, 1785, in: WTJ, Vol. 4, 418. Madison, “The Federalist No. 63,” March 1, 1788, in: Cooke (ed.), The Federalist, 422–423. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, “Introduction,” in: idem and Ursula Lehmkuhl (eds.), Enemy Images in American History (Providence: Berghahn, 1997), 24–25. For Spanish–American relations in the early republic, see Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Spanish–American Frontier, 1783–1795: The Westward Movement and the Spanish Retreat in the Mississippi Valley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927); idem, The Mississippi Question, 1795–1803: A Study in Trade, Politics, and Diplomacy (New York: Appleton, 1934); James E. Lewis Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); J. C. A. Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish–American Frontier, 1776–1821 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

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The Genesis of America

capturing American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean (and later to a lesser extent in the east Atlantic), triggering the founding of the U.S. navy in the 1790s. However, in contrast to the issues troubling Anglo- and FrancoAmerican relations, the U.S. could easily deal with this challenge militarily, as the Barbary States were comparatively small and weak: once the U.S. had built a sizable navy, it was dispatched to the Mediterranean to protect American ships and attack the Barbary vessels.64 The second reason why Great Britain and France were the central points of reference for the developing American nation was the fact that they were historically and culturally most closely tied to the U.S. and hence the standard against which Americans measured themselves. The U.S. remained bound to Great Britain in terms of trade and culture, specifically to its language, habits, material goods, and tastes. Yet, in order to invent themselves as a separate nation Americans had to disentangle themselves from their former mother country.65 France had not only been the ally that helped the U.S. win independence in the first place: after the outbreak of the French Revolution France also seemed to follow the American example and become America’s political sibling. While the French Revolution legitimized the American Revolution in retrospect and encouraged Americans to pursue their experiment of selfgovernment, it initially also raised troubling questions about the uniqueness of the American experience, as it blurred the distinctions between America’s and Europe’s political systems.66 As a result, Americans also

64

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66

See James R. Sofka, “The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security: Commerce, the Atlantic Balance of Power, and the Barbary War, 1786–1805,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1997), 519–544. For the Barbary Wars in general, see Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005). For Americans’ anxieties about remaining dependent on Great Britain after achieving independence and their attempts to achieve a greater amount of cultural and economic autonomy, see Yokota, Unbecoming British. Joseph Eaton, The Anglo-American Paper War: Debates about the New Republic, 1800–1825 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). P. J. Marshall emphasized the ambiguous character of Anglo-American relations in the first decade after independence arguing that while Americans defined their new nation politically by rejecting Great Britain, they mostly maintained the close transatlantic links that had characterized their relationship during the colonial period in terms of trade, tastes, and the migration of people and ideas. P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See David Brion Davis, “American Equality and Foreign Revolutions,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 3 (1989), 737; Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots:

Introduction

19

had to disentangle themselves from France to imagine themselves as forming a distinct community. Setting the European settlers in North America apart from their internal Others – above all Native Americans and African Americans who were not supposed to become citizens of the U.S. – was another fundamental aspect of the demarcation process characterizing early American nationalism.67 After all, a basis for the feeling of community among the disparate white peoples of various ethnic origins was their shared perception that they all had more in common with each other than with the Native Americans and African Americans and that the former posed a direct and the latter at least a latent threat to them.68 As the historian Walter Hixson argued, despite the

67

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Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). It is a matter of debate whether Indians were internal or external Others. On the one hand, the American government seemed to have regarded Native American tribes as at least partially independent nations, since it concluded peace treaties with them, the power to declare war and peace being a traditional prerogative of sovereign states. On the other hand, white Americans considered relations to Native Americans a domestic issue rather than one governed by international law. After all, Indian affairs were made the responsibility of the War Department rather than the State Department and disputes between the federal government and the Indian tribes were settled in federal courts rather than through international tribunals. The federal government also denied that international conventions regarding the laws of war applied to relations with Indians and regularly broke the treaties it had negotiated on flimsy, or without any, pretexts. The stark inequality in terms of power between the federal government and Indian tribes as well as the latter’s economic dependence upon white citizens made sure that federal treaty commissioners believed that Indian tribes were wards of the government rather than sovereign nations. For the anomalous nature of Indian treaties, see Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For the increasingly unequal relationship between federal commissioners and Indian negotiators, also see Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See Elise Marienstras, “The Common Man’s Indian: The Image of the Indian as a Promoter of National Identity in the Early National Era,” in: Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (eds.), Native Americans and the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 261–296; Michael A. Morrison and James Brewer Stewart (eds.), Race and the Early Republic: Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early Republic (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Many Native Americans of various Indian nations – the Delaware, Shawnee, Cherokee, and Creek – in turn came to develop a pan-Indian consciousness after the mideighteenth century in response to Anglo-American expansionism. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spiritual Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

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The Genesis of America

ethnic and religious tensions between the English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, Germans, French Huguenots, Swiss, and Jews, “the Euro-Americans gradually found that race provided the best means to manage their own considerable ethnic and class differences.”69 Moreover, leaders of the independence movement were able to rally many people to fight their brethren across the Atlantic in the American Revolution only by linking Great Britain to fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians and accusing British agents of inciting both groups to take up arms against Americans. They thereby ensured not only that the British would be increasingly viewed as an “alien” people but also that Native and African Americans would be excluded from U.S. citizenship.70 In the Northwest, the joint experience of defending themselves against Native Americans, who mostly sided with the British in the War of Independence and continued resisting white Americans’ expansionism after 1783, even united “Patriots” and “Loyalists,” as a racially defined collective identity among the white settlers trumped their political differences.71 Nonetheless, defining American identity in opposition to these internal Others did not obviate the need to dissociate America from its major external reference points. After all, white Americans had already set themselves apart from Native and African Americans and developed a sense of inter-ethnic racial solidarity during the colonial period, as only the racial denigration of Amerindians and blacks and their relegation to a status below “civilized” Europeans legitimized the taking of their lands and the expropriation of their slave labor respectively.72 After attaining independence, it now seemed paramount for Euro-Americans to, additionally, develop a consciousness of being different to their white brethren on the other

69

70

71

72

Walter L. Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 29. Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 212–216. For the development of racism and Indian-hating in the colonial period, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812, 2nd edn. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Walter L. Hixson, “‘No Savage Shall Inherit the Land’: The Indian Enemy Other, Indiscriminate Warfare, and American National Identity, 1607–1783,” in: Michael Patrick Cullinane and David Ryan (eds.), U.S. Foreign Policy and the Other (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 16–41.

Introduction

21

side of the Atlantic in order to invent a separate American nationality.73 This it not to say that processes of external and internal demarcation were not intertwined. To the contrary, both aspects of American identity formation were directly related.74 On the one hand, forcing – through an assertive foreign policy – its European parent societies to acknowledge that the U.S. was an equal part of the “civilized world” was essential for white Americans to substantiate their claims of superiority over their racial Others in North America. Indeed, many Americans were concerned that – once the political connection to the European center of “civilization” was severed – they might degenerate and come to resemble the non-

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The claim that racial demarcation processes were set in motion during the colonial period should not be interpreted to mean that they had fully matured or come to an end by 1783. To the contrary, American national identity formation in opposition to Native and African Americans continued deepening after independence. As Richard White showed, the fluid and reciprocal relationships characterizing white–Indian relations in the Great Lakes region were replaced by processes of racial Othering after the restraining influence of the imperial center disappeared and Americans began taking possession of the newly acquired lands by violent conquest rather than peaceful negotiation. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, 20th anniversary edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Eric Hinderaker also argued that the War of Independence, in which most Native Americans eventually sided with the British, led white settlers in the Ohio Valley to increasingly view Indians as inhuman Others who should be denied membership in the new nation. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For the view that Indian-hating received a boost after American independence, also see Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 243. The most obvious example of a direct connection between external and internal demarcation processes is America’s reaction to the Haitian Revolution. On the one hand, the federal government – instead of welcoming that the former French colony followed the American model in establishing another republic in the Western Hemisphere – offered the French support to crush the slave insurrection and, when these attempts failed, refused to acknowledge the independence of Haiti in 1804 and even instituted an embargo against the Caribbean island in 1806 fearing that the example of a successful slave revolt could inspire similar uprisings in the American South and that the existence of a black republic could challenge racial definitions of American citizenship. On the other hand, the Haitian Revolution made slaveholders defend slavery more vigorously and strengthened their resolve not to grant citizenship to any blacks. For U.S. foreign policy towards Haiti in the early republic, see Tim Matthewson, A Pro-Slavery Foreign Policy: Haitian–American Relations during the Early Republic (Westport: Praeger, 2003). For the reception of the Haitian Revolution in the U.S., see Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); James Alexander Dun, Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

22

The Genesis of America

white peoples in their proximity, as several European commentators predicted.75 These fears not only rendered it imperative to emphasize racial differences to Native and African Americans; they also made white Americans anxious to obtain confirmation by their European kin that, despite their geographical distance and political independence, they were still members of Europe’s “civilization.”76 Consequently, the British practice of impressing white American seamen – akin to blacks being caught in West Africa and sold into slavery in the Americas – was so upsetting, as it seemed to indicate that Britons considered Americans as being closer to black slaves than white Europeans, thereby challenging the racial basis of slavery in the U.S. Similarly, the British use of Indian proxies against Americans in the War of Independence and the War of 1812 was so disturbing, as it challenged the notion of white racial solidarity that was so essential to American national identity formation. Both British practices – impressment and alliances with Native Americans – therefore necessitated a strong response to force the former mother country to accept white Americans as their equals and thereby validate the racial foundation of American nationalism.77 On the other hand, to become accepted as an equal and independent member of the European state system the federal government had to establish its unchallenged authority over U.S. territory by wresting sovereignty over the hinterlands from Native Americans that resisted white expansionism.78 When the federal government failed to permanently pacify the transAppalachian West (various Indian tribes uniting in opposition to the further 75

76

77

78

Britons’ condescending notions of Americans as having allegedly degenerated into a state of society somewhere between the mother country and the Amerindians and Africans in the later colonial period had been deeply offending to Americans. See Jack P. Greene, “The American Revolution,” in: American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 1 (2000), 100. White Americans’ simultaneous pursuit of setting themselves apart from Native and African Americans on the one hand and from Europeans on the other could create profound tensions, as the former endeavor, making Americans wish to prove that they were still part of the “civilized world” and thus superior to their racial Others in America by importing refined products from Europe, undermined their latter efforts to culturally demarcate the U.S. from the Old World. Yokota, Unbecoming British, 217–223. See Matthew Mason, “The Battle of Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2002), 665–696; Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 203–210; Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 138. Leonard J. Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). To consolidate the union in the Northwest, the authority of the federal government also had to be

Introduction

23

advancement of white settlers in Tecumseh’s Confederation in the early nineteenth century), Americans in turn needed an explanation for why they could not successfully subject Native American tribes, whom they considered inferior, to their rule. Consequently, they came to the conclusion that the Indians in the Northwest had to enjoy the support of the British, rendering it even more urgent to assert American sovereignty against the former mother country.79 Insofar as the internal demarcation processes were linked to the external ones, this book will therefore incorporate them into the analysis. The focus, however, will lie on the analysis of how foreign policy was used to set the emerging American nation apart from its European reference points, the separate question of how Native and African Americans within North America were excluded from U.S. citizenship having already been discussed elsewhere.80 A precondition for foreign policy to resonate in the public and for processes of demarcation to become effective was the existence of a national communication system through which Americans would be discursively connected and which would allow for nation-wide discussions of U.S. foreign policy and consequently negotiations of American identity. After all, once Americans had broken their ties to Great Britain, their attachment lay primarily with their county and state, of which they had a physical knowledge, and in the local institutions, in which they could often directly participate. The process of switching their allegiance to a much larger territorial entity, which they could never travel in its entirety and most inhabitants of which they could never meet, required the emergence of a common discourse – the experience of sharing the same information at the same time – throughout the United States such that Americans could at least imagine to be part of a larger whole. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this discourse could only emerge and be conducted in newspapers: they were the essential institution

79

80

asserted over white settlers who frequently squatted on public lands without permission. François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” in: American Historical Review, Vol. 113, No. 3 (2008), 663–664. Lawrence A. Peskin, “Conspiratorial Anglophobia and the War of 1812,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 98, No. 3 (2011), 667. See James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Deborah A. Rosen, American Indians and State Law: Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship, 1790–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

24

The Genesis of America

that forged the “imagined political community” of the nation, as nationalism scholar Benedict Anderson argued. As Americans were unconnected to each other personally, it was by reading newspapers that they could become members of an audience that shared the same reference points and assumptions.81 As Alexis de Tocqueville explained after touring the U.S. in the early 1830s, it was impossible to make large numbers of people cooperate and identify with each other in a large democratic society unless all were convinced that they formed a community. “This can be habitually and conveniently effected only by means of a newspaper,” he maintained; “nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment.”82 Newspapers alone, supplying readers with a common print-language and similar sets of ideas, could thus help create a sense of national identity and make citizens believe that they shared a common destiny with their fellow members of the nation. While, in colonial times, most debates had occurred in town meetings and rarely extended beyond the state borders, by the time of the American Revolution, key economic requirements for widespread newspaper development had been realized that would allow for the emergence of a national discourse.83 Population growth in combination with a first phase of urbanization was a core prerequisite for the evolution of domestic newspapers, as a small and scattered population could not provide a sizable subscription list. Growing towns such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Charleston, and Baltimore would serve as ready markets for newspapers.84 The number of possible subscribers also depended on the literacy rate in America, which in the early republic was among the highest of its time due to the spread of schools. By 1800, the literacy rate had reached over 90 percent in New England. In addition, the female literacy rate had almost caught up with the male one by the early nineteenth century.85 Due to the 81

82

83

84

85

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. by Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), Vol. 2, 111. Robert A. Gross, “Printing, Politics, and the People,” in: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 99, No. 2 (1990), 382. Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 18. Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 11–12; Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 13; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 193.

Introduction

25

politicization of the entire population in the American Revolution, moreover, all social strata had become politically conscious and therefore interested in political news.86 Due to these structural developments, the number of newspapers more than doubled from 92 in 1790 to 234 in 1800, and then continued to increase to 329 until the end of Jefferson’s presidency in 1809. Although the War of 1812 somewhat slowed this rapid development, the number of newspapers in America had still grown to 413 by 1815 when the war ended.87 This expansion of the press bears witness to the rising importance attached to newspapers in the early republic and serves as a significant indicator for their representativeness as a conveyor of public opinion. In many public gathering places such as taverns, coffee houses, restaurants, and libraries, newspapers were available and often read aloud. Numerous printers established reading rooms at their printing shops where people, for an annual fee, could read from a broad selection of periodicals that the editor had received through his exchanges of newspapers. Americans who subscribed to a newspaper often shared it with their neighbors or they subscribed jointly. As most people in the early republic still managed their daily affairs through face-to-face contacts, news in the printed press soon diffused widely within the area of their publication – even to those who had no direct access to a newspaper or could not read.88 Moreover, common Americans also had the chance to participate actively in the increasingly pluralist newspaper discourse, as editors made their publications open to contributions from readers. Newspapers would frequently include letters to the editor, speeches delivered and toasts made at public festivities such as Independence Day

86

87

88

Charles G. Steffen, “Newspapers for Free: The Economics of Newspaper Circulation in the Early Republic,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2003), 382. The numbers are taken from Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), 711; Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969), 15; Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party Operations, 1801–1809 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 236. Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 7–8; Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 188; John C. Nerone, The Culture of the Press in the Early Republic: Cincinnati, 1793–1848 (New York: Garland, 1989), 43; Milton W. Hamilton, The Country Printer: New York State, 1785–1830, 2nd edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 81–82; Steffen, “Newspapers for Free,” 408–418.

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The Genesis of America

celebrations, petitions, political treatises, pamphlets, patriotic songs, and sermons.89 The ability of newspapers to contribute to the formation of an American identity was, however, also dependent on the development of a federal communication system which would allow for a national discourse instead of merely numerous local or regional discourses to emerge. For newspapers to be circulated nationally and supplied to subscribers in far-flung settlements in the countryside and for editors to obtain news that transcended local affairs, an extensive and reliable federal postal system was a necessity. Without it, newspapers could only be distributed locally (for example, by newsboys, often apprentices in printing shops, who delivered them in urban areas) and could only print local news (or news from abroad in port cities engaged in transatlantic trade). The political leadership of the young republic was aware that outlying regions of the union could only remain attached to the new central government if they received national news through newspapers.90 President Washington in particular wished to accelerate and expand the dissemination of information and therefore lent his support to expanding the national postal service as well as subsidizing newspapers through generous postage rates.91 However, the desire to use the federal government to facilitate the spread of information for nation-building purposes was bipartisan.92 Madison, as legislative leader of the emerging Republican Party, also recommended promoting a greater circulation of newspapers, as it “facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments” between the national capital and the more peripheral regions. This would amount to a “contraction” of the territorial expanse of the U.S. He therefore urged Congress to improve the “circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people.”93 In his First Inaugural Address, Jefferson would also advocate the federal encouragement of “the diffusion of information.”94 The postal service was, therefore, successively enlarged in the early republic and a system of regular riders was established that carried not only mail 89

90 92 93

94

Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, 20–21; David Paul Nord, “Newspapers and American Nationhood, 1776–1826,” in: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 100 (1991), 398–400; Charles E. Clark, “The Newspapers of Provincial America,” in: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 100 (1991), 389. 91 Kielbowicz, News in the Mail, 6. John, Spreading the News, 59. Gross, “Printing, Politics, and the People,” 388–389. “Public Opinion” [by Madison], in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), December 19, 1791. Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 57.

Introduction

27

but also the newspapers. The network of post roads grew from 1,875 miles in 1790 to 43,966 miles in 1815.95 The Post Office Act of 1792, moreover, provided free exchanges of newspapers between printers. As a result, even though most newspapers continued having local subscription bases, the contents of many newspapers made their way to other states and regions, where publishers simply reprinted articles from the periodicals they received through the mail.96 After all, copyright law had yet to exist. Consequently, the same information could become available to Americans in all states and a national discourse emerged in the early republic.97 Yet, print media were not only agents of unification but also of division, as they gave expression to different political ideologies. The parties that developed after the adoption of the Constitution had competing visions of America’s future and their political struggles were fought out in newspapers. In fact, most newspapers in the early republic emerged in response to the development of the first party system and were founded for the express purpose of supporting a partisan cause.98 Impartiality and neutrality were not seen as a virtue or a journalistic standard in the early republic.99 On the contrary, most editors defined the role of their newspaper as a medium for the propagation of party views. William Cobbett, Federalist editor of Porcupine’s Gazette, for example, declared that “Professions of impartiality I shall make none.” He held that if someone tried to be neutral in political matters he was “a poor passive tool, and not an editor . . . To profess impartiality here, would be as absurd as to profess it in a war between Virtue and Vice, Good and Evil, Happiness and Misery.”100 The Republican editor of the American and Daily Advertiser, Alexander Martin, proclaimed to the same effect that “the American people have long enough been imposed upon by pretended impartiality of printers; it is all delusion.”101 95 96 97 98

99

100 101

Kielbowicz, News in the Mail, 46. John, Spreading the News, 30–42; Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers,” 48–49. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers,” 8–9. Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Two National Gazettes: Newspapers and the Embodiment of American Political Parties,” in: Early American Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2000), 78; Carol Sue Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 1783–1833 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 43. Hazel Dicken Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 30–38, 71–82. Porcupine’s Gazette and United States Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), March 4, 1797. American and Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), May 16, 1799. Also see American Citizen and General Advertiser (New York), March 10, 1800.

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The Genesis of America

Not only was the press extremely partisan presenting highly biased and invective editorials that completely ignored standards of objectivity, neutrality, and fairness and only selectively sharing news that was advantageous to their political goals; they also printed false information. Editors rarely checked the correctness of stories when they reprinted letters from anonymous authors and frequently presented mere rumors as facts.102 For example, Federalist newspapers fabricated stories about alleged French invasion plans that had no substance in reality during the Quasi-War. Many Indian attacks and atrocities that Republican newspapers reported about and blamed on British intrigue during the War of 1812 were also imagined or at least exaggerated. Newspapers were thus not only a unifying institution by establishing a national discourse but also a dividing agency by promoting different political ideologies. As a result, the formation of American nationalism was not simply a continuous process of progressing unity. After all, national identity is a fluid and contested construct that lends itself to divergent interpretations and can therefore become an object of partisan controversy. In the early republic, Americans, fighting over the shape of the young republic’s domestic political and social order, also competed to define the identity of their emerging nation in a way that would justify their respective political interests and social values and consequently argued over which foreign nation to primarily demarcate the U.S. from. More concretely, the emerging Republican Party considered the ideology it embraced – democratic egalitarianism – the only true form of Americanism; the Federalist Party believed the same of its own persuasion, elitist conservatism. In the context of the French Revolutionary Wars, Federalists and Republicans then chose different foreign templates against which they would define American identity to nationalize their political creed. Republicans viewed America as the polar opposite of Great Britain, perceived as the international bearer of conservatism, whereas Federalists set America apart from France, considered the international champion of democratic egalitarianism. The identity debates therefore quickly translated into opposing foreign-policy orientations. Republicans favored a confrontational foreign policy towards Great Britain, whereas Federalists advocated provoking tensions with France. In other words, attempts to promote American nationalism at first created more division than unity. Yet, although the national flow of communication allowed for the emergence of national parties and competing definitions of American 102

See Stewart, The Opposition Press, 22–23.

Introduction

29

identity, thereby dividing the nation, the very fact that the press connected readers throughout the nation allowed Americans to share information with each other beyond their immediate surroundings, and gave them a national – instead of a local – partisan cause behind which they could unite, led to the formation of a national discourse, and, as a result, an increasing identification with the new nation. Moreover, even if the precise nature of American nationality was disputed, an underlying sense of American self was produced by the very fact that Federalists and Republicans constantly argued over definitions of American identity, which established the assumption that there existed an American nation as a common point of departure for their debates. In other words, by arguing over U.S. national identity, they created it in the first place. As early American nationalism was a demarcation process that was mainly carried out through the press and driven by a confrontational foreign policy, this book is based on a two-fold analysis. First, the articles, editorials, and other contents pertaining to Anglo-American and Franco-American relations in a broad selection of early U.S. newspapers (occasionally supplemented by pamphlets and broadsides) were examined to reconstruct the national discourse on American identity as it had unfolded in the early republic. It was in and through these public sources that Americans had controversially debated the character of their nation and constructed an American identity in opposition to America’s major European reference points. This source pool also included political sources intended for public consumption such as presidential messages to Congress, government reports, and congressional debates, which were usually at least partially reprinted in most newspapers. Second, diplomatic sources – such as protocols, memoranda, instructions to ministers and envoys abroad, and, significantly, letters by Cabinet members, diplomats, and Congressmen – were analyzed to show that the discourses of demarcation had shaped foreign-policy makers’ perception of international events and that they had deliberately sought to promote the development of an American national identity through their diplomatic actions; most importantly through their decisions to wage war against France in 1798 and Great Britain in 1812. Significantly, these sources were private, i.e. they were not intended to be published (at least not immediately). Therefore, they reveal the motives of foreign-policy makers such that it becomes possible to explain why certain policies were adopted and diplomatic decisions made. When the newspapers were chosen for the analysis, it was made sure that, on the one hand, newspapers from all the states that were part of the U.S. at the time of its founding (the thirteen colonies that declared

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The Genesis of America

themselves independent in 1776 and adopted the Constitution between 1787 and 1790) or became admitted to the union during the period of investigation (Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio) – with the exception of Louisiana, which only joined the union in 1812, i.e. in the end phase of the early republican era – were included. Even though Maine would only achieve statehood in 1820, newspapers from this area were also included, since it formed a district of Massachusetts and was hence part of the U.S. from the very beginning. On the other hand, the selection incorporates – to a roughly equal extent – both newspapers that supported the Federalists and those that advanced the Republican cause.103 In terms of the selection of diplomatic sources, all Cabinet members, ministers abroad, and pertinent members of Congress were identified as relevant foreign-policy makers. For one, in the early republic, all the most senior executive officers – not just the President and the Secretary of State – could be considered foreign-policy makers, as all the important political issues were discussed in the Cabinet meetings and the Presidents usually asked all their department heads for advice on foreign policy. As James Monroe explained to his Secretary of State in 1817, “it was the practice of the Government to communicate in confidence to all the heads of Departments every important circumstance occurring in our foreign concerns . . . This had heretofore been the practice, and had been found very useful to the Government.”104 Second, because of the slowness of communication across the Atlantic, U.S. ministers abroad and special envoys had considerable leeway when conducting negotiations with their host governments and consequently also had a significant influence on the formulation of foreign policy.105 Finally, since the concurrence of two-

103

104

105

The newspapers were analyzed in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Library of Congress. In addition, the Readex online collection of America’s historical newspaper was used. John Quincy Adams, December 26, 1817, in: Charles Francis Adams (ed.), Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874–1877), Vol. 4, 31. To correspond with ministers, the Secretary of State used the “British packet,” a mail system for overseas transport of high-value goods run by the British government, for general messages. For secret communications, private vessels sailing to and from Europe were used. According to the historian of public administration, Leonard D. White, one had to wait about three months for a dispatch from Europe to arrive at the Department of State, such that, on average, it took about six months for an exchange of letters to be completed in the late eighteenth century. White, The Federalists, 129–130, 484–486. An analysis of the correspondence between Secretary of State Edmund Randolph and envoy extraordinary John Jay between the latter’s arrival in England on June 8, 1794, and his return to New York on May 28, 1795, reveals that the time was somewhat

Introduction

31

thirds of the Senate was required for the ratification of treaties and Congress had the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, to declare war, and to raise and maintain an army and a navy, the legislative assemblies, too, shaped early U.S. foreign policy. After all, the Constitution did not resolve the question of which branch should determine foreign policy. In the early years, the President and Congress hence struggled over control of U.S. foreign policy.106 The overall objective of this two-part analysis is to bring to light the interaction between a national discourse on American identity, which developed mainly in the newspapers, and the diplomatic decisions made by foreign-policy makers to disentangle America from its European reference points. The influence of the national discourse on U.S. foreign policy was two-fold. First, newspapers were the best reflection of public opinion available to politicians at the time.107 “In a republic of which the public opinion is the basis,” the General Advertiser explained, the press “is of very peculiar importance as the organ of that opinion, and in many instances the only organ.”108 Even those who questioned whether the partisan press was actually speaking for the people at large admitted that the press was the most influential institution to shape public opinion. “Give to any set of men the command of the press, and you give them the command of the country; for you give them the command of public opinion, which commands everything,” as the Columbian Centinel quoted a Federalist judge.109 Therefore, politicians had to take the opinions of newspaper editors into account when making political decisions. “Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one,” as Madison maintained.110 Consequently, foreign-

106

107

108

109

110

shorter than White assumed. Nonetheless, it still took, on average, sixty-one days for a letter to make its way to its recipient on the other side of the Atlantic. See ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 475–519. See Cecil V. Crabb Jr. and Pat M. Holt, Invitation to Struggle: Congress, the President, and Foreign Policy, 3rd edn. (Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1989), 43–58. British diplomatic agents also considered American newspapers conveyors of public opinion and therefore sent clippings to their government as information about national sentiment in the U.S. Troy Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15. “To the Editor of the General Advertiser” by “Sidney,” in: General Advertiser (Philadelphia), January 23, 1793. Alexander Addison, “Liberty of Speech, and of the Press,” in: Columbian Centinel (Boston), December 29, 1798. “Public Opinion” [by Madison], in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), December 19, 1791. The use of the term “public opinion” skyrocketed after 1789 indicating the

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policy makers – at least those residing within the U.S. – carefully read newspapers of national importance to find out the current state of public opinion – particularly since foreign affairs made up a large part of newspaper contents in the early republic and editorials very often dealt with foreign-policy issues.111 If public pressure built up in newspapers to take a certain political action, it could force politicians’ hands or at least severely limit their options, as happened when the nationalistically aroused Republican press demanded a declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812. Apart from serving as the best approximation of public opinion, the national newspaper discourse also had a significant bearing on U.S. foreign policy, since they provided the larger ideological context in which policies were designed and diplomatic actions were taken. After all, statesmen are no cold strategists acting rationally according to objective criteria: their perception of international events is shaped by their nation’s culture, its stereotypes, conventions, symbols, images, and values. Ideologies, as the sets of political beliefs prevalent in a particular culture, therefore, impose restraints, as they make an array of possible policy options unconceivable at a certain time and prevent a fully “realistic” assessment of the international situation, as could be seen when Republicans falsely attributed Indian resistance against white settlers to British machinations. However, ideologies are not just limiting but also

111

increasing relevance of the concept. Mark Schmeller, “The Political Economy of Opinion: Public Credit and Concepts of Public Opinion in the Age of Federalism,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2009), 37. Most early American newspapers consisted of four pages of which, on average, two (usually the first and last) were devoted to advertisements, one to news received from abroad or other U.S. newspapers, and one to editorials, letters to the editors, and reprints of congressional debates or presidential messages. In other words, only the advertisements were local, whereas the news articles, editorials, and reprints were mostly about foreign affairs or national politics (which again often revolved around foreign policy in the early republic). When starting to publish their newspaper, Titus Powers and Gurdon Isaac Seymour promised their readers above all “the most latest and authentic intelligence” from “the theatre of Europe” and from the federal government. Local affairs were not mentioned in their introductory editorial apart from advertisements. “To the Public,” in: Columbian Museum & Savannah Advertiser, March 8, 1796. For the preponderance of international news between 1789 and 1815, also see Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information, 22; Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, 21–24; Hamilton, The Country Printer, 311–312; Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 260 Years: 1690 to 1950, rev. edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 195–196. News from Europe usually arrived in the form of letters and foreign publications or was provided directly by sailors, immigrants, and travelers.

Introduction

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enabling, as they make it possible for political decision makers to act purposefully in a complicated and unsettling world in the first place.112 Ideologies are “an indispensable guide to an infinitely complex and otherwise bewildering present,” as diplomatic historian Michael H. Hunt put it.113 An analysis of the newspaper discourse, therefore, is not only most suitable for reconstructing public opinion in the early republic, but also helps one to unravel the ideological “prism” through which U.S. foreignpolicy makers interpreted international events (and British and French actions in particular) and lay bare the basic convictions that shaped their foreign policies such as Republicans’ belief that republics would be naturally peaceful or Federalists’ assumption that democracies would eventually turn into dictatorships.114 The relationship between the national discourse and U.S. foreign policy, however, was not a one-way street. It also worked the other way round. On the one hand, federal policy makers were not just influenced by what they read in the press, but they also tried to mold public opinion by contributing materials to newspapers themselves – either by writing editorials under pseudonyms or by virtue of the fact that newspapers reprinted messages of the President or department heads and congressional debates.115 They also tried to win the favor of particular periodicals by providing them with printing contracts, political patronage, and privileged access to governmental information.116 Even those who warned of the baneful effects of the populist pressures emanating from the press used it to mobilize public support for their policies.117 On the other hand, federal policy makers could also use foreign policy as a tool to galvanize the formation of national identity and influence the course of public discussions. In particular, by precipitating international 112

113

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116 117

Frank Ninkovich, Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865–1890 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 330–331. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 12. For the metaphor of the “prism,” see Bradford Perkins, “Interests, Values, and the Prism: The Sources of American Foreign Policy,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1994), 458–466. Hamilton and Madison were among the most prolific authors of newspaper articles among the founding generation. See, for example, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, The Pacificus Helvidius Debates of 1793–1794: Toward the Completion of the American Founding, ed. by Morton J. Frisch (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). See Pasley, “The Two National Gazettes.” Todd Estes, “Shaping the Politics of Public Opinion: Federalists and the Jay Treaty Debate,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2000), 393–422.

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crises – which are here understood as communicative events – they could trigger demarcation processes and change the parameters within which the debate on American identity took place. Most importantly, by rejecting diplomatic compromise and escalating tensions with France and Great Britain – to the point that the U.S. found itself at war with each country – Federalists and Republicans could accelerate the dissociation of America from its European reference points and move the public discourse into a direction that was favorable to their respective party. Conversely, by settling diplomatic issues with a foreign country amicably, the party in control of the federal government could undermine the basis of the opposition’s call for war, as when the Jay Treaty that the Federalists negotiated with Great Britain deprived Republicans of legitimate reasons to complain about the former mother country. In sum, this book thus combines both a cultural and a political analysis of the origins of American nationalism. The book is divided into six chapters. As Chapter 1 lays out, the radicalization of the French Revolution and the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France in 1793 transformed the struggle between the emerging parties into a debate on America’s national identity. To conservative Federalists, revolutionary France became a vivid demonstration of what would be the concrete consequences of egalitarian democracy. In order to prevent a similar social upheaval in America, Federalists therefore distinguished the moderate American from the radical French Revolution and defined America in opposition to France, thereby equating Federalists’ political ideology with Americanism. To Republicans, by contrast, the radicalized French Revolution served as an inspiration for their quest for social equality. By stressing Franco-American communalities and defining America in opposition to the former mother country, they challenged the existing political, social, and cultural hierarchies at home. In consequence of their diverging definitions of American identity, Federalists and Republicans developed opposing foreign-policy views, as Chapter 2 makes clear. Federalists wished to terminate the FrancoAmerican alliance of 1778 and sought a rapprochement with Great Britain in order to discourage revolutionary tendencies in America. Republicans, by contrast, wanted to support France in her struggle against Europe’s conservative powers and tried to prevent any kind of Anglo-American accommodation, which they feared would undermine their pursuit of political and social change at home. In fact, since the foreign-policy making process was not yet centralized in the office of the

Introduction

35

President – the Republican-dominated Congress and Federalist-led administration competing over their relative influence on the general course of U.S. foreign policy and Republican and Federalist officeholders within the Washington Administration often working at cross purposes – it seemed at times that the U.S. pursued two conflicting foreign policies simultaneously. In 1794, Republicans in the House of Representatives tried to bolster their anti-British definition of American identity by bringing on a war crisis with Great Britain through a policy of commercial restrictions. In this situation, Federalists – dominating the Administration and the Senate – sent John Jay to London to peacefully settle Anglo-American disputes – not only to prevent an Anglo-American war but also to invalidate the Franco-American alliance and increase Anglo-American cooperation and interdependence in order to cement Federalists’ conservative definition of American identity. Republican attacks on the Federalist administration, however, intensified such that, by 1797, prominent Federalists around Hamilton had come to the conclusion that an actual war with France was necessary to disentangle America from her ally and discredit democratic egalitarianism as a viable ideology in American politics. Chapter 3 hence analyzes how a group of leading Federalists in the Adams Administration and Senate provoked the Quasi-War from 1798 to 1800 in an attempt to unite the divided country behind a Francophobic version of American identity. Using the fact that France interfered with American trade with Great Britain as a pretext to escalate tensions with France, they sent a mission to Paris in 1797 – officially to settle Franco-American disputes over neutral rights, but in fact intended to obtain the justification for an outright war in case it failed. The XYZ Affair – the attempt by French diplomats to secure a bribe from the American negotiators – then indeed provided Federalist politicians with a suitable reason to seek a rupture in Franco-American relations and to engage in military conflict. Chapter 4 reconstructs how the war situation made it increasingly difficult for Republicans to continue defining America by positive reference to France, without casting doubt on their national loyalty. Reluctantly, Republicans reconsidered their attachment to France and ceased to assume a congruence of the American and French Revolutions. Instead, they came to associate democratic egalitarianism exclusively with the U.S., setting the American nation apart from all of Europe, which they held to be too much rooted in despotism to be able to maintain a republic for long. In the face of the war fever that swept the nation in 1798, Federalists across the country – by contrast – increasingly defined

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America in appropriation of Great Britain, stressing Anglo-American commonalities. During the Quasi-War, they thus came to embrace an ethnic definition of American identity considering only white persons born in the U.S. (which had mostly Anglo-Saxon origins) to be members of the American nation but excluding Irish, French, and other recent immigrant groups. However, while Anglo-Saxonism would become an influential strand of American nationalism in the nineteenth century, at the turn of the century Federalists’ nativism contributed to their marginalization, as in the context of a post-colonial nation seeking to define an identity of its own Federalists’ outspoken Anglophilia raised suspicion about their national allegiance – especially after Adams concluded peace with France and thus eliminated the perception of a French threat. The Quasi-War thus ended with the demise of the Federalist Party as a dominant force in national politics. While peace with France was restored in 1800, Anglo-American relations deteriorated after Republicans assumed power in 1801. Besides their Anglophobia, Republicans’ belief in the theory of republican peace was responsible for the rising tensions with Great Britain, as Chapter 5 argues. This theory held that republics were inherently peaceful, while monarchies were dependent on constant warfare. Since America had a republican form of government, Republicans were therefore convinced that the U.S. was also inherently peaceful. Conversely, the theory of republican peace made them prone to perceive Europe’s monarchies as naturally aggressive and hence a threat to the U.S. America’s former mother country – Republicans’ long-time monarchical nemesis – in particular was suspected of harboring hostile intentions towards the U.S. This mindset made Republican foreign-policy makers interpret British war policies against France as being primarily motivated by Britain’s wish to destroy the U.S. The theory of republican peace thus led to an allconsuming perception of threat from Great Britain justifying and making necessary an uncompromising American foreign policy. This confrontational approach resulted in an escalation of tensions that in turn reaffirmed the perception of British enmity. A fatal cycle was set in motion at the end of which a declaration of war seemed unavoidable in 1812. Just as the Quasi-War had forced Republicans to renounce their attachment to France, the War of 1812 made it difficult for Federalists to continue defining America by positive reference to Great Britain, as the last chapter shows. Particularly after British forces invaded American territory and thus threatened America directly, most Federalists came to see England as a national enemy that needed to be repelled and began

Introduction

37

defining America not only in opposition to France but also to Great Britain. Despite Federalists’ initial opposition to the war, Republicans were thus largely successful in uniting the nation in enmity to Great Britain. By 1815, the process of demarcating the American nation had reached a peak, as a consensus had emerged that America was defined by her otherness from Europe at large.

1 Political Ideologies and American Identity in the Era of the French Revolution

When the federal government commenced its operation under the new Constitution in 1789, newspapers throughout the U.S. battled to outdo each other in glorifying Americans’ achievements in their successful revolution, boasting that Americans enjoyed freedom, peace, and prosperity to a degree unparalleled in human history. “Citizens of the United States! you have a well balanced constitution, established by general consent, which is an improvement on all republican forms of governments heretofore established,” David Ramsay, one of America’s earliest historians and former member of the Continental Congress, told Americans in a public address.1 “WHAT an happy asylum does America present to the wretched inhabitants of the old world,” the Gazette of the United States proclaimed. “Here – where no lordly despot usurps the land to dispossess the swain – where laws, and equal liberty are the lot of all.”2 The recently founded newspaper reminded Americans of their exceptionalism: “there are in America no Kings, Princes or Nobles; no Popes, Cardinals, Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops or other ecclesiastical dignitaries.”3 The General Advertiser also rejoiced over America’s uniqueness. “The Rights of Opinion are not only established in our charters of government, but are written in the hearts and minds of our citizens . . . Such is the genius of American liberty – let the boasters of European liberty blush at the contrast.”4 The Columbian Centinel also

1

2 3

David Ramsay, “Address to the Citizens of the United States of America,” in: The NewJersey Journal, and Political Intelligencer (Elizabeth-Town), November 3, 1790. “OUR COUNTRY,” in: Gazette of the United States (New York), June 20, 1789. 4 Ibid., April 18, 1789. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), June 15, 1792.

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Political Ideologies and American Identity

39

emphasized how much America stood out in the world. “Secluded from the politicks, the parties, the illiberal establishments, both in government and religion, and corruption of Europe; how distinguished may we not hope these United States will be in the annals of the world?”5 Not only was America fortunate to enjoy an unprecedented degree of liberty; newspapers in all parts of the country also claimed that Americans were blessed with unrivaled peace and prosperity. “WHILST AMERICA is cultivating Peace, promoting her Commerce, extending her Manufactures, and Improving her Agriculture, EUROPE is terrified by impending War, with its long, black catalogue of miseries in the train,” the New-Jersey Journal maintained.6 The Boston Gazette concluded that, while Europe was characterized by “famine, war, commotion and destruction,” Americans enjoyed “the blessings of peace, plenty, civil and religious liberty.”7 American identity, however, would not be defined so easily and the moment of harmony and optimism would prove to be fleeting, as the liberty for which America allegedly stood would turn out to be a highly contested concept. Within a few years after the inauguration of George Washington as America’s first President in 1789, parties advancing different political programs, championing competing ideologies, and promoting divergent visions of American identity began to emerge – a development the Founding Fathers had neither anticipated nor desired.8 For much of the eighteenth century, classical republicanism or civic humanism dominated the political discourse in America and one of its main tenets was the belief that “factions” – driven by the pursuit of partisan interests – were incompatible with republican government, which required political leaders to be exclusively guided by concerns for the “public good,” as parties created social divisions and thus endangered the cohesion of society. A republic was dependent on disinterested gentlemen who possessed enough “virtue” to only make decisions in support of the general welfare. Partisans, motivated by personal ambition and self-interest, by contrast, would undermine republicanism, as they tended to suppress domestic dissent and erect a tyranny once they had acquired power. “Public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics,” John Adams made clear. “There must be

5

6 7 8

“An Oration, On the Rising Glory of America,” in: Columbian Centinel (Boston), January 5, 1793. The New-Jersey Journal, and Political Intelligencer (Elizabeth-Town), August 10, 1791. The Boston Gazette, and the Country Journal, December 27, 1790. In fact, the Constitution does not mention parties at all.

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a possitive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty.”9 The opposite of “public virtue” was “faction” – the “sacrifice of every national Interest and honour, to private and party Objects,” he explained.10 Yet, despite fears among the founding generation about the baneful effects of “factions,” two competing political groups, promoting different economic, social, and sectional interests, gradually emerged between 1790 and 1792: the Federalists and the Republicans. The Federalists, under the leadership of the first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, wished to build a strong central government capable of holding the fragile union together and of successfully competing with the European powers. In order to establish public credit, Hamilton sought to redeem the revolutionary debts the federal government owed both to foreign and domestic creditors, paying the full value of government securities to their current holders. Moreover, in an effort to undermine the power of the states, he even pushed through federal assumption of the debts the states had incurred during the American Revolution. Hamilton also proposed not just an acknowledgement of the government’s obligation to pay back the entire revolutionary debt at face value but suggested funding the debt. Unable to redeem the full debt on the short term, he suggested refinancing it, i.e. making it a permanent one on which the federal government would pay an annual interest rather than paying back the principal, thereby giving the wealthy investors a pecuniary interest in the survival of the union. Importantly, the funding of the debt would also turn the federal government securities, which replaced the multiple notes and bonds issued by the Confederation and the state governments, into a form of legal tender and thus increase the money supply in a polity in which specie was rare. In order to develop America’s economy, Federalists also created a national bank with the power to lend money to the federal government, to help it collect taxes and make payments, and to distribute paper money in the form of loan notes that could be used for tax payments. Furthermore, they stimulated industrial development 9

10

Adams to Mercy Warren, April 16, 1776, in: Paul H. Smith (ed.), Letters of Delegates to Congress 1774–1789, 26 vols. (Washington: Library of Congress, 1976–2000), Vol.3, 538. Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 15, 1813, in: Lester J. Cappon (ed.), The Adams–Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), Vol. 2, 401.

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through moderate protective tariffs for certain goods such as weapons and iron (Hamilton’s suggestion of government subsidies to new manufacturing enterprises not winning legislative approval) to make America more independent of foreign imports (particularly in times of war) and diversify its economy.11 Finally, Federalists believed that – to give the federal government the necessary coercive power both to deter or repel a foreign invasion and to keep domestic order in case of a rebellion – it was imperative to maintain a standing army and navy (even though popular distrust of military establishments in peacetime only allowed for a small size).12 In short, Federalists sought to transform America’s largely agricultural society into an advanced commercial one and to build a strong fiscal-military state comparable to Great Britain, which was capable of waging war and could contend with rival European powers. Federalists mostly represented the elites in the states and especially wealthy merchants and bankers. Thomas Jefferson, the unofficial head of the Republican Party, characterized Federalists as the “fashionable circles” in urban centers, large merchants engaged in the lucrative trade with Britain, and mere speculators living off other people’s labors as well as “old tories.”13 James Madison, Republicans’ congressional leader, described the emerging Federalist Party in similar socio-economic terms. Its members were “more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society.”14 However, in New England, which was economically dependent on overseas trade, especially with Great Britain, even artisans and craftsmen, who in the other parts of the country tended to vote for Republicans, identified with the Federalists, since they promoted foreign trade and amicable relations to the former mother country, the entire structure of Hamilton’s financial system relying on revenues from duties on goods imported from Great Britain.15 11

12

13 14

15

For Hamilton’s financial program, see Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 97–136; Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 80–107. For the creation of the U.S. army, see Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975). Jefferson to Madison, May 13, 1793, in: PTJ, Vol. 26, 26. Anonymous [Madison], “A candid State of PARTIES,” September 22, 1792, in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), September 26, 1792. For the Federalist Party, see James M. Banner Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); Doron S. Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (eds.), Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Gary

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The Republicans, which formed in opposition to the Federalist policies, were composed of two very different groups.16 There were Southern land and slaveholders who rejected Federalists’ efforts to enhance the federal government’s power, as they feared that Congress could one day interfere with the institution of slavery in the South if the stipulations of the Constitution were not strictly adhered to. They also criticized Federalists’ program of economic development believing it would favor commercial New England at the expense of Southern yeoman farmers and plantation owners. After all, almost the entire population in the South was engaged in the production of staple crops and only very few Southerners were concerned with banking, manufacturing, and shipping. Moreover, since Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia had already paid back substantial parts of their revolutionary debts, while Massachusetts still faced large outstanding obligations, many Southerners considered the federal assumption of remaining state debts regionally unfair.17 Demographically more important was a second group of Republicans: ordinary Americans in the Middle States – and to a smaller degree in New England – who had always been excluded from political power but, inspired by the egalitarian promises of the American Revolution, began defying the entrenched Federalist elite. These “middling sorts” consisted of ambitious upstart farmers, artisans, mechanics, and small merchants not dependent on trade with Great Britain as well as religious and ethnic minorities.18 According to Jefferson, the Republican voter base consisted of small and ordinary “tradesmen, mechanics, farmers and every other possible description of our citizens.”19 Federalists described them less favorably. In the words of William Loughton Smith, Representative of South Carolina, they were “men of little reputation, less property.”20

16

17

18

19 20

J. Kornblith, “Artisan Federalism: New England Mechanics and the Political Economy of the 1790s,” in: Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (eds.), Launching the “Extended Republic”: The Federalist Era (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 249–272. For the political alliance of the two groups described in the next two paragraphs, see Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 169–177. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 167–169. Jefferson to Madison, May 13, 1793, in: PTJ, Vol. 26, 26. William L. Smith, “Address to his Constituents,” in: The City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), October 2, 1794. Also see Connecticut Journal (New Haven), June 25, 1794.

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These “middling sorts” opposed Hamilton’s financial system, since Federalists – to finance the assumption and funding of the Revolutionary War debt – placed excise taxes on the goods that these artisans and farmers produced and small tradesmen sold (such as snuff, refined sugar, and whiskey) rather than levying higher duties on foreign imports or taxing proprietary and landed wealth. Republicans, moreover, considered redemption at full value unfair, as the original owners of the securities – mainly American patriots who had supported the War of Independence through loans or military service – had mostly been forced to sell them to speculators at highly depreciated prices during the turbulent 1780s. While the Virginia “gentlemen” dominated the national leadership of the Republican group in Congress, the “middling sorts” organized their political opposition to the Federalist rule on the state and local level throughout the U.S. – after 1793 often in so-called Democratic-Republican societies.21 While Federalist policies benefitted Northeastern mercantile elites and Republicans represented the interests of Southern land and slaveholders as well as those of the aspiring “middling sorts,” these political groups were initially mere ad hoc coalitions serving the interests of certain constituencies. What allowed them to mature into relatively stable parties that existed at least partially for their own sake over the course of the 1790s was the fact that Federalists and Republicans respectively were increasingly held together by competing ideologies that gave coherence and purpose to their actions and thus facilitated the gradual development of party organizations. One way scholars tried to make sense of the emerging ideological divide was by applying the court–country dichotomy that had characterized British politics in the eighteenth century and that had shaped American patriots’ perception of the struggle with the British parliament in the coming of the American Revolution to U.S. politics in the 1790s.22 21

22

See Eugene Perry Link, Democratic Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (New York: Octagon Books, 1965); Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976); Matthew Schoenbachler, “Republicanism in the Age of the Democratic Revolution: The Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1998), 237–261; Albrecht Koschnik, “The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the Limits of the American Public Sphere, Circa 1793–1795,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3 (2001), 615–636. For the significance of republican opposition theory in revolutionary America, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

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According to this paradigm, Republicans likened the Washington and Adams Administrations to the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole who had augmented the power of the British executive between the 1720s and the 1740s by, so the opposing Whigs believed, “corrupting” the parliament, i.e. making its members dependent through bribery, pensions, and the sales of offices and honors, and then using this power to impose heavier taxes and incur public debts to finance costly wars and an oversized standing army. Republicans were convinced that just as Walpole, by concentrating power in the executive, had gradually subverted the British Constitution that was founded on king, lords, and commons checking and balancing each other, Federalists – and above all the powerful Secretary of the Treasury – now threatened the republican character of the U.S. by granting special privileges to a selected few, undermining the power of the states, and unconstitutionally expanding the power of the federal government. As a result, principled opposition to the Federalist administrations had to be organized to prevent the U.S. from following the example of so many previous republics that had been gradually “corrupted” and lost their liberty.23 Moreover, Republicans believed that the maintenance of a republic required the U.S. to uphold its agrarian character, since the hordes of dependent and propertyless wage-laborers characterizing a commercial and manufacturing society like Great Britain were unable to act as responsible citizens. Only land-holding yeoman farmers allegedly possessed enough virtue to sustain a republic, since their property provided them with personal independence. In Republican eyes, Federalists’ efforts to diversify the American economy by promoting manufactures were thus undermining the republican foundation of American society – a policy that seemed even more outraging to Republicans, since the U.S. was in the unique position to avoid the social development that shaped European societies. After all, the abundance of available land in the west gave Americans the opportunity to expand across space rather than develop through time: any excess population would not have to be provided new forms of employment in factories in the cities along the Atlantic seaboard, they could simply migrate westward and become farmers on unsettled land.24

23

24

For republican ideology in the early republic, see Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

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This so-called classical-republican interpretation is plausible to the extent that Hamilton and his Federalist followers in Congress did indeed wish to transform the U.S. into a powerful fiscal-military state by following the British model and that the Republican leadership considered these state-building efforts a threat to republican government. It also clarifies why many prominent Republicans were so afraid of the modernization of America’s economy. Yet, while it explains why the revolutionary leadership that had pushed through the new Constitution divided into two groups and why Republicans in Congress were so principally opposed to Hamilton’s financial program, it becomes less convincing when considering the larger context of the early republic, which was characterized by profound socio-political changes, and when looking beyond the Republican leadership in Congress. While the classical-republican interpretation goes a long way towards explaining the mindset of Republican figureheads such as Jefferson and Madison when they denounced Federalist policies as “corrupt,” it is not useful when reconstructing the thoughts of the masses of Republican voters and representatives at the state and local levels. These were animated by the egalitarian promises of the American Revolution, which had mobilized ordinary people to participate in the political process to an unprecedented extent and undermined entrenched hierarchies and the social elite’s exclusive access to political power. In response to this rise of popular politics, which could not be adequately explained in the classical-republican framework, fundamentally new ideologies formed justifying opposing positions on whether the elites or the common people should hold the reigns of power.25 Encouraged by the egalitarian language of the American Revolution, the assertive “middling sorts” – who became the Republican voter base – began challenging the eighteenth-century world of deferential politics and gentry rule, seeking active participation in politics, and demanding an expansion of the suffrage.26 “In Representative Governments,” the Otsego Herald declared, “the people are [the] master, all their officers from the highest to the lowest are servants to the people.”27 It was thus

25

26

27

For the argument that it was liberal rather than republican ideas that shaped Republicans’ thought, see above all Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). See Todd Estes, The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). Jedidiah Peck, The Political Wars of Otsego (Cooperstown: E. Phinney, 1796), 9–10.

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wisest, a Republican newspaper from western Massachusetts concluded, to elect men “not only of ourselves, but as much as possible as ourselves, Men who have the same kind of interests to protect and the same dangers to avert.”28 They should distrust, by contrast, a man “who boldly tells the world, that there are different grades and casts in every society, arising from natural causes, and that these grades and casts must have a separate influence and power in the government, in order to preserve the whole,” the Centinel of Freedom found.29 Not only did these “middling sorts” join the Republican cause to fight for an expansion of their political rights; sensitive to any displays of superiority, they also attacked existing social hierarchies, demanding “respect” from those of the “higher orders.” In the early 1790s, Republicans therefore began using a new terminology to replace the customary deferential rhetoric prevalent in the colonial period – calling each other “Citizen” and “Fellow Citizen” in lieu of the traditional “Sir.”30 They opposed all names, symbols, and conventions which represented the “old order” and which perpetuated social hierarchies, such as the titles of “Excellency,” “Honorable,” and “Enquirer,” levees, the celebration of the birthday of public officials like the President, “pompous carriages” and “tawdry gowns,” government secrecies, and a “vain display of superiority,” all of which were indicative of a “disposition for distinction and inequality.”31 Republicans hence believed that the republican form of government required not only political but also social equality. Finally, Republicans – while not wishing to seize property or eradicate economic inequalities completely – emphasized that a certain level of equal conditions was a necessary prerequisite for the successful operation of a republic, since economic inequality would translate into political inequality. “It is evident that exorbitant wealth constitutes the substance and danger of aristocracy,” John Taylor of Virginia argued. “Money, in a state of civilization is power . . . A democratic republic is endangered by 28 29

30

31

Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 69. The Centinel of Freedom (Newark), November 2, 1796. Also see The Diary; or, Loudon’s Register (New York), January 18, 1793. Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 25–26. See “For the National Gazette: Forerunners of MONARCHY and ARISTOCRACY in the United States” by “Mirabeau,” in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), December 12, 1792; “To the Editor of the National Gazette” by “Condorcet,” in: ibid., December 15, 1792.

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an immense disproportion in wealth.”32 John F. Mercer of Maryland established the same causal link: “A love and veneration of equality is the vital principle of free Governments. It dies when the general wealth is thrown into a few hands.”33 Republicans, therefore, sought to withhold “unnecessary opportunities from a few,” to “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort,” and to fight off “measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expence of another,” as Madison summed up Republicans’ program.34 As Republicans insisted that republican government required a maximum amount of political, social, and economic equality, they usually linked the concepts of liberty and equality in their political discourse, the Republican rank-and-file drinking toasts to the “sacred Principles of Liberty and Equality.”35 The Massachusetts Constitutional Society, for example, defined Republicans as those “Freemen in America” who declared their “attachment to Universal Liberty” and “profess[ed] a sacred regard to the great principles of natural Equality.”36 Moreover, since Republicans strove for the expansion of the electorate and favored rule by popular majorities, they increasingly questioned traditional distinctions between (good) “republicanism” and (bad) “democracy,” arguing that both were actually the same.37 After all, many Republican grass-root organizations called themselves “Democratic-Republican Societies.”38 In sum, as the overarching goal of the aspiring “middling 32

33 34

35 36

37

38

John Taylor, An Enquiry into the Principles and Tendency of Certain Public Measures (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794), 29–30. Also see Charles A. Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 206–211. Mercer, March 30, 1792, in: AC, 2nd Congress, 1st Session, 510. Anonymous [Madison], “PARTIES,” in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), January 23, 1792. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), February 12, 1794. “Declaration by the Massachusetts Constitutional Society,” in: The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), January 16, 1794. Democratic Society of the City of New York, “Address to the Republican Citizens of the United States,” May 28, 1794, in: Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, May 31, 1794. Increasingly, Republicans called themselves “Democratic Republicans” and America “a Democratical Republic.” See “ON DEMOCRACY – No. IV” by “PLAIN TRUTH,” in: Eastern Argus (Portland), October 6, 1803. Seth Cotlar showed that it was in the 1790s that the formerly derogatory term “democracy” acquired a positive connotation among Republicans in “Languages of Democracy in America from the Revolution to the Election of 1800,” in: Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds.), Re-Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13–27.

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sorts,” who made up the bulk of the Republican Party, was a “democracy” based on the “principle of equal liberty,” the term “democratic egalitarianism” best captures the ideology they championed.39 The characterization of Republicans as egalitarian democrats is not to deny that the eighteenth-century “Whig” mentality initially shaped the Republican leadership’s perception of the political struggle of the 1790s. After all, in the context of the political battles against Federalists both the “country” ideology and the democratic-egalitarian ideology were compatible in that they opposed centralization tendencies at the level of the federal government, special privilege, and concentration of political power in a few hands. The Southern plantation owners controlling the fate of the party, moreover, joined the “middling sorts” in extolling the virtues of the “common man” and calling for a widespread franchise. After all, since their social and political position in the South was unchallenged, most small white yeoman farmers accepting their leadership out of racial solidarity in a society marked by black slavery, it was relatively easy for them to pay lip service to the ideal of (white) egalitarian democracy.40 However, as the Republican leadership increasingly adopted the language of democratic egalitarianism that was used by Republican newspapers throughout the country, it is clear that classical republicanism was on the wane. It is, therefore, little surprising that in the nineteenth century the Republican leadership attached to classical-republican principles would have increasing problems remaining in control of the party that had become dominated by adherents of democratic egalitarianism.41 In response to Republicans’ demands for more equality and for permitting the common people to actively participate in the political process, Federalist intellectuals developed an ideology justifying the existing social hierarchies, limitations on the franchise, and restricted access to political power. Championing an elitist conservatism, they emphasized that inequality was part of the human condition. It was by “the constitution of nature” that “all men shall not have equal means and opportunities of gratifying it,” Adams – one of the chief ideologues of the Federalist 39

40

41

The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), January 3, 1793. Also see Columbian Herald: or, the Southern Star (Charleston), September 7, 1793; “From the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, established in Philadelphia, to the Patriotic Societies throughout the United States,” in: Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), December 22, 1794. Richard Buel Jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 79–83. See Chapter 5.

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persuasion – claimed.42 “Man differs by nature from man, almost as much as man from beast,” he explained. “But a physical inequality, an intellectual inequality, of the most serious kind, is established unchangeably by the Author of nature; and society has a right to establish any other inequalities it may judge necessary for its good.”43 Federalists could accept a certain degree of “equality of opportunity.” After all, it was with their consent that entail, primogeniture, and monopolies had been abolished during or after the American Revolution. But they rejected attempts to achieve an “equality of station,” because men differed in talent and virtue.44 As Federalists believed that inequality was part of the conditio humana, they considered it justified refusing to give the vote to the poor and propertyless and to allow members of “the lower order” or “middling sorts” to be elected into public office, because – forming a numerical majority – they would easily attain power, which they would use to pursue their petty selfish interests by dispossessing the wellto-do. When those of the “lower sorts” used the terms “liberty” and “equality,” Porcupine’s Gazette commented sardonically, they actually meant “to take the liberty of robbing those who are richer than themselves, consequently bring them nearer a level of equality.”45 South Carolina Federalist Timothy Ford held that “inequality of condition is one of nature’s laws” and that “all the rights of property are lost” if attempts were made to make men “equal in their circumstances.”46 Liberty “is a fine sounding word; but most of those who use it, mean nothing more by it than a liberty to oppress others, themselves uncontrouled by any superior authority,” the Federalist Gazette of the United States explained, warning that the rule of law was in danger if common men were in charge.47 Adams warned to the same effect that in

42

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44

45

46

47

Adams, “Discourses on Davila; A Series of Papers on Political History,” in: WJA, Vol. 6, 271–272. Adams to Abigail Adams, February 4, 1794, in: John Quincy Adams and Charles Francis Adams, The Life of John Adams, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1871), Vol. 2, 161–162. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 70. “A Friend of Mankind,” October 21, 1797, in: Porcupine’s Gazette (Philadelphia), October 24, 1797. Also see “Americanus,” in: ibid., June 5, 1798. Americanus [Timothy Ford], Constitutionalist (Charleston: Markland & M’Iver, 1794), 31, 33. “LIBERTY,” in: Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, November 19, 1798.

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a “democracy” there would be “no possible way of defending the minority . . . from the tyranny of the majority,”48 since “the Majority are always Superior to the Laws.”49 The Republican; or, Anti-Democrat concluded that if it democratized the republic was bound to turn into a despotism. “DEMOCRACY Has always ended in tyranny.”50 In fact, Federalists were quite outspoken in their disdain of the common people and did not deny their elitist outlook. “The people who own the country ought to govern it,” as John Jay – one of their leading figures – put it bluntly.51 However, Federalists did not conceive of themselves as representatives of special interests but were convinced that they were acting for the public good when limiting the political influence of ordinary Americans and cementing the political power of America’s “upper class.” After all, they believed that a republic could only endure if it was governed by the “natural aristocracy” – the group of educated, talented, and virtuous “gentlemen” who alone were wealthy and hence independent enough to be able to pursue disinterested policies in the national interest.52 This is not to say that Federalists were monarchists or opposed to parliamentary forms of government. After all, during the revolution they had supported the abolishment of titles of nobility and of inherited political privileges. However, Federalists wished to limit the franchise and to discourage common people from electing candidates of their own to political offices, believing that they thereby protected America’s republican government.53 They hence clearly distinguished between republicanism and democracy, describing themselves as “republicans” and their

48

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51 52

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Adams to Abigail Adams, December 10, 1792, in: L. H. Butterfield et al. (eds.), Adams Family Correspondence, 13 vols. to date (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963– ), Vol. 9, 343. Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, March 18, 1794, in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 377. “COMMUNICATION,” in: Republican; or, Anti-Democrat (Baltimore), October 22, 1802. Also see “Florian” [Robert Walsh Jr.], “Vox populi vox dei,” in: The Port-Folio (Philadelphia), February 11, 1804, 42. Frank Monaghan, John Jay (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), 323. In the colonial and revolutionary periods, large parts of the American elite adhered to notions of liberty that reinforced inequalities and social hierarchies. They believed that the full exercise of liberty – as in the form of voting and holding office – was not a universal right but the privilege of the people at the top of society, which set them apart from the lower classes. Michał Jan Rozbicki, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). J. R. Pole, “Equality,” in: Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (eds.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Malden: Blackwell, 1991), 618–619.

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opponents as “democrats.”54 “Genuine republicanism is friendly to order and a proper subordination in society,” David Ramsay explained, and “it is hostile to mobs and licentiousness of every kind, but the firm supporter of constituted authorities – the guardian of property.”55 Democracy, by contrast, was, in the words of the Alexandria Daily Gazette, tantamount to “the tyranny of the mob.”56 The Republican; or, Anti-Democrat equated democracy with “mob aristocrecy.”57 Federalists and Republicans – championing competing ideologies – thus differed sharply in their assessment over who should be allowed to actively participate in the body politic, how permeable the social hierarchies in a republic should be, and how much economic inequality a republic could endure. However, as the concept of loyal opposition had yet to develop, the emerging parties did not accept each other as legitimate but accused each other of seeking to subvert the Constitution. Federalists considered Republicans dangerous “democrats,” “social levellers,” or even “anarchists” who challenged the popularly elected government and encouraged “mob rule.”58 George Cabot – one of the most influential Federalist Senators – called Republicans “malcontents” who intended a “general overthrow of our establishment.”59 Hamilton also claimed that Republicans were a party formed with “a serious design to subvert the Government.”60 Even Washington, who at the beginning of his presidency had tried to remain above partisan politics but in the end came to identify with the Federalist Party, denounced Republicans as “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” who were planning “to subvert the Power of the People, and to

54

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56 57

58

59

60

See Regina Ann Markell Morantz, “‘Democracy’ and ‘Republic’ in American Ideology, 1787–1840” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1971), 146–152. David Ramsay, “An Oration, Delivered in St. Michael’s Church, before the Inhabitants of Charleston, South-Carolina, on the Fourth of July, 1794,” in: Robert L. Brunhouse (ed.), “David Ramsay, 1749–1815: Selections from His Writings,” in: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 55, No. 4 (1965), 196. Alexandria Daily Gazette, Commercial & Political, November 4, 1811. Republican; or, Anti-Democrat (Baltimore), October 13, 1802. Also see “For the NEWARK GAZETTE” by “An American Citizen,” in: Woods’s Newark Gazette and New-Jersey Advertiser, September 2, 1795. See Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 8; John R. Howe Jr., “Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,” in: American Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1967), 150. Cabot to Theophilus Parsons, October 3, 1792, in: Theophilus Parsons, Memoir of Theophilus Parsons (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859), 468–469. Hamilton to John Adams, June 25, 1792, in: PAH, Vol. 11, 559.

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usurp for themselves the reins of Government; destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”61 Just as Federalists accused Republicans of seeking to overthrow the government, Republicans called into doubt whether Federalists were actually reconciled to America’s republican form of government, interpreting their elitism as an attachment to monarchical principles. As they were only “contending for the benefits of a part” but did not represent the “the whole community,” Federalists could not expect to muster an electoral majority in a republican system and therefore tried to usurp power by “the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments, and the terror of military force,” as leading Republicans argued.62 Republican editor William Duane also believed that elitist Federalists sought to “subvert the power of the people and usurp the government.”63 Therefore, Republicans concluded that Federalists were not republicans, but monarchists in disguise. They were “those who avow or betray principles of monarchy and aristocracy, in opposition to the republican principles of the Union, and the republican spirit of the people,” as Madison claimed.64 The Independent Chronicle even asserted that Federalists had only “renounced their connection with the British throne” in the American Revolution in order “to erect a throne formed on the model, in America!”65 By the end of 1792, two political interest groups championing competing ideologies, representing different constituencies, and pursuing competing economic and financial policies had thus started to emerge. However, these embryonic “proto-parties” were hardly organized and institutionalized. Moreover, they lacked cohesion, the voting record in Congress not yet displaying a consistent partisan voting pattern. Also, the Republican alliance of Southern slaveholders and ambitious “middling sorts” in the Middle States had not yet been forged, making the cleavages characterizing the First and Second Congress as much sectional as 61

62

63

64

65

Washington, “Farewell Address,” September 19, 1796, in: John C. Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1931–1944), Vol. 35, 224–225. Taylor, An Enquiry into the Principles, 85; Anonymous [Madison], “A candid State of PARTIES,” September 22, 1792, in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), September 26, 1792. Jasper Dwight [William Duane], A Letter to George Washington, President of the United States: Containing Strictures on His Address of the Seventeenth of September, 1796 (Philadelphia: William Duane, 1796), 17, 21. Anonymous [Madison], “THE UNION. WHO ARE ITS REAL FRIENDS?,” March 31, 1792, in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), April 2, 1792. “A REVIEW OF THE REVENUE SYSTEM” by “A CITIZEN,” in: The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), July 3, 1794.

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partisan. Even the ideologies of democratic egalitarianism and elitist conservatism were still in the process of developing. It was only the radicalization of the French Revolution and the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France in 1793 that allowed these ideologies to mature and to be expressed with rising clarity when Federalists and Republicans controversially debated the nature of the events in Europe, formulated competing foreign-policy approaches towards the belligerents, and in that process argued over America’s national identity.66 After all, the French Revolutionary Wars, which triggered the development of the first party system, were an ideologically charged conflict that was fought over the very issues on which Federalists and Republicans had started to divide.67 “The war,” as Jefferson noted, “has kindled & brought forward the two parties with an ardour which our own interests merely, could never excite.”68 As the political positions of Federalists and Republicans became more ideologically coherent when they related American politics to the French Revolutionary Wars, these rather loose political associations were gradually transformed into stable parties after 1793.69

*** 66

67

68 69

See Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1815 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 34. Most scholars agree that proper parties did not emerge before foreign policy moved to the center stage of the political debate in 1793. See Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System (Williamsburg: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1956); Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957); William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776–1809 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); Paul Goodman, The DemocraticRepublicans of Massachusetts: Politics in a Young Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Rudolph M. Bell, Party and Faction in American Politics: The House of Representatives, 1789–1801 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973); John F. Hoadley, “The Emergence of Political Parties in Congress, 1789–1803,” in: American Political Science Review, Vol. 74, No. 3 (1990), 757–779. Jefferson to James Monroe, June 4, 1793, in: WTJ, Vol. 7, 362. Admittedly, the Federalists and Republicans lacked several attributes of modern parties such as a formal organizational structure with party headquarters, official membership, regular conventions, and established rules for nominating candidates. However, there was a clear political-ideological divide, a partisan press emerged, and politicians increasingly identified and campaigned as Federalists or Republicans and displayed partisan voting behavior in Congress. For a discussion whether Federalists and Republicans qualified as parties, see Ronald P. Formisano, “Federalists and Republicans: Parties, Yes – System, No,” in: Paul Kleppner, Walter Dean Burnham, Ronald P. Formisano, Samuel P. Hays, Richard Jensen, and William G. Shade (eds.), The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981), 33–76.

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At first, the French Revolution – which began at the very moment that the new federal government was installed – was almost universally welcomed in America. The meeting of the Estates-General in May 1789, the convening of the National Assembly in June, the storming of the Bastille in July, and the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen in August aroused Americans’ unequivocal enthusiasm.70 The main reason for the French Revolution’s initial popularity in the U.S. was the fact that it legitimized the American Revolution in retrospect, as the French seemed to follow the American model.71 The Gazette of the United States was convinced that the “example of America” had inspired the French Revolution, predicting that the “Constitution of France . . . will be . . . nearly like the American,” and hoping that other European nations “will soon follow it.”72 The “Torch of Liberty” had crossed the Atlantic and it seemed just a matter of time until “the lower orders of people in England, Scotland, and Ireland” would also “be completely delivered from every vestige of feudal tyranny.”73 Jefferson, witnessing the beginnings of the upheaval in France first-hand as America’s minister in Paris, also considered the French Revolution an offspring of the American Revolution. The American Revolution seemed “to have awakened the thinking part of this nation [France] in general from the sleep of despotism in which they were sunk.”74 French revolutionaries, he believed,

70

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72 73 74

For the reception of the French Revolution in America, see David Brion Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Lloyd S. Kramer, “The French Revolution and the Creation of American Political Culture,” in: Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel (eds.), The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994), 26–54; Matthew Rainbow Hale, “On Their Tiptoes: Political Time and Newspapers during the Advent of the Radicalized French Revolution, circa 1792–1793,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2009), 191–218; Philipp Ziesche, “Exporting American Revolutions: Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Jefferson, and the National Struggle for Universal Rights in Revolutionary France,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2006), 419–447; Rachel Hope Cleves, “‘Jacobins in This Country’: The United States, Great Britain, and TransAtlantic Anti-Jacobinism,” in: Early American Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010), 410–445. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 309; David Brion Davis, “American Equality and Foreign Revolutions,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 3 (1989), 737; Matthew Rainbow Hale, “‘Many Who Wandered in Darkness’: The Contest of American National Identity, 1795–1798,” in: Early American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003), 131. Gazette of the United States (New York), December 16, 1789. Ibid., October 10, 1789. Jefferson to Richard Price, January 8, 1789, in: PTJ, Vol. 14, 420.

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regarded the American Revolution “as a model for them on every occasion.”75 When the French Revolution radicalized, however, Federalists and Republicans sharply divided over their assessment of events in France. Federalists condemned the decapitation of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, and the subsequent “Reign of Terror,” in which thousands of “enemies of the revolution” were guillotined.76 To Federalists, France became a vivid, live demonstration of what would be the concrete, historical consequences of unchecked egalitarian democracy. “Look at France! There you have a picture of real democracy,” Noah Webster told the citizens of Connecticut.77 More importantly, following developments in France, Federalists became concerned that the French Revolution could inspire the underprivileged in American society and that it would serve Republicans as a model for social revolution. “It is however a matter of very sober concern to us, that there should have been in America from the beginning so blind, undistinguishing and enthusiastic an admiration of every Thing that has been done by that light airy and transported People [the French],” Adams told Rufus King, Federalist Senator from New York.78 Hamilton also feared the influence of the radicalism of the French Revolution on Republicans. “There are too many proofs that a considerable party among us is deeply infected with those horrid principles of Jacobinism which proceeding from one excess to another have made France a theatre of blood.”79 George Cabot was likewise concerned about the impact of the French Revolution on American society. “Will not this, or something like it, be the wretched fate of our country?” he asked his friend Theophilus Parsons.80 The egalitarian and democratic 75

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78 79

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Jefferson to Madison, August 28, 1789, in: James Morton Smith (ed.), The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), Vol. 1, 629. See Spooner’s Vermont Journal (Windsor), April 8, 1793; Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), March 20 and April 13, 1793; Chauncey Goodrich to Oliver Wolcott Jr., March 24, 1793, in: George Gibbs (ed.), Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott, 2 vols. (New York: William van Norden, 1846), Vol. 1, 90. Noah Webster, An Address to the Citizens of Connecticut (New Haven: J. Walter, 1803), 23. Adams to King, October 11, 1792, in: LCRK, Vol. 1, 432–433. Hamilton, “The Defence No. 2,” July 25, 1795, in: PAH, Vol. 18, 495–496. Also see Hamilton to unknown, May 18, 1793, in: ibid., Vol. 14, 474; Hamilton, “Defense of the President’s Neutrality Proclamation,” May 1793, in: ibid., 503. Cabot to Parsons, August 12, 1794, in: Henry Cabot Lodge (ed.), Life and Letters of George Cabot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1877), 79.

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principles guiding the French Revolution had the potential to “destroy us as a society” and, therefore, should be feared more “in a moral view, than a thousand yellow fevers in a physical,” he told Samuel Phillips.81 Connecticut Federalist Chauncey Goodrich considered “the contagion of levelism” the “greatest danger” the French Revolution posed to American society, decrying the “folly” that had “set the whole world agog to be all equal to French barbers!”82 Oliver Wolcott Jr., Comptroller and future Secretary of the Treasury, agreed with his fellow Federalists, finding that the U.S. should rather “be erased from existence than infected with the French principles.”83 At the same time that Federalists began criticizing the French Revolution, and fearing its repercussions on the U.S., they came to consider Great Britain – at war with France since February 1, 1793 – an ideological ally. A contributor to the Gazette of the United States explained that he belonged to the “British faction” in American politics, because Great Britain symbolized “the cause of order, liberty, morality and religion.”84 As the French Revolutionary Wars and the party struggle in America became intrinsically intertwined, Federalists concluded that America’s fate depended on a British victory, since the former mother country seemed the only bulwark against the spread of France’s dangerous ideology. “It is a humiliating thought,” Cabot told King who was then representing the U.S. in London, but “I reluctantly avow it, that our fate depends essentially upon the issue of the struggle between Britain & France . . . I rely that British policy will do more for us than we are willing to do for ourselves.”85 According to the New-York Gazette, “our doom seems . . . so closely linked to that of England.”86 Only a British victory against revolutionary France would wipe out what Federalists called the “French influence” in America. In other words, while they set America apart from France, Federalists did not try to dissociate the U.S. from Great Britain. To the contrary, the former mother country became a positive foreign template for the elitist conservatism that Federalists found

81 82

83 84

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Cabot to Phillips, March 10, 1794, in: ibid., 78. Goodrich to Oliver Wolcott Jr., February 17, 1793, in: Gibbs (ed.), Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Vol. 1, 88. Wolcott to Oliver Wolcott, Sr., April 14, 1794, in: ibid., 133–134. “BRITISH and FRENCH FACTIONS” by “INDIGENOUS,” in: Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, March 10, 1798. Cabot to King, March 21, 1798, in: LCRK, Vol. 2, 291. New-York Gazette, reprinted in: Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, October 3, 1797.

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threatened by “French equality.” “If any similitude exists between the American Governments and foreign Governments, the resemblance most strongly relates to the British Government,” Richard Bland Lee of Virginia held. “Every generous American” should have “respect for a people who were the champions of liberty, when no other champions existed.”87 In contrast to Federalists, Republicans did not become alienated from the French Revolution when it radicalized. On the contrary, they welcomed the execution of Louis XVI. They also justified the “Reign of Terror” by pointing to the centuries-long abuse of the French people by their kings, the continuing resistance of the nobility and the ecclesiastical establishment to political and social change, and the interventions by Europe’s monarchies.88 Not only did Republicans view events in France with a sympathetic eye; they considered the radicalization of the French Revolution, just as Federalists feared, an inspiration for their quest for social renewal, since it seemed to justify their appeals for domestic reform. On the one hand, Republicans continued interpreting the French Revolution “in a great measure as a consequence of the American” and considered “the struggles of France as a continuation of the glorious struggles of our own country,” as the National Gazette explained.89 On the other hand, Republicans argued that the French example showed that the American Revolution had not yet been completed. The French Revolution offered a frame of reference by which the progress of democratic egalitarianism in America could be measured. “Turn your eyes my brethren, to France,” the Republican newspaper asked its readers; “she will afford you an example well deserving of your imitation – there you will see none but citizens, nothing but Equality, the substance and not the shadow of democratic spirit.”90 To Republicans, revolutionary France symbolized the attainability of the social aspirations of America’s “middling sorts” and thus became a model for Americans to emulate. The American Daily Advertiser asked its readers to look at France, expressing its hope that “it is not yet too late, [to] take from her a republican lesson. There we find republicanism and democracy, in the most elevated degree of pure and uncontaminated perfection.”91 The French Revolution thus indeed

87 88

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Lee, January 22, 1794, in: AC, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, 265–266. For Republicans’ response to the radicalization of the French Revolution, also see John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 358. “Cool Reflections Relative to the French Revolution” by “Philadelphus,” in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), June 15, 1793. “Mirabeau,” in: ibid., January 19, 1793. American Daily Advertiser, reprinted in: ibid., December 26, 1792.

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encouraged Republicans to challenge the existing social hierarchies within American society. As they believed that France’s example could help them realize ideals of equality in America, Republicans publicly displayed their Francophilia in the streets and rejoiced over French victories as a means to promote democratic egalitarianism in America and criticize the Federalist administration. They celebrated French holidays like Bastille Day and hailed the anniversary of the Franco-American alliance of February 6, 1778, as “the day which secured Liberty to America, and sowed its seeds in the soil of France.”92 They also organized their own partisan Independence Day festivities stressing France’s contribution to the “Patriots’” cause.93 Local Republicans erected so-called liberty poles – wooden sticks, which were rammed into the ground and surmounted by caps and which often bore placards expressing solidarity with the French cause, hostility to the British monarchy, and opposition to the Federalist government – as symbols of their solidarity with the French Revolution.94 Another way Republicans showed their attachment to France in towns and cities was to wear tricolor cockades and sing “Ça ira.”95 They also hissed French alongside American flags in taverns and other public places.96 As France became the focal point for Republicans’ quest for equality in America, Great Britain naturally became their ideological nemesis after the outbreak of the Anglo-French war in 1793. “Among the different powers combined against the Rights of Man, we have marked the British Nation the champion of despotism,” the Democratic Society in Wythe County proclaimed.97 The struggle between France and Great 92 93

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General Advertiser (Philadelphia), February 8, 1794. For partisan celebrations, see especially Simon F. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 44–119; Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 88–101; Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together,” 24–25. For the liberty poles, see Charles Warren, Jacobin and Junto, or, Early American Politics as Viewed in the Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 1758–1822 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 103–107. “CA IRA” by “North-End,” in: The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), April 26, 1793. Link, Democratic Republican Societies, 44. Democratic Society in Wythe County, “Address to the People of the United States,” July 4, 1794, in: Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 2, 1794.

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Britain was one between “freedom against tyranny,” the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania asserted, concluding that Great Britain pursued a “liberticide intention.”98 Republicans’ Francophilia and their Anglophobia were thus two sides of the same coin. Denouncing Great Britain was – just as displaying attachment to France – a means to promote egalitarian democracy at home. Perceiving Great Britain as the international bearer of conservatism, Republicans feared her example could inspire a counterrevolution in America. Linking the French Revolutionary Wars to the party struggle in the U.S., the Republican Society of Norfolk and Portsmouth warned in 1793 that British victories against France would encourage monarchists in America “to sap the foundation of that glorious fabric upon which our liberties rest; our free and excellent constitution.”99 A contributor to the National Gazette calling himself “Mirabeau” also held that a French defeat would put republicanism in America in jeopardy. “Should France be subjugated by the confederated tyrants, woe unto America – for if a direct attack should not be made by them upon her liberties, the seductive power of corruption may make them pass away like a meteor.” In any case, a British victory would strengthen “the influence and intimations of those characters” presently in power in America.100 Just like Federalists, Republicans thus came to believe that the fate of the American republic was being determined in the European war. Jefferson found that only a victory of French arms would prevent a gradual monarchization of America under Federalist rule. “I consider the establishment and success of their government as necessary to stay up our own, and to prevent it from falling back to that kind of Half-wayhouse, the English constitution,” he wrote to George Mason.101 He told Edward Rutledge that “the permanence of our own [revolution] leans in some degree on that; and that a failure there would be a powerful argument to prove there must be a failure here.”102 If the French Revolution did not succeed, it would strengthen “the zealous apostles of English despotism here.”103 Jefferson was convinced that developments in

98

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100 101 102 103

Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, “Minutes,” April 10, 1794, in: General Advertiser (Philadelphia), April 14, 1794. Republican Society of Norfolk and Portsmouth, “Declaration of Sentiments and Principles,” June 3, 1793, in: Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), June 15, 1793. “Mirabeau,” in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), May 25, 1793. Jefferson to Mason, February 4, 1791, in: WTJ, Vol. 6, 185–186. Jefferson to Rutledge, August 25, 1791, in: PTJ, Vol. 22, 73–75. Jefferson to Jean Pierre Brissot de Warville, May 8, 1793, in: WTJ, Vol. 7, 322.

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Europe and America were intrinsically tied. “There are in the U.S. some characters of opposite principles, . . . all of them hostile to France and fondly looking to England as the staff of their hope.” To these men, the Constitution was just “a stepping stone to monarchy.” Only the “successes of republicanism in France have given the coup de grace to their prospects,” he explained to William Short, America’s chargé d’affaires in Paris. Therefore, Jefferson found that the “Reign of Terror” in France should not be viewed too critically. While he admitted that he “deplored” that “some innocent” persons had been executed “in this struggle . . . without the forms of trial,” he reminded Short that these losses paled in comparison to what was at stake. “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little blood?”104 After its radicalization, Federalists and Republicans thus differed markedly in their assessment of the French Revolution and, after the outbreak of the Anglo-French war, also in their view on Great Britain. More importantly, both parties agreed that the shape of America’s political and social order would be determined by the outcome of the European conflict, Federalists fearing that the successful spread of French principles across Europe would encourage Republicans to seek a social revolution in the U.S. and Republicans dreading that a British victory in the European conflict and a subsequent suppression of the French Revolution would boost Federalists’ efforts to erect a monarchy in America. However, one’s attitude towards European events not only shaped partisan allegiances in the U.S.; as Americans simultaneously began debating the nature of their national identity, it also determined how they imagined the U.S., Federalists defining America in opposition to, Republicans in appropriation of France. Both parties thereby sought to represent their respective political creed as the only true form of Americanism. Hoping to prevent the French example from bringing about social upheaval in America, Federalists were eager to emphasize the fundamental differences between the French and the American Revolution, deemphasizing the latter’s revolutionary character. “There is a difference between the French and American Revolution,” the Gazette of the United States asserted in early 1793, elaborating on the violence in France:

104

Jefferson to Short, January 3, 1793, in: PTJ, Vol. 25, 14–15. For Jefferson’s attitude towards the French Revolution, see Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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In America no barbarities were perpetrated – no men’s heads were struck upon poles – no ladies bodies mangled, were carried thro’ the streets in triumph – their prisoners guarded and ironed, were not massacred in cold blood. The Americans did not, at discretion, harass, murder, or plunder the Clergy – not roast their Generals, unjustly, alive. – They set limit to their vices, at which their pursuits rested. And whatever blood was shed, flowed gallantly in the field. The American Revolution, it ought to be repeated, was not accomplished as the French has been, by massacres, assassinations, or proscriptions; battles, severe and honorable, were fought, and the chance of war left to decide.105

Hamilton wished “to Heaven that the comparison” between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was “just” and that he “could discern in Mirror of French Affairs . . . the same order, the same dignity, the same solemnity, which distinguished the course of the American Revolution.” However, he did not like the comparison. When I contemplate the horrid and systematic massacres of the 2d. & 3d. of September – . . . When I see the sword of fanaticism extended to force a political creed upon citizens who were invited to submit to the arms of France as harbingers of Liberty . . . I acknowledge, that I am glad to believe, there is no real resemblance between what was the cause of America & what is the cause of France – that the difference is no less great than that between Liberty & Licentiousness.106

Not only had the American Revolution and the French Revolution been characterized by different means; Federalists insisted that their purposes had also been at variance. According to John Lowell Jr., Federalist Representative in the Massachusetts state legislature, the American and French Revolutions presented “a perfect contrast.” Americans had pursued their goal of independence “calmly and dispassionately, . . . and, when their lofty purpose was accomplished,” they returned “to the enjoyment of innocence and repose.”107 The French, by contrast, had failed to conclude their revolution at the right moment. “In seeking liberty, France has gone beyond her,” Federalist intellectual Noah Webster asserted in his history of the French Revolution.108 Federalist Richard Bland Lee asserted that “the idea of equality as far as it has been carried in France” offered a warning tale to Americans, as “French equality” only led to 105 106 107

108

Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), January 16, 1793. Hamilton to unknown, May 18, 1793, in: PAH, Vol. 14, 475–476. Lowell, “Speech,” July 4, 1799, in: James Spear Loring (ed.), The Hundred Boston Orators Appointed by the Municipal Authorities and Other Public Bodies, from 1770 to 1852 (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852), 279–280. Noah Webster, The Revolution in France, Considered in Respect to Its Progress and Effects (New York: George Bunce, 1794), 71–72.

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“conflagrations” and “bloody scenes.”109 France had become “a mad and despotic democracy,” as the New-York Journal, & Patriotic Register called the government of France.110 Hamilton went one step further, calling France an “anarchy” that would soon turn into a dictatorship.111 In the Federalist mind, Americans had attained independence by conducting an “orderly” revolution and erecting a republican government based on law, whereas France sank into anarchy by falling prey to democratic and egalitarian temptations. America stood for “liberty, peace, order,” France represented “despotism, anarchy, wars,” as William Loughton Smith put it.112 Opposed to democratic egalitarianism, Federalists thus defined the American nation in opposition to revolutionary France, thereby seeking to delegitimize the ideology of their political opponents and to represent their own conservative political and social values as quintessentially American. Two sketches, which appeared in a Philadelphia pamphlet at the time, comparing American and French liberty illustrate how Federalists set America apart from her “sister republic” (see Figure 1). In the roundel on the left, Columbia – the personification of the U.S. – holds the Constitution as a symbol of an orderly and balanced government in her right hand and scales as a symbol of justice and the rule of law in her left hand. Wearing a helmet with a plume, she is represented as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. In a sitting position, she has a calm and stable posture, serenely looking at her French counterpart on the right. The American eagle and seal, symbols of American strength and unity, are at her feet, a pole surmounted by a Phrygian cap, signifying America’s liberty, resting against her shoulder. In the background, an American merchant ship, emphasizing America’s prospering trade and amicable external relationships, sails away. It is a tranquil and calm scene that portrays America as the land of liberty, order, and peace. In the roundel on the right, French liberty – by contrast – is represented by a ghastly looking woman treading on a decapitated corpse whose head is impaled on a trident that she carries in her right hand. The snakes, symbols of

109 110 111

112

Lee, January 22, 1794, in: AC, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, 264. The New-York Journal, & Patriotic Register, September 3, 1790. Hamilton, “Americanus No. 1,” January 31, 1794, in: PAH, Vol. 15, 670–671. Also see Jeremiah Smith to Robert Fletcher, February 12, 1794, in: John H. Morison, Life of the Hon. Jeremiah Smith (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1845), 61. William Smith, An Oration, Delivered in St. Philip’s Church, before the Inhabitants of Charleston, South-Carolina, on the Fourth of July, 1796 (Charleston: W. P. Young, 1796), 20.

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figure 1: “The Contrast,” drawing by an unidentified artist from the 1790s, reprinted in: Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 81.

viciousness and vengefulness, making up her hair and forming her belt, portray her as the Greek monster Medusa. Fumes, signifying her fury, emanate from her body. Wearing an agitated expression, she is looking wildly at her American counterpart. Her left hand holds a sword, symbolizing the expansionism of revolutionary France. In the background, a dead man hangs from a lamppost. It is a turbulent and aggressive scene that associates the French Revolution with chaos, violence, and terror. The fact that this caricature is an adaptation from a British engraving by Thomas Rowlandson, which had already appeared in 1792 and juxtaposed British and French liberty, shows that Federalists’ Francophobia went hand in hand with a view of Great Britain as an ideological ally. As Federalists used France as a negative foil to construct American identity setting the allegedly conservative American apart from the radical French Revolution, they called the national loyalty of their pro-French Republican opponents into doubt. To Wolcott, Republicans were “devoted entirely to the views of France” and “treasonably Francophile.”113 Calling Republicans “Gallic 114 Americans,” “Gallic Jackalls,”115 “gallican traitors,”116 “Sans-

113

114 116

Oliver Wolcott Jr. to Oliver Wolcott Sr., April 14, 1794, in: Gibbs (ed.), Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Vol. 1, 134. 115 Columbian Centinel (Boston), January 23, 1799. Ibid., January 30, 1799. Warren, Jacobin and Junto, 91–92.

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culottes,”117 “frog-eating, man-eating, blood drinking cannibals,”118 “Gallic despots,”119 “understrappers” and “hirelings of France,”120 “Frenchified democrats,”121 “Democratic Jacobin French Tory foes,”122 or simply “the French faction,”123 Federalists openly questioned Republicans’ national allegiance. The most common derogatory name Federalists used for Republicans, however, was “Jacobins” – a term which captured both Republicans’ radicalism and their alleged lack of attachment to the American nation.124 On the one hand, “Jacobinism” connoted a “spirit of political fanaticism,” as the Columbian Centinel explained.125 On the other hand, the term implied that democratic egalitarianism was a French “doctrine” and Republicans were hence un-American. A “Jacobin” was a person “who sings ‘Ca Ira’ because a French sailor sings it; who dances the ‘Carmagnole’ because it is danced at Paris, and who toasts ‘the French Republic’ in preference to his native land, because GENET thus toasts it.”126 According to Woods’s Newark Gazette, Republicans were “the open and avowed enemies of their country.”127 An “inordinate love of French liberty” was synonymous with “hatred to the sacred constitution of the United States,” the Philadelphia Gazette claimed.128 To Charles Lee, Republicans were “anti-

117

118 119 121

122 123 124

125

126 127 128

Mathew Carey, A Plumb Pudding for the Humane, Chaste, Valiant, Enlightened Porcupine (Philadelphia: Carey, 1799), 41. Mathew Carey, The Porcupiniad (Philadelphia: Carey, 1799), 85. 120 Porcupine’s Gazette (Philadelphia), July 14, 1798. Ibid., November 28, 1798. “DEMOCRATIC DESPONDENCY,” in: Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, May 4, 1798. Minerva (Dedham), reprinted in: ibid., July 14, 1798. Fisher Ames to Christopher Gore, January 11, 1799, in: WFA, Vol. 1, 250. The Jacobin Club was a political “party” in the French Revolution, which was headed by Robespierre and was responsible for the “Reign of Terror” in 1793 and 1794. For Federalist denunciations of “violent Jacobinism,” see Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). “POLITICAL TRUTHS” by “A.B.,” in: Columbian Centinel (Boston), December 9, 1797. Also see Peter Porcupine [William Cobbett], “History of the American Jacobins, Commonly Denominated Democrats,” 1796, in: William Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America: Pamphlets on Republicanism and Revolution, ed. by David A. Wilson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 185–187. Columbian Centinel (Boston), November 15, 1794. “CANDOR,” in: Woods’s Newark Gazette and New-Jersey Advertiser, August 26, 1795. Philadelphia Gazette, quoted in: Deborah Norris Logan, Memoir of Dr. George Logan of Stenton, ed. by Frances A. Logan (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1899), 59.

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Americans.”129 Federalists, as the enemies of “Jacobinism,” appeared – by contrast – as representatives not of a party but of the American nation itself. A Federalist, as the Columbian Centinel defined him, was a person “who prefers the honour and felicity of his native country to every other.”130 Therefore, Federalists frequently signed their newspaper articles condemning Republicans with “Americanus” or “an American.”131 While Federalists defined America in opposition to France, Republicans did so by positive reference. “Yes, fellow-citizens,” the New York Democratic Society proclaimed in response to Federalist charges, “we take a pleasure in avowing thus publicly to you, that we are lovers of the French nation, that we esteem their cause as our own.”132 France and America were “sister Republics,” the General Advertiser added.133 DemocraticRepublican societies declared that France was America’s “new mother country” and that “in becoming American citizens” with the help of France in the War of Independence “we did not cease to be Frenchmen.”134 Equating Americanism with Francophilia, Republicans claimed that one’s attitude towards the French Revolution became the litmus test that would reveal one’s national loyalty. “Can any man justify the principles of the American revolution and condemn the revolution of France?” the National Gazette asked.135 A Republican calling himself “PHILADELPHUS” found “that those who have uniformly been against the French revolution, or wish well to the despots employedin overturning the new republic, are at heart inimical to liberty and the rights of the people in their own country.”136 The Democratic Society of New York explained that “we most firmly believe, that he who is an enemy to the French

129

130 131

132

133 134 136

Lee to Oliver Wolcott, October 5, 1797, in: Gibbs (ed.), Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Vol. 1, 567. Columbian Centinel (Boston), November 15, 1794. Republicans complained about Federalists’ efforts to question Republicans’ national loyalty by labeling them with French appellations. Federalists called “every man a Jacobin who dared to oppose their will, and openly declared that every man who was opposed to any of the doings of Government, was a Disorganizer and a Jacobin, who only wished for a state of anarchy,” the Eastern Argus commented ironically. “A PLOUGHMAN,” in: Eastern Argus (Portland), September 29, 1803. Democratic Society of New York, “Address to the Republican Citizens of the United States,” in: Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, May 31, 1794. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), July 10, 1793. 135 National Gazette (Philadelphia), May 22, 1793. Ibid., May 15, 1793. “Cool Reflections Relative to the French Revolution, No. 5” by “PHILADELPHUS,” in: ibid., June 22, 1793. Also see The State Gazette of South-Carolina (Charleston), July 8, 1793.

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Revolution, cannot be a firm republican.”137 The Republican Society of Charleston asserted that “to advocate doctrines and principles derogatory to the cause of France . . . or in support of the base measures of the combined despots of Europe, particularly Great Britain” was “a convincing manifestation of sentiments treacherous and hostile to the interests of the United States.”138 In the Republican mind, hostility to the French Revolution was therefore tantamount to national treachery. Speaking out in defense of Great Britain and in opposition to France was un-American, the Independent Chronicle asserted: “for an American to attempt even to vindicate such conduct, is I think, beyond all account ridiculous. An American! did I say? No American will do it – none can do it!”139 As Republicans defined America in appropriation of revolutionary France, they simultaneously set her apart from Great Britain whose monarchical form of government represented the established order to them, as demonstrated by an engraving by the American artist Edward Savage from the mid-1790s (see Figure 2). In the center, a young woman, representing, as the title suggests, the Greek goddess of youth Hebe, dressed in a white garment and wearing a garland of flowers, offers a cup of nourishment to a bald eagle, the personification of America, which is descending from the upper left. The dark cloud behind the bird is just opening up to allow beams of light to illuminate the scene. In the background above Hebe’s head, a pole flying the American flag and surmounted by a liberty cap appears behind the clouds. At the bottom, we see a broken scepter and the goddess’ right foot trampling on other symbols of royal order, namely chains, a royal medal, and a garter of the royal order. The engraving thus seems to suggest that America as the land of liberty represents the future, . whereas the monarchical order of the past is collapsing. However, looking at the rest of the image, the meaning appears more specific and partisan. First, Hebe also treads on the key to the Paris Bastille, the symbol of the 137

138

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Democratic Society of the City of New York, “Address to the Republican Citizens of the United States,” May 28, 1794, in: Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, May 31, 1794. “Resolutions of the Republican Society of South Carolina, Charleston,” March 14, 1794, printed in: The City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), March 17, 1794. Also see Republican Society in Portland, Maine, “Resolutions,” July 17, 1794, in: Foner (ed.), The Democratic-Republican Societies, 268; “Resolutions of the Rutland County Democratic Society,” May 4, 1794, in: The Farmer’s Library: Or, Vermont Political & Historical Register (Rutland), May 27, 1794. The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), July 4, 1793. Also see “Alcohol,” in: The Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette, October 5, 1793.

figure 2: “Liberty in the Form of the Goddess of Youth Giving Support to the Bald Eagle,” engraving by Edward Savage from 1796 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

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ancien régime that the French Revolution had destroyed, the key having been given to George Washington by Marquis de Lafayette as a sign of the Franco-American friendship and alliance. Second, at the lower right, next to the pedestal, we see lightning flashes striking down from the clouds, as the British fleet is besieging Boston harbor – an allusion to the British occupation of the Massachusetts capital at the beginning of the War of Independence. As Hebe was the daughter of Zeus, the god of the sky and thunder, we can assume that the lightning strikes are deliberately cast down to chase the British away, meaning that the spread of liberty has divine support. The engraving is thereby championing the republican sisterhood of America and France and simultaneously emphasizes their common enmity to the British monarchy. Since Republicans regarded their political ideology of democratic egalitarianism not as a partisan but as the national creed and believed that the realization of the principles of liberty and equality in America was dependent on a French victory in the European conflict, they in turn questioned the national loyalty of their Federalist opponents who championed an elitist conservatism and hoped for the success of British arms. They accused them of “Toryism” and of being “more attached to Great Britain, than to America.”140 To Madison, Federalists were the “Anglican Party.”141 Jefferson called Federalists “an Anglo-Monarchico-Aristocratic party.”142 Importantly, Republicans did not deem Federalists pro-British but British thus placing them outside the bounds of the American nation. They denounced Federalists as “British bootlickers,”143 “British-loving aristocrats,”144 “British sycophants,”145 “British Junto,”146 “imps of Britain,”147 “BRITISH FACTORS,”148 and “British agents.”149 In fact, Republicans called Federalists “Anti-Americans.”150 140

141 142

143

144 146 147 148 149 150

American Minerva; an Evening Advertiser (New York), August 4, 1795. Also see “To the UNDEFILED REPUBLICANS of the CITY of NEW-YORK” by “A HYPOCRITE,” in: Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register (New York), July 22, 1795. Madison to Jefferson, September 2, 1793, in: PJM:CS, Vol. 15, 92. Jefferson to Philip Mazzei, April 24, 1796, as reprinted in the Minerva (New York), May 2, 1797, in: PTJ, Vol. 29, 86. Melvin Small, Democracy & Diplomacy: The Impact of Domestic Politics on U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1994 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 2. 145 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 256. Warren, Jacobin and Junto, 8. Nathaniel Ames, Diary, April 3, 1798, in: ibid., 75. Idem, Diary, July 1, 1798, in: ibid., 123. The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), September 14, 1795. Ibid. “THE CRISIS” by “COMMON SENSE,” in: New-York Journal, reprinted in: The Boston Gazette, and Weekly Republican Journal, January 29, 1798.

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Federalists and Republicans thus not only championed opposing ideologies but defined the U.S. in incompatible ways, the former setting the U.S. apart from France, the latter from Great Britain. As a result of their irreconcilable views on American identity and America’s significant Others, they accused each other of having foreign attachments and hence of being disloyal to the American nation. “In the primitive principles of the parties, the Federalists were disposed to consider the first principle of Society to be the preservation of order; while their opponents viewed the benefit above all others in the enjoyment of liberty,” as John Quincy Adams described the roots of the first American party system in retrospect. When these parties emerged after the adoption of the Constitution, a war broke out between Great Britain and France, which was not an ordinary conflict about dynastical succession, power, territory, or empires, as Adams correctly observed. “It was a war of opinions; in which France assumed the attitude of champion for freedom, and Britain that of social order throughout the civilized world.” As a result, the struggle over America’s domestic order and the European contest became intrinsically intertwined. “Freedom and order,” explained Adams, “were also the elementary principles of the parties in the American Union, and as they respectively predominated, each party sympathized with one or the other of the great European combatants. And thus the party movements in our own country became complicated with the sweeping hurricane of European politics and wars.”151 The members of America’s first political parties increasingly identified each other by their foreign attachments and defined America in opposition to either Great Britain or France. “Anglophobia” and “Antigallomany,” Jefferson noted, had “decided the complexion of our [political] dispositions.”152 John Adams concurred that the “difference between France and England occasions the differences here.”153 France and England had become, in the words of the historian Joyce Appleby, “symbols of two alternative futures or fates for the United States.”154 Republicans viewed America as the polar opposite of Great Britain, perceived as the international

151

152 153

154

John Quincy Adams, The Lives of James Madison and James Monroe (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850), 243–244. Jefferson to Madison, May 13, 1793, in: PTJ, Vol. 26, 26. Adams to Thomas Welsh, March 10, 1797, in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 117. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 57.

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bearer of conservatism, whereas Federalists set America apart from France, considered the international champion of democratic egalitarianism. Political ideology and nationalism became inherently entangled, as the emerging Republican Party and Federalist Party considered their respective ideology – democratic egalitarianism and elitist conservatism – as the only true form of Americanism. Consequently, political differences quickly escalated into irreconcilable disagreements about the nation’s character and both Federalists and Republicans called into doubt each other’s national loyalty.155

155

For paranoid fears in the Federalist Era, also see Marshall Smelser, “The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” in: Review of Politics, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1951), 457–482; idem, “The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion,” in: American Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1958), 391–419; idem, “The Jacobin Phrenzy: The Menace of Monarchy, Plutocracy, and Anglophilia, 1789–1798,” in: Review of Politics, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1959), 239–258.

2 Foreign Policies of Unneutrality and the Jay Treaty

Since both Federalists and Republicans defined the emerging nation in opposition to different contestants in the European conflict and believed that the fate of America was being determined in the war, neither of them favored a policy of neutrality or saw the re-establishment of a balance-ofpower in the life-and-death struggle between France and Great Britain as a primary objective. Nathaniel Ames, the Republican brother of Federalist Representative Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, contended that “a policy of neutrality was . . . objectionable to both parties in this country.”1 Federalists and Republicans consequently developed competing foreignpolicy objectives, with Republicans favoring a confrontational foreign policy towards Great Britain and Federalists advocating provoking tensions with France. As France represented the democratic-egalitarian forces that Federalists fought against in the U.S., they wished to terminate the Franco-American alliance of 1778 and sought a rapprochement with Great Britain in order to discourage revolutionary tendencies in America. Republicans, by contrast, wanted to support France in her struggle against Europe’s conservative powers and worked to prevent any kind of AngloAmerican accommodation that would undermine their quest for political and social change at home. The contest over American identity hence became intrinsically intertwined with the struggle over the direction of U.S. foreign policy. As both parties pulled into opposing directions, the U.S. at times even seemed to have two foreign policies. On the one hand, the foreign-policy making process was not yet under the control of the executive such that

1

Charles Warren, Jacobin and Junto, or, Early American Politics as Viewed in the Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 1758–1822 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 68.

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the Republican-dominated House of Representatives could enact legislation concerning foreign commerce that was at odds with the foreign-policy course adopted by the Federalist-led administration. On the other hand, since the “Founding Fathers” had not anticipated the development of parties and Washington kept up the hope that he could reconcile the two factions that had emerged during his first term until the mid-1790s, the Cabinet included both Federalists and Republicans for several years. While Washington increasingly relied on the advice by his Federalist Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, who quickly assumed the role of an unofficial Prime Minister and became heavily involved in the foreign-policy making process, the State Department itself was initially in the hands of Republicans (Jefferson from 1790 to 1793 and Edmund Randolph from 1794 to 1795). Moreover, in 1794, Washington deliberately nominated a Republican as U.S. minister to France, believing that the appointment of a pro-French member of the opposition party would gain France’s goodwill and not anticipating that James Monroe would conduct a diplomacy in open conflict with the President’s line. As a result, even the executive did not always pursue a coherent foreign policy but seemed at times to be speaking with two voices. The early years of the republic were therefore marked by intense partisan struggles over control of U.S. foreign policy.2 As soon as the French Revolution began radicalizing, Federalists in the Washington Administration and in Congress worked towards suspending the alliance with France, the symbol of Republicans’ democraticegalitarian aspirations. When Washington heard in early April that France had declared war on England and the Netherlands on February 1, 1793, and asked his Cabinet members for their opinions on how America should react, Hamilton advised Washington to issue a proclamation of neutrality to make clear that America would not feel obliged to enter the war on France’s side despite the Franco-American treaty of 1778 in which both sides guaranteed each other their possessions in the New World.3 Washington followed Hamilton’s advice and told

2

3

After Randolph had been forced to resign and Monroe was recalled, it even happened that Republicans tried to conduct their own diplomacy as private citizens by negotiating with foreign governments without official authorization, as when George Logan traveled to France to convince the French government to put an end to the Quasi-War. The Logan Act of 1799, however, made this practice illegal. For the Logan Act, see Kevin M. Kearney, “Private Citizens in Foreign Affairs: A Constitutional Analysis,” in: Emory Law Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1987), 285–355. Hamilton and Henry Knox to Washington, May 2, 1793, in: PAH, Vol. 14, 368.

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Americans on April 22 – in what would come to be known as the Proclamation of Neutrality – to “adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent Powers.”4 The process of diplomatically dissociating America from France was subsequently reinforced by a set of rules that defined American neutrality more specifically. The American government made clear that it would not tolerate the original equipping of foreign vessels for military purposes on American territory, including the arming of merchantmen for defense. Foreign consuls were forbidden to set up admiralty courts on American soil for condemning the prizes brought in by foreign vessels – a practice France had engaged in since the outbreak of war. A federal statute also prohibited belligerents’ recruitment of American citizens on U.S. territory. These rules would be incorporated into the Neutrality Act of 1794.5 Secretary of State Jefferson, who believed that the alliance with France diplomatically supported Republicans’ domestic agenda, was opposed to a proclamation of neutrality. He feared that a policy of neutrality pursued by Federalists would really favor Great Britain (“a mere English neutrality”) and could be interpreted as a renunciation of the cause of France.6 “When of two nations, the one has engaged herself in a ruinous war for us . . ., while the other has moved heaven, earth and hell to exterminate us in war, . . . to place these two nations on a footing, is to give a great deal more to one than to the other.”7 Madison shared Jefferson’s apprehension over Washington’s policy. “The proclamation was in truth a most unfortunate error. It wounds the National honor, by seeming to disregard the stipulated duties to France. It wounds the popular feelings by a seeming indifference to the cause of liberty.”8 4

5

6 7

8

In an effort to accommodate Jefferson, Washington omitted the term “neutrality” and only spoke of a “friendly and impartial” position. Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality is reprinted in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 140. For the Cabinet discussion and Washington’s decisions, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 337–341. Charles Marion Thomas, American Neutrality in 1793: A Study in Cabinet Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931). Also see Charles S. Hyneman, The First American Neutrality: A Study of the American Understanding of Neutral Obligations during the Years 1792 to 1815 (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1974), 118–119, 128–132. Jefferson to Madison, May 12, 1793, in: WTJ, Vol. 7, 324. Jefferson to Madison, August 28, 1789, in: James Morton Smith (ed.), The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), Vol. 1, 629. Madison to Jefferson, June 19, 1793, in: PJM:CS, Vol. 15, 33.

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Republican newspapers were more outspoken in their criticism of the Proclamation of Neutrality. “If by neutrality it is meant, that we stand, with respect to France, in the same political connection as we did with England,” the editor of the National Gazette found, “such a state of neutrality is contrary to our present treaty, and contrary to our interest.”9 A Pennsylvanian asserted in the Republican newspaper that “neutrality is desertion” because the “cause of France is the cause of man.”10 Washington had acted against the “national will,” another Republican argued, because the sentiments of a majority of Americans “from one extremity of the Union to the other” were “firmly attached to the cause of France.”11 Many Republican organizations and newspapers demanded that, instead of remaining neutral, America should openly support France by entering the war against Great Britain. “If all tyrants unite against free people, should not all free people unite against tyrants? Yes! Let us unite with France, and stand or fall together,” the Democratic Society of Wythe County, Virginia, maintained.12 The Republican writer Hugh Henry Brackenridge also believed that America should actively participate in this ideological struggle. “If kings combine to support kings, why not republics to support republics?”13 A contributor to the National Gazette held that if Americans could “render France any effectual assistance, war would be our duty, it would be our security.”14 The Republican Society of Pendleton County in South Carolina found that the U.S. should have entered the war at “the moment Britain openly declared [war] against France.”15 Notwithstanding the Washington Administration’s official policy of neutrality, several Republicans on the local level chose to militarily participate in France’s war against Great Britain, joining French privateers in American ports, as George Hammond, the British minister to the U.S., 9 11

12

13

14

15

10 National Gazette (Philadelphia), May 22, 1793. Ibid., May 15, 1793. “Veritas,” in: ibid., June 5, 1793. Also see Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, “Resolutions,” January 9, 1794, in: General Advertiser (Philadelphia), January 13, 1794. Democratic Society in Wythe County, “Address to the People of the United States,” July 4, 1794, in: Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 2, 1794. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, January 18, 1794, in: idem, Gazette Publications (Carlisle: Alexander & Phillips, 1806), 275. “To the Editor of the National Gazette” by “An Old Soldier,” in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), May 22, 1793. Republican Society of Pendleton County, South Carolina, “Resolves,” September 16, 1795, in: City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), October 28, 1795.

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complained to the Washington Administration.16 With the financial help of the French government, Stephen Thorn of New York and Ira Allen of Vermont, moreover, schemed to assemble a small expeditionary force to invade Lower Canada and wrest the colony from Great Britain (their weapons shipments, however, being seized by the British on their way to America).17 William Tate of South Carolina, a veteran of the War of Independence, even planned and led a failed invasion of Great Britain.18 Ironically, the discussions over the Proclamation of Neutrality thus made clear that neither Federalists nor Republicans actually favored a policy of neutrality. The mission of revolutionary France’s new minister to the U.S., Edmond Charles Genet, provided the next issue which divided Federalists and Republicans over foreign policy, since Genet’s instructions called for American assistance to France. Genet was to encourage privateering against British merchantmen from American bases, to ensure that Americans fulfilled their treaty obligations, which included – according to French interpretation – not only to allow French privateers to bring their prizes to and adjudicate them in American ports but also to allow them to arm and equip their privateers (while denying Britain the same privileges), and to persuade the U.S. government to introduce discriminatory tonnage duties against British trade.19 After Genet arrived at Charleston on April 8, 1793, and was enthusiastically received by local Republicans, he began issuing letters of marquee to commission four French privateers, which were mainly operated by Americans, and set up courts under the local French consul to condemn the prizes they would bring in. Subsequently, he outfitted French privateers in several other ports in the U.S. and commissioned and armed American ships as 16

17

18

19

Hammond to Jefferson, May 8, 1793, in: Thomas Jefferson Papers (Library of Congress), reel 018. T. S. Webster, “A New Yorker in the Era of the French Revolution: Stephen Thorn, Conspirator for a Canadian Revolution,” in: New-York Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3 (1969), 251–272; J. Kevin Graffagnino, “‘Twenty Thousand Muskets!!!’: Ira Allen and the Olive Branch Affair, 1796–1800,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (1991), 409–431. John D. Ahlstrom, “Captain and Chef de Brigade William Tate: South Carolina Adventurer,” in: South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 88, No. 4 (1987), 183–191; Matthew Rainbow Hale, “‘Many Who Wandered in Darkness’: The Contest of American National Identity, 1795–1798,” in: Early American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003), 142–144. Genet’s instructions are printed in: Frederick J. Turner (ed.), Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, 1791–1797 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 201–211.

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privateers. Jefferson encouraged him to perform these actions, even though they seriously challenged the official policy of neutrality.20 The Federalists in Washington’s Administration were horrified by the enthusiasm Genet could generate among Republicans. John Adams later spoke of an atmosphere of “Terrorism, excited by Genet, in 1793, when ten thousand People in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compell it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution, and against England.”21 On June 5, Genet was informed that the President was convinced that it was “the right of every nation to prohibit acts of sovereignty [as was the arming and recruiting of privateers] from being exercised by any other within its limits” and that French vessels armed in the U.S. had to leave American ports.22 Not only did Federalists thus subvert Genet’s mission, the Washington Administration also decided to ask the French government for his recall, after Genet – persuaded by Jefferson that most Americans were on France’s side – had threatened to appeal directly to the people to force the President to repeal his policy of neutrality.23 Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality and the “Genet Affair” temporarily drove Republicans onto the defensive. Yet, in the winter, they took the initiative and sought to bolster their Anglophobic definitions of American identity by using their influence in Congress to bring on a war crisis with Great Britain through a policy of commercial restrictions against British trade. On December 16, 1793, Jefferson presented his “Report on the Privileges and Restrictions on the Commerce of the United States in Foreign Countries” to Congress.24 In the report, the Secretary of State contrasted a hostile Great Britain that, he claimed, 20

21

22 23

24

Harry Ammon, “The Genet Mission and the Development of American Political Parties,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 52, No. 4 (1966), 725–741; idem, The Genet Mission (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973); James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 78–83. Adams to Jefferson, June 30, 1813, in: Lester J. Cappon (ed.), The Adams–Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), Vol. 2, 346–347. Jefferson to Genet, June 5 1793, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 150. Douglass Southall Freeman, John Alexander Carroll, and Mary Wells Ashworth, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948–1957), Vol. 7, 102–104. Jefferson’s report is reprinted in: PTJ, Vol. 27, 532–580. On Jefferson’s report, see Merrill D. Peterson, “Thomas Jefferson and Commercial Policy, 1783–1793,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1965), 584–610.

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effectively waged economic war against America with a peaceful and goodwilled France. Exaggerating the effects of the British Navigation Law on American commerce, Jefferson made it look like Great Britain was economically ruining the U.S. It was a picture “of reduced exports, reduced shipping, a virtual collapse of shipbuilding, an inordinate share of America’s trade preempted by the British,” as the historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick put it. In response to British discriminations against American trade, Jefferson proposed engaging in “reciprocity.”25 Even though the picture Jefferson drew was largely distorted – American exports and tonnage had continuously risen since 1789, while the tonnage of British ships entering American ports had constantly fallen26 – Madison, who had emerged as the Republican congressional leader, used Jefferson’s one-sided report to introduce resolutions in the House, permitting tariffs and trade restrictions against Great Britain, on January 3, 1794.27 Officially, Republicans justified these discriminatory measures as a means to force Great Britain to change its commercial policy towards the U.S. Madison argued that once America imposed trade restrictions on Great Britain, she would give up her mercantilist navigation system, being allegedly more in need of America’s trade than vice versa. He insisted that the British market needed to be opened up for American trade, since America’s rising population would only migrate westwards and engage in farming (and hence turn Republicans’ vision of an expanding agrarian republic into reality) if they could sell their surplus produce abroad.28 In strictly economic terms, however, Madison’s logic of commercial restrictions did not make sense, as Federalists could easily demonstrate that the U.S. was actually more dependent on British trade than the other way round. Trade with America made up only about a sixth of Britain’s total external trade, while half of America’s foreign commerce was conducted with Britain. In the end, Britain would receive those articles previously imported from America through third parties.29 Moreover, since

25 26

27 28

29

Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 381. Oliver Wolcott, “Tonnage for the Year 1796, and a Comparative View from 1789 to 1796,” April 5, 1798, in: Walter Lowrie, Matthew St. Clair Clarke, and Walter S. Franklin (eds.), American State Papers: Commerce and Navigation, 2 vols. (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832/1834), Vol. 1, 389. Madison, January 3, 1794, in: AC, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, 155–156. Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 162–164. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 376, 383–384.

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import duties made up the lion share of the federal revenues, waging economic warfare against Great Britain would deprive the American government of its major source of income and thus undermine Hamilton’s financial system.30 Yet, Republican economic policies were not solely animated by commercial concerns.31 As Federalist William Loughton Smith of South Carolina suggested, he could not believe “that all this proceeds from a pure zeal for the advancement of commerce and navigation.”32 Indeed, Republican Representatives rejected Federalist proposals to limit the debate to economic matters, insisting that they also wanted to discuss political issues.33 After all, the purpose of their policy could not have been primarily commercial, i.e. meant to promote American trade by forcing the British government to abandon its navigation system, because, if successful, it would deepen U.S. dependence on Great Britain and thus contradict Republicans’ main goal of disentangling America from her former mother country. Madison made clear that Republican economic policies were not intended to increase the profits of merchants whose dependence on Great Britain compromised their national loyalty. “The body of merchants who carry on the American commerce is well known to be composed of so great a proportion of individuals who are either British subjects, or trading on British capital, or enjoying the profits of British consignments, that the mercantile opinion here might not be an American opinion.”34 Madison was genuinely concerned about “the influence that may be conveyed into the public councils by a nation directing the course of our trade by her capital, and holding so great a share in our pecuniary institutions, and the effect that may finally ensue on our taste, our manners, and our form of Government itself.”35 The economic sanctions against Great Britain were thus really supposed to reduce British influence in America rather than to increase AngloAmerican trade. That is why Republicans were also not dissuaded by the possibility that a trade war with Great Britain could ultimately 30

31

32 33 34 35

Charles A. Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 274. Alexander DeConde, Entangling Alliance: Politics & Diplomacy under George Washington (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958), 296–297; Paul A. Varg, Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1963), 99–101; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 383–387. Smith, January 13, 1794, in: AC, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, 198. Madison, January 14, 1794, in: ibid., 209. Madison, January 29, 1794, in: ibid., 390. Madison, January 14, 1794, in: ibid., 215.

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“bring on [real] war,” as Jefferson admitted. “If it does, we will meet it like men.” After all, an Anglo-American war would promote Republicans’ domestic agenda.36 “I believe this war would be vastly more unanimously approved, than any one we ever were engaged in,” as Jefferson maintained.37 Federalists in turn vigorously opposed Republicans’ policy of trade restrictions against Great Britain not only for economic reasons but also because it would embroil America in the European war on France’s side. Fisher Ames wrote to Christopher Gore, U.S. Attorney for the district of Massachusetts, that “Madison & Co. now avow . . . that we will make war, not for our commerce, but with it.”38 Smith warned that an actual war could be the result of this policy of commercial restrictions, since it was a hostile act and an effective assistance to France.39 As a result of the fundamental disagreements and the lack of clarity about the majority situation in Congress at a time when the parties were still in the process of forming, the House kept postponing voting on Madison’s resolutions.40 The perception of British hostility, which animated Republican commercial policy, did not appear urgent enough for a majority of Americans to be willing to give up the lucrative trade with the former mother country such that there was little pressure on Federalist Representatives to back Republican proposals. Soon enough, however, the international circumstances changed, giving credence to Republican warnings of a British threat and justifying a strong American response. In an attempt to use the Royal Navy to subdue France’s New World colonies and cripple France’s foreign trade, the British government applied the Rule of 1756, which stipulated that a trade not open in time of peace could not be opened in time of war, to American trade with the French West Indies and declared a virtual blockade of the islands. Under the order-in-council of November 6, 1793, the Royal Navy was ordered to confiscate anything bound to or coming from there. The background of the British government’s policy was the decision by the French National Convention of February 19, 1793, to open the ports of France’s colonies to American commerce. After the Royal Navy had swept the French

36 37 38 39 40

Jefferson to James Monroe, May 5, 1793, in: WTJ, Vol. 7, 309. Jefferson to Tench Coxe, May 1, 1794, in: PTJ, Vol. 28, 66–67. Ames to Gore, January 28, 1794, in: WFA, Vol. 1, 133. Smith, January 13, 1794, in: AC, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, 198, 205–206. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 387–388.

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merchant fleet from the oceans, France needed neutral carriers to take up her trade with the colonies, and entrepreneurial Americans started at once to exploit these commercial opportunities thereby subverting Britain’s war strategy. The British government, therefore, chose to also interrupt neutral trade with the French West Indies. As a result, the Royal Navy seized about 250 American merchant vessels in the Caribbean in the winter of 1793–1794 and British prize courts confiscated their cargoes.41 When news of the seizures reached America in March 1794, Republican claims of British hostility towards the American republic seemed to be proven correct. Recounting the course of Anglo-American relations since 1783 as a narrative of continued British aggressions, Republican newspapers meticulously recorded British violations of American sovereignty on the high seas, pointed to the British failure to evacuate their posts in the Northwest of the U.S., as stipulated in the peace treaty, and interpreted British obstinacy as a sign for British nonacceptance of American independence.42 Although the British minister repeatedly denied it, many Republicans also accused the British of supplying Native Americans with guns and ammunitions, blaming the British for conflicts with Indians on the frontier.43 The Democratic Society of Pinckneyville complained that “the conduct of Great Britain towards the United States, since the late war, has been uniformly hostile, injurious and

41

42

43

Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy toward the United States, 1783–1795 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969), 300. DeConde, Entangling Alliance, 92. The order-in-council is printed in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 430. The British government had decided to postpone the evacuation of the Northwestern posts until the U.S. would meet its treaty obligations. Most Loyalists could not return home and their property was not restored. Instead, Great Britain had to care for some 100,000 refugees most of whom were resettled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario. Furthermore, state courts denied many British creditors the recovery of pre-war debts. Lord Hawkesbury’s Draft of Instructions to George Hammond, July 4, 1791, and Lord Grenville to Hammond, September 2, 1791, in: Bernard Mayo (ed.), Instructions to the British Ministers to the United States, 1791–1812 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), 7, 14. At about the same time that British cruisers started their assault on America’s trade with the French West Indies, Canada’s Governor General Lord Dorchester told a group of Indian chiefs that – considering the volatile atmosphere in the U.S. – an Anglo-American war could break out soon and that in that case they should demand an independent Indian territory with the Ohio River as its southern boundary. Although Dorchester made these (unauthorized) comments in reaction to the American war hysteria, the American public accused him of planning a war. Lord Dorchester’s Speech to the Seven Villages of Lower Canada and the Nations of the Upper County of February 10, 1794, is reprinted in: E. A. Cruikshank (ed.), The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, 5 vols. (Toronto: The Society, 1923–1926), Vol. 2, 149–150.

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insulting” and suspected that “the assumed power of controuling our commerce, and capturing and condemning our vessels, are proofs that the late peace was only a cessation of arms, and not an abatement of enmity, or a reconciliation on her part.”44 In response to news of the order-in-council, Republican newspapers and local organizations clamored for war. Mobs attacked Royal Navy officers in American ports and broke the windows of Hammond’s house in Philadelphia.45 The editor of the Farmer’s Library called for armed resistance against Britain’s aggressions: Americans should not let “property, ease, nor fear of death itself . . . deter them from coming forward voluntarily, under the sacred banners of liberty, against the enemies, of our republican government.”46 Greenleaf’s New York Journal suggested sending out American privateers against British merchantmen, capturing the British posts in the Northwest, and attacking Canada. There was no alternative to “entering into the war.”47 The Charleston Democratic Society also believed that “war is inevitable” and concluded that “we cannot therefore be too early in making preparations” calling on “all good republican citizens, to provide themselves as speedily as possible with such implements of war, as may be necessary for their defence.”48 The Republican Society of Portland asked its members to “equip themselves as speedily as possible with every implement of war.”49 In the wake of the public outrage at British seizures of American merchant vessels, Republicans in Congress were able to carry their commercial discrimination program, particularly since their economic rationale for it (forcing Great Britain to stop interfering with Franco-American

44

45

46

47 48

49

“Resolutions of the Democratic Society of Pinckneyville,” April 7, 1794, printed in: The South-Carolina State Gazette & Timothy & Mason’s Daily Advertiser (Charlestown), April 29, 1794. Spencer C. Tucker and Frank T. Reuter, Injured Honor: The Chesapeake–Leopard Affair, June 22, 1807 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 30; Bernard Faÿ , The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America: A Study of Moral and Intellectual Relations between France and the United States at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 348–349. The Farmer’s Library: Or, Vermont Political & Historical Register (Rutland), July 29, 1794. Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, May 28, 1794. “Resolutions of the Republican Society of Charleston,” March 14, 1794, printed in: The City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), March 17, 1794. Republican Society in Portland, Maine, “Resolutions,” July 17, 1794, in: Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976), 268.

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trade rather than to open her markets to American produce) now matched their political goal of making the U.S. more independent of the former mother country and was thus more convincing. In late March of 1794, Congress passed a thirty-day embargo against Great Britain.50 On April 7, moreover, Abraham Clark of New Jersey introduced a resolution calling for the end of all trade with Great Britain, until the Western posts had been surrendered and all seizures had been restituted.51 On April 21, the House passed the measure in an amended version such that, if the Senate concurred, intercourse with Great Britain would be suspended after November 1.52 In view of the aroused atmosphere, an Anglo-American war seemed unavoidable. As Federalists feared that Republicans intended their program of economic retaliation against Great Britain to provoke an Anglo-American war, they came to the conclusion that they had to regain the initiative and change the parameters within which the public debate took place by sending an envoy extraordinary to England to settle the matters in dispute.53 It was three issues that troubled Anglo-American relations and bolstered Republicans’ perception of British hostility towards the U.S. and which hence needed to be addressed. First, both America and Great Britain had failed to fulfill all of their duties arising from the peace treaty of 1783. On the British part, the retention of the posts in the Northwest of the U.S. was the most bothersome to Americans. Furthermore, once Great Britain had acknowledged American independence, they had revoked those commercial privileges that Americans had previously enjoyed when they still formed part of the British Empire. As a result, Americans were eager to conclude a treaty of commerce with the former mother country, which, so far, however, had reacted with indifference to pertinent American overtures. Finally, after the Anglo-French war had broken out in 1793, Great Britain began interfering with American trade with France, intercepting American vessels carrying contraband to France, seizing French property aboard American vessels, and interrupting American trade with the French West Indies. These issues had to be resolved to undermine Republicans’ efforts to define America in opposition to the British monarchy and in appropriation of France’s egalitarian democracy.

50 51 53

For the embargo, see AC, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, 75–76, 529–530. 52 Clark, April 7, 1794, in: ibid., 561. Ibid., 602. For Hamilton’s fear that Republicans sought war against Great Britain, see Hamilton to Washington, April 14, 1794, in: PAH, Vol. 16, 267–268.

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For this purpose, Federalist Senators convinced Washington to send Federalist Chief Justice John Jay to London “to calm the public mind” and “to adjust those points which menaced a war between the two Countries.”54 On April 16, the President officially nominated Jay, and three days later, the Senate confirmed his nomination.55 The decision to send Jay to London to settle the lingering Anglo-American tensions disrupted further legislative measures against Great Britain and the Federalist-dominated Senate defeated the non-intercourse bill the House had previously passed.56 Madison complained that the nomination of Jay “has had the effect of impeding all legislative measures for extorting redress from G.B.”57 On April 21, 1794, Hamilton and Federalist Senators Rufus King of New York, George Cabot of Massachusetts, and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut then met with Jay to discuss the mission. They decided that Jay should push for satisfaction for spoliations on American trade and for rules preventing them in future (for example, by agreeing on a list of items deemed contraband). If Britain agreed to fulfill the remaining provisions of the treaty of 1783 and evacuate the posts in the Northwest of the U.S., America would follow suit and pay the debts American citizens owed to British creditors. If both the issues resulting from the European war and the peace treaty of 1783 could be settled amicably, Jay should also conclude a commercial treaty, seeking access to the British West Indies for American trade and most-favored-nation status for American exports to Great Britain and Ireland. The U.S. would then reciprocate in kind with regards to British and Irish exports to America. As Federalists’ main objective was peace, however, only indemnification for the seizures under the order-in-council of November 6, which had aroused the American public, was made a sine qua non condition for the conclusion of any treaty.58 On May 12, Jay sailed to London and the thirty-day

54 55 56 57 58

Rufus King, “Manuscript,” March 10 and 12, 1794, in: LCRK, Vol. 1, 517–518. Washington to the Senate, April 16, 1794, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 447; SEJ, Vol. 1, 152. AC, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, 89–90. Madison to Jefferson, May 11, 1794, in: PJM:CS, Vol. 15, 327. King, “Manuscript,” April 21, 1794, in: LCRK, Vol. 1, 523. Also see PAH, Vol. 16, 319n. On April 22, Hamilton met again with Jay to go into more detail and the following day he sent a letter to Washington in which he outlined the diplomatic guidelines for Jay. These recommendations would form the main body of Jay’s official instructions subsequently drawn up by Secretary of State Edmund Randolph. Hamilton to Washington, April 23, 1794, in: PAH, Vol. 16, 319–323. Hamilton, “Suggestions for a Commercial Treaty,” April–May, 1794, in: ibid., Vol. 16, 357–358; Randolph, “Instructions to Mr. Jay,” May 6, 1794, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 472–474. For an analysis of both meetings, see Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 396–398.

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embargo, which had already once been renewed, was suspended in order not to hinder Jay’s negotiations.59 Although Britain’s Foreign Minister Lord Grenville did not attach much importance to the negotiations with Jay, he was willing to compromise in order to prevent an Anglo-American war. After all, Great Britain found herself in a rapidly deteriorating situation in the European contest to which it did not wish to add a conflict with the U.S. To accommodate Jay, Grenville quickly assured him that the new order-in-council of August 6, 1794, made it possible for American merchants whose cargoes had been seized to appeal their cases, suspending the normal time limit.60 The British Foreign Minister, however, made clear from the beginning that he would never jeopardize Britain’s war strategy and consent to revoke the right of seizing enemy property aboard neutral vessels or of intercepting contraband destined to Britain’s enemies. He also refused to agree to exclude foodstuffs from the British definition of contraband (but he acknowledged that they would have to be preempted rather than confiscated). On matters not interfering with the war efforts against France, Grenville, by contrast, was more forthcoming, accepting most of Jay’s other demands: the evacuation of the Northwestern posts, compensations for the late seizures, and (on conditions) the opening of the British West Indies to American trade. Jay acquired, moreover, access to British East India for American trade and Great Britain granted America most-favorednation-status. In return, the American government promised to compensate British creditors who could not recover the pre-war credits in the ordinary course of justice; gave Great Britain the most-favorednation status; agreed not to discriminate against British trade for ten years; pledged herself not to sequester British debts; and accepted limitations on America’s re-export rights. The U.S. also agreed to remain neutral in the Anglo-French war, prohibiting its citizens to accept commission from or enlist in the military service of a nation at war with Great Britain and to arm belligerent privateers and sell their prizes in American ports.61 On November 19, 1794, Jay and Grenville signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, which would come to be 59 60 61

AC, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, 675–683. Grenville to Jay, August 1, 1794, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 481–482. As no protocols of the negotiations were kept, the course of the diplomatic proceedings can only be traced by consulting Jay’s correspondence and Grenville’s private papers. The negotiations are analyzed in detail in Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (New York: Macmillan, 1923).

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known as the Jay Treaty.62 It arrived in Philadelphia on March 7, 1795, and was laid before the Senate on June 8.63 The Senate approved it on June 24 with a strictly partisan vote of 20 to 10, after it had struck out the part that included the limitations on America’s re-export trade.64 On August 14, Washington signed the treaty and the ratification documents were exchanged with the British minister.65 The agreement Jay negotiated with Grenville in London has become one of the most discussed treaties in U.S. diplomatic history. A conspicuous feature of the historiography of the Jay Treaty is the fact that most scholars either treated it as a diplomatic event exploring the international setting, the course of the negotiations, and the treaty’s terms and effects, or they dealt with the domestic controversy that the publication of the treaty sparked in the American public. How they evaluated Jay’s handiwork has depended to a large part on which level – diplomatic or domestic – they were focused. Most diplomatic historians agree that the Jay Treaty reflected the existing distribution of power.66 Considering the relative power of both states, the Jay Treaty was, in the words of Paul A. Varg, “a reasonable give-and-take compromise.”67 Jay was successful with his major aims: the surrender of the posts, compensations for British seizures of American ships, limited access to the British West Indies, and most importantly the prevention of war with Great Britain – without compromising any 62 63 64

65

66

67

The Jay Treaty is printed in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 520–525. AC, 3rd Congress, 2nd Session, 855. For the Senate debate on the Jay Treaty, see Eugene F. Kramer (ed.), “Senator Pierce Butler’s Notes of the Debates on Jay’s Treaty,” in: South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 62, No. 1 (1961), 1–9. For the vote on the treaty, see AC, 3rd Congress, 2nd Session, 862–863. Initially, Washington had some objections to the treaty. The Randolph Affair, however, made Washington aware that his Republican Secretary of State – the only Cabinet member advising against a quick ratification – was secretly collaborating with the French minister and convinced him that any further delay in the ratification process would undermine his administration. For the Randolph Affair, see John J. Reardon, Edmund Randolph: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 307–315; Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, “George Washington and the Reputation of Edmund Randolph,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1986), 15–34. See Bemis, Jay’s Treaty, 268–269; Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 146; Gilbert L. Lycan, Alexander Hamilton and American Foreign Policy: A Design for Greatness (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 231–234; Lawrence S. Kaplan, Alexander Hamilton: Ambivalent Anglophile (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 115. Varg, Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers, 95.

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essential American interests.68 Grenville, for his part, made notable concessions against the vociferous opposition of British merchants and creditors.69 The Jay Treaty thus seemed to have been the best possible under the given circumstances.70 Diplomatic historians also judged the Jay Treaty to have been in America’s interest, since its effects were highly advantageous to the young republic. Politically, the Jay Treaty could be interpreted as the first step in creating the special relationship between Great Britain and the U.S. and leaving behind the bitterness caused by the War of Independence.71 A failure to ratify the Jay Treaty – by contrast – would in all probability have led to a disastrous war. A clash on the ocean or the frontier would have become more likely if the British had not evacuated their posts in the Northwest and had not stopped the rigorous application of the Rule of 1756.72 The Jay Treaty also resulted in important concessions from Spain. Don Manuel de Godoy, Spain’s Foreign Minister, unaware of the details of the Jay Treaty but assuming that it was the basis of an Anglo-American alliance, guaranteed the U.S. navigation rights on the Mississippi and agreed to the American definition of the boundary line between the U.S. and the Spanish colonies of East and West Florida, which had been in dispute since 1783, in Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795.73 The British surrender of their posts in the Northwest also facilitated the 68

69

70 71

72

73

Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 412; Alfred L. Burt, The United States, Great Britain and British North America from the Revolution to the Establishment of Peace after the War of 1812 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 155; Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 323–332; Combs, The Jay Treaty, 155. See Bradford Perkins, “Lord Hawkesbury and the Jay–Grenville Negotiations,” in: Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 40, No. 2 (1953), 291–304; Charles R. Ritcheson, “Lord Hawkesbury and Article Twelve of Jay’s Treaty,” in: Studies in Burke and His Time, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1973–1974), 155–166. Combs, The Jay Treaty, 158. Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States 1795–1805 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955), 1–2. British seizures of American vessels steadily declined in 1796 and 1797. Gerard H. Clarfield, “Postscript to the Jay Treaty: Timothy Pickering and Anglo-American Relations, 1795–1797,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1966), 106–120. Great Britain, moreover, ceased to apply the Rule of 1756, only seizing French property aboard American vessels after 1795. Josiah T. Newcomb, “New Light on Jay’s Treaty,” in: American Journal of International Law, Vol. 28, No. 4 (1934), 685–692. Combs, The Jay Treaty, 183; Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 326, 358; Burt, The United States, Great Britain and British North America, 152; Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 69. Samuel Flagg Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty: A Study of America’s Advantages from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), 305–308.

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Treaty of Greenville in which Indian tribes ceded to the U.S. about threefourths of what is now Ohio, as – after losing British patronage – Indians were eager to come to terms with Americans.74 Considering the fact that the Jay Treaty was probably the best treaty Jay could have obtained and that it proved highly advantageous to the young nation, one would expect it to have met universal approval in the U.S. However, even before its exact content became public – but much more so after the publication of the actual text – Republican as well as non-partisan newspapers denounced it in harsh terms.75 Diplomatic historians were at odds in explaining why a treaty apparently in the national interest would spark widespread controversy, often simply blaming Jeffersonian idealism, naive expectations or the lack of diplomatic experience for the failure of most Americans to appreciate the benefits of the Jay Treaty – if they cared at all to consider the reception the treaty received in the American public.76 This puzzle can be solved if the Jay Treaty is not exclusively interpreted in diplomatic terms but viewed within the framework of the struggle between Federalists and Republicans over defining American identity. Historians examining the domestic context have depicted it as either a measure to protect Hamilton’s financial system, which depended on a steady influx of British imports and which an AngloAmerican war would thus have seriously endangered, or as a measure to keep the Federalists in power.77 While – in a narrow sense – these claims are plausible, they underestimate the long-range implications an Anglo-America accord would have on America’s domestic order. Federalists did not only wish to avoid war, which was likely to break out if Republicans were to successfully implement their program of economic coercion against Great Britain, but they intended Jay’s 74

75

76

77

Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 438–439; Reginald Horsman, “The British Indian Department and the Resistance to General Anthony Wayne, 1793–1795,” in: Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 49, No. 2 (1962), 286. See Todd Estes, “Shaping the Politics of Public Opinion: Federalists and the Jay Treaty Debate,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2000), 399. Paul A. Varg, for example, blamed the Jeffersonians’ blindness to power realities for their lack of sympathy for the Jay Treaty. Varg, Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers, 112. Bemis, Ritcheson, and Perkins ignored the domestic controversy over the Jay Treaty. Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, 274–276, 282–283; Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 272; Manning J. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), 7–8; Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System (Williamsburg: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1956), 101–103; DeConde, Entangling Alliance, 101.

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mission to diplomatically promote Federalist definitions of American identity. Jay’s instructions are revealing as to the ultimate goals of his mission.78 Hamilton made clear to Jay that his overall aim was to adjust “all matters of past controversy” and to promote “future good understanding with G Britain.” If the Western posts were relinquished and the Great lakes were demilitarized, the perception of a British threat would fade. Once Jay had got rid of the irritants remaining from the War of Independence, he had to persuade the British government to pay indemnification for the spoliations made under the order-in-council of November 6, 1793. Public outrage over the large-scale seizures had been too great to settle for something of “mere appearance.” Great Britain had to make some substantial concessions on this point; otherwise, Federalists’ vision of an Anglo-American community would not be appealing to Americans.79 After the issues troubling Anglo-American relations had been removed, Jay was to conclude a commercial treaty that would make both nations increasingly dependent upon each other, irrevocably thwarting Republican plans to have France replace Great Britain as America’s foremost trading partner.80 As the British had to be persuaded of the mutual benefits they would derive from a liberal trade regime between both nations, Jay was to seek symbolic openings into Britain’s commercial regime that could be widened over the course of time rather than push for an immediate dismantling of the British navigation system by a threat of commercial restrictions. Once the British agreed to make exceptions to their rigid navigation system, it would collapse completely after a while. The establishment of a precedent in at least partially exempting the U.S. from the strict navigation act by granting Americans access to the British West Indies “breaks the ice – that is, it breaks in upon the navigation act. The least stream from a mass of water passing through a bank will enlarge its passage,” as Jay explained to Washington.81 Anglo-American cooperation would then effectively undermine the Franco-American alliance. Therefore, Jay was instructed not to formally “derogate from our treaties and engagements with France,” because otherwise Federalists would be charged with

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For an analysis of Hamilton’s instructions to Jay, also see Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 398–401. 80 Hamilton to Jay, May 6, 1794, in: PAH, Vol. 16, 381–382. Ibid., 383–384. Jay to Washington, March 6, 1795, in: Henry P. Johnston (ed.), The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 4 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1890–1893), Vol. 4, 170.

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deliberately antagonizing France and the public mind would become more receptive to Republican allegations that Federalists sought to turn the U.S. into a quasi-colonial dependency of the British monarchy.82 Most immediately, the Jay Treaty was thus a means to prevent an Anglo-American war that Federalists feared would be the result of Republicans’ policy of commercial restrictions and lead to a social revolution in America. In the medium term, it was a means to invalidate the French alliance that Republicans used to justify their calls for American solidarity with France in the present war. Obliterating the French alliance would help undermine Republican efforts to transform America’s domestic order towards the French model. In a long-range perspective, it was a means to increase Anglo-American cooperation and interdependence, thus cementing Federalists’ conservative definition of American identity. Considering what Federalists wished to accomplish with the Jay Treaty, it is not surprising that Republicans were fundamentally opposed to it. Republicans had been against a peaceful settlement of the differences with Great Britain from the beginning. In 1794, they had sharply criticized Washington for sending Jay to negotiate the matters in dispute with Great Britain. Fearing that an accommodation with England would necessarily come at the expense of good relations with France and thus undermine democratic egalitarianism in America, they objected to the mission in general. The General Advertiser was convinced that the recovery of the political support of the “mercantile wealth,” which would enable the “party who are so strongly linked to the British government” to maintain its power in America, was “the secret object of the mission.”83 The Democratic Society of Pinckneyville predicted that the dissociation of America from France would be a first step towards an approximation of the American system to the British form of government. The objective of the treaty was “to facilitate measures for bringing about a radical change in our republican government and assimilate it to the monarchical government of Great Britain.”84 They were appalled that the Federalist administration sought peace, just as Republicans

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Randolph, “Instructions to Mr. Jay,” May 6, 1794, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 474. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), April 28, 1794. Democratic Society of Pinckneyville, “Resolutions,” May 1, 1794, in: Gazette of the United States and Daily Evening Advertiser (Philadelphia), September 8, 1794. For the arguments of the Republican press against Jay’s mission, also see Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969), 188–190.

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in Congress were beginning to wage economic warfare against Great Britain. In fact, many Democratic-Republican societies would have preferred going to war against Great Britain to reaching a compromise.85 Republicans not only protested verbally against Jay’s mission; some of them even tried to actually subvert his diplomacy. In June 1795, a Republican mob stormed a British merchantman, which they believed to be a privateer, threw its guns into the harbor, and burned the ship in an attempt to provoke an Anglo-American war.86 James Monroe also sought to frustrate Jay’s efforts to come to an agreement with Great Britain. He had been appointed U.S. minister to France in order to demand compensation for French seizures of American ships.87 Yet, instead of seeking indemnification and demanding the repeal of the French decree of May 9, 1793, which authorized the confiscation of American grain cargoes bound for English-controlled ports, Monroe declared that if France’s policy produced “any solid benefit” to France “the American Government, and my countrymen in general, will not only bear the departure with patience, but with pleasure.”88 In late November, he even suggested that America should enter the European war. France’s military successes in the Netherlands had brought England into a difficult situation such “that, if America strikes the blow her own interest dictates, and which every other consideration prompts, it must be decisive, and . . . ruinous to the fortunes of that proud and insolent nation.”89 In a subsequent letter to the Secretary of State, he insisted that America should “embark in the war” and that – since Britain was “certainly not in a condition to embark in a war against us” – “we should dispossess her of Canada.”90 As Republicans were not reconciled to Jay’s mission in principle and hoped to sabotage his diplomacy, it “was not [to] be expected that the treaty with England would escape censure,” once its terms became known, as the Gazette United States concluded.91 Moreover, since 85

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For Republican calls for war, see, for example, Republican Society of Charleston, “Resolves,” March 14, 1794, in: The City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), March 17, 1794. John Bach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, From the Revolution to the Civil War, 8 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883–1913), Vol. 2, 217. For Monroe’s instructions, see Randolph to Monroe, June 10, 1794, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 668–669. For Monroe’s mission to Paris, see Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 498–513. Monroe to the Committee of Public Safety, September 3, 1794, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 677. Monroe to Randolph, November 20, 1794, in: ibid., 686. Monroe to Randolph, December 2, 1794, in: ibid., 688. Gazette United States (Philadelphia), July 7, 1795.

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Republican newspapers were the first to publish the content of the treaty, they could set the “frame” within which the document was debated, outdoing each other in denouncing the Jay Treaty in the most vitriolic terms.92 “Before the treaty was known, attempts were made to prepossess the public mind against it,” as Hamilton would later analyze the strategy pursued by the Republican leadership to mold public opinion on the treaty. “Before it was published at large, a sketch, calculated to produce false impressions, was handed out to the public through a medium noted for hostility, to the administration of the government [the Philadelphia Aurora].” Once editors of Republican newspapers in the federal capital got hold of the whole treaty text, they lost no time in sending it to their fellow Republican colleagues throughout the U.S. such that they would be the first to publish (and evaluate) it in their respective communities. “Emissaries flew through the country, spreading alarm and discontentment: the leaders of clubs were every where active to seize the passions of the citizens and preoccupy their judgments against the treaty.”93 As Republican newspapers, interpreting it as a sell-out treaty, dominated the public debate on the Anglo-American agreement, Federalist newspapers – by contrast – at first hardly dwelt on it. Since Republicans had established the ground upon which it would be discussed, Federalists did not dare defend it.94 The Senate decision to keep the treaty secret, 92

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On June 29, 1795, the Aurora (Philadelphia) published a first summary of the Jay Treaty (which was reprinted the next day by Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser). On July 1, the Aurora published the entire treaty in pamphlet form. Within a few days, the treaty became known throughout the U.S. The French minister, Pierre Auguste Adet, had bought a copy of the treaty from a Republican senator and then shown it to Benjamin Franklin Bache, the editor of the Aurora, on June 28. Republican Senator Stevens T. Mason of Virginia then provided Bache with a complete copy of the treaty. Frank Monaghan, John Jay (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), 390; James Tagg, Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 246–247; Mason to Bache, June 29, 1795, printed in: State Gazette of North-Carolina (Edenton), July 23, 1795. “Camillus” [Hamilton], “The Defence No. 1,” in: The Argus, or Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser (New York), July 22, 1795. Several essay series denouncing the Jay Treaty appeared in Republican newspapers such as The Argus, or Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser (New York) by “Decius” and “Cinna” [Brockholst Livingston] and “Cato” [Robert R. Livingston]; Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia) by Alexander James Dallas; the Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia) by “Atticus”; and the Aurora (Philadelphia) by “Hancock,” “Valerius,” “Pittachus,” and “Belisarius.” Many newspaper articles, speeches, resolutions, and addresses relating to the Jay Treaty were compiled by Mathew Carey, The American Remembrancer; or, an Impartial Collection of Essays, Resolves, Speeches, etc., Relative, or Having Affinity, to the Treaty with Great Britain, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Henry Tuckniss, 1795–1796). Also see Mathew Carey, An Address to

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moreover, supported Republican arguments that the treaty was not in the national interest, since anything closed from the public eye would seem to be scandalous.95 Republicans on the local level also used public demonstrations to condemn the Jay Treaty burning copies of the treaty, effigies of Jay, and British flags.96 Mass meetings denouncing the Jay Treaty took place in Faneuil Hall in Boston on July 10; in front of Federal Hall in New York on July 18 at which Hamilton – trying to speak in defense of the treaty – was stoned, and again on July 20; and in Philadelphia on July 23 and 25, with 5,000 to 6,000 participants.97 One way to understand why Republicans were so vehemently opposed to the Jay Treaty is to analyze their assessment of the individual articles. Madison, for example, offered a detailed critique of the treaty, specifying why he was opposed to its particular provisions, in a petition to Virginia’s General Assembly and in a speech to Congress. He inter alia pointed to the failure of Great Britain to provide compensation for the slaves liberated during the War of Independence; warned that the stipulation allowing Native Americans to freely move and trade between the U.S. and British North America would perpetuate their close links to the British; complained that the British refused to acknowledge the principle of “free ships, free goods”; chastised Jay for agreeing to an extensive list of contraband; and found it inexpedient for America to forsake not only the sequestration of British debts but also discriminations against British trade. The last stipulation was particularly galling to Republicans who considered trade restrictions the only weapon capable of putting effective pressure on Great Britain to fully open its markets to American trade in future.98

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the Representatives of the United States, on Lord Grenville’s Treaty (Philadelphia: Samuel Harrison Smith, 1796); Alexander James Dallas, Features of Mr. Jay’s Treaty (Philadelphia: Lang & Ustick, 1795); Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, 194–235. Bernard Faÿ , The Two Franklins: Fathers of American Democracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), 239–243. For the claim that the Senate’s decision to discuss the treaty in secret and not involve the House before ratifying it was unconstitutional, see the resolutions by the North Carolina militia companies in Charlotte as printed in: The NorthCarolina Journal (Halifax), November 16, 1795. “A Letter from Savannah,” July 25, 1795, in: Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 12, 1795. McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, Vol. 2, 216–221, 224–225; Monaghan, John Jay, 392–394; Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 10th edn. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 78. Madison’s petition – originally published in the Petersburg Intelligencer on October 12, 1795 – is reprinted in: Carey, The American Remembrancer, Vol. 3, 4–12. His speech in

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Southern Republicans were especially incensed about the fact that the Jay Treaty did not even mention the issue of the slaves who had escaped behind British lines in the War of Independence charging Jay with having sacrificed a fundamental national interest for partisan motives.99 Their accusation could not be dismissed out of hand. During the 1780s and early 1790s, Jay and other future Federalist leaders such as Adams and Gouverneur Morris had indeed pressed for compensation for the liberated slaves (which the British had promised to pay in the Treaty of Paris), since British actions during the Revolutionary War challenged not only racebased slavery in the U.S. but also Americans’ status as Europeans’ equals. After all, when the English and French had waged war against each other in the Caribbean in the 1740s and 1750s, they had refrained from liberating their enemy’s slaves. During the Revolutionary War, by contrast, the British not only freed American slaves but also integrated them into their forces to fight white Americans.100 However, once Great Britain assumed the role of a symbol of conservatism in 1793, Federalists began downplaying the significance of the issue. Seeking to diplomatically bind the U.S. to its former mother country to strengthen the existing social order, they represented it as a morally dubious and financially insubstantial cause dear only to obstinate Southern slaveholders and not worth risking a war for.101 Just as Southern Republicans suspected, Jay, therefore, did not press very hard for compensation for the slaves during the negotiations with Grenville.102 Still, an analysis of Republicans’ censure of the particular articles alone is not fully satisfying when seeking to explain the vigor with which they attacked the treaty. For one, some of their criticisms seem disingenuous.

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the House of Representatives on April 15, 1796, is printed in: AC, 4th Congress, 1st Session, 976–987. For the issue of the liberated slaves in the Jay Treaty debate, see William Renwick Riddell, “Jay’s Treaty and the Negro,” in: Journal of Negro History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1928), 185–192. Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 148. The issue arose over different interpretations of the Treaty of Paris. The British government insisted that the pertinent clause meant that the British would only return or pay compensation for those slaves that had fled across British lines after the signing of the preliminary peace treaty in November 1782, whereas the American government claimed it applied to all “Black Loyalists.” Jay to Randolph, February 6, 1795, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 518. “Camillus” [Hamilton], “The Defense No. 3,” in: The Argus, or Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser (New York), July 29, 1795. Combs, The Jay Treaty, 155.

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As Secretary of State, Jefferson, for example, had acknowledged that the principle of “free ships, free goods” could not be asserted internationally.103 As U.S. minister to France, he had also called the issue of the slaves the British had carried off during the War of Independence a “bagatelle.”104 The hyperbolical condemnations of Jay for failing to make the British accept American definitions of neutral rights and to secure compensation for the slaves, therefore, seem unfair. In any case, Republicans had good reasons not to place the issue of the slaves at the center of the debate. After all, France had emancipated the slaves in all her colonies in the same year that Jay negotiated with Grenville such that discussions of slavery in foreign-policy debates put Republicans in an awkward position, the French National Assembly’s decision to abolish slavery in the French Empire laying bare that celebrating the French Revolution and defending Southerners’ slaveholding interests did not go well together.105 Moreover, Republicans could hardly expect the British to open their markets to American produce if the U.S. simultaneously insisted on keeping a free hand at sequestrating British debts and discriminating against British trade. Finally, if merely looking at Republicans’ negative assessment of the commercial stipulations of the treaty, one would have to conclude that they were simply wrong and that their clamorous opposition was utterly misplaced. After all, the treaty clearly proved to be advantageous, the value of American exports to the British Empire tripling in the following five years after ratification of the treaty.106 In other words: Federalists achieved through negotiation what Republicans had sought to attain by economic warfare. A better way to make sense of Republican opposition to the Jay Treaty is to focus on its meaning within the political identity debates conducted in the U.S. at the time. In the end, Republicans were opposed to any treaty with Great Britain irrespective of its particular provisions. In fact, Republican newspapers had begun publishing condemnations of the Jay 103 104 105

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Jefferson to Genet, July 24, 1793, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 166. Jefferson to Monroe, May 10, 1786, in: PTJ, Vol. 9, 501. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1812 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 124–125. Perkins, The First Rapprochement, 13, 73. Moreover, by 1801, American vessels transported about 70 percent of the foreign trade with East India. See Goberdhan Bhagat, “The Jay Treaty and Indian Trade,” in: Essex Institute Historical Collections, Vol. 108, No. 2 (1972), 153–172. Americans also gained virtually unlimited access to the British West Indies. See Alice B. Keith, “Relaxations in the British Restrictions on the American Trade with the British West Indies, 1783–1802,” in: Journal of Modern History, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1948), 12–13.

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Treaty even before the terms became known.107 Once newspapers started printing the text, Republicans organized mass meetings against it, in which it was denounced in the most general terms without any discussion of its specific stipulations. A Massachusetts Federalist was perplexed that the “Jacobins, as soon as the Treaty was promulged, . . . called hastily a Town Meeting and . . ., without reading the Treaty, condemned it IN TOTO.”108 When a participant in a mass demonstration against the treaty, taking place in Boston on July 10, 1795, asked whether the treaty should be read before it was voted upon, he was shouted down. He was told that “they came to denounce the treaty, not read it.” A Federalist later sarcastically remarked that “one ought not to read what he knows to be bad.”109 While all Republicans were against the treaty, a correspondent in the Gazette United States asserted, “it is probable that not one tenth of them have read the treaty.”110 In an ironic commentary, the New York Herald reported about an imaginary “Meeting of Disorganizers” who resolved that “we will condemn the Treaty in the whole, have townmeetings called before the Treaty is published, and the whole Treaty damned before it is read.”111 Cabot noted that “no man of information” opposed any article in particular but that “the ignorant are played upon & their prejudices kept alive” by the Republican leadership.112 Republicans rejected the Jay Treaty primarily for its likely effects on the party struggle over America’s domestic order. Since the Jay Treaty undermined the French alliance by defining American neutrality in favor of Britain, Republicans’ Francophile definitions of American identity were subverted, while Federalists’ Anglophile notions were given diplomatic substance. In other words, the British enemy image that Republicans fostered to promote democratic egalitarianism in the U.S. would dissolve under a favorable treaty regime with Great Britain. Republicans

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The first extensive Republican critique of the treaty was a series of letters, which appeared in The Independent Gazetteer before the treaty’s terms were known. “Letters of Franklin No. 1–14,” in: Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), March 11 – June 10, 1795. They were subsequently also published in pamphlet form. Alexander James Dallas, The Letters of Franklin, on the Conduct of the Executive, and the Treaty Negotiated, by the Chief Justice of the United States with the Court of Great Britain (Philadelphia: Eleazar Oswald, 1795). “Extract of a Letter from a very respectable gentleman of Massachusetts, dated August 1, 1795,” in: Gazette United States (Philadelphia), August 8, 1795. Monaghan, John Jay, 392. Gazette United States (Philadelphia), September 18, 1795. “For the Herald,” in: The Herald; A Gazette for the Country (New York), July 29, 1795. Cabot to King, March 21, 1798, in: LCRK, Vol. 2, 291.

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understood the Jay Treaty as a measure to “Anglicize” the U.S., i.e. cement Federalists’ elitist conservatism as the dominant political ideology in America. According to Jefferson, the Jay Treaty’s “avowed object” was to copy “the substance . . . of the British government.”113 Woods’s Newark Gazette shared Jefferson’s analysis, noting that “There are some men among us [who] from the habit of education, others from the influence of interest, entertain an high idea of the English Constitution, and the wisdom of the administration of its government” and who believed “it would be better to sacrifice many things, than not to connect ourselves in amity, and commerce, with so wise and enlightened a nation.” The Republican newspaper warned, however, that “an intimate connection with such a government, is the greatest evil that could befall a virtuous and free people; that to assimilate our government to theirs would be the height of madness,” and that “we ought to avoid their political, principles and practices, as we would contagion.”114 Paradoxically, Republicans therefore came to conclude that the better the diplomatic terms of the treaty were, the worse it would be for the future of democratic egalitarianism in the U.S. When Monroe heard (false) rumors in late 1794 that Jay had obtained everything in his negotiations, including a British cessation of Canada, Monroe was not content but appalled. It seemed that the British government fully supported Federalists’ vision of Anglo-American cooperation. “If any thing of this kind should have taken place,” he wrote to Randolph, “the impudence of the British faction [will] become intolerable.”115 Not although but because the Jay Treaty was a diplomatic success, Republicans were fundamentally opposed to it, since it would promote Federalists’ conservative agenda. Republicans made plain that due to their Anglophobia they opposed any treaty with Great Britain, irrespective of its actual provisions. America, a contributor to the City Gazette maintained, “ought to oppose, in every sense of the word, any treaty with that nation; none can be favorable.”116 A contributor to Greenleaf’s New York Journal came to

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Jefferson to Philip Mazzei, April 24, 1796, as reprinted in the Minerva (New York), May 2, 1797, in: PTJ, Vol. 29, 86. “TO THE PUBLIC No. II,” in: Woods’s Newark Gazette and New-Jersey Advertiser, August 12, 1795. Monroe to Randolph, December 18, 1794, in: Stanislaus Murray Hamilton (ed.), The Writings of James Monroe, 7 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1898–1903), Vol. 2, 160–161. “For the CITY GAZETTE” by “An American,” in: City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), July 24, 1795.

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the same conclusion. “I believe no one in his senses will presume to say we can have the least expectation of any advantage, by any treaty that can be made with that nation.”117 Republicans of Portsmouth also made known their aversion to any treaty with Great Britain and demanded of Washington to refrain from signing it into law and delivering America to the “perfidious, corrupting and corrupt Nation.”118 Even before the treaty had been published, Republican newspapers had made clear that they would object to any settlement with England, as “There is not a nation upon Earth so truly and justly abhorred by the people of the United States as Great Britain,” as Alexander James Dallas, future Secretary of the Treasury, had explained in the Independent Gazetteer in April of 1795.119 Such announcements of fundamental hostility to any treaty Jay would conclude in London made the Federalist Gazette of the United States publish a mock article, quoting the ironic resolution of the inhabitants of “Anarchy town” that they would “oppose every measure that may have a tendency to promote the continuation of peace and tranquility” and were “prepared to oppose every article and clause of any treaty or convention which may be signed with Great-Britain.”120 Republicans not only opposed the Jay Treaty, because they were against any kind of rapprochement with the former mother country; they also rejected the Jay Treaty, since it alienated America from her French “sister republic.” It altered “the position of these states relative to the belligerent powers in favour of Great-Britain, and to the detriment of France,” as the citizens of Wilmington complained.121 Jefferson noted that “the must numerous class, comprehending the whole body of the people” did not understand “the particular articles” of the treaty but condemned it “generally as wearing a hostile face to France.”122 Republicans were particularly concerned that the Jay Treaty might be a prelude to an actual war with France, which Federalists would provoke to subdue the domestic opposition. The Independent Chronicle predicted 117

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“Ontario, Feb. 24, 1795,” in: Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, March 7, 1795. “Address to the Citizens of Portsmouth,” July 15, 1795, quoted in: Warren, Jacobin and Junto, 58. “Franklin” [Alexander James Dallas], “Letter No. 5,” in: The Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), April 1, 1795. Gazette of the United States and Daily Evening Advertiser (Philadelphia), February 24, 1795. “Memorial of the Citizens of Wilmington to George Washington,” in: The Delaware Gazette (Wilmington), August 15, 1795. Jefferson to Monroe, September 6, 1795, in: WTJ, Vol. 8, 187–188.

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that the treaty “might involve this country in a war with that powerful Republic.”123 Republican William Manning of Massachusetts was also afraid that “the greatest danger from this treaty is a war with France, and this seems to have been the design of our administration ever since the treaty was in contemplation.” He was convinced that Federalists would use the treaty “to persuade us to go to war with France.”124 In the end, Republicans opposed the agreement, as they believed that the foreign policy the U.S. adopted towards the belligerents would determine America’s domestic order. At the core of the Jay Treaty debate was the question “whether we will adopt the first supreme law of the land under the patronage of France or of England,” as the Republican Society of Pendleton maintained.125 After all, the decision which country America allied herself with, Dallas, writing under the pseudonym of “Franklin,” explained in the Independent Gazetteer when the treaty had not yet arrived in the U.S., would have a profound impact on American society. “If the intention is to cement a connection with Great Britain, and to treat France as an alien, the consequences may be serious, and such as every friend to liberty and his country would deprecate.”126 Republicans feared “a base and unnatural political connection between a Republican government and a monarchy,” as the Boston Gazette called the Jay Treaty.127 The Republican Society of Pendleton County argued that a connection with the British monarchy was “Dangerous, because (whilst her government is monarchical and unregenerated) we shall insensibly give her such a footing amongst us, and consequently so great an ascendancy over our councils and government, as may eventually sap our independence, and subvert our constitution!”128 Dallas, writing in the Independent Gazetteer, also opposed any treaty with Great Britain, as it would bind the U.S. to a monarchy and consequently threaten American

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Independent Chronicle (Boston), reprinted in: Gazette United States (Philadelphia), July 17, 1795. William Manning, “On the British Treaty and the War with France,” in: Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz (eds.), The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 183–185. Republican Society of Pendleton County, South Carolina, “Resolves,” September 16, 1795, in: City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), October 28, 1795. “Franklin” [Dallas], “For the Independent Gazetteer,” in: The Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), March 14, 1795. The Boston Gazette, and Weekly Republican Journal, July 27, 1795. Republican Society of Pendleton County, South Carolina, “Resolves,” September 16, 1795, in: City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), October 28, 1795.

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republicanism. “The United States are a Republic – is it advantageous to a Republic to have a connection with a Monarch? What has accelerated the destruction of all Republics? The corruption of principles which has resulted from the introduction of the fashions, the forms and the precedents of Monarchical Government.”129 A caricature that appeared at the time of the Jay Treaty debate neatly captures Republican fears that the Anglo-American agreement would alienate America from her “sister republic,” make the U.S. dependent on the British monarchy, and thereby undermine America’s republican form of government (see Figure 3). At the center, a porcupine with quills erect is wildly scribbling libels against Republicans such as Albert Gallatin and Madison and radicals such as Thomas Paine and Comte de Volney. The porcupine represents William Cobbett, a British immigrant, editor of the Federalist newspaper Porcupine’s Gazette, and polemical author of numerous anti-Republican pamphlets written under the pseudonym of Peter Porcupine. A crowned lion, the symbol of the British monarchy, standing on the stars and stripes and thus symbolically trampling on American independence and sovereignty, is encouraging him with the words “Go on dear Peter, my friend & I will reward you.” A white dove, standing on the lion’s back, holds the controversial Jay Treaty that secured peace between the U.S. and Great Britain in its beak. Above the British lion, the devil is giving Cobbett instructions: “More scandal, let us destroy this Idol liberty.” In his left hand, the devil is holding a sack of gold as reward for Cobbett’s slander. With his right hand, he is pointing to a female figure, most likely representing the goddess of liberty, sitting at a monument commemorating Benjamin Franklin and the Declaration of Independence on the left. She is turning away, hiding her face behind her right arm, holding a laurel branch in her left hand, and weeping. The American eagle holding a liberty pole next to he has lowered its head in sorrow. At the bottom of the monument’s stone base lie notes alluding to what has been lost as the result of the nefarious actions of the British monarchy and its Federalist puppets: spoliated goods, impressed seamen, American neutrality, and adjudicated ships. The Treaty of Alliance with France has been torn. By concluding the Jay Treaty that bound the U.S. to Great Britain and thereby invalidating the FrancoAmerican alliance, Federalists, so the engraving’s message seems to be,

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“Franklin” [Dallas], “Letter No. 14,” in: The Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), June 10, 1795.

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figure 3: “See Porcupine, in Colours just Portray’d,” engraving published by Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mé ry in 1796 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society).

were betraying the legacy of the American Revolution and revealed themselves to be monarchists under British influence. Instead of making a treaty with the British monarchy, several Republican newspapers and societies suggested going to war with it. “If war or slavery is then the question,” as the Independent Gazetteer put it, “rather let the temple of Janus be forever open, than that Liberty should be made a peace offering to a British Tyrant.”130 The Republican Society of Pendleton also advocated war: “we pronounce for war, with all its horrors; rather than see our country approve of measures, which will effect her annihilation.”131

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“Letter VI” by “ATTICUS,” in: ibid., August 12, 1795. Also see “From the Argus,” in: The Daily Advertiser (New York), April 25, 1796, Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), April 28, 1796. Republican Society of Pendleton County, South Carolina, “Resolves,” September 16, 1795, in: City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), October 28, 1795. Also see Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, August 12, 1795.

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The City Gazette also made no secret of its sympathy for those Francophiles who called for war. “The enthusiasm of America, in seeking a closer connection with another country, (i.e. France) is honorable, politic, and replete with gratitude. The ardor which panted for war in support of that connection, is equally just and honorable.”132 Monroe – the only Republican still part of the Washington Administration – also argued for an American entry into the European war on France’s side, advising the Secretary of State not to ratify the treaty but to use force to obtain America’s demands.133 At the peak of the Jay Treaty debate, even Jefferson told a correspondent that he preferred war with Great Britain to compromise and accommodation: “acquiescence under insult is not the way to escape war.”134 Despite the widespread condemnation of the treaty in the summer of 1795, Republicans were not successful in persuading the American public that war was preferable to a diplomatic solution to Anglo-American disputes. On the contrary, by April 1796, public opinion had changed so much in favor of the treaty that several Republican Representatives deserted their party rank and voted for the appropriation of the funds necessary to carry the Jay Treaty into effect.135 Historians have offered two explanations for this remarkable swing in overall sentiment. First, they have linked the Jay Treaty to Pinckney’s Treaty, which allowed Westerners to use the Mississippi to export their produce, and the Treaty of Greenville, which promised to end Indian resistance in the Northwest once and for all. Both treaties could have been practically nullified, if Congress had failed to put the Jay Treaty into effect and the British had retained their forts in the Northwest.136 Another possible explanation for the shift in public opinion is the remarkable boom in the overseas carrying trade that the Jay Treaty ignited. This “golden shower” – to use Elkins’ and McKitrick’s phrase – showed Americans that Hamilton’s financial system and Federalist foreign policy paid off. In this reading of the

132

133 134 135

136

“For the CITY GAZETTE” by “An American,” in: City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), July 24, 1795. Monroe to Randolph, September 10, 1795, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 721. Jefferson to Henry Tazewell, September 13, 1795, in: WTJ, Vol. 8, 191. The arbitration commissions set up to determine the disputed boundary line between Canada and the U.S., American claims to compensations for ship seizures, and the amount of money America would have to pay back to British creditors would involve expenses which the House had to appropriate. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 436–440; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 200–201.

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Jay Treaty debate, the material benefits of the treaty had become visible to most Americans by 1796.137 While both the opening up of the West for settlement and economic prosperity were certainly viable incentives to carry the Jay Treaty into effect, they do not suffice to account for the general shift in public opinion. The political influence of Westerners who would profit most from the pacification of the frontier through the Jay Treaty, Pinckney’s Treaty, and the Greenville Treaty was negligible at the time – at least in terms of congressional votes. The economic opportunities created by the Jay Treaty alone cannot explain the change of attitude, either. As Republicans saw an enlargement of Anglo-American trade as a burden rather than an asset, it is unlikely that they were guided by economic motives when they changed their attitude towards the implementation of the Jay Treaty. Furthermore, it was mainly the Federalist stronghold of New England that profited from an expansion of the overseas carrying trade, while Americans in the South were little affected by the shipping business. A more palpable explanation as to why the public mood changed so profoundly within a few months is that Republicans’ outspoken advocacy of war with Great Britain in the wake of the Jay Treaty’s publication allowed Federalists to depict Republicans as “warmongers.” Warnings of a British threat did not seem plausible in view of the recently concluded accord. Instead, it appeared as if it was Republicans who sought a confrontation during the Jay Treaty debate. Before 1795, seizures of American merchant vessels by the Royal Navy and Britain’s retention of posts in America’s Northwest had made Republican accusations of British hostility appear credible. However, by 1795, the war crisis had dissipated such that Republican claims that America was in imminent danger no longer seemed likely. To the contrary, Republicans’ insistence that war was preferable over compromise with Britain undermined their position, since it made them appear the aggressors. Federalists’ catch-all argument in favor of the Jay Treaty was therefore that it preserved peace and that failure to ratify it would bring on war.138 137 138

Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 431. The most important Federalist publications in defense of the Jay Treaty were Peter Porcupine [William Cobbett], A Little Plain English Addressed to the People of the United States on the Treaty, Negotiated with His Britannic Majesty (Philadelphia: Thomas Bradford, 1795). “The Defence” by “Camillus,” in: The Argus, or Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser (New York) (the first twentyone issues), and The Herald; A Gazette for the Country (New York) (the remaining

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As a Federalist speaker at a public meeting, taking place at Charlestown in Massachusetts for the purpose of discussing the treaty, explained to his audience, the choice they faced was between accepting the treaty or embarking upon war.139 Hamilton – in the most extensive defense of the Jay Treaty published under the pseudonym of “Camillus” – made clear that prior to Jay’s mission “War was inevitable.” Had Republicans been successful in sequestering British debts and prohibiting all intercourse with Great Britain, “War in all human probability would have followed.” Federalists had chosen an alternative path, making “one more effort of negotiation by a solemn mission to avert it,” since “Few nations can have stronger inducements than the U States to cultivate peace.” Hamilton thus portrayed Federalists as “the real friends of Republican Government” whose foreign policy “was congenial with that pacific character which is ascribed to it” and who would “brandish the weapons of hostility only when it is apparent that the use of them is unavoidable.” Republicans, by contrast, suggested “outstripping the war maxims of Europe.”140 Federalists’ claims that it was Republicans rather than the British who sought aggression seemed justified in view of Republicans’ vociferous rejection of the Jay Treaty and their calls for war in 1795. By framing the issue of the Jay Treaty’s implementation as a matter of war or peace, Federalists were not only able to depict Republicans as “war hawks,” as they called them, whose desire for armed conflict was incompatible with the nature of republican government; they also charged Republicans with prioritizing France’s over America’s interests, questioning their allegiance to the American nation.141 The Gazette United States argued that there was “great reason to suppose that the designs of our allies have been more consulted than the interests of this country.”142 Federalists were thus able to take the moral high ground in the Jay Treaty debate, in which they were not only the voice of reason but also seemed to

139

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seventeen), July 22, 1795 – January 9, 1796. Twenty-one of the “Camillus” essays were written by Hamilton and ten by Rufus King. “Philo-Camillus” [Hamilton], in: The Argus, or Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser (New York), July 17 – August 19, 1795. “Curtius” [Noah Webster], in: American Minerva (New York), July 18 – August 5, 1795. Two of the “Curtius” essays were written by James Kent. “Charlestown (Mass.) Proceedings,” in: Gazette United States (Philadelphia), August 1, 1795. “Camillus” [Hamilton], “The Defense No. 2,” in: The Argus, or Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser (New York), July 25, 1795. For Federalist newspapers’ use of the term “war hawks” for Republicans, see Gazette United States (Philadelphia), July 31 and August 8, 1795. Ibid., August 13, 1795.

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be speaking for the American people. Federalists were “not linked to Englishmen, nor to Frenchmen – They are native Americans, who know their rights perfectly well and who will neither be the slaves of English insolence or French Artifice,” as the Gazette United States put it.143 Between August and September of 1795, criticism of the Jay Treaty became much less agitated and prominent Republican authors such as Alexander James Dallas, Tench Coxe, and Brockholst Livingston withdrew from the debate. After all, they could not continue attacking the Jay Treaty without appearing bellicose and thereby confirming Federalists’ accusations.144 Federalists were thus successful in temporarily changing the parameters of the public debate on American identity to their favor. As the Jay Treaty partly settled the differences with Great Britain, Republican warnings of a British threat appeared less credible such that their continuing calls for war would no longer unite the American nation in enmity to Great Britain but rather tend to divide the nation. Therein lay the most important reason for the gradual shift in public opinion towards the Jay Treaty. When the Republican leadership, which remained committed to nonacceptance of the Jay Treaty, tried to use their majority in the House of Representatives to prevent the appropriation of the funds necessary to carry the treaty into effect, newspaper articles, letters, petitions, and resolutions put pressure on Republican Congressmen – especially those who had been elected by narrow margins – to vote for the funds.145 Benjamin Rush noted that the “treaty with Great Britain becomes less unpopular in proportion as it is understood.”146 The Jay Treaty, he concluded, “once reprobated by 19/20 of our citizens, is now approved of, or peaceably acquiesced in, by the same proportion of the people.”147 More and more Republican Representatives – under pressure from their constituents – defected from the party cause. Samuel Smith of Maryland,

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Ibid., August 7, 1795. Dallas who had written anti-treaty essays for the Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia) retired from the campaign on August 7, 1795. Coxe discontinued his “Juricola” essays in The Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser on August 12, 1795. Livingston as “Cinna” concluded his attacks on the Jay Treaty in The Argus, or Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser (New York) on August 18, 1795. For an excellent analysis of how public opinion came to diverge from the position of the Republican leadership in early 1796, on which this paragraph is built, see Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 441–448. Rush to John Redman Coxe, January 16, 1796, in: Lyman H. Butterfield (ed.), Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), Vol. 2, 769. Rush to Samuel Bayard, March 1, 1796, in: ibid., 768n-769n.

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for example, told his fellow Congressmen that although he had “objections” to the treaty, he would vote for it, since he felt bound to follow “the opinion of the great majority of the people of Maryland, whom he had the honor to represent.”148 Republican Representative Gabriel Christie informed Congress that “though he thought the Treaty a bad one, his constituents were desirous it should be carried into effect, and he found himself bound to lay aside his own opinion, and act according to their will.”149 Republican floor leader Madison lamented that “the opponents of the Treaty” were left “in a minority.”150 At the end of the House debate on the treaty on April 28, 1796, Federalist Representative Fisher Ames made a final effort to convince Republican Congressmen to vote in favor of appropriating the funds by laying out the war question in detail. In an emotional speech, not only did he make it clear in drastic words that a rejection of the treaty would result in Indians assaulting white settlers on the frontier but also raised the specter of an Anglo-American war and a break-up of the union. If the treaty was rejected, he asserted, “even I, slender and almost broken as my hold upon life is [he was struck by a severe pneumonia], may outlive the Government and Constitution of my country.” He did not fail to remind Republicans that they would have to bear the war guilt. They were so hateful of Great Britain that they would have rejected any treaty with her, even if “all was granted.” Republicans would even have found a treaty “obnoxious” that only “left King George his island,” not even “if he stipulated to pay rent for it.” If Republicans succeeded in forcing the nation into a war with Great Britain, Americans would be a “divided people.” As the American republic was unaccustomed to armed conflict, the “shock” of war would “shake down the feeble and then unbraced structure of our Government.” The question before the House was thus whether “we cherish the spirit of peace, or show the energies of war.”151 The war issue swayed enough moderate Republicans to ensure a majority on the vote for implementing the treaty. On April 30, 1796, the House appropriated the funds by a fairly narrow vote of 51 to 48 and the Jay Treaty was in full effect.152

*** 148 149 150 151 152

Smith, April 22, 1796, in: AC, 4th Congress, 1st Session, 1157. Christie, April 29, 1796, in: ibid., 1280. Madison to Jefferson, December 27, 1795, in: PJM:CS, Vol. 16, 173. Ames, April 28, 1796, in: AC, 4th Congress, 1st Session, 1249, 1261–1262. For the treaty vote, see ibid., 1291.

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The Jay Treaty successfully changed the international situation and thus the context of the political debate on American identity. Before 1795, Republicans could point to British violations of American sovereignty – such as their retention of the Western posts or the confiscation of American bottoms – to make their warnings of a British threat appear credible and to promote their efforts to define American identity in opposition to the British monarchy. After 1795, the British withdrew from their posts in the Northwest and the number of British searches and seizures of American ships declined. The Jay Treaty, the Treaty of Greenville, and Pinckney’s Treaty markedly improved Anglo-American relations and alleviated the tensions that had bolstered Republicans’ Anglophobic nationalism. As a result, Republican diatribes against Great Britain no longer seemed reasonable. Federalists’ success, however, was only temporary. For one, while the Jay Treaty could resolve some issues that had led to Anglo-American tensions, others continued to burden the relationship between both English-speaking nations such as the British practice of impressing seamen from American merchant ships on the high seas. The commercial stipulations of the Jay Treaty, moreover, would expire in 1803 such that Federalists’ foreign policy of increasing Anglo-American interdependence was not built on a solid foundation. Finally, while Republican attempts to provoke a war with Great Britain had been thwarted, the Jay Treaty did not put an end to Francophile definitions of American identity, as Republicans continued using the French example to promote democratic egalitarianism in the U.S. It seemed that only a war with France could permanently disentangle America from France and cement Federalists’ elitist conservatism as the dominant national ideology.

3 Federalists and the Origins of the Quasi-War

There is probably no war more forgotten or neglected in American history than the Quasi-War with France. While it is – at least briefly – mentioned in all general accounts of American diplomatic history, full-length monographs on the conflict are rare and its place in the American public memory is negligible.1 The obvious explanation for this lack of attention is the fact that most scholars do not consider the Quasi-War a real war (the name of the conflict indicates as much) but rather a merely diplomatic episode in the history of America’s involvement in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. After all, the Quasi-War was never officially declared and was only waged on sea, thus hardly affecting Americans not engaged in foreign trade. The foreign threat faced by the U.S. was hence not as great as in the War of 1812, in which the enemy actually invaded American territory. As America was not in imminent danger, Americans even felt free to vote wartime President John Adams out of office, while the military conflict was not yet officially over. The lack of interest in the war has led most historians to interpret the Quasi-War as a merely defensive maneuver: the U.S. government, as it is commonly held, was simply responding to French depredations on American merchantmen when it decided to attack French warships. As a result, there was little need for an investigation of American motives and possible contributions to the outbreak of war. After all, had not

1

The only book-length study on the political history of the war is Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966). For the military history of the war, see Gardner W. Allen, Our Naval War with France (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909); Michael A. Palmer, Stoddert’s War: Naval Operations during the Quasi-War with France, 1798–1801 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987).

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Washington – in his paradigmatic and oft-cited Farewell Address of September 1796 – told Americans to enjoy their “detached and distant situation” and to avoid being drawn into Europe’s “frequent controversies,” in which America had no stake? According to the first President’s neutrality mantra, it was natural for the U.S. to stay out of Europe’s quarrels, “the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns.”2 As America allegedly had no interest in becoming involved in a war with a European power, it followed that the Quasi-War must have been forced onto America in 1798. Consequently, it seemed to suffice to analyze how America reacted and built up its tiny navy to meet the French challenge. However, despite the general perception of the Quasi-War as a merely diplomatic conflict, it seems warranted to treat it as a real war, which America actively helped bring about. For one, the military confrontation produced more than 500 casualties on the American side alone, which justifies interpreting the event as an actual war rather than a diplomatic skirmish.3 Moreover, while not formally declaring war, Congress did authorize the deployment of U.S. ships of war to attack French vessels, thereby making a deliberate political decision to use military force. Finally, Americans at the time considered the conflict a war and spoke of it as such. More significantly still, exclusively blaming France for the outbreak of the Quasi-War, which the U.S. was allegedly forced to enter, means ignoring that the French government at the time attached little importance to the U.S. During the French Revolutionary Wars, France, engaged in full-scale warfare in Europe, was primarily concerned with survival and the defeat of her European enemies and could have had no interest in yet another military conflict, which would divert resources from the more important struggle on the Continent. In fact, the U.S. played hardly any role at all in the formulation of French policy. When the Directory issued the decree of July 2, 1796, declaring that France would “treat neutral vessels, either as to confiscation, as to searches, or capture, in the same manner as they shall suffer the English to treat them,”4 it was reacting to the exigencies of the war with Great Britain, the state of France’s finances, 2 3

4

Washington, “Farewell Address,” September 17, 1796, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 37. Admittedly, only twenty sailors of the U.S. Navy were killed and another forty-two wounded in action, but additionally almost 500 seamen died of diseases or were lost at sea while taking part in naval operations on U.S. warships. How many privateers died is difficult to reconstruct. See Palmer, Stoddert’s War, 119, 208, 218, 228; Dudley W. Knox (ed.), Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War between the United States and France, 7 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1935–1936), Vol. 7, 493. Pierre Auguste Adet to Timothy Pickering, October 27, 1796, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 577.

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pressure of local merchants, and food shortages in Europe, but it certainly did not mean to provoke a war with the U.S.5 The decree, moreover, was not issued in open hostility towards the U.S. There was no public declaration, the policy directive being issued secretly. Furthermore, it was not intended to sweep American commerce from the seas. It was vaguely termed and “created the greatest confusion,” as Albert Hall Bowman argued, and only French privateers in the West Indies – who could no longer be controlled by the French government – used it as a justification for a large-scale attack on American merchantmen, which they had commenced even before the decree was issued.6 The situation in the French West Indies was chaotic at the time, with Saint-Domingue in the midst of a civil war and few regulations of the metropolitan center being followed.7 If the causes of the Quasi-War are not to be found in France, however, one has to turn to the U.S. to trace its origins. As this chapter argues, it was Federalists in the Adams Administration and Congress who actively sought a state of belligerency with France in order to promote a Francophobic American nationalism. While the Jay Treaty had been successful in preventing the outbreak of an Anglo-American war and had changed the international situation under which the debate on American identity was conducted in Federalists’ favor, it had not disentangled America from France. Republicans still defined America by positive reference to that country and continued erecting liberty poles, wearing French cockades, displaying French flags, singing the “Marseillaise” and “Ça ira,” toasting the French republic, and celebrating the anniversary of the French alliance of 1778 in order to

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6

7

According to Doron S. Ben-Atar, local authorities in the French Indies sanctioned all-out privateering against American merchant vessels because the islands were running out of supplies due to social and political upheavals as well as British invasions. Doron S. BenAtar, The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 140–141. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick pointed out that the French raided American commerce in 1796 simply because the French Treasury was empty, in The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 509. Albert Hall Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy during the Federalist Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 244. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 648–649. Also see Victor du Pont au Citoyen Talleyrand Ministre des Relations Extérieures, le 3 Thermidor, an VI (July 21, 1798), in: Samuel Eliot Morison (ed.), “DuPont, Talleyrand, and the French Spoliations,” in: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 49 (1915–1916), 68; Ulane Bonnel, La France, les États-Unis, et la guerre de course (1797–1815) (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latins, 1961), 96.

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promote their democratic-egalitarian agenda.8 Moreover, when Washington decided not to seek a third term and Federalists and Republicans for the first time competed for the presidency in 1796, it seemed possible that Republicans could be successful at the polls. In that case, Republicans could radically change the course of U.S. foreign policy and draw the U.S. into the European conflict on France’s side, as Federalists feared.9 Considering the volatile political context of the 1790s, most historians today, therefore, interpret Washington’s valedictory message not as a statement of timeless wisdom that was intended to infinitely guide U.S. foreign policy but as a partisan document meant to discredit Republicans’ Francophilia in the context of the upcoming elections and to undermine their attempts to embroil the U.S. in the European war by way of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance.10 When Washington warned Americans of “inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others” because of their tendency to involve the U.S. in unnecessary wars, he was in fact criticizing Republicans for their Anglophobia and Francophilia that made them advocate an American entry into the European conflict. In the same manner, Washington referred to France, when he suggested having “as little political connexion as possible” with foreign nations and eschewing “permanent alliances,” since France was the only country that the U.S. was allied to and which sought American support in the current European war. Moreover, when the retiring President advised Americans to be alert of “the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” he most likely had Genet’s meddling in U.S. politics

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Matthew Rainbow Hale, “‘Many Who Wandered in Darkness’: The Contest over American National Identity, 1795–1798,” in: Early American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003), 138–140. For the elections, see Joanne B. Freeman, “The Presidential Election of 1796,” in: Alan Richard Ryerson (ed.), John Adams and the Founding of the Republic (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2001), 142–167. Alexander DeConde called the Farewell Address “a piece of partisan politics directed specifically against Republicans and Francophiles” and “a political manifesto, a campaign document.“ Alexander DeConde, “Washington’s Farewell, the French Alliance, and the Election of 1796,” in: Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (1957), 648. Also see idem, Entangling Alliance: Politics & Diplomacy under George Washington (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958), 469; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 494; Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 113; Jeffrey L. Pasley, The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 216–223.

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and current French attempts to help Jefferson win the presidential elections in mind.11 Admittedly, Washington also recommended honoring existing engagements, but he made clear that the Franco-American treaty of 1778 should not be construed as a gateway for Republicans to embroil the U.S. in the European conflict. After all, he declared that he had “been guided by the principles which have been delineated” in his address when he pursued a policy of neutrality in the European war after 1793. Republicans insisting that the Franco-American alliance bound the U.S. to assist France in her conflict with Great Britain were, according to Washington, therefore trying “to extend” American commitments beyond what was necessary and prudent. Moreover, Washington clearly considered the FrancoAmerican alliance a nuisance, since he did not full-heartedly embrace it but seemed to regret that under current circumstances the U.S. was not “at liberty” to follow his “great rule of conduct” and keep clear of entangling alliances.12 While Washington seemed to have been content to leave the alliance formally in place as long as it was not used to draw the U.S. into the European conflict and was thus rendered de facto meaningless, Hamilton and other leading Federalists, by the end of Washington’s second term, had come to believe that an outright nullification of the treaty of 1778 was necessary to dissociate America from France.13 Only an open conflict, however, would legitimize dissolving the ties to America’s ally from the War of Independence and thus permanently undermine Francophile definitions of American identity, discredit democratic egalitarianism as

11 12

13

Washington, “Farewell Address,” 37. Ibid. Bradford Perkins found that Washington’s advice to avoid permanent alliances “obviously implied that the alliance of 1778, to which Republicans wished to cling, was out of date.” Perkins, The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 103. Robert Kagan even claimed that Washington alluded to the recently concluded treaty with Great Britain when he advised that “already formed engagements” should be fulfilled. Kagan, Dangerous Nation, 116. Possibly, Hamilton had already started planning the abrogation of the treaty when he wrote his draft for Washington’s valedictory message. It is at least clear that the passage on foreign policy was originally written by Hamilton and subsequently only slightly modified by Washington. To compare Washington’s first version, which was based on an earlier draft by Madison, Hamilton’s major revision, and the final version, see Victor Hugo Paltsits (ed.), Washington’s Farewell Address in Facsimile, with Transliterations of All the Drafts of Washington, Madison, & Hamilton (New York: New York Public Library, 1935). On Hamilton’s influence on the Farewell Address, also see Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 123–134.

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a viable political ideology in America, and ensure Federalist dominance over the nation. “War may be compared to an acute but not mortal disorder, while foreign influence is to popular governments sometimes a slow, but always a corrosive and fatal poison,” as Wolcott explained. Only in a war would Republicans be forced to renounce their attachment to France, while in the existing state of uncertainty Republicans might be tempted to enlist the support of France to overthrow the Federalist government.14 The fact that France intensified its attacks on American trade in 1796 and 1797 provided Federalists around the former Secretary of the Treasury with the necessary pretext to escalate tensions with the French republic. On March 2, 1797, the Directory decreed that the “free ships, free goods” stipulations of the treaty of 1778 would be abrogated and that, in consequence, it would consider all enemy property on neutral (including American) vessels as liable for seizure; that all foreigners (including impressed American sailors) serving on British ships would be treated as pirates; and that any American vessel which sailed without a proper list of the crew and passengers (role d’équipage) would be considered as good prize. The 1778 list of contraband was also extended. Thus, France began treating American trade with Great Britain in the same way as America allowed Great Britain to treat her trade with France.15 As a result, French vessels captured over 300 American merchantmen in 1797.16 The French government also refused to receive Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as America’s new minister and asked him to leave the country, as they considered him (falsely) to be pro-British and hoped that Jefferson would become President in 1797 and send a more amenable diplomat.17 In an effort to suspend the French alliance, Federalist politicians and newspapers used the decree of 1797 to arouse the American public in 14

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Wolcott to Adams, April 25, 1797, in: George Gibbs (ed.), Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott, 2 vols. (New York: William van Norden, 1846), Vol. 1, 510. The Decree of the Executive Directory of March 2, 1797, is printed in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 30–31. To the French government, Jay’s acceptance of Britain’s right to seize provisions bound for France was especially galling, since France had explicitly agreed in the Treaty of 1778 not to consider food contraband and since there was a serious food shortage in France at the time due to the British blockade. Marshall Smelser, The Congress Founds the Navy, 1787–1798 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), 102–103. Palmer, Stoddert’s War, 6. For Pinckney’s rejection, see Marvin R. Zahniser, “The First Pinckney Mission to France,” in: South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 66, No. 4 (1965), 205–217.

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opposition to France, which they claimed to pose a direct threat to the U.S. Under the pseudonym of “Americus,” Hamilton wrongly asserted in the Gazette of the United States that French abuses of American trade were not required by economic necessities resulting from the war with Great Britain. Instead, “the flagrant injuries which we are now suffering from her, proceed from a general plan of domination and plunder.”18 According to the Connecticut Courant, “France was not contending for LIBERTY, but like the Romans, for UNIVERSAL EMPIRE.”19 The Federal Gazette agreed, claiming that the objective of the French government was “to establish an universal domination over the whole globe!”20 Republicans, not surprisingly, denied that France strove for world domination and called such an accusation “a mere bugbear.”21 In view of the international situation, however, Federalists’ charges that France sought worldwide domination could not be dismissed out of hand. Spain had terminated the alliance with Great Britain and signed a peace treaty with France, as had Prussia. France had annexed Belgium and defeated the Austrian and Sardinian armies. By the end of 1797, Austria had quit the war, leaving Great Britain as France’s only major enemy. Had a victory for France against a Great Coalition of Europe’s monarchies looked highly improbable in 1793, “the possibility of the overthrow of Great-Britain” did no longer seem “chimerical” in the late 1790s, as Hamilton correctly explained in the Commercial Advertiser.22 The French decree and the recent successes of French arms in the European war now gave the Federalist administration the justification to pursue a confrontational policy towards France. On May 16, President Adams, who concurred with Hamiltonian Federalists that Republicans’ Francophilia posed a threat to the domestic order, urged Congress to allow for the arming of American merchantmen and the use of U.S. warships as convoys; to prohibit the equipping of French privateers in American ports; and to enact a build-up of America’s military forces,

18

19 20

21 22

“Americus” [Hamilton], “The Warning No. III,” in: Gazette of the United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, February 21, 1797. Also see idem, “The Warning No. 1,” in: ibid., January 27, 1797. The Connecticut Courant (Hartford), January 15, 1798. “COPY OF A LETTER,” in: Federal Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Boston), January 26, 1798. Albert Gallatin, May 8, 1798, in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 1632–1633. “Titus Manlius” [Hamilton], “The Stand No. VI,” in: Commercial Advertiser (New York), April 19, 1798.

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particularly of the U.S. Navy. Nevertheless, he also decided to send a special mission to France in an attempt to settle the issues diplomatically, as Adams – unlike Hamilton’s clique – was not yet fully set on a war course.23 However, Federalist schemers around Hamilton neither expected nor wished the mission to be successful. Hamilton had told fellow Federalists before Adams delivered his speech that the reason American envoys would be sent to France was to “accumulate the proofs of French Violence & demonstrate to all our Citizens that nothing possible has been omitted.”24 The retired Secretary of the Treasury suggested sending the congressional leader of the Republican Party on this mission, because the “influence on party, if a man in whom the opposition has confidence is sent, will be considerable in the event of non success.”25 It would “disarm” Republicans “of the Argument that all has not been done which might have been done towards preserving peace.”26 In order to “give security” that no treaty would be concluded, Madison was to be outmanned by two solid Federalists, as Hamilton advised the Secretary of State.27 Washington also advocated official negotiations with France because if they failed – an event he considered probable – “the eyes of all, in this country, who are not willfully blind, and resolved to remain so . . ., will be fully opened.”28 The ultimate aim of the peace mission was thus not to settle the Franco-American differences in an attempt to secure peace but rather to obtain the justification for an outright war – a war not fought to protect American commerce but to unify the nation behind Federalists’ conservative agenda. Once a state of war existed, Republicans would be hard-pressed to renounce their Francophilia lest they appeared unAmerican. Those who remained convinced – in the event of a failure of 23

24

25

26 27 28

Adams, “Special Session Message,” May 16, 1797, in: James D. Richardson (ed.), Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1908, 11 vols. (Washington: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1908), Vol. 1, 233–239. Hamilton to William Loughton Smith, April 5, 1797, in: PAH, Vol. 21, 21. Also see Hamilton to Wolcott, March 30, 1797, in: ibid., Vol. 20, 567–568. Hamilton to Washington, January 25–31, 1797, in: ibid., Vol. 20, 480. Wolcott also wished to include a Republican in the mission, since “in case of failure, it will contribute to the important end of uniting opinion at home.” Wolcott to Adams, April 25, 1797, in: Gibbs (ed.), Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Vol. 1, 510. Hamilton to Pickering, March 29, 1797, in: PAH, Vol. 20, 557. Hamilton to Pickering, March 22, 1797, in: ibid., 545. Washington to John Marshall, December 4, 1797, in: John C. Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1931–1944), Vol. 36, 93.

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the negotiations – “that we ought to bear any thing from France rather than go to war with her,” Hamilton predicted, would be engaging in “treason,” which was tantamount to committing “an act of political suicide.”29 Republican newspapers and party leaders understood that the peace mission was a hoax and accused Federalists of plotting a war, denouncing Adams’ speech as a “war message.”30 They argued that the preparations for armed conflict revealed that Federalists did not really seek peace. The issue “was war or no war,” as Republican Representative Samuel Smith of Maryland found.31 Jefferson feared that Federalists were bent on war with France and therefore concluded that the Adams Administration had determined that “their mission would not result in a settlement of differences, but would produce circumstances tending to widen the breach, and to provoke our citizens to consent to a war with that nation, & union with England.”32 Even though Republican accusations were indeed true, Federalist Representatives denied that they sought to provoke a war with France and justified their war preparations as purely defensive. Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina complained that Republicans “had constantly attributed to him” and other Federalists “the very worst of motives – a desire to bring their country into war.” He rejected the claim that Federalists’ naval build-up program was “a question of peace or war.” Making sure that the Federalists would not be blamed for the military conflict if the mission failed, he asserted that it was up to France to determine the future of Franco-American relations. “War we should have, if war was her desire.”33 Since the threat Federalists claimed France posed to the U.S. did not seem urgent enough yet, Republicans were able to block most measures that Adams had recommended. Congress only allowed for the completion of the three frigates, which were already in the process of being constructed, and for the strengthening of harbor defenses. Hamilton realized 29

30

31 32

33

“Americus” [Hamilton], “The Warning No. III,” in: Gazette of the United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, February 21, 1797. Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), May 18, 1797; The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), May 29, 1797; Jefferson to Madison, May 18, 1797, in: WTJ, Vol. 8, 288–289; Gallatin to James Nicholson, May 26, 1797, in: Albert Gallatin Papers (Library of Congress), reel 3. Smith, June 7, 1797, in: AC, 5th Congress, 1st Session, 259–260. Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799, in: WTJ, Vol. 9, 21. Also see Jefferson to Aaron Burr, June 17, 1797, in: ibid., Vol. 8, 310. Robert Goodloe Harper, June 7, 1797, in: AC, 5th Congress, 1st Session, 261–263, 266.

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that the French decree was not dramatic enough to serve as a justification for war and, therefore, hoped that a failure of the negotiations would lead to a stronger arousal of public opinion.34 Since Madison refused to go to France, Adams eventually nominated Federalists John Marshall of Virginia, Francis Dana of Massachusetts, and Pinckney of South Carolina for the mission and the Senate agreed to them on June 5. When Dana declined to accept, Adams nominated his confidant, the independent-minded Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who was confirmed on June 22.35 The envoys were instructed to press for compensation for depredations on American commerce and for claims on supplies that the French had not yet paid. The clause of the Treaty of Alliance in which both sides agreed to defend each other’s territories in case of a defensive war was to be eliminated. The alliance would thus be effectively terminated. The diplomats were forbidden to make “any engagement inconsistent with the obligations of any prior treaty” (i.e. the Jay Treaty with Great Britain), to agree to restrictions on American trade, and to promise loans to the French government during the present war. The only concession the commissioners were allowed to make was that – in the process of revising the existing treaties – they could agree to give France the same maritime treatment as Great Britain. In other words, they could give up the principle of “free ships, free goods.” Federalist foreign-policy makers were willing to sacrifice this principle, because if France renounced it, Republicans could no longer claim that France treated America better than did Great Britain.36 Both Marshall and Hamilton were in Philadelphia when the instructions were drawn up for the Paris mission and it seems probable that they both agreed on their details and the general course the negotiations ought to follow. It can be inferred, therefore, that Marshall shared Hamilton’s intentions and that they agreed that the mission should not only be unsuccessful but also that France had to appear responsible for the failure to come to terms.37

34 35 36

37

Hamilton to Rufus King, June 8, 1797, in: LCRK, Vol. 2, 183. SEJ, Vol. 1, 243, 245. The instructions can be found in Pickering to Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry, July 15, 1797, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 153–157. Albert Hall Bowman found that the terms the American government suggested were so one-sided that it was clear from the beginning that the negotiations would end in failure. Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality, 286–288.

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The French government, by contrast, had no interest in a war with the U.S. and gave no hint that it wished to escalate tensions.38 France’s former minister to the U.S., Joseph Fauchet, explained that France had “un intérêt particulier à demeurer unie avec l’Amérique” (“a special interest to remain united with America”) and, therefore, recommended revoking the decree of March 2, 1797, which had become “la source d’une foule de vexations, qui ne font que nuire au but” (“the source of a host of vexations, which are only detrimental to the goal”).39 Pierre Auguste Adet, the most recent minister, agreed: “L’admission des commissionnaires et une négociation franche voila je pense le moyen de terminer des différences qu’il n’est pas de notre intérêt de prolonger” (“The reception of the commissioners and a frank negotiation are, I believe, the means of settling differences which it is not in our interest to prolong”).40 Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French Foreign Minister, fully concurred with this view, as his diplomatic correspondence indicates. In a letter to the French consul-general in Philadelphia, Joseph Philippe Létombe, who assumed Adet’s functions in May 1797, he expressed his hope that the differences would soon be terminated. He called the rejection of Pinckney “fâcheux” (“unfortunate”) and promised that it “pourra se réparer” (“could be repaired”) and that “nous ferons tout ce qui dépendre de nous quand les Commissaires arriveront, pour mettre dans tout leur jour nos intentions pacifique” (“we shall do everything that is up to us, when the commissioners arrive, to fully disclose our peaceful intentions”).41 Talleyrand reasoned that “we have major reasons favoring a reconciliation,” since a rupture would bring Americans “in league with England,” and that, therefore, the “time has come to remove the despotic actions and violence which are carried out against the Americans in our Antilles.”42

38

39

40

41 42

The analysis of French foreign-policy makers’ views on the negotiations presented in the next two paragraphs follows the accounts provided by ibid., 289–312, and Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 564–567. Also see E. Wilson Lyon, “The Directory and the United States,” in: American Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 3 (1938), 520–521; William C. Stinchcombe, “Talleyrand and the American Negotiations of 1797–1798,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 62, No. 3 (1975), 575–590. Joseph Fauchet, Coup d’oeil sur l’état des nos rapports actuels avec les États-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris: Pougin and Laran, an V (1797)), 59, 25. Adet to Talleyrand, le 1 Vendémiaire, an VI (September 22, 1797), in: Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères: Correspondence Politique, États-Unis (Photostats in the Library of Congress), Vol. 48, 263r–263v. Talleyrand to Létombe, le 15 Fructidor, an V (September 1, 1797), in: ibid., 214v–215r. Talleyrand, “Memoirs on Relations between France and the United States from 1792 to 1797,” September 1797, in: William C. Stinchcombe, “A Neglected Memoir by Talleyrand

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Yet, while France was willing to accommodate, leading Republicans in America urged the French to delay negotiations and wait for them to come to power. Jefferson told Létombe that Adams’ “Présidence ne dure que cinq ans; il n’a été Président que de trios voix, et le Systême des Etats-Unis changera avec lui” (“Presidency only lasts five years; he became President by only three votes, and the system of the United States will change with him”). The public indignation over French seizures of American vessels “sera de peu de durée. C’est à la France, grande, généreuse, au Sommet de la gloire à dissimuler, à patienter, à ne rien précipiter et tout rentrera dans l’ordre“ (“will be of short duration. It is for France, great, generous, at the summit of her glory, to dissimulate, to wait, to precipitate nothing, and all will return to order”). In regard to the mission on its way to France, he advised to “les accueiller, les entendre; Trainer en longueur la négociation et les amollir par l’Urbanité de ses procédés (“receive them, listen to them; drag out the negotiations at length, and mollify them by the urbanity of the proceedings”). Fearing war with France and a further rapprochement with England, Jefferson suggested a delay hoping that a successful French invasion of England would make the current Franco-American issues obsolete.43 The former French consul in New York, Alexandre Hauterive, to whom Jefferson had also recommended “the way of a prorogation,” therefore, told Talleyrand to waylay negotiations. There was no reason to react to the “impatience” of the American commissioners. “I am sure that nothing will disconcert or try them more than a cold and polite reception, rare, vague, and private discussions, and a fardistant prospect of results.”44 Létombe also advised to stall the negotiations and to focus on the war with Great Britain. “Je dirois que c’est à la France à dissimuler, à temporizer, à se preparer . . . à remettre l’Angleterre à sa place” (“I would say that it is for France to dissimulate, to temporize, to prepare herself . . . to put England back into her place”).45 Although the French government had agreed to solve the differences, there did not seem

43

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45

on French–American Relations, 1793–1797,” in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 121, No. 3 (1977), 206–207. Létombe to Minister of Exterior Relations, le 19 Prairial, an V (June 7, 1797), in: Frederick J. Turner (ed.), Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, 1791–1797 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904) 1030–1031. Frances S. Childs, “A Secret Agent’s Advice on America, 1797,” in: Edward Meade Earle (ed.), Nationalism and Internationalism: Essays Inscribed to Carlton J. H. Hayes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 35, 38. Létombe to Minister of Exterior Relations, le 11 Prairial, an V (May 30, 1797), in: Turner (ed.), Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, 1024.

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to be any time pressure to begin the negotiations early on and to bring them to a speedy conclusion. In any case, America did not feature prominently in the minds of French foreign-policy makers. What animated French policy towards the U.S. was the wish for American assistance in the war against Great Britain and since 1793 the French government had believed that this help should primarily take the form of money lending. In 1797 in particular, the Directory was almost bankrupt and in desperate need of cash. In other words, while French policy makers did not seek to escalate tensions, they hoped to receive American financial assistance, before any time-consuming negotiations took place. As they believed nothing would be lost by a delay in the talks, they decided to demand a loan from the American commissioners – and, as Talleyrand had the habit of using his office to enrich himself, to ask for a personal bribe – in advance of any discussions. If they agreed, France would receive much needed money; if they did not, they calculated that the most likely outcome would be a postponement of the beginning of actual negotiations – a development urged by Republicans in America and also in the interest of the French government, which was aware that the American commissioners would seek indemnities for American prizes taken by French privateers, but which at the moment was incapable of paying them. In sum, France’s policy towards the U.S. in 1796 and 1797 was not characterized by hostility towards the U.S. but by the requirements of the war with Great Britain and a lack of interest in American affairs.46 When analyzing the diplomatic episode that would come to be known as the XYZ Affair, it is important to keep in mind that the only version of the entire story comes from Marshall’s journal and the letters written by him – and subsequently signed by the entire mission – to the American government. In other words: although there is no doubt that the main facts of Marshall’s account are true, he determined how they were presented and in what light they appeared. He set the frame within which the American public at the time, and historians later on, would interpret the encounters between the American envoys and French agents.47

46

47

See DeConde, The Quasi-War, 43; Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality, 312–317; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 568–570, 874n–876n. For the XYZ Affair, as analyzed in the next two paragraphs, see DeConde, The QuasiWar, 46–59; Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality, 317–325; William C. Stinchcombe, The XYZ Affair (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980); Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of

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The commissioners presented their credentials to Talleyrand on October 8, 1797.48 Ten days later, they were visited by Jean Conrad Hottinger. The French agent, who would later be referred to as X in the envoys’ dispatches, transmitted the French government’s demand that before the actual beginning of negotiations America should assume all the unpaid debts that France had contracted with American merchants and all indemnities for spoliations on American trade France was responsible for; America should make a “considerable loan” to France; and the envoys should give the Directory and Talleyrand a bribe of 1,200,000 livres (about 50,000 pounds sterling) for “private use.”49 While Marshall wished to terminate the mission right away in view of these barefaced demands, Gerry – who was no Federalist and thus not bent on escalating tensions with France – cautioned that war might ensue if they broke off the negotiations and that they should ask for more details.50 Two days later another agent appeared: Pierre Bellamy or “Y,” who repeated the demands that America should make a loan to France, that the envoys should pay a bribe, and that Adams’ criticism of the decree of March 2, 1797, had to be taken back.51 On October 21, when Hottinger and Bellamy again visited the American diplomats, the Americans told them that their instructions allowed them neither to agree to the requested loan nor “to confirm or invalidate any part of the President’s speech,” but they were only empowered to make a treaty which would “place France on an equal ground with England.”52 Six days later, Hottinger saw the envoys again to ask for money and “looked somewhat surprizd” when the envoys made clear that America would pay “not a sixpence!”53 On October 30,

48

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50 51

52

53

Federalism, 570–579. For the Paris mission from the perspective of the three American diplomats, see Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (New York: Holt, 1996), 192–233; Marvin R. Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: Founding Father (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 136–195; George Athan Billias, Elbridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 264–286. Marshall, “Paris Journal,” October 8, 1797, in: PJM, Vol. 3, 159; Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry to Pickering, October 22, 1797, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 158. Marshall, “Paris Journal,” October 18–19, 1797, in: PJM, Vol. 3, 163–166; Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry to Pickering, October 22, 1797, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 158. Marshall, “Paris Journal,” October 18, 1797, in: PJM, Vol. 3, 165. Idem, “Paris Journal,” October 20, 1797, in: ibid., 166–167; Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry to Pickering, October 22, 1797, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 159. Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry to Pickering, October 22, 1797, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 159–160. Marshall, “Paris Journal,” October 27, 1797, in: PJM, Vol. 3, 171, 173; Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry to Pickering, October 27, 1797, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 161–162.

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Bellamy made a last attempt to test the envoys’ willingness to open the purse by telling them that if they agreed – in addition to the loan and the bribe – to an advance payment to the amount of the debt France owed to American citizens, France would stop French privateers from attacking American merchantmen, while the commissioners would seek further instructions from home. The envoys again declined to promise money.54 While Marshall and Pinckney were determined to terminate the mission and travel back to the U.S. in response to these insolent demands, Gerry wished to procrastinate, fearing that the American negotiators’ departure could lead to the outbreak of war. He therefore suggested that they should rather stay and wait for the French government to give up its requests for money.55 Marshall, however, was not afraid of a war, since it would discredit the “French party” in America. He wished to depart, being content that he could put the blame for the failure of the mission entirely on France.56 Rather than leaving voluntarily, however, Marshall hoped that Talleyrand would order them out of the country, supplying him with yet another argument to hold the French government responsible for the escalation of tensions and thereby to rouse the American public against France.57 Talleyrand, for his part, wrongly calculated that if Marshall and Pinckney sailed away, the amenable Gerry, who wished to avoid a Franco-American war, would stay to negotiate with him and that he could thus prevent a rupture.58 As a result, Talleyrand only expelled Marshall and Pinckney, while asking Gerry to stay.59 Three major conclusions can be drawn from this brief review of the XYZ Affair. First, the French government did not attach much importance to the relations to America. Otherwise, they would not have taken the risk of spoiling the negotiations by demanding money. Furthermore, it is apparent that Marshall and Pinckney were determined to terminate the mission at the first sign of trouble. In contrast to Gerry, they were not interested in discovering what made the unofficial French agents insist on 54

55

56

57

58 59

Marshall, “Paris Journal,” October 30, 1797, in: PJM, Vol. 3, 179–183; Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry to Pickering, October 30, 1797, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 163–164. Gerry to William Vans Murray, December 28, 1797, quoted in: Billias, Elbridge Gerry, 274. See Marshall, “Paris Journal,” November 4, 1797 – February 4, 1798, in: PJM, Vol. 3, 185–197. Talleyrand understood the game Marshall was playing and complained that the American envoy “only wished to receive the order for [his] departure for the purpose of throwing the blame on France.” Marshall, “Paris Journal,” April 11, 1798, in: ibid., 241. Marshall, “Paris Journal,” February 4, 1798, in: ibid., 196–197. Talleyrand to Pinckney and Marshall, April 13, 1798, in: ibid., 461–462.

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money or in waiting for them to drop their demands. After October 20, they were only concerned with gathering enough evidence for the French government’s effrontery, revealing that they had little interest in the success of the negotiations. Finally, Gerry’s diplomacy shows that there was an alternative way the affair could have been handled. By simply remaining in France to wait for the French diplomats to give up their demands for money, Gerry maintained a semi-official communication channel through which enough positive information would flow that Adams could later be convinced to send another peace mission. If all American commissioners had earnestly wished to make the mission a success and if Marshall and Pinckney had not decided to make the initial demand for money a casus belli, there are reasons to believe that the XYZ Affair would only have been the awkward prelude to an eventually successful negotiation maintaining peace between both countries. However, Gerry – the only one who tried to avoid a rupture and understood that the Frenchmen’s claims for money were not intended to antagonize the U.S., but rather a clumsy attempt to obtain money for the empty French Treasury – was not the one to determine how the episode would be received in the American public. It was the account given by Marshall – who had obtained the lever that would arouse the American public in indignation against France – that was to shape the subsequent debate on the XYZ Affair.60 The reaction to the diplomatic episode by the members of Adams’ Cabinet further supports the claim that war had been their goal all along.61 Secretary of State Timothy Pickering wished to use the XYZ Affair as a justification to declare war against France immediately and to form an alliance with Great Britain to prosecute it. He hoped that Republicans would then be forced to renounce their attachment to France and that consequently democratic egalitarianism would be eliminated in the U.S.62 Attorney General Charles Lee also thought that an 60

61

62

Gerry would be crucified in the American public for not departing with the other commissioners and for thus letting Talleyrand divide the American mission (even though he did not assume negotiating powers but merely stayed in Paris to keep a channel of communication open). For Marshall’s and Pinckney’s criticism of Gerry, see Marshall, “Paris Journal,” April 3, 1798, in: ibid., 236–238. For the response of the Adams Administration to the dispatches from Paris, as analyzed in the next three paragraphs, see, above all, Page Smith, John Adams, 2 vols. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962), Vol. 2, 953–959; DeConde, The Quasi-War, 67–73; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 583–588, 596–597. On March 13, Adams sent a circular to all the heads of department asking them about their opinions as to whether he should ask Congress for a declaration of war.

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outright declaration of war was the proper response to the affair, as war was the only means to arouse the public, which as yet showed “no animation.” Only “a formal declaration of war” would give Republicans no alternative but to abandon their Francophilia, since to “adhere to France in her present system” could not be construed as officially “treasonable, until France is declared to be an Enemy.” Conversely, “the french faction . . . would do more harm with impunity; than if there was to be a declaration of war.”63 Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott and Secretary of War James McHenry, however, preferred “a qualified hostility” to “an immediate declaration of war.” A limited war would suffice to disentangle the U.S. from France. A declaration of war, by contrast, could be interpreted as an overreaction and expose Federalists to charges that they were pushing for a war with France.64 McHenry warned Adams that Americans did not wish to go to war unless forced to. “It is an undoubted fact, that there is a very general indisposition to war in the minds of the people of the United States, and that there is a considerable part of them still peculiarly averse to a war with the French republic.” While Adams should recommend to Congress “a truly vigorous defensive plan” (which included both building up the navy and enlarging the army), “a countenance [should be] still kept up, to negotiate” and the President should give “the appearance of still being disposed to meet any opening to accommodation.”65 Hamilton agreed that the U.S. should militarily engage France, but that the entire blame for the rupture had to be put on the French government. On the one hand, the U.S. should meet French

63

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65

Unfortunately, Pickering’s answer – if he composed one – was lost. See WJA, Vol. 8, 568n. After analyzing Pickering’s correspondence with U.S. ministers abroad and other Federalist leaders, Gerard H. Clarfield, however, concluded that Pickering preferred allout war and a formal alliance with Great Britain in Timothy Pickering and American Diplomacy, 1795–1800 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969), 144–147. Lee to Adams, March 8, 1798, in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 387. Six days later, he still recommended “a formal declaration of war,” but only after the American commissioners had returned home. Lee to Adams, March 14, 1798, in: ibid. Adams’ wife Abigail also favored a declaration of war. Abigail to John Quincy Adams, July 14, 1798, in: ibid., reel 390. Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch, July 9, 1798, in: Stewart Mitchell (ed.), New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788–1801 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 201. McHenry to Adams, March 14, 1798, in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 387. Wolcott only advised Adams “to adopt promptly . . . measures . . . for the protection of the persons and property of our seafaring & commercial Citizens; – for the defence of any vulnerable portions of our territory & . . . efficient supplies of Revenues.” Wolcott to Adams, March 15, 1798, in: ibid. McHenry to Adams, February 15, 1798, in: ibid.

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aggressions on the high seas, build up its navy, and establish a provisional army. On the other hand, “a state of mitigated hostility” was preferable over a declaration of war such that American actions appeared completely defensive, as he explained to the Secretary of State.66 Even before the failure of the mission became known, Hamilton had already advised the Adams Administration to start preparing for a “mitigated hostility” rather than “a formal war,” while simultaneously putting up “the air of still being disposed to meet any opening to accommodation.”67 At first, Adams seemed to concur with Pickering and Lee. In his notes for his message to Congress, he wrote that “in my opinion they [France’s insults] demand on the Part of Congress an immediate Declaration of War against France.”68 Upon further reflection, however, Adams came to agree with Hamilton and McHenry that a bellicose speech calling for a declaration of war would cast doubts on Federalists’ motives in the XYZ Affair. His message to Congress on March 19, 1798, was, therefore, restrained. Neither did he publish Marshall’s dispatches nor did he ask Congress for a declaration of war. He simply reiterated his earlier proposals for strengthening America’s military and arming American merchantmen.69 Those like Fisher Ames and Pickering who would have preferred open war over the current “torpor and indecision” were still content with the existing state of hostilities: enacting measures “as if we were in war” would suffice for the moment. “To declare is to choose war; it is voluntarily changing our condition, which however urgent the reasons and motives of the change may be, leaves a door open for blame on the government.” This would give the “malecontent party a specific text of sedition.” They hence agreed that “Wage war, and call it self-defence” was a suitable strategy.70 66

67 68

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Hamilton to Pickering, March 17, 1798, in: PAH, Vol. 21, 366. As he wished to provoke a Franco-American war, but place the war guilt squarely on the French government’s shoulders, Hamilton was “delighted with their contents,” as he wrote to Pickering, after reading the envoys’ dispatches from Paris, since they provided Federalists’ with a suitable casus belli. Hamilton to Pickering, March 27, 1798, in: ibid., 379. Hamilton to McHenry, January 27 – February 11, 1798, in: ibid., 342. Adams, notes for message to Congress (the document is undated, but must have been prepared after Adams received the envoys’ dispatches from Paris on March 4 and the delivery of the message on March 19), in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 387. Adams’ message to Congress is printed in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 152. The war had to be limited to naval operations anyway, because the U.S. did not have the resources to send an army to France. Ames to Pickering, July 10, 1798, in: WFA, Vol. 1, 233–234.

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Republicans in Congress understood that Federalists had fabricated the war crisis in order to push through their domestic agenda. The “Executive Party” was fomenting the French crisis in order to “increase their power and to bind us by the treble chain of fiscal, legal and military despotism,” as Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania put it.71 While Republican Congressmen’s accusation that Federalists were deliberately creating a national emergency situation was correct, they erred when they assumed that the diplomatic correspondence did not contain anything offensive on the part of France. Hoping that the dispatches sent by the envoys in Paris would provide them with arguments for renewed negotiations, Republican Representatives demanded their release and thus committed a serious political blunder. On April 2, the House called for the diplomatic papers of the American envoys by a large majority vote, and within days the letters were printed and read throughout the country.72 The subsequent uproar in the American public over the French government’s impertinence finally gave Federalists enough political support to push through their war program.73 Between April and July 1798, Congress unofficially declared the Quasi-War by laying an embargo on all trade with France; by abrogating the Treaty of Alliance; by stripping French diplomats in the U.S. of their credentials; by allowing American ships on the high seas to attack any armed French vessel; by authorizing plans for strengthening the army; and by enlarging the navy. Congress ordered the building of fifteen warships and the acquisition of twelve sloops and ten galleys. The budget for the navy increased manifold to $1.4 million in 1798. The Navy Department was established for supervising the navy and Benjamin Stoddert was appointed as the first Secretary of the Navy taking office on June 24. Congress increased the regular army of about 3,000 men by an “Additional Army” of 12,000. At the same time, it created a “Provisional Army” of 10,000 men, which the President could call in case of “imminent danger.”74 On July 2, Adams sent the nomination of George Washington as “Lieutenant General and 71

72 73

74

Gallatin, quoted in: David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 499. Also see Gallatin to Congress, March 1, 1798, in: F. James Ferguson (ed.), Selected Writings of Albert Gallatin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 137. For the vote, see AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 1371. For the public reaction to the XYZ Affair, see Thomas M. Ray, “‘Not One Cent for Tribute’: The Public Addresses and American Popular Reaction to the XYZ Affair, 1798–1799,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1983), 389–412. For the Federalist war program, see DeConde, The Quasi-War, 90–91; Smelser, The Congress Founds the Navy, 150–159; Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 101, 105–106;

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Commander in Chief of all the Armies raised, or to be raised, in the United States” to the Senate, which confirmed it the next day.75 Republicans knew that – although war was not officially declared – the enactment of these measures amounted to the same thing. Edward Livingston of New York made clear: “let no man flatter himself that the vote which has been given is not a declaration of war. Gentlemen know that this is the case.”76 Thus, the Quasi-War with France began. Federalist leaders in the Adams Administration and Congress provoked the Quasi-War in order to disentangle America from France, undermine Francophile definitions of American identity, and thereby discredit the democratic egalitarianism that the French Revolution represented. When France interfered with American trade, they sent a mission to Paris, hoping that it would fail and thus provide Federalists with a pretext to escalate FrancoAmerican tensions, using the subsequent XYZ Affair to fabricate a war crisis that would force Republicans to renounce their attachment to France. While their policy towards France was deliberately confrontational, Federalist foreign-policy makers skilfully managed to put the blame for the outbreak of hostilities entirely on the French government. After all, only by making large parts of the American public believe that the conflict was utterly defensive could their objective of tarnishing Republicans’ image of France be attained. Three factors explain why Federalist leaders were able to impress their interpretation of the conflict on the public mind. To begin with, Federalists’ claim that France had been responsible for the Quasi-War appeared credible because until 1797 Federalists had continuously and successfully represented themselves as champions of neutrality seeking to prevent American participation in the European war. While neither Federalists nor Republicans were neutral in the European conflict, it had only been the latter who, before 1797, had pursued an agenda that could have actually drawn the U.S. into it – e.g. through their opposition to the Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793, their program of economic warfare against Great Britain in 1794, and their attempts to bring the Jay Treaty down in 1795 and 1796. Meanwhile, Federalists had only fought a rearguard action against Republican attempts to embroil the U.S. in a war against Great Britain and had not yet themselves taken any active

75 76

George C. Daughan, If by Sea: The Forging of the American Navy – From the Revolution to the War of 1812 (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 311–315. SEJ, Vol. 1, 284. Livingston, April 20, 1798, in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 1519.

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steps to draw the U.S. into a war against France – a fact continuously exploited for good use in public messages by prominent Federalists. In 1795, Hamilton had defended the Jay Treaty by arguing that it avoided an unnecessary war with Great Britain that Republicans had sought to provoke because of “their animosity against one foreign Nation and their devotion for another.” Rather than seeking to form “a close political connection with any power of Europe” and to “entangle you in all the contests[,] broils, and wars of Europe” like Republicans, Federalists pursued a policy of genuine neutrality following the maxim of “POLITICAL CONNECTION with NONE.”77 In his Farewell Address of 1796, Washington had described his administration’s foreign policy in the same manner as impeccably neutral. Explaining that the causes of the European wars were foreign to the U.S., he made clear that it was in America’s interest to stay out of European affairs as much as possible (apart from commerce), implicitly chastising France for meddling in American politics and disapproving of Republican attempts to drag the U.S. into the European conflict because of their Francophilia and Anglophobia. When the Federalist leadership decided to bring matters with France to a head in 1797, they could, therefore, build on the image of themselves as the defenders of American neutrality that they had cultivated since 1793 to successfully portray their policies as defensive. In his message to Congress on May 16, 1797, President Adams consequently continued making the by now familiar argument that Federalists spoke for a neutral nation whose members did not wish “to involve ourselves in the political system of Europe,” but sought “to keep ourselves always distinct and separate from it if we can,” even though he was simultaneously urging a military build-up and setting America and France on a collision course.78 As a result, Federalist newspapers could blame France for the escalating tensions in 1798. The Columbian Centinel maintained that “the war in which we are compelled to engage is defensive” and forced on the U.S. by France.79 “Though in the beginning we had wished to live secluded from the bustles of the world and had hoped to view the distant troubles of Europe, like the traveller, who from some unshaken 77 78

79

Hamilton, “Horatius No. II,” July 1795, in: PAH, Vol. 19, 76–77. Adams, “Special Session Message,” May 16, 1797, in: Richardson (ed.), Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. 1, 238. Columbian Centinel (Boston), July 4, 1798. Also see the speech delivered on June 5, 1798, by the Governor of Massachusetts, as printed in: The North-Carolina Minerva, and Fayetteville Advertiser, July 7, 1798.

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promontory surveys the fury and effects of a sea storm, yet . . . we are dragged into the contest,” the Federalist newspaper complained.80 “It is now obvious to all, that the conduct of the French nation would long before this time have justified an open and direct state of hostilities,” the Gazette of the United States alleged. It was only Americans’ “love of peace” that had “hitherto restrained the authorities of the union from such a state of things.”81 The international situation at the time offers a second reason for the Federalist leadership’s success in molding public opinion. As France, between 1794 and 1798, had helped bring down the Dutch Republic (instead establishing the Batavian Republic as a client state), had created the Cisalpine Republic in northern and the Roman Republic in central Italy as French satellites, had forced Spain to cede the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola to France, and had annexed the left bank of the Rhine, the Austrian Netherlands (today’s Belgium and Luxembourg), and Savoy (from the Kingdom of Sardinia), Federalists’ accusation that the meddling in U.S. politics by French officials was a first step in turning the U.S. into a satellite of France did not seem to be without substance. Furthermore, in 1796 and 1797, French depredations of American commerce were “real” and gave credence to Federalist claims that France displayed an aggressive conduct towards the U.S. Finally, the Federalist leaders’ clever political maneuvering explains why they were able to shape the public debate. The fact that it was Republican rather than Federalist Representatives who demanded the publication of the XYZ dispatches made it appear as if Federalists had not deliberately tried to provoke a war but were merely protecting American commerce and complying with the aroused public’s wishes for avenging the national honor. Moreover, since Federalists refrained from seeking an outright declaration of war, they also made it look like they were acting reactively rather than proactively. An English caricature from 1798 elucidates the way that Federalists in the U.S. represented the XYZ Affair to justify the Quasi-War (see Figure 4). On the left, we see Columbia, wearing long robes and a large plumed headdress, being molested and fleeced by two Frenchmen, one of them grabbing her chin with his right hand to direct her eyes towards a sack labeled “private plunder for the directors” that he is pointing to 80

81

“For the Centinel” by “Clarendon,” in: Columbian Centinel (Boston), November 25, 1797. Also see ibid., January 30, 1799. Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, November 19, 1798.

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figure 4: “Property Protected à la Françoise,” etching by unidentified artist from 1798 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

with his left hand. He is offering her “the hug Fraternale,” explaining that “we do not want to quarrel with you, as a proof, my Brother: the grand Directeur’s are at this moment take all de Care possible of your Baggage,” and suggesting that she “go back and bring littel more of de l’Argent” for “de honor of de sitting.” The other Frenchman plucks a plume from Columbia’s headdress, telling her that “some of dese fedders vil look vel in de caps of us Legislateurs.” Columbia, however, is resisting letting them know that “America will not have her rights infringed on.” In the center, two more Frenchmen empty sacks of plunder labeled “Extorted from Portugal” and “Borrow’d pr Force from Switzerland” into a large “NATIONAL SACK” full of “DIPLOMATIC PERQUISITES” that is being held open by a fifth Frenchman – a soldier bearing a sword on which “French Argument” is engraved and adding in the direction of Columbia: “Oui Oui Madame Amerique dis Argument vil convince you dat all he say be true.” In the foreground on the right, five Europeans are watching Columbia being plundered. The Pope, who lost his Papal States and was exiled to France, complains that “aye they left me nothing but my prayer book and Crown, and strip’d that of its jewels.” The Spaniard predicts that “they’ll certainly pluck her to the last feather.” The Austrian agrees, “yes we know how things will go by Experience.” The Dutchman admits “yaw Mynheer we have been great dupes and there sits John Bull

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on his Rock laughing at us.” He is pointing to the personification of Great Britain that is sitting on a perch on “Shakespeare’s Cliff” on the other side of the Channel in the background and laughing at the scene below. The caricature thus depicts the XYZ Affair as an attempt by the French government – in the form of the five-headed Directory – to turn the U.S. into a satellite, as it had already done with the Batavian, Helvetian, Cisalpine, and Roman Republics. Having gained ascendency in the public discourse in the Jay Treaty debate, in which they were able to present themselves as the “peace party” and Republicans as the “war party,” Federalists were so successful in convincing the American public that they were neutral in the European conflict that they could start a naval war against France without appearing responsible for it. In consequence, the Quasi-War, so Federalists hoped, would drive their Republican opponents further into the defensive, make expressions of Francophilia publicly inacceptable, and discredit the democratic egalitarianism that the French republic represented.

4 Disentangling America from France

After the Jay Treaty had failed to undermine Republicans’ Francophilia and to end the partisan strife over America’s domestic order, Federalist leaders were keen to provoke an undeclared war against France, hoping to thereby unify the nation behind their conservative ideology. Fearing that the French example encouraged a social revolution in America and consequently seeking to disentangle America from her “sister republic,” Federalist power brokers envisioned that a military conflict between both countries would discredit the democratic egalitarianism that France symbolized and instead bolster Federalists’ conservative definitions of American identity. According to William Vans Murray, America’s minister to the Netherlands, the purpose of a war with France would be to demonstrate “that we are not French,” as he wrote to the Secretary of War in 1797.1 The conflict with France was a “war which, in my opinion is not so much to be waged against the People of France, as against their principles,” “A FRIEND TO GOVERNMENT” explained in the Gazette of the United States after Federalist leaders had used the XYZ Affair as a justification to escalate tensions with France in 1798.2 The Quasi-War would eradicate “the spirit of unbridled and licentious democracy, the spirit of Jacobinism,” as the Federalist flagship anticipated.3 The Quasi-War was hence not primarily waged for diplomatic aims but rather for domestic objectives: Federalist leaders 1

2

3

Murray to James McHenry, August 7, 1797, in: Bernard C. Steiner, The Life and Correspondence of James McHenry, Secretary of War under Washington and Adams (Cleveland: Burrows, 1907), 246. “A FRIEND TO GOVERNMENT,” in: Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, December 11, 1798. “SHEW VICE ITS OWN FEATURES” by “TIMO: QUID NUNC,” in: ibid., December 11, 1798.

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considered it a suitable means to purge the U.S. of revolutionary principles and politically homogenize the American nation.4 Federalist decision makers hoped that the Quasi-War would achieve its desired domestic effects in two ways. On the one hand, they expected the undeclared naval war against the ally from the War of Independence to promote a Francophobic American nationalism detaching the large body of Republicans from their French “idol” and dampening their zeal for democratic-egalitarian reform. Knowing that “every danger from external outrage” tended “to restore the confidence and harmony of our domestic scene,” as the Federalist Governor of Pennsylvania Thomas Mifflin put it in a speech to the state legislature, Federalists exerted nationalistic pressure on Republicans to rally behind the Federalist administration and renounce their Francophilia after they had put the dispatches the American envoys had sent from Paris to good public effect and created the perception of foreign aggression.5 “By union we shall repel, by division we have invited injury and insult; let us then Americans, my dear fellow citizens, at this very interesting crisis, . . . call far from us all internal dissention,” a Federalist calling himself “PATRIOTICUS” demanded in the New-York Gazette, hoping that the external threat would compel Americans to stand by their country.6 Seeking to arouse Americans’ nationalism in the wake of the XYZ Affair, Hamilton proclaimed in the Commercial Advertiser: “Who that loves his country . . . would not rather perish than subscribe to the prostration of both before such men [Frenchmen] and such a system [France]?”7 On the other hand, Federalist policy makers knew that the wartime emergency would allow them to discredit those Republicans who refused to renounce their Francophilia by casting doubt on their national loyalty. Washington hoped that a war with France would expose “who are true 4

5 6

7

In his notes for his message to Congress in the wake of the XYZ dispatches, Adams directly linked his request for a declaration of war against France to an attack on Republicans’ domestic opposition accusing them of “indulging too keen a Resentment, too implacable a Malignity against one nation [Great Britain], and too fond a Partiality for another [France]” and of “Too much hatred against Some forms of Government in Europe [constitutional monarchies] and too blind an Attachment to others [democracies],” and criticizing their belief that “the Principle of our Revolution and theirs [the French] is the Same.” Adams, notes for message to Congress, in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 387. The Daily Advertiser (New York), December 11, 1798. “PATRIOTICUS,” in: The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, September 30, 1797. “The Stand No. IV” by “Titus Manlius” [Hamilton], in: Commercial Advertiser (New York), April 12, 1798.

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Americans.”8 Representative John Allen of Connecticut explained the dichotomous situation Republicans found themselves in most clearly when warning them that “he that is not with us is against us.”9 Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina admitted openly that the Quasi-War was waged both to “resist our external enemies and domestic traitors.”10 Senator James Lloyd of Maryland also predicted that a declaration of war against France would “enable us to lay our hands on traitors.”11 His colleague from Massachusetts Theodore Sedgwick went a step further. Advocating an outright declaration of war against France as the best way of revealing “Jacobins” as un-American, he suggested hanging “traitors and exported Frenchmen.”12 From the beginning, Republicans in Congress understood that Federalists were attempting to provoke a war with France in order to alienate Americans from their “sister republic” and thus undermine the democratic egalitarianism that America’s ally had come to represent as a legitimate political ideology in the U.S. When Federalist leaders decided to send a peace mission to France, Republicans had already begun to express their concern that its purpose was to obtain a pretext for an armed conflict with France, since they simultaneously began building up America’s military to prepare for a possible failure of the negotiations.13 Therefore, Republicans demanded a publication of the XYZ dispatches, after Pinckney and Marshall had decided to return home from their diplomatic assignment, since they believed it did not contain sufficient grounds for war. Even after the documents had been made public, Jefferson accused the Federalists of unnecessarily creating a war fever, since the diplomatic skirmish could have been handled more delicately. The diplomatic communications did “not offer one motive the more for our going to war.”14 He found no reason for war “plausible enough

8

9 10 11

12 13

14

Washington to Thomas Pinckney, May 28, 1797, in: John C. Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1931–1944), Vol. 35, 452. Allen, July 5, 1798, in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 2099. Harper, June 21, 1798, in: ibid., 2024. Lloyd to Washington, July 4, 1798, in: William W. Abbot (ed.), The Papers of George Washington: Retirement Series, 4 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998–1999), Vol. 2, 376. Sedgwick to Rufus King, January 20, 1799, in: LCRK, Vol. 2, 515. See John W. Kuehl, “The XYZ Affair and American Nationalism: Republican Victories in the Middle Atlantic States,” in: Maryland Historical Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 1 (1972), 2. Jefferson to Madison, April 6, 1798, in: WTJ, Vol. 8, 403.

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to impose even on the weakest mind.”15 Jefferson insisted that the fact that some dubious agents had demanded a bribe was no legitimate ground upon which to justify a recourse to war. The “X.Y.Z. dish” had been “cooked up by Marshall, where the swindlers are made to appear as the French government.”16 In fact, however, France had “sincerely wished peace,” while it was Federalists in the Adams Administration and Congress who “wished war.”17 The Republican leadership also understood why Federalists sought armed conflict with France. War had historically been used as a means to suppress domestic dissent and in view of the international situation they had reason to believe that the current confrontation with France would be no different.18 They feared that by waging war against America’s “sister republic,” Federalists de facto joined the league of European despots and thus revealed themselves to be monarchists scheming to subvert republicanism in America. Jefferson had already predicted in 1797 that “the future character of the republic” was in danger if America waged an offensive war against her natural political ally.19 In 1798, he feared that the reason why Federalists pushed the conflict with France was a desire to prepare the public mind for “a treaty of alliance, offensive & defensive with G Britain,” which they would use to justify their attempts to remodel America’s political system after the example of the British monarchy.20 In early 1799, he expressed his conviction that Federalists desired war with France “for the chance of changing the constitution, while the people should have time to contemplate nothing but the levies of men and money.”21 Despite the fact that the Republican leadership saw through Federalists’ fabrication of the XYZ Affair right from the beginning, they could not, however, prevent serious breaks in party loyalty in the wake of mounting public pressure to take a firm stance towards France. As newspapers across the country expressed their outrage at the conduct of the French government, groups of citizens sent hundreds of petitions to Congress, in which they called for armed resistance against French

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Jefferson to Madison, March 21, 1798, in: ibid., 386–387. Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, January 29, 1799, in: ibid., Vol. 9, 27. Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, March 12, 1799, in: ibid., 63. Jefferson to Thomas Pinckney, May 29, 1797, in: ibid., Vol. 8, 293. Jefferson to Aaron Burr, June 17, 1797, in: ibid., 311–313. Jefferson to Madison, March 29, 1798, in: ibid., 392. Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, March 12, 1799, in: ibid., Vol. 9, 63.

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depredations.22 As a result, the Republican majority in Congress no longer solidly opposed Federalist war measures and Federalists were able to enact their program.23 “When the despatches from our envoys were published here,” Ames rejoiced, “the Jacobins were confounded, and the trimmers dropt off from the party, like windfalls from an appletree in September.”24 Pickering noted approvingly that “The Democrats in neither House of Congress make much opposition.”25 Despite his misgivings about the breaks in party ranks, Jefferson acknowledged that, in times of national emergency, Republicans had no choice but to support the federal government to show their commitment to the national cause. If war took place, “no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it. In that, I have no doubt, we shall act as one man.”26 In the event of war, he admitted, “we must give up political differences of opinion.”27 The Quasi-War thus changed the parameters for the debate on American identity. As France and America were at war with each other, it became increasingly difficult for Republicans to define America by positive reference to France, without appearing un-American, as Federalist newspapers kept reminding them. A Federalist from New York maintained in the Albany Centinel that “There is no middle

22

23

24 25

26 27

The petitions to the Senate are accessible in Record Group 46: Records of the United States Senate, Microform Publication M1704: Unbound Records of the U.S. Senate, 5th Congress, roll 3, SEN5A-G4: Petitions and Related Records regarding Various Subjects (National Archives and Records Administration). Unfortunately, the petitions sent to the House of Representatives were destroyed when the British burned the Capitol in 1814. The few remaining papers of the House of Representatives of the 5th Congress can be found in Record Group 233: Records of the United States House of Representatives, Microform Publication M1705: Unbound Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 5th Congress (National Archives and Records Administration), which contains only 1 roll. Another effect of the publication of the XYZ dispatches was that Federalists made electoral gains in the second half of 1798 and the beginning of 1799, faring well in state elections, even in the South, and taking control of Congress. See John W. Kuehl, “Southern Reaction to the XYZ Affair: An Incident in the Emergence of American Nationalism,” in: Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 70, No. 1 (1972), 21–49; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 588. Ames to Christopher Gore, December 18, 1798, in: WFA, Vol. 1, 245–246. Pickering to Washington, April 14, 1798, in: Abbot (ed.), The Papers of George Washington: Retirement Series, Vol. 2, 237. Jefferson to James Lewis Jr., May 9, 1798, in: WTJ, Vol. 8, 417. Jefferson to Thaddeus Kosciusko, February 21, 1799, in: TJW, Vol. 10, 116.

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course in my opinion to be pursued. I view a good citizen and a Jacobin as two incompatible beings, incapable of living in the same community, or of breathing the same air in harmony.” Those who did not renounce their attachment to France during a Franco-American war, therefore, “ought to be banished from our country. Nothing short of this can give us domestic security, and I am prepared in my own mind, as it respects internal enemies, to make it a war of extermination.”28 Porcupine’s Gazette also wished to expel Francophiles from America: “If they love France, to France let them go.”29 The New-York Gazette demanded to the same effect that Republicans who kept up their Francophilia should be excluded from the national community: “let us set a mark upon our most dangerous enemies – our internal vipers, who, even at this moment applaud and justify the unheard of injuries and insults we have received from France: Are such men to be suffered to remain among us in time of danger?” The Federalist newspaper recommended applying “their favorite instrument the GUILLOTINE as a cure for their want of patriotism.”30 During a foreign crisis, “every American,” the Knoxville Register explained, would “consider union, as the principal paramount to all others.”31 A caricature of Jefferson that appeared at the time of the Quasi-War demonstrates how Federalists, insisting that Republicans give up their attachment to France, equated Francophilia with national disloyalty (see Figure 5). It depicts the pro-French head of the Republican Party, on bended knee, trying to toss a document called “Constitution & Independence U.S.A.” into the fire that is burning on top of the “Altar of Gallic Despotism,” a reference to the French Revolution, and which is fuelled by the Republican flagships Aurora and Independent Chronicle; the radical writings Age of Reason by Thomas Paine and Ruins of Empire by Comte de Volney; French Enlightenment authors Voltaire, Rousseau, and Helvetius; the English radical writer William Godwin; and America’s former Republican minister to France James Monroe (here spelled “Munro”). American spoliations, the Dutch Republic, Flanders, Sardinia, and Venice have already been sacrificed to the altar, behind which lurks Satan and around which a serpent is wound. The American 28

29 30

31

“Extract of a letter from a gentleman of intelligence and respectability in the State of New-York to his friend near Boston, July 2d, 1798,” in: The Albany Centinel, July 7, 1798. “Philadelphia Dispensary,” in: Porcupine’s Gazette (Philadelphia), June 7, 1798. “PATRIOTICUS,” in: The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, September 30, 1797. Knoxville Register, September 18, 1798.

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figure 5: “The Providential Detection,” engraving by unidentified artist from between 1797 and 1800 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society).

eagle, however, is wresting the paper from Jefferson, as he is about to throw it into the flames, with one claw and fending him off with the other. Terrified, Jefferson drops from his right hand his letter to the Italian liberal Philip Mazzei – which had caused widespread sensation when it was reprinted in the American press, because it contained an attack on the popular George Washington. In the upper right-hand corner, the eye of God, who, according to the title, detected Jefferson’s plan and sent the

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eagle to stop him, is watching the scene. The engraving hence portrays the Republican leader as subservient to France and his radicalism as principally un-American.32 Reluctantly, Republican rank-and-file gave in to Federalist pressures and reconsidered their attachment to France ceasing to display symbols representing the French cause, as both Federalist and Republican newspapers called for unity. Before the Quasi-War, local Republicans had, for example, worn the French cockade (in blue or tricolor) to show their Francophilia. After America found herself de facto at war with France in 1798, the Federalist press warned them not to continue putting the symbol of the national enemy on their hats.33 On the Fourth of July, the NewYork Gazette insisted, “every American not meanly devoted to France in preference to his own country, is expected to wear the American Cockade [a black ribbon or rosette, which American soldiers had worn during the War of Independence] as the badge of his attachment to the government of the United States.” Conversely, “every American who wears the French Cockade or displays the French flag on that day, [shall] be looked upon by his fellow citizens as a traitor to his country.”34 The Columbian Centinel also called everyone a traitor who refused to wear the American cockade – “the ‘open and visible sign’ of federalism, and an immutable determination, in the wearers, to support the Constitution, Government, Independence and Happiness of their country.” Those who refused to mount it “must content themselves with being considered as Semproniuses – Men who bellow for their country, but who wish to betray it.”35 Republican newspapers mostly agreed with Federalist demands. The Independent Chronicle told its readers “not to think of assuming

32

33

34

35

Since his letter to Philip Mazzei was only revealed to the American public in May of 1797, the caricature could not have appeared before that time. Therefore, it is not unlikely that it was produced at the time of the XYZ Affair and the beginning of the Quasi-War. Alternatively, it could have come out during the presidential elections of 1800, in which Jefferson was running as the Republican candidate. Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 104–105; Simon F. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 162–163. “FOR THIS GAZETTE” by “INDEPENDENCE,” in: The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, May 26, 1798. Also see “NEW-YORK, May 21,” in: Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser, May 23, 1798; “FEDERAL COCKADE” by “AN AMERICAN,” in: Russell’s Gazette. Commercial and Political (Boston), July 2, 1798. Columbian Centinel (Boston), July 28, 1798.

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any badge liable to misconstruction.”36 A Republican writing in Greenleaf’s New York Journal also encouraged his fellow party members to “wear the American Cockade with the Eagle” in order to show Federalists that “we do not merit the title which they so kindly have attached to us: ‘The dupes of the French Nation.’”37 Republican local organizers also stopped flying the French flag alongside the American flag at Independence Day celebrations and using the guillotine in their parades.38 The Columbian Centinel was “happy to observe, that the French flag, which the democrats have usually hoisted with the American, on the anniversary of independence, was not seen [this year], and that the American standard only was displayed.”39 After the XYZ Affair, the erection of liberty poles surmounted by French caps, moreover, fell out of use. After the sensational dispatches had been made public, several newspapers reported about nationalistically aroused groups chopping these symbols of Francophilia down. During the Fourth of July celebrations in Hackensack, New Jersey, “the CAP – at once an obsolete and offensive symbol of our late connexion with France, and of the exploded Jacobinism of ’93, was dismounted from the Liberty Pole, carried in procession to the place destined for its interment, and after a short, but pointed funeral oration, it was committed to the cold regions of oblivion,” as the New-York Gazette noted with satisfaction.40 The Daily Advertiser rejoiced that even the Republican stronghold of western Pennsylvania was “withdrawing its support from . . . French principles” and was happy to inform its readers that a liberty pole had been erected

36 37

38 39 40

The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), July 2, 1798. “FOR THE ARGUS” by “A DEMOCRAT,” in: Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, June 6, 1798. Travers, Celebrating the Fourth, 160. Columbian Centinel. Massachusetts Federalist (Boston), July 7, 1802. “Communicated from Jersey,” in: The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, July 11, 1798. A liberty pole with a French cap was also demolished in Dedham, Massachusetts. “FALL of the DEDHAM POLE,” in: Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, Or Worcester Gazette, November 14, 1798. Even before the dispatches were published and when only rumors of a failure of the French mission made their rounds, a liberty pole erected by Republicans in Wailingford, Vermont, “was cut down, burnt to ashes, and scattered in the wind” by Federalists. “Massachusetts,” in: Greenfield Gazette. An Impartial Register of the Times, February 7, 1798. What Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser called “the notorious symbol of inveterate Jacobinism” was also removed in Morris county, New Jersey. “New-York, Aug. 15,” in: Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 17, 1798; Progress of Federalism,” in: The Daily Advertiser (New York), August 25, 1798.

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in the Republican counties of this state “only to be cut down again as a mark of their sincere penitence for their former sins and entire renunciation of former delusions.”41 Furthermore, allusions to French “brethren” and America’s “sister republic” became less and less frequent and the French revolutionary song “Ça ira” was hardly played anymore.42 The New-York Gazette was pleased to report that aroused citizens had suppressed “at our Theatres those homicidal tunes, the Marseilles Hymn, Ca Ira, and Carmagnole” and interpreted their action as a sign of “the rapid and just change of public opinion with respect to France.”43 Before the XYZ Affair, the “French and their party ruled all public places, held entertainments, marched in procession thro the streets, chaunting Carmagnole,” the Spectator reminisced. “Now the tables are turned.”44 Instead of French songs, “Hail Columbia,” written at the time, was frequently played as an unofficial national anthem to express Americans’ nationalism during the Quasi-War.45 The author of the lyrics, Joseph Hopkinson, wrote to Washington about “the great change that has taken place in the american mind, when american tunes and american sentiments have driven off those execrable french murder shouts.”46 Republicans not only refrained from exhibiting visible symbols of Francophilia during the Quasi-War; most of them explicitly revoked their previous endorsements of revolutionary France, discontinued hailing France as America’s “sister republic,” and no longer demanded an American entry into the European war on France’s side. President Adams received a vast amount of patriotic addresses from Americans all over the country, including declarations of Republicans who formally renounced their attachment to France, offered support, and pledged their lives to the defense of the U.S.47 Former Francophiles from New 41 42

43

44 45

46

47

“Progress of Federalism,” in: The Daily Advertiser (New York), August 25, 1798. Matthew Rainbow Hale, “‘Many Who Wandered in Darkness’: The Contest of American National Identity, 1795–1798,” in: Early American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003), 169. “FOR THIS GAZETTE” by “INDEPENDENCE,” in: The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, April 25, 1798. The Spectator (New York), August 11, 1798. Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), 82; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 243–244. Hopkinson to Washington, May 9, 1798, in: Abbot (ed.), The Papers of George Washington: Retirement Series, Vol. 2, 259. The addresses to the President and Adams’ replies can be found in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reels 388–390 and 119. A sample of the addresses is

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Jersey professed that “we once were attached to the French nation,” but assured him that they would never “permit our zeal for any nation to induce us to lose sight of the honour, interest, dignity & freedom of our own country.”48 The young men of Augusta in Georgia also informed the President about their new attitude towards France. “At the commencement of their revolution we regarded the French nation as engaged in a glorious and just cause . . . Viewing them in this light, we were proud of calling France a sister republic; we gloried in calling Frenchmen by the endearing appellation of brothers.” Their sentiment, however, changed fundamentally when they realized that “indiscriminate rapine and universal empire instead of peace and justice are their objects.”49 In an address to the President, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, the citizens of Montgomery county in Maryland vowed that “no previous predilections will under any circumstances induce us directly or indirectly to favor the enemies of our country.”50 Under the impression of the Quasi-War and Napoleon Bonaparte’s subsequent rise to power in France, even the most Francophilic Republicans eventually turned Francophobic and denied any similarity between the American and the French Revolution.51 Jefferson, who in 1793 had defended the violence of the French Revolution by stating that he “would

48

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printed in: William Austin (ed.), A Selection of the Patriotic Addresses, to the President of the United States: Together with the President’s Answers (Boston: John W. Folsom, 1798). For an analysis of the addresses and replies and the argument that the declarations reflected public opinion at the time, see Thomas M. Ray, “‘Not One Cent for Tribute’: The Public Addresses and American Popular Reaction to the XYZ Affair, 1798–1799,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1983), 389–412. The citizens of the townships of Amwell, Readington, and Kingwood to Adams, in: Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, May 31, 1798. The young men of Augusta, Georgia, to Adams, July 2, 1798, in: The Daily Advertiser (New York), September 6, 1798. The citizens of Montgomery county to the President, Senate, and House of Representatives, in: Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, June 8, 1798. Napoleon had seized power in France through the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, an VIII (November 9, 1799). At first, some Republicans welcomed news of Napoleon’s assumption of power, arguing that the Corse’s step had prevented a Royalist takeover, but most Republicans quickly followed Jefferson’s conclusion that Napoleon was a dictator rather than an upholder of republican values. After Napoleon had declared himself Emperor in 1804, even the most Francophilic Republicans lost sympathy for the French general. Joseph I. Shulim, The Old Dominion and Napoleon Bonaparte: A Study in American Opinion (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 79–89, 156–158. For Jefferson’s attitude towards Napoleon and Napoleonic France, see idem, “Jefferson Views Napoleon,” in: Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 60, No. 2 (1952), 288–304; Lawrence S. Kaplan, Jefferson and France: An Essay on Politics and Political Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 82–129.

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have seen half the earth desolated” rather than watch it fail,52 now told the Scottish economist John Sinclair that the “events which have taken place in France have lessened in the American mind the motives of interest which it felt in that revolution.”53 To the British chargé, he intimated that “for republican France he might have felt some interest, but that was long over, and there was assuredly nothing in the present Government of that country, which could naturally incline him to shew the smallest undue partiality to it at the expence of Great Britain or indeed of any other country.”54 Federalist newspapers welcomed Republicans’ political conversion. The New-York Gazette noted with satisfaction that “the vile Revolutionary fervor subsides, and men begin to recover from the phrenzy of their Gallic delirium.”55 The citizens of Arlington and Sandgate in Vermont told Adams that “the veil is now removed” from Francophiles’ eyes, and “the spell is broken.”56 The inhabitants of Dedham in Massachusetts were happy to observe that “by the publication of the diplomatic correspondence with France, the period of this infatuation [with France] has . . . passed.”57 The Philadelphia Gazette reported that the publication of the dispatches from America’s diplomats in Paris “have created an enthusiastic Americanism” and that, as a result, “few, very few indeed, now approbate French measures.”58 Those few that did not give up their proFrench views were marginalized in the public discourse, as the Albany Gazette found. “It is delightful to observe that the few rancorous, inveterate and Frenchified democrats who still hang on to their shattered cause, are compelled to confess their weakness and defeat, and shape their sentiments and toasts accordingly.”59 The Commercial Advertiser rejoiced in the same vein that the “clamorous and unprincipled part of the community, will now hold their tongues; and many who were only in an error thro ignorance, will now join heart and hand in repelling an enemy.”60

*** 52 53 54

55

56 57 58 59 60

Jefferson to William Short, January 3, 1793, in: PTJ, Vol. 25, 14–15. Jefferson to Sinclair, June 30, 1803, in: TJW, Vol. 10, 397. Edward Thornton to Lord Grenville, March 7, 1801, in: Public Record Office, Foreign Office Series (Photostats in the Library of Congress) 5, Vol. 32, 66. “THE EFFUSIONS OF PATRIOTISM,” in: The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, May 7, 1798. The Rutland Herald; A Register of the Times, June 25, 1798. The Universal Gazette (Philadelphia), August 16, 1798. The Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser, May 1, 1798. “DEMOCRATIC DESPONDENCY,” in: The Albany Centinel, May 11, 1798. “Extract of a letter from a merchant in Baltimore,” in: Commercial Advertiser (New York), April 23, 1798.

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Yet, while Federalists were successful in dissociating America from France, they failed to unite the nation behind their conservative political ideology. On the contrary, the Franco-American war would eventually exacerbate the political differences between Federalists and Republicans. Although most Republicans turned Francophobic during the Quasi-War and stopped defining America by positive reference to France, they continued championing democratic egalitarianism and resisting Federalist domestic policies. Calls for social equality and a more inclusive political sphere remained at the core of Republicans’ political program. Henceforth, however, they would no longer justify their demands by invoking the French example.61 As France was now the enemy of America, she could no longer symbolize Republicans’ democratic-egalitarian aspirations. Republican newspapers, therefore, began emphasizing the differences between the American and French Revolution. “It is the most cruel slander of the American revolution to say that the French resembles it,” the Independent Chronicle pointed out indignantly, arguing that “it deeply concerns the cause of republicanism throughout the world to persuade mankind that the French revolution is a stranger and a foe to” the American Revolution. “Our revolution . . . was not to acquire; it was to preserve. We had liberty enough and we resolved we would not in future submit to have less . . . France, on the contrary, was grey in slavery, debased and corrupted by it.” As “a stranger to liberty,” the French people were “unfitted for its exercise.”62 The Aurora would also come to view France as America’s antinomy lamenting that hopes that the French would follow America’s lead in erecting a durable republic had been disappointed. Defining America in opposition to France, the Aurora now beseeched Americans to view France as a negative model: “when the revolution of France shall be held up as a beacon, to warn nations of impending ruin, that of America will shine as a luminary, casting its light upon the gloom of distant and unborn time, and handing down an unceasing consolation to the desponding friends of virtue, liberty, learning, and mankind.”63 Like Federalists, Republican newspapers thus set America apart from France, but unlike Federalists, neither did they interpret the failure of the French Revolution as the result of the flaws of democratic egalitarianism nor did their more critical attitude towards France translate into a more

61 62

63

See Hale, “Many Who Wandered in Darkness,“ 168. “For the Independent Chronicle,” in: The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), August 19, 1799. “Considerations on the Organization of the Executive Departments of the Government of the U States, No. II,” in: Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), April 13, 1811.

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positive view on Great Britain.64 The Quasi-War rather led them to Americanize their political creed and champion an American exceptionalism: only in America could democratic and egalitarian ideas be put to practice. Europe, by contrast, was too much rooted in despotism to be able to maintain liberty and establish equality among its citizens, as Republicans concluded in view of the Franco-American hostilities and the fact that the French Revolution did not produce a republic comparable to the U.S. Jefferson no longer believed in the capacity of the French people for self-government and found that in France “forms of government have been attempted to which the national character is not adapted.” The best he could hope for now was that the French people would settle on a form of government “as free as their habits of thinking and acting will permit.”65 While Jefferson had argued that American liberty was dependent on the success of the French Revolution in the early 1790s, he now felt the need to set America clearly apart from France, lest the failure of the French Revolution be taken as proof that republicanism could not work in America, either. “It is very material,” Jefferson noted, that Americans were “made sensible that their own character & situation are materially different from the French; & that whatever may be the fate of republicanism there [in France], we are able to preserve it inviolate here . . . Our vessel is moored at such a distance, that should theirs blow up, ours is still safe, if we will but think so.”66 It was “impossible not to be sensible . . . that circumstances denied to others, but indulged to us, have imposed on us the duty of providing what is the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave it’s individual members.”67 Thomas McKean, the Second Governor of Pennsylvania, who had welcomed the French Revolution and had continued to do so after the French King had been decapitated, also 64

65

66 67

A contributor to the New-York Gazette calling himself “APPREHENSION” came probably close to the truth when he asserted that most Republicans would join him “in saying, ‘though I love France less than I once did, I do not love England more.’” The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, June 9, 1798. Also reprinted in: The Bee (New London), June 20, 1798; American Mercury (Hartford), June 21, 1798. Jefferson to Volney, April 20, 1802, in: Gilbert Chinard (ed.), Volney et l’Amérique d’après des documents inédits et sa correspondence avec Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1923), 128. Also see Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, February 2, 1800, in: PTJ, Vol. 31, 357–358. Jefferson to John Breckenridge, January 29, 1800, in: WTJ, Vol. 9, 106–107. Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, June 19, 1802, in: ibid., 381. For Jefferson’s belief that for the time being Americans were the only people in the world capable of self-government, see Brian Steele, Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 91–130.

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came to the conclusion that France was unfit for republicanism during the Quasi-War: “I was a friend of the revolution in France,” he later wrote to Adams, “until I clearly perceived that nation was incapable at that time of being ruled by a popular government.”68 James Jackson of Georgia told Congress to the same effect that he “believed that no democratic Republic but our own exists, or can exist.”69 Republican newspapers also went to great lengths to disconnect the American experience from developments on the other side of the Atlantic to prevent democratic egalitarianism from being delegitimized in view of the Franco-American war. Rejecting earlier Republican calls for the spread of liberty throughout the world, “A REAL DEMOCRAT” wrote in the Herald of Liberty that “to force others to be free when they do not know they have rights, or before they have learned their nature has something of chivalry in it.” Comparing Europeans to the African slaves in America, this contributor to the Republican newspaper in Pennsylvania cautioned: “There is a time for all things; minds unfit for Liberty natively continue in slavery.” Revoking his previous support for the French Revolution in light of recent events, he explained that just as Americans were aware that it was “unjust to detain the Africans in slavery,” but still knew better than “to free them all at once,” they should refrain from encouraging revolution in Europe.70 “The attempt to apply republican forms where they are inapplicable; can only discredit republicanism,” the Independent Chronicle argued. “A people unfit for liberty, has become more unfit. Tame slaves, they have become maniacs. . . Liberty has failed, and there is almost no hope left of revival.”71 Declaring the French people incapable of maintaining a republic, Republican newspapers championed the notion of an American exceptionalism, i.e. the claim that America was fundamentally different from and indeed superior to the Old World. The Republican Farmer in Connecticut praised America as the only country suited for republican government and therefore defined by its otherness from “Europe” at large. “At length, thank heaven! we’re quit of kings, / And emperors, and stupid things; / . . . Here, when

68 69 70

71

McKean to Adams, June 13, 1812, in: WJA, Vol. 10, 14. Jackson, February 25, 1803, in: AC, 7th Congress, 2nd Session, 242–243. “For the HERALD of LIBERTY” by “A REAL DEMOCRAT,” in: The Herald of Liberty (Washington), July 30, 1798. “For the Independent Chronicle,” in: The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), August 19, 1799.

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oppression’s flood of yore, / O’erwhelm’d Europe’s blood-stain’d shore, / Sweet Freedom pluck’d the olive fair, / And wav’d the precious token there!”72 Whereas the Quasi-War encouraged Republicans to renounce their attachment to France and to endorse the notion of an American exceptionalism, it prompted Federalists, by contrast, to increasingly define America by positive reference to Great Britain. Having deliberately produced a war situation to transform France from an ally into a national enemy, Federalists became increasingly consumed by the fear that the threat that they wanted the public to perceive in France now actually turned real, as the war dragged on. As a result, they came to believe that a closer rapprochement with Great Britain was vital to protect America from her enemy and considered America’s fate increasingly bound to the former mother country. As it seemed that only the Royal Navy shielded America from a French invasion, many Federalists advocated an outright alliance with Great Britain – Washington’s advice “to steer clear of permanent alliances” notwithstanding – and stressed Anglo-American familial communalities. Just as many Republicans had been prepared to join France in the European contest before 1798, an increasing number of Federalists were willing to enter the Anglo-French war on Britain’s side during the Quasi-War.73 It was not only the mounting fear that France posed a tangible threat that made Federalists seek a further rapprochement with Great Britain. The Franco-American war also made them fear internal subversions, as they were concerned that some of their domestic opponents might be in league with America’s external foe. First of all, they charged French immigrants and those Republicans who remained Francophilic with seeking to undermine the nation’s independence. Pointing to the French annexation of Belgium and parts of Germany and the creation of puppet republics in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy, Federalists argued that France sought to make America a protectorate and that pro-French Republicans and French émigrés would act as France’s fifth column.74 72 73

74

Republican Farmer (Bridgeport), January 2, 1805. For Federalists’ paranoid fears of foreign-led subversion and internal insurrection, see Marshall Smelser, “The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” in: Review of Politics, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1951), 457–482. Richard Buel Jr., America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 17; James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), 64–66.

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“Do we not know,” Representative Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts asserted, “that the French nation have organized bands of aliens as well as of their own citizens, in other countries, to bring about their nefarious purposes”? He reminded Congress that “By these means they have overrun all the republics in the world but our own . . . And may we not expect the same means to be employed against this country?”75 Federalists also dreaded the machinations of other immigrant groups that showed hostility towards Great Britain and championed democratic egalitarianism and were therefore, in Federalists’ eyes, prone to be subservient to French influence. In particular, they persistently warned of the pernicious influence of Irish immigrants, who came in ever growing numbers (particularly in the wake of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the suppression of which forced many United Irishmen to escape to the U.S.) and who tended to be strongly Anglophobic and radically democratic. The Gazette of the United States apprehended that “those United Dagger men are plotting” to subvert the federal government and turn it into “an instrument for the directory of France.”76 Federalist newspapers insisted that Irish immigrants were unfit for republicanism and consequently threatened the political stability of the U.S. The Federal Gazette found that “Wild Irishmen” were “dangerous animals” and, therefore, hoped that “such animals would remain in their own country.”77 Porcupine’s Gazette demanded that “every United Irishman ought to be hunted from the country, as much as a wolf or a tiger. – For a more bloody and remorseless band of organized assassins never polluted the fountains of society.”78 Soon enough, Federalists would view with suspicion all those who had not been born on American soil. They accused resident aliens in general of scheming “to completely stop the wheels of Government, and to lay it prostrate at the feet of its external and internal foes,” as Harper warned.79 Federalists did not so much fear that immigrants would directly assault America’s institutions but that they would spread “foreign doctrines” – i.e. democratic egalitarianism – in the U.S. and thus gradually subvert the political and social order. Viewing their own conservatism as quintessentially American, Federalists regarded immigrants who opposed them not

75 76 77 78 79

Otis, June 19, 1798, in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 1988–1989. Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, December 11, 1798. Federal Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Boston), February 24, 1798. “United Irishmen,” in: Porcupine’s Gazette (Philadelphia), November 27, 1798. Harper, June 19, 1798, in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 1991.

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as political dissenters but as national foes. Those who came to the U.S. after they had grown up abroad would “entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it, that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?” as Hamilton explained in the New-York Evening Post.80 “The mildness of our laws . . . have invited among us swarms of restless European adventurers – whose habits and customs vary extremely from those of our own, and whose moral and political sentiments are generally hostile to peace and good government,” the Portland Gazette lamented, warning that “the European contagion, . . . so subversive of order,” threatened America’s domestic peace and concluding that the influx of immigrants needed to be curbed.81 Federalists were especially concerned about the political repercussions of immigration, since it tended to be primarily the “lower sorts” who chose to leave Europe and settle in America. After all, people of a low social status were more likely to champion democratic egalitarianism and hence pose a threat to the Federalist elite. Immigrants consisted of “none but the most vile and worthless, none but the idle and discontented, the disorderly and wicked,” who came to America “in search of political preferment” believing “Any government, and all laws are now too tyrannical,” Hopkinson complained.82 “We have among us French, Germans, English, Scotch, Irish, &c.,” the Gazette of the United States noted and explained that some of them “fled from oppression, some from poverty, and some from the gallows; some who have been bred up in ignorance, some in villany, some in the bigotry of superstition, some in the delusions of infidelity, some in the chains of despotism, and some in the confusions of anarchy.” All of these immigrants were unaccustomed to republican values, the Federalist flagship argued. “Of the French, some admire the old tyranny, some the licentiousness, anarchy and insurrection of the revolution.” The Scots and Irish were no better. “Two rebellions within 30 years in Scotland, mark the strong passions and prejudices in the minds of the Scotch. Of the Irish it must be owned, that the permanent examples of riot and mischief, which they see before them at home, render 80

81

82

“The Examination No. VIII” by “LUCIUS CRASSUS” [Hamilton], in: New-York Evening Post, January 12, 1802. “ALIEN BILL, SEDITION BILL, and LAND TAX BILL” by “NUMA,” in: The Gazette (Portland), November 19, 1798. “An American” [Joseph Hopkinson], What Is Our Situation? And What Our Prospects? (Philadelphia: n.p., 1798), 19–20.

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them too often dangerous inhabitants of another country.” The newspaper concluded that immigration of discontent radicals from Europe would undermine the stability of the American republic and therefore needed to be stopped.83 Otis did “not wish to invite . . . the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility,” as he told Congress.84 Federalists, therefore, wished to limit the immigration of foreigners. During the Quasi-War, Federalists thus came to embrace a nativist version of American nationalism wishing to exclude Irish, French, and other European ethnic groups from the American nation. They came to believe that merely those born in the U.S. who had mostly Anglo-Saxon origins should be considered real Americans, as they feared that ethnic diversity equaled political heterogeneity and hence threatened to undermine the cohesion of the American nation.85 The Federal Gazette warned that immigration “has a tendency to render the manners and principles of the people of this country dissimilar, and thereby to destroy all hope of permanent union – that it has a tendency . . . to prevent the establishment of a national character.”86 Hamilton also maintained that uniformity was necessary to produce an American nationality. “To render the people of this Country as homogeneous as possible must lend as much as any other circumstance to the permanency of the Union & prosperity.”87 As he was convinced that a common ethnicity was conducive to the formation of a national consciousness, he concluded that the “influx of foreigners” – by contrast – would “tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change 83 84 85

86

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Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, September 2, 1797. Otis, July 1, 1797, in: AC, 5th Congress, 1st Session, 430. In the Federalist Papers, John Jay had already drawn a connection between ethnic homogeneity and political stability in 1787 when he claimed that Americans constituted “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” Jay, “The Federalist No. 2,” October 31, 1787, in: Jacob E. Cooke (ed.), The Federalist (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 9. At the time of the American Revolution, almost 80 percent of America’s white population was of British ancestry. This included English, Welsh, and Scottish background, but not ancestry from Ireland, which was only joined to the United Kingdom in 1801. Eric Kaufmann, “American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon Ethnogenesis in the ‘Universal’ Nation, 1776–1850,” in: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1999), 440. Federal Gazette (Philadelphia), June 28, 1798, quoted in: Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union 1774–1805 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 161. Hamilton, “Draft of George Washington’s Eight Annual Address to Congress,” November 10, 1796, in: PAH, Vol. 20, 385.

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and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities.”88 Since Federalists had come to believe that American nationalism was based on the common AngloSaxon roots of most white Americans, they became opposed to the inclusion of immigrants from diverse backgrounds into the American nation.89 Harper declared that “the time was now come when it would be proper to declare, that nothing but birth should entitle a man to citizenship in this country.”90 William Craik of Maryland would “have no objection to say, that no foreigner coming into this country after this time, shall ever become a citizen.”91 Under the impression of hostilities with France, Federalists thereby defined American nationalism in nativist terms. To set themselves apart from those they wished to exclude from the nation, they increasingly used the term “NATIVE AMERICAN” as a pseudonym in their newspaper articles.92 As Federalists came to consider foreign-born aliens – particularly Anglophobic and radical immigrants of modest means – a threat to the cohesion of the American nation, they were determined to prevent their naturalization, to limit their influence, or even to deport them in an effort to reinforce America’s existing ethnic homogeneity.93 The Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798, extended the period required for the attainment of citizenship to fourteen years, and demanded the registration of aliens with a district court or a government agent within two days after arrival. The act also prohibited the naturalization of

88

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90 91 92

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“The Examination No. VIII” by “LUCIUS CRASSUS” [Hamilton], in: New-York Evening Post, January 12, 1802. For how Federalist attitudes towards naturalization changed over the course of the 1790s, see Rogers M. Smith, “Constructing American National Identity: Strategies of the Federalists,” in: Doron S. Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (eds.), Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 19–40. Harper, May 2, 1798, in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 1567. Craik, May 21, 1798, in: ibid., 1779. See “TO THE PUBLIC” by “A NATIVE AMERICAN,” in: Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser, July 27, 1798; “For the FEDERAL GAZETTE” by “A Native American,” in: ibid., July 31, 1798; “FOR THE CENTINEL” by “A NATIVE AMERICAN,” in: Columbian Centinel (Boston), March 2, 1799. Federalists had already unsuccessfully attempted in 1797 to refuse the citizenship to potentially subversive classes by proposing to tax certificates of naturalization at twenty dollars. The “deserving part” of immigrants could pay it, Otis told the House, but the measure “would tend to foreclose the mass of vicious and disorganizing characters who could not live peaceably at home, and who, after unfurling the standard of rebellion in their own countries, might come hither to revolutionize ours.” Otis, July 1, 1797, in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 429–430.

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aliens of nations with which the U.S. was at war.94 After they had changed the naturalization procedures, Federalists also decided to allow for the deportation of aliens. The Alien Friends Act of June 25, 1798, empowered the President to expel any alien whom he considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,” and the Alien Enemies Act of July 6, 1798, authorized the President to deport enemy aliens during wartime.95 The Sedition Act was the final piece of the legislation that aimed at the “purification” of the nation. While the goal of the Naturalization and Alien Acts was to prevent foreign enemies from obtaining citizenship and to allow for their deportation, the purpose of the Sedition Act was to limit immigrants’ political influence: it imposed a fine of up to $2,000 and a penalty of up to two years in prison on persons who “shall write, print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious, writing or writings against the Government of the United States.”96 Congressman Allen denied that the federal government’s attempts to prosecute public critics of the war effort undermined Americans’ freedom of expression, since he hoped, “for the honor of human nature and of our country,” that those who tried to disturb “the peace of our Zion” were “foreigners” and not native Americans.97 Federalists emphasized that the most radical and outspoken Republican politicians and editors stirring up public opinion against the federal government, such as James Callender, Thomas Cooper, Matthew Lyon, and Mathew Carey, were immigrant aliens.98 If nativeborn Americans allied themselves to the foreign foe and thwarted the war efforts by attacking the federal government, they also became national enemies and consequently forfeited their civil rights. Republican resistance to the Sedition Act only confirmed that they had to be viewed as nationally unreliable, Federalists argued. They had been seized by “the contagion of the French mania.” Both the Alien and Sedition Acts were, 94

95 96 97 98

In 1790, Congress had passed the first Naturalization Act, which made residence of two years the only precondition for the naturalization of free whites. The Naturalization Act of 1795, adopted by both Federalists and Republicans, extended the period of residence to five years and also required the renunciation of any title of nobility and the proof of good moral character and allegiance to the Constitution. For U.S. naturalization policies in the early republic, see Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution. The Alien Acts are printed in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 3744–3746, 3753–3754. The Sedition Act of July 14, 1798, is printed in: ibid., 3776–3777. Allen, July 5, 1798, in: ibid., 2100. For foreign-born radical newspaper editors in the early republic, see Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).

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therefore, in the words of Otis, means “of purifying the country from the sources of pollution.”99 It would, therefore, be a mistake to view the Alien and Sedition Acts as partisan measures simply enacted to give Federalists a better position in the presidential elections of 1800.100 They were based on Federalists’ definition of American identity, as it had evolved under the impression of the Quasi-War, and were intended to promote American nationalism by maintaining America’s relatively high amount of ethnic homogeneity and enforcing a stronger political unity of the American nation. While Anglo-Saxonism would become an influential strand of American nationalism in the nineteenth century, in the early republic Federalists’ ethnic definitions of American identity, by contrast, contributed to their marginalization, as, in the context of a post-colonial nation seeking to develop an identity of its own, the outspoken Anglophilia resulting from their nativism raised suspicion about their national allegiance. Fearing the external threat of France and the internal subversion from immigrants, Federalists increasingly defined America in approbation of Great Britain, stressing Anglo-American communalities and expressing their affection for the former mother country. Just as Republicans had celebrated the success of French arms in the early 1790s, Federalist newspapers and local organizers now openly rejoiced at British victories. The Salem Gazette declared that Britain’s military successes would “excite the admiration and gratitude of every people unpolluted by French principle” and would “animate every nation to spirreted and well directed efforts in a cause now become common to the whole civilized world.” The Federalist newspaper strongly supported the idea of “celebrating this victory” of Lord Horatio Nelson in the Battle of the Nile, explaining that “our happiness, our existence” depended on the success of Britain in the European war.101 Doubts about Federalists’ true loyalty were also raised by their fondness for British royalty. In New Mills, New Jersey, Federalists toasted to the “King and People of Great-Britain” during the Independence Day celebrations.102 On December 1, the members of the

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Otis, June 21, 1798, in: AC, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 2018. Most editors arrested and charged with seditious libel were indeed foreign-born. John C. Miller, for example, considered the nationalistic rhetoric of Federalists mere political strategy. Miller, Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951). “Observations on Admiral Nelson’s Glorious Victory,” in: The Salem Gazette, December 14, 1798. Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), July 14, 1798.

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St. Andrew’s Society in Charleston toasted to “His Britannic Majesty” and sang “God save the King” as well as “Rule Britannia.”103 In New York, the Sons of St. George even toasted to “A happy and permanent union between Great Britain and America.”104 William Cobbett displayed portraits of English royalty in the windows of his shop.105 “[A]fter all, our connexions are nearly as close as those of Man and Wife,” he wrote emphasizing Anglo-American similarities.106 The Federalist editor and English immigrant even boasted that he “would not exchange my title of subject of King George, for all the citizenships in the Universe” – a pronouncement that Republicans would put to effective propagandistic use quoting it widely to put Federalists’ national loyalty into question.107 The transformation of the Republican and Federalist discourse on American identity during the Quasi-War thus proved politically favorable to the former and eventually led to the latter’s loss of control of the federal government in the elections of 1800.108 Before the Quasi-War, Federalists had been more convincing in portraying Republicans as attached to a foreign country, as Republicans had linked the future of the American republic to the success of the French Revolution and had been clamoring for an American entry into the European war on France’s side. After they renounced their affection for France, Republicans’ national loyalty was no longer in doubt and Federalists could not convincingly denounce Republicans as “French Jacobins” anymore. Most Federalists’ vociferous Anglophilia – fuelled by wartime fears of a French invasion and internal 103 104

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Georgia Gazette (Savannah), December 13, 1798. The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, April 25, 1798; The Centinel of Freedom (Newark), May 8, 1798; Stewart’s Kentucky Herald (Lexington), May 22, 1798. Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Cobbett in England & America, Based on Hitherto Unpublished Family Papers, 2 vols. (New York: John Lane, 1913), Vol. 1, 103n. William Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America: Pamphlets on Republicanism and Revolution, ed. by David A. Wilson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 117. Porcupine’s Gazette (Philadelphia), November 28, 1798. For quotations in Republican newspapers, see Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, March 11, 13, and 15, 1799; The Herald of Liberty (Washington), February 9, 1799; The Universal Gazette (Philadelphia), April 4 and 11, 1799. For the election of 1800, see James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (eds.), The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 – America’s First Presidential Campaign (New York: Free Press, 2007); John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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insurrection – on the other hand cast doubt on Federalists’ national allegiance. As Federalists expressed pro-British views with mounting selfconfidence, Republicans could turn the tables and now themselves accuse their opponents of being “more devoted to foreign views and foreign attachments than to the welfare of their country.”109 The Argus reminded Federalists that “patriotic ardor . . . is independent of all foreign attachments,” not just of attachment to France.110 At the end of the Quasi-War, Republicans could thus claim with greater credibility than Federalists that they had no compromised loyalties, pursued a policy of real neutrality, and were, therefore, representing the American nation. Not coincidentally, Republican writers increasingly signed their editorials with “Native American” or “True American” to set themselves apart from Anglophilic Federalists.111 Federalists who became aware that Republicans’ renouncement of their attachment to France did not go hand in hand with a renunciation of democratic egalitarianism and therefore felt the need to ally the U.S. more closely to Great Britain did not even deny the charge that they were not neutral in the European conflict, refusing to embrace definitions of American identity based on opposition to Europe at large. “Those who have too much grace any longer to advocate the French, and at the same time too much bigotry and rancor to allow any merit to the English, have assumed a perfectly neutral station, and sunk into a sort of negative being, designated by the term of true American,” the Gazette of the United States found. “Though formerly all French, they are now wholly American . . . 109

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“To THOMAS McKEAN,” in: The Daily Advertiser (New York), November 28, 1799. Republican claims became not only increasingly convincing because Federalists indeed showed their affinity for Great Britain more openly, but also because their foreign policy – seeking peace with Great Britain at any cost, but waging a naval war against France – appeared pro-British rather than truly neutral. “If peace with England was heretofore an object of desire, an accommodation with France is at present equally worthy to be courted,” the Independent Chronicle pointed out. “A New Year’s Day Review,” in: The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), January 7, 1799. Also see Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), March 19, 1799; “On Party Spirit,” in: New-Jersey Journal (Elizabeth-Town), October 15, 1799. The Argus, reprinted in: Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), June 5, 1799. See “CRISIS” by “A NATIVE AMERICAN,” in: Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, May 26, 1798; “From the Daily Advertiser” by “A NATIVE AMERICAN,” in: The Bee (New London), June 20, 1798; “BRITISH CLAIMS” by “A NATIVE AMERICAN,” in: City Gazette (Charleston), reprinted in: The Sun Dover Gazette, and Country Advertiser, October 2, 1799; “ON THE ALIEN LAW” by “A NATIVE AMERICAN,” in: The Carolina Gazette (Charleston), October 9, 1800; “ON A FREE PRESS” by “A TRUE AMERICAN,” in: Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), March 1, 1799.

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and hold themselves totally detached from every other portion of the human race, in whose affairs they disclaim any connection or discern.” The Federalist newspaper, however, did not question that the picture Republicans drew was correct, but, to the contrary, fully endorsed it and criticized Republicans for their position of neutrality, interpreting it as a sign that democratic egalitarianism – or “love of change,” as the Gazette of the United States called it – was not on the wane. After all, while Republicans’ image of France had deteriorated, their view on Great Britain did not simultaneously improve. “What then are we to think of those politicians, who are laboring to keep alive an enmity to Britain,” even though “the respectability of her constitution . . . contrasted with the democratic tyranny of France”?112 Whereas Republicans thus increasingly appeared as champions of American neutrality and hence as promoters of American nationalism, Federalists maneuvered themselves into a pro-British corner that made them lose the “high ground” on the debate over American identity. Although it seems clear why the changes in the Federalist and Republican discourse triggered by the Quasi-War (Republicans turning exceptionalist, Federalists nativist) were politically advantageous to Republicans in the long run, it is still surprising how quickly Federalists were driven from the offensive into the defensive. After all, the XYZ Affair set in motion a wave of nationalism the country had not yet seen and seemed to validate Federalists’ warnings of a French threat. To incite public outrage, Federalists did not hesitate to print and disperse 10,000 copies of the incriminating diplomatic papers Marshall had sent from Paris all over the nation.113 Pinckney’s reply to French demands for money “No, no, not a sixpence!” was made into the slogan “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” and printed by newspapers throughout the country.114 During the Fourth of July festivities of 1798, Americans tried to outdo each other in exhibiting their nationalism, newspapers throughout the country commenting favorably upon the displays of “love of country” and “unanimity” shown in response to French insults.115 “Papers from all parts of the Union

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Gazette of the United States, reprinted in: South-Carolina State Gazette, and Timothy’s Daily Advertiser (Charleston), January 17, 1799. Albert J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall, 4 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916–1919), Vol. 2, 339n. See, for example, Columbian Centinel (Boston), July 11, 1798. See The Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette, July 6, 1798; “Trenton,” in: The Spectator (New York), July 14, 1798; “Mendham, July 4, 1798,” in: The Centinel

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give evidence of encreasing attachment to the Federal Government,” the Daily Advertiser declared. “The distinction of Englishmen and Frenchmen are dying away, and love of country and an indignant spirit of resentment against the insulting propositions of the present dominant faction in France, begin to unite all parties.”116 Adams remarked in response to an address from the inhabitants of Cincinnati that “at no Period of the Existence of the United States have Evidences of the Unanimity of the People been given, so decided as on the present Question with France.”117 Naval victories in the war further promoted identification with the American nation.118 To make sense of the subsequent rapid shift in public opinion on Federalists and the war taking place in the first months of 1799, it is helpful to remember that the relative popularity and potency of an ideology such as nativist conservatism depends to a large extent on how well it is able to explain, respond to, or even predict actual historical events and developments. Put differently, while the perception of reality and reality itself can certainly diverge, they are still connected. The more observable facts an ideology can incorporate into its narrative structure, the more appealing it will be to historical contemporaries. The more material facts an ideology has to dispute and obfuscate, by contrast, the less convincing it will be. This is not to deny that facts can be interpreted very differently and given competing meanings; but in a pluralistic public sphere, promoters of an ideology are at a profound disadvantage if they are compelled to ignore or even fabricate a sizable body of empirical evidence. Applying this general insight to the analysis of the American newspaper discourse during the Quasi-War, one can state that initially Federalists were able to impress their interpretation of the international situation on the larger public and use the conflict to promote a Francophobic American nationalism because, when the XYZ dispatches were published in the spring of 1798, their warnings of a French threat seemed credible. France was a powerful nation that had the potential to attack the U.S.; there were notable French depredations on American commerce; French representatives regularly

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of Freedom (Newark), July 17, 1798; “Newbern,” in: Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, July 26, 1798. The Daily Advertiser (New York), July 12, 1798. Adams to William Henry Harrison, August 11, 1798, in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 119. The defeat of the French frigate Insurgente by the USS Constellation under the command of Thomas Truxtun on February 9, 1799, in particular led to outbursts of national pride. For the encounter, see Eugene S. Ferguson, Truxtun of the Constellation: The Life of Commodore Thomas Truxtun, U.S. Navy, 1755–1822 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 160–169.

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meddled in American domestic affairs; and French agents intrigued on the frontier in anticipation of a possible purchase of Louisiana from Spain.119 Moreover, the XYZ Affair could be construed as an attempt to make the U.S. a protectorate, since France had indeed transformed other neutral states such as the Netherlands and Switzerland into quasi-dependencies. Finally, since France – through a victory against the Austrian army – had gained predominance in Continental Europe, Federalists’ warning of a possible French invasion could not be dismissed out of hand. After all, only Great Britain remained as a formidable enemy to France, and she faced a serious bread shortage, mutinies in the Royal Navy, and financial problems. If Great Britain got out of the war, France could turn against the U.S., as Federalists warned, since currently only the Royal Navy protected the U.S. from a French invasion.120 At the turn of the year, however, the international situation, which had previously legitimized Federalists’ foreign policy, abruptly changed and made Federalists’ claims about a French menace less and less convincing. For one, in November 1798, news of Lord Nelson’s victory over the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile, fought between August 1 and 3 and giving the British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean, spread throughout U.S. Moreover, between December 1798 and March 1799, a Second Coalition against France was formed, which consisted inter alia of Great Britain, Russia, and Austria and temporarily drove France into the defensive. Both events made the prospect of an imminent French invasion of the U.S. very unlikely. In December 1798, Albert Gallatin noted that “since the French fleet is destroyed they [Federalists] cannot even affect to believe that there is any danger of French invasion.”121 On January 10, 1799, John Nicholas of Virginia criticized Federalists’ zeal “to guard against visionary dangers, which exist only in their imaginations” and told Congress that “he

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For French depredations, see Michael A. Palmer, Stoddert’s War: Naval Operations during the Quasi-War with France, 1798–1801 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 6. For French intrigues on the frontier, see E. Wilson Lyon, “The Directory and the United States,” in: American Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 3 (1938), 514–532; George W. Kyte, “A Spy on the Western Waters: The Military Intelligence Mission of General Collot in 1796,” in: Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1947), 427–442; Durand Echeverria, “General Collot’s Plan for a Reconnaissance of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, 1796,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1952), 512–520. Bradford Perkins, The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 85; Wood, Empire of Liberty, 240–241. Gallatin to his wife, December 7, 1798, in: Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1879), 223.

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did not believe there is a man in the United States who seriously dreads, or even the most distantly expects, an invasion from France.”122 Consequently, the perception of a French threat began to fade. As important as this change of the international context was, Adams’ decision to seek an end to the war with France in early 1799 had probably an even stronger impact, leading to Federalists’ rapid loss of their hegemony in the public discourse and their defeat in the elections of 1800. The reason for his willingness to seek a quick accommodation with the French government was his Anglophobia.123 Adams was quite unusual among the founding generation in that he never defined America in appropriation of either France or Great Britain in the 1790s. As one of the chief conservative ideologues in America, he was certainly not above party, sharing Federalists’ overall domestic agenda. However, his political ideology was not tied to an attachment to Great Britain. Even in his private correspondence, he would not voice preference to a British victory in the French Revolutionary Wars.124 As a result, Adams was always more critical of Great Britain than most other Federalist leaders and was opposed to an Anglo-American rapprochement that went beyond the Jay Treaty. When he was elected President in 1796, the British minister, therefore, did not rejoice, because Adams had never shown “any partiality of sentiment towards Great Britain.”125 When Adams sent Marshall, Pinckney, and Gerry to France in 1797, he sincerely wished that they would succeed in keeping peace between both nations. Unlike the so-called High Federalists – a group of Federalists led by Hamilton including Adams’ Cabinet members and Federalist leaders in the Senate, who had continuously pushed for an escalation of the FrancoAmerican conflict – he wanted to avoid war with France, as he knew that it could drive the U.S. into the arms of England. If peace could not be

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Nicholas, January 10, 1799, in: AC, 5th Congress, 3rd Session, 2600, 2603. Adams’ image of Great Britain has never been examined in detail. However, it seems likely that Adams had a particularly critical view of England not only because of his role in the American Revolution but also as a result of his experience as America’s first minister in London where he was frequently snubbed. In consequence, he did not – like most other Federalists – equate conservatism with Anglophilia. In 1812, he would be one of the few Federalists who supported the declaration of war against Great Britain. See Adams to Elkanah Watson, July 6, 1812, printed in: The Weekly Register (Baltimore), August 8, 1812. Adams to Abigail Adams, April 15 and May 5, 1794, in: L. H. Butterfield et al. (eds.), Adams Family Correspondence, 13 vols. to date (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963– ), Vol. 10, 143–144 and 164–165. Perkins, The Creation of a Republican Empire, 85.

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maintained, he would have preferred a war against both nations. “If possible we shall certainly avoid war,” he wrote to Gerry in 1797. Yet, “if a war with France cannot be avoided but by an unjust and unnecessary war with England,” he added, “I would engage in a war with . . . both together rather than prostrate our honor or surrender our Independence.”126 The tone of Adams’ message of May 16, 1797, in which he informed Congress of his decision to dispatch a special mission to France, was, therefore, much more moderate than High Federalists had hoped and Republicans had feared. Adams merely emphasized maritime preparations for a possible war and only mentioned in passing that Congress might consider strengthening the army. He also refused to recommend an embargo, alien law, and direct taxes, as his Cabinet members urged him to do.127 His proposed naval program was meant “as a psychological support for further negotiations,” as one historian put it, but not as actual preparations for outright war.128 When the publication of the XYZ dispatches gave Adams the chance to obtain an official declaration of war against France in 1798, he decided against it, fearing that an all-out war against France would automatically turn the U.S. into a junior partner of Great Britain. He had made clear from the beginning that if war broke out with France he would not agree to ally the U.S. to Great Britain. The major war aim was to disentangle America from France and no foreign assistance was needed to attain the goal.129 Once this objective was achieved – in 1799, Adams noted approvingly that France’s “charm is dissolved. Their magic is at an end in America” – he was eager to terminate the Quasi-War.130 Ending the conflict seemed all the more urgent, since the President came to realize that High Federalists were taking advantage of the wartime emergency to prepare a military and political alliance with Great Britain that he feared would undermine American independence. Concerned over the mounting attachment to the former mother country that many Federalists displayed as the war progressed, he, like Republicans, hence began warning of a “British faction” among 126

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Adams to Gerry, May 3, 1797, in: Adams Family Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 117. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 553. Marshall Smelser, The Congress Founds the Navy, 1787–1798 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), 107. Also see Manning J. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), 129. Adams to the Heads of Department, January 24, 1798, in: WJA, Vol. 8, 561–562. Adams to Pickering, August 6, 1799, in: ibid., Vol. 9, 11.

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Federalists whose unquestioned loyalty to the American nation could no longer be counted upon and concluded that the armed confrontation with France needed to be stopped to prevent a fateful Anglo-American rapprochement.131 At the time Adams started considering putting an end to the hostilities with France, Gerry returned from Paris on October 1, 1798.132 Three days later, he told a receptive President about the discussions he had held with Talleyrand, after Marshall and Pinckney had left Paris. When the French Foreign Minister had learned that America was in fact taking the XYZ Affair as a pretext to engage in warfare with France, he had given up all demands for money and bribes and had assured Gerry that no preconditions would have to be met for a renewal of official negotiations.133 Before Gerry had left France, Talleyrand, moreover, had informed him that the Directory had issued a decree on July 31, which revoked the commission of privateers in the West Indies. On August 16, the Directory also lifted the embargo against American ships in French ports. In October, Adams also received information from Murray that Talleyrand was seeking compromise with the U.S. Murray had been reassured by Louis Pichon, a French diplomat in The Hague, that Talleyrand “was solicitous for accommodation.”134 In his speech to Congress on December 8, 1798, Adams, therefore, asserted that he would send another minister to France if he obtained “determinate assurances that he would be received” and thus effectively opened the door to peace negotiations.135 In early February 1799, Adams subsequently received the reassurances of Talleyrand that he had asked for.136 Furthermore, the decree

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For Adams’ accusation that High Federalists were in fact a “British faction,” see Hamilton to Adams, August 1, 1800; Hamilton to Oliver Wolcott Jr., August 3, 1800; Oliver Wolcott Jr. to Hamilton, September 3, 1800, in: PAH, Vol. 25, 51, 54, 106–107. The argument presented in the next two paragraphs largely follows the analysis provided by DeConde, The Quasi-War, 152–187; Albert Hall Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy during the Federalist Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 347–379; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 608–623. Gerry to Pickering, October 1, 1798, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 207. Murray to Adams, July 17, 1798, in: WJA, Vol. 8, 680. For Murray’s conversations with Pichon, also see Peter P. Hill, William Vans Murray, Federalist Diplomat (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971), 103–115. Adams, “Speech to Both Houses of Congress,” December 8, 1798, in: Adams, WJA, Vol. 9, 130. Murray sent Adams a letter from Talleyrand to Pichon, in which the French Foreign Minister declared that “whatever plenipotentiary the Government of the United States might send to France, to put an end to the existing differences between the two countries,

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of October 29, 1798, which called for treating Americans aboard British ships as pirates, was revoked.137 On February 18, 1799, Adams, therefore, informed Congress that he nominated William Vans Murray as minister plenipotentiary to the French republic.138 Consequently, the perception of a French threat immediately faded and Federalist displays of Anglophilia seemed out of place. Federalists wishing to prolong the war with France were incensed about the President’s decision to resume negotiations with France at this moment. Ames explained that “War is not desired for its own sake” but to promote a Francophobic nationalism and complained that just as “We begin to feel a little patriotism” and “France is neither loved nor trusted,” Adams quenched the war fever.139 In the Senate, Federalists – determined to continue the war – tried to defeat the mission intending to question Murray’s competence. Before they could vote down the nomination, however, Adams sent another message to the Senate on February 25 nominating a three-man commission in Murray’s stead. It was to consist – besides Murray – of Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and Patrick Henry of Virginia.140 As Federalist Senators could not challenge the capacity of all three, they relented and confirmed the mission on February 27.141 When Henry declined his appointment, Adams chose Governor William R. Davie of North Carolina to take his place.142 Not only did the military cooperation with Great Britain die once the peace mission was on its way to Paris; the perception of a French threat that had underpinned Federalists’ Francophobic foreign policy also

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would be undoubtedly received with the respect due to the representative of a free, independent, and powerful nation.” Talleyrand to Pichon, le 7 Vendemiaire, an VII (September 28, 1798), in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 239. For the revocation of the decree, see Adams to the House of Representatives, February 15, 1799, in: ibid., 238. Adams to the Senate, February 18, 1799, in: ibid., 239. Ames to Pickering, March 12, 1799, in: WFA, Vol. 1, 253–254. Adams to the Senate, February 25, 1799, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 240. SEJ, Vol. 1, 318–319. Henry to Pickering, April 16, 1799, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 241. SEJ, Vol. 1, 326. In an effort to sabotage the mission, Pickering drew up the instructions in such a way that he was “morally sure” that no agreement would be found. Pickering to King, March 12, 1799, in: LCRK, Vol. 2, 558. However, his hope was thwarted when the American ministers decided not to adhere to all of Pickering’s the sine qua non stipulations in the negotiations in Paris. The instructions to the American commission can be found in Pickering to Ellsworth, Davie, and Murray, October 22, 1799, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 301–306.

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disappeared.143 In a desperate attempt to keep up fears of a French menace, High Federalists invented stories about alleged French invasion schemes that obviously bore no substance in fact and were immediately recognized as a hoax. When they came up with the Taylor Plot – the false assertion that a large amount of French military clothing, a sign for an upcoming French invasion, had been confiscated in Philadelphia – and the Tub Plot – the rumor that a Frenchman with secret dispatches from the Directory, hidden in a tub, was about to descend on American soil to ignite a slave rebellion – and the Ocean Plot – the lie that French privateers had allegedly boarded the “Ocean” and killed every one they could find on the American merchant vessel – their credibility was seriously undermined.144 The Herald of Liberty called the Taylor Plot a “flagitous misrepresentation” and “one of the grossest artifices to keep alive and extend the prejudices against the French we have ever witnessed,” finding it “shocking, so to sport with truth and peace.”145 According to the Constitutional Telegraph, “a desperate British faction” made up “the most absurd and ridiculous accounts” in order to undermine “every measure that will have a tendency amicably to settle the unhappy dispute between the United States and the French republic.”146 These transparent lies designed to create a public panic which would allow for an extension of the war with France made High Federalists appear as a clique who tried to erect a dictatorial regime under the guise of a foreign threat – just as Republican leaders had warned all along. Hamilton’s plan to use the army to conquer Louisiana and Florida from Spain before France could take them and also to liberate South America from Spanish rule made Republicans as well as Adams fear that Hamiltonian Federalists were 143

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For the Anglo-American military cooperation during the Quasi-War, see Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795–1805 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955), 95–98; George W. Kyte, “Robert Liston and Anglo-American Cooperation, 1796–1800,” in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 93, No. 3 (1949), 259–266; idem, “Guns for Charleston: A Case of Lend-Lease in 1798–1799,” in: Journal of Southern History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1948), 401–408. For the Taylor Plot and the Ocean Plot, see Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969), 326–327. For the Tub Plot, see Miller, Crisis in Freedom, 146–150. “On the Spreading of False Alarms by the Gazette of the United States,” in: The Herald of Liberty (Washington), May 20, 1799. The Aurora tried to tell the story of the Taylor Plot “without laughing.” “THE TAYLORS’ PLOT,” in: Aurora, General Advertiser (Philadelphia), April 30, 1799. “COMMUNICATION” by “A Friend to Religion,” in: The Constitutional Telegraph (Boston), November 16, 1799.

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intending to use the army for domestic purposes and for reuniting America with the former mother country. Adams warned that “Hamilton & a Party were endeavoring to get an Army on foot to give Hamilton the command of it & then to proclaim a Regal Government, place Hamilton at the Head of it & prepare the way for a Province of Great Britain.”147 As the French threat had disappeared, the feeling of unity generated by the Quasi-War gave way to fierce partisan conflict, as both Adams and Republicans accused High Federalists of seeking to escalate the Franco-American conflict in an attempt to seize power by military means. A war begun to unite the nation behind their conservative ideology ended in a peace that raised doubts about many leading Federalists’ republicanism and national loyalty. Although the Quasi-War eventually exacerbated the party struggle and led to Federalists’ marginalization, it fulfilled a significant, yet frequently neglected, role in the formation of an American national identity. The naval conflict successfully disentangled America from France and prompted Republicans to renounce their attachment to what they had previously called America’s “sister republic” and instead to unequivocally identify with the American nation. Taking into account that Federalists had commenced the war in order to promote a Francophobic version of American nationalism, one has to conclude that their major war aim was achieved, even though the conflict did not lead to a strengthening of conservatism in America but rather to the eventual demise of the Federalist Party as a viable force in national politics. Viewed in this light, the Convention of 1800 officially ending the QuasiWar looks brighter than in a narrowly diplomatic perspective. At the time, it was not received with much joy in America. Most Federalists having been unhappy with the peace mission from the start only reluctantly decided to ratify the treaty and Republicans having opposed the war from the beginning pointed to the fact that two years of hostilities had not resulted in any material benefits.148 Historians have tended to follow the critical verdict reached in 1800 and evaluated the convention as a diplomatic failure. Forrest McDonald, for example, interpreting the negotiations as a zero-sum game between both sides, concluded that “the United States had been removed as one of France’s antagonists, had resumed the carrying of vital goods to France, and had sacrificed the valid spoliation claims of its citizens in the

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Gerry, “Minutes of a Conference with the President,” March 26, 1799, in: Elbridge Gerry Papers (Library of Congress), reel 1. For the contemporary reaction, see Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 662.

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amount of $12 million,” whereas, in exchange, America “received nothing except a cessation of the hostilities that France had momentarily lost the capacity to sustain.”149 Since the Quasi-War was primarily waged for domestic purposes, however, judging the peace treaty merely by what had been achieved diplomatically misses the point.150 Since the early 1790s, Federalists had continuously wished to disentangle America from France and invalidate the Treaty of Alliance, which diplomatically bound the U.S. to France and substantiated Republican claims that France and America were political siblings. In the negotiations at Mortefontaine, Federalist diplomats, therefore, prioritized the formal nullification of the alliance – they spoke of the “former treaty” that they did not wish “to renew or amend.”151 The French commission, which consisted of Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, Pierre-Louis Roederer, and Charles-Pierre Claret de Fleurieu, however, argued that the “treaties of friendship and commerce” were still “existing,” i.e. in effect, as they hoped to keep it as a symbol of diplomatic legitimacy for Napoleonic France.152 As it became clear during the negotiations that France simply lacked the financial resources to pay indemnities for seizures of American ships, the American envoys decided to exceed their instructions and agree to a treaty that postponed the settlement of American claims in exchange for France’s 149

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Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 347. For critical evaluations of the Convention of 1800, also see Jacob E. Cooke, “Country above Party: John Adams and the 1799 Mission to France,” in: Edmund P. Willis (ed.), Fame and the Founding Fathers (Bethlehem: Moravian College, 1967), 73–77; Henry Adams, History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 9 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891–1896), Vol. 1, 370. For the negotiations of the Convention of 1800, see Albert Du Casse (ed.), Histoire des négociations diplomatiques relatives aux traités de Mortfontaine, de Lunéville et d’Amiens, 3 vols. (Paris: E. Dentu, 1855), Vol. 1, 177–357; E. Wilson Lyon, “The Franco-American Convention of 1800,” in: Journal of Modern History, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1940), 305–333; DeConde, The Quasi-War, 223–258; Hill, William Vans Murray, 174–194; Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality, 391–414; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 683–687. Ellsworth, Davie, and Murray to Bonaparte, Fleurieu, and Roederer, April 11, 1800, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 315. Bonaparte, Fleurieu, and Roederer to Ellsworth, Davie, and Murray, le 19 Germinal, an VIII (April 9, 1800), in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 314. Murray noted that the French commissioners were “extremely hurt at the [suggested] dissolution of Treaties” arguing that the American position “that though the Treaties be dissolved yet we are not in War” was contradictory. Murray, “Journal,” April 9, 1800, in: William Vans Murray Papers (Library of Congress), reel 1. For the French insistence that the “ancient treaties” were still effective, also see Bonaparte, Fleurieu, and Roederer to Ellsworth, Davie, and Murray, le 23 Germinal, an VIII (April 14, 1800), in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 316.

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acquiescence in their demand to abrogate the Treaty of Alliance.153 The Convention of Mortefontaine, signed on October 3, 1800, then restored “a firm, inviolable, and universal peace,” established rules for the prevention of future maritime conflicts (e.g. elimination of the role d’équipage), reinstated useful provisions of the earlier treaties and the Consular Convention of 1788, placed port privileges on a most-favored-nation status, and asserted the principle of “free ships, free goods.”154 At first, it was rejected by the Senate on January 23, 1801. Yet, as Federalist office-holders could neither maintain their opposition nor prolong the war without further eroding their political base, and since they feared that if a Republican administration had to renegotiate the treaty the results would even be worse, they changed their mind and the Senate finally ratified the treaty by 22 to 9 votes on February 3.155 The Quasi-War had thus fulfilled its purpose: it had officially disentangled the U.S. from France. In this perspective, the Convention of 1800 was symbolically rather than materially significant. Finally, an assessment of the Quasi-War requires acknowledging that the dissociation from France was a precondition for the Louisiana Purchase.156 After Jefferson, who became U.S. President in 1801, learned that France had acquired the Louisiana Territory from Spain, 153

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The French diplomats “refuse compensation,” but in return “they give up Treaties,” as Murray explained in his Journal, July 23, 1800, in: William Vans Murray Papers (Library of Congress), reel 1. He admitted that the American position that there was “No Open War” and that simultaneously the Treaty of Alliance was no longer in effect was not easily reconcilable. To make the French government agree to a suspension of the alliance, the American negotiators had to “defer – not abandon indemnity,” even though he was aware that the claims would be “Lost in fact forever.” Ibid., September 20, 1800. For the American commissioners’ suggestion to postpone the discussion of the indemnities, see Ellsworth, Davie, and Murray to Bonaparte, Fleurieu, and Roederer, September 13, 1800, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 339. The Convention of Mortefontaine is reprinted in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 295–301. AC, 6th Congress, 2nd Session, 775–778. The Senate, however, insisted on expunging the second article on the postponement of the negotiations of American claims for indemnities from the Convention – a change Napoleon accepted only on the condition that “the two states renounce the respective pretensions which are the object of the said article.” The U.S. thereby effectively surrendered its claims with regard to French seizures of American ships and cargoes that occurred before 1800. ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 344. See George A. King, “The French Spoliation Claims,” in: American Journal of International Law, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1912), 830–857. The best treatment of the diplomacy of the Louisiana Purchase is still Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976). Equally important are volumes 2 and 3 of Henry Adams’ classic History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

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he immediately sought to acquire New Orleans, since the possession of the Crescent City seemed necessary to control the entire Mississippi River through which Western settlers exported their products.157 To convince Napoleon to sell the Mississippi River Delta to the U.S., he had America’s ministers in Paris and Madrid, Robert R. Livingston and Charles Pinckney, threaten the French Emperor with war in 1802 if the issue of Louisiana was not settled in America’s favor.158 In January 1803, he asked James Monroe – who was sent to Paris to support Livingston – to repeat the warning.159 He also told Livingston that he was willing to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”160 While it cannot be discerned with certainty whether Jefferson’s threats of war prompted Napoleon to sell Louisiana or whether it was the failure to re-establish effective control over SaintDomingue or the impending war with Great Britain, there is no doubt that he was informed about the frequent threats of war which Jefferson intimated to France’s minister, Pichon, and that these threats were an incentive to sell Louisiana (as Napoleon’s plan for building a new colonial empire in North America had been based on the assumption that the U.S. would at least temporarily accept such an endeavor and not seize New Orleans in a preemptive strike before France could bring Louisiana under her effective control).161 Significantly, Jefferson was only able to take such a decisive stance against French possession of Louisiana and

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More recent studies include Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Frank W. Brecher, Negotiating the Louisiana Purchase: Robert Livingston’s Mission to France, 1801–1804 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006). The first official news the Jefferson Administration received about France’s secret deal with Spain on Louisiana was a letter from Rufus King, America’s minister in London, to Secretary of State James Madison, which arrived on March 29, 1801. Charles A. Cerami, Jefferson’s Great Gamble: The Remarkable Story of Jefferson, Napoleon and the Men behind the Louisiana Purchase (Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2003), 37. Jefferson to Livingston, April 18, 1802, in: WTJ, Vol. 9, 364–367; Jefferson to M. Dupont de Nemours, April 25, 1802, in: Dumas Malone (ed.), Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, 1798–1817 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 46–49. Jefferson to Monroe, January 13, 1803, in: WTJ, Vol. 9, 419. Also see Jefferson to Livingston, February 3, 1803, in: ibid., 442. Jefferson to Livingston, April 18, 1802, in: ibid., 365. See Pichon to Talleyrand, le 12 Nivôse, an X (January 2, 1802); le 18 Messidor, an X (July 7, 1802); le 2 Nivôse, an XI (December 23, 1802); and le 29 Pluviôse, an XI (February 18, 1803), in: Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères: Correspondence Politique, États-Unis (Photostats in the Library of Congress), Vol. 54, 17r–17v, 413r; Vol. 55, 125r–126r, 300r.

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credibly threaten France with war and an Anglo-American alliance, since Republicans had renounced their attachment to what they had previously considered America’s “sister republic” and had stopped defining America in approbation of France during the Quasi-War. In 1798, the Federalist leadership had sought war with France in order to unite the divided country behind a Francophobic version of American identity. The war situation did indeed force Republicans into a dichotomous situation in which they had to choose between loyalty to the nation and attachment to France. As a result, Republicans mostly renounced their Francophilia and stopped defining America in approbation of France during the Quasi-War such that Federalists’ endeavor to disentangle America from France was largely successful. This is not to say that Republicans’ Francophobia matched their Anglophobia or that Francophilic expressions could not be heard again after Franco-American relations ameliorated after the transfer of Louisiana to the U.S. and the settlement of the remaining American claims in 1803.162 However, if there were still sentiments of Francophilia among Republicans, they were usually no longer ideologically charged. By 1800, France had ceased for Republicans to be an example worth emulating. Ironically, their very success in disentangling America from France undermined Federalists’ political dominance, as the perception of an imminent French threat encouraged them not only to seek a further rapprochement with Great Britain but also to increasingly define America by positive reference to the former mother country, thus raising doubts about their own national allegiance. At the end of the war with France, therefore, Republicans championed the notion of American exceptionalism, which in the early republic primarily meant detachment from Europe, whereas Federalists stressed Anglo-American commonalities. Instead of Federalists’ conservatism, which was intrinsically tied to Great Britain, becoming hegemonic, their opponents’ democratic egalitarianism, which Republicans no longer linked to the French Revolution but hailed as quintessentially American, emerged as the dominant national ideology.

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In Articles 4 and 5 of the Convention of 1800, both governments had agreed to restore property that was captured but not yet condemned and to pay the debts owed to the other nation or its citizens. In the Convention of April 30, 1803, the U.S. government then agreed to assume the claims of American citizens to France resulting from these articles to the extent of twenty million livres as part of the Louisiana Purchase. The Convention of 1803 is reprinted in: ASP:FR, Vol. 2, 508.

5 Republicans and the Origins of the War of 1812

At first sight, America’s declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812 poses a stupefying puzzle.1 Officially, the war was begun to protect America’s neutral rights and the safety of American sailors. Both had been violated by the former mother country during the Napoleonic Wars through the order-in-council of 1807, which led to the abuse of U.S. foreign trade, and the practice of pressing seamen from American merchant ships into service in the Royal Navy on the high seas. Most historians have therefore focused on maritime factors when seeking to explain the origins of the Anglo-American conflict.2 Surprisingly, however, it was predominantly Southern and Western members of Congress who voted for war, while the majority of Northern Representatives and Senators voted against it. This seems paradoxical because America’s seafaring industry, which was most directly affected by British depredations of American international trade and impressments of American seamen, was concentrated in the Northern states.3 Admittedly,

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For a discussion of this historiographical puzzle, see Jasper M. Trautsch, “The Causes of the War of 1812: 200 Years of Debate,” in: Journal of Military History, Vol. 77, No. 1 (2013), 274–278. Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961); Reginald Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962); Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); J. C. A. Stagg, The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); William Earl Weeks, Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Moreover, Republicans, who were the ones to push the war issue, deeply mistrusted merchants engaged in overseas trade, as they had doubts about their national loyalty and feared that they could use their wealth to exert a disproportionate and baneful

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merchants, shippers, and sailors engaged in transatlantic trade were not the only Americans distressed by Britain’s interference with American trade. Many Southern and Western farmers exporting their produce to Europe also suffered from the British blockade of the European Continent, as it depreciated prices for some of their products.4 However, if the main goal of Congress had been to promote the export of agricultural goods, imposing an embargo and declaring war against America’s major trading partner was illogical. Not only would Americans no longer be able to sell their crops to the British, but during the war the powerful Royal Navy would also face no legal restraints at all when capturing American merchantmen on the high seas and bringing America’s foreign trade to a standstill. It would have been more rational to renew the commercial provisions of the Jay Treaty or negotiate an even more favorable trade agreement with the main purchaser of American produce. Moreover, if free access to the European markets had been the major war aim, the hostilities should have ended soon after the American government learned that the order-in-council responsible for the abuse of American trade had been rescinded.5 Other historians therefore went beyond the maritime issues in their analyses of the war and identified more cynical motives guiding American foreign policy in 1812. They claimed that America’s official war aims – the defense of neutral rights and the protection of American sailors from British impressment – disguised the war’s real objective. Allegedly, the Madison Administration and a congressional majority wanted to take

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influence on the public councils. To go to war to protect the commercial interests and profits of merchants was therefore incompatible with Republicans’ political views. For this reason, Britain’s minister, Augustus John Foster, was perplexed that Republicans were willing to go to war to seek a repeal of the orders-in-council, while at the same time they usually spoke of merchants only with the greatest contempt. Augustus John Foster, Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America, Collected in the Years 1805–6–7 and 11–12, ed. by Richard Beale Davis (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1954), 93–94. George Rogers Taylor, “Prices in the Mississippi Valley Preceding the War of 1812,” in: Journal of Economic and Business History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1930), 148–163; idem, “Agrarian Discontent in the Mississippi Valley Preceding the War of 1812,” in: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1931), 471–505; Margaret Kinard Latimer, “South Carolina – A Protagonist of the War of 1812,” in: American Historical Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (1956), 914–929. Two days before President Madison signed the declaration of war on June 18, 1812, Lord Castlereagh, Great Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, announced in Parliament that the controversial order-in-council would be suspended. Unfortunately, news of the British government’s intention to revoke its offensive decree reached America too late to prevent the declaration of war, as it took almost two months for the information to arrive at Washington.

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advantage of Great Britain’s distress and take British North America – today’s Canada – from her, whilst she was fully occupied with preventing Napoleon from assuming control of all Europe. Not coincidentally, the proponents of the expansionist thesis argue, Congress chose to declare war on Great Britain at the exact moment that Napoleon invaded Russia, as they believed that the French Emperor’s campaign would be successful and thus deprive Great Britain of its last ally in Europe. The fact that the U.S. primarily fought the war by repeatedly attempting to invade Canada instead of waging a naval war against the Royal Navy and thus addressing the source of the maritime issues directly seems, at first sight, to support their argument that the War of 1812 was an attempted land grab.6 While illuminating the enthusiasm for war in the West, the expansionist interpretation, however, is also not fully adequate to make sense of the war declaration, since it fails to explain why Northerners mostly opposed the war. After all, an acquisition of Canada would have been highly advantageous to New England, as its sectional weight would have significantly increased through the admission of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into the union. The expansionist thesis also leaves it unclear why most Southerners, who in turn could have had little interest in annexing Canada to the U.S., voted for war.7 While for some legislators the conquest of Canada might have been the major reason for seeking armed conflict and for many others it became a popular war aim once the conflict had started, the majority of those who declared war considered the invasion of Canada above all a means of 6

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For the expansionist thesis, see Howard T. Lewis, “A Re-Analysis of the Causes of the War of 1812. Parts I and II,” in: Americana, Vol. 6, No. 5 and 6 (1911), 506–516 and 577–585; Louis Morton Hacker, “Western Land Hunger and the War of 1812: A Conjecture,” in: Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1924), 365–395; Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Andrew Lambert, The Challenge: Britain against America in the Naval War of 1812 (London: Faber & Faber, 2012). J. C. A. Stagg connected the expansionist to the maritime interpretation by claiming that Madison wished to wrest Canada from Great Britain, since he believed that British access to Canadian foodstuffs and timber had undermined Republicans’ embargo policy in 1807. Without being able to rely on Canada for compensating the loss of U.S. trade, the British government, the President hoped, would be more likely to give in to American demands in future. Stagg, “James Madison and the Coercion of Great Britain: Canada, the West Indies, and the War of 1812,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1981), 3–34. Even a simultaneous acquisition of Florida, which Julius W. Pratt claimed Southerners desired, would not have made up for the increased weight of the North resulting from an annexation of British North America. Moreover, Pratt’s evidence for an alliance of Western and Southern expansionists to this effect was thin. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812 (New York: Macmillan, 1925).

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carrying out the war against Great Britain.8 As Americans were unable to effectively challenge the Royal Navy, they chose to attack Great Britain at her weakest side, the long Canadian–American border being difficult to defend.9 Possibly the major war aim of many bellicose Westerners and certainly a handy side benefit of a victorious campaign in the eyes of many war supporters in general, the acquisition of Canada was most likely not the main reason why Congress sought armed conflict with Great Britain in 1812.10 A solution to the puzzle regarding the causes of the conflict can be found if the declaration of war is interpreted as a political rather than a sectional event. The congressional voting record makes clear that party allegiance played a larger role than regional background in determining whether legislators voted for war against Great Britain or not.11 Most state delegations in Congress split their votes on the war question. As a result, the war vote would not have carried in the House without the votes of representatives from north of the Delaware River. In the Senate, the declaration of war would not have found a majority if New England Senators had unanimously opposed it. A clearer picture, by contrast, emerges when looking at the party affiliation of legislators. No Federalist in either branch of Congress voted for war. It was exclusively Republicans who supported the declaration of war (83 percent in the House and 73 percent

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Nicole Eustace recently showed that Republican propagandists generated support for the war by linking territorial expansion to demographic growth and national power: once the war had begun the displacement of the Native populations became a goal that united white Americans of all stripes. However, her analysis is not concerned with the causes of the war. Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Clifford L. Egan, “The Origins of the War of 1812: Three Decades of Historical Writing,” in: Military Affairs, Vol. 38, No. 2 (1974), 72–75; Reginald Horsman, “The War of 1812 Revisited,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1991), 115–124; Reginald C. Stuart, War and American Thought: From the Revolution to the Monroe Doctrine (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1982), 135. For a thorough refutation of the claim that the War of 1812 was an expansionist war, see Richard W. Maass, “‘Difficult to Relinquish Territory which Had Been Conquered’: Expansionism and the War of 1812,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2015), 70–97. On the voting behavior, see Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, “Party Unity and the Decision for War in the House of Representatives,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1972), 367–390; Donald R. Hickey, “Letter to the Editor,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1973), 371–373; Rudolph M. Bell, “Mr. Madison’s War and Long-Term Congressional Voting Behavior,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 3 (1979), 373–395.

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in the Senate).12 To explain the origins of the War of 1812 it is therefore necessary to examine why Republicans – rather than Southerners and Westerners – voted for it. Inquiring into the political origins of the war declaration, one is tempted to apply the analysis of the causes of the Quasi-War to the War of 1812 and argue that – just as Federalists provoked war with France in 1798 in order to disentangle America from her French ally and thereby discredit democratic egalitarianism – Republicans wished that armed conflict with Great Britain would disentangle America from her former mother country and undermine conservatism in 1812. Indeed, this is exactly what the next chapter sets out to do. However, before delving into a discussion of what Republicans hoped to accomplish in the War of 1812 once it had broken out, it is necessary to reconstruct how they came to declare it, because – unlike Federalists who deliberately instigated a foreign war and deceptively blamed France for it – Republicans did not intentionally seek military conflict but felt forced to enter into armed hostilities with Britain, which they did only reluctantly and with great apprehensions.13 To understand how the heterogeneous coalition that formed the Republican Party and was made up of groups with competing interests, such as the protection of slavery, the acquisition of more farmable land in the West, and the expansion of commercial opportunities abroad, came to a shared belief that a war against the former mother country was necessary in 1812, it is warranted to reconstruct the deeper ideological foundations of Republicans’ foreign policy.14 In the most general terms, the juxtaposition of a republican America and a monarchical Europe determined Republicans’ perspective on world affairs after Napoleon had usurped power in France and America hence remained the only large republic left in the world, as the last chapter demonstrated. Yet, an 12

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Donald R. Hickey, “The Federalists and the War of 1812” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1972), 341–342. For the reluctance of Republican Representatives to declare war, see Roger H. Brown, “The War Hawks of 1812: An Historical Myth,” in: Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 60, No. 2 (1964), 137–151. By unraveling the larger ideological driving forces of Republican foreign policy, this chapter complements studies that are concerned with the more immediate political factors prompting the war declaration such as Republicans’ fears that Americans might lose faith in the efficacy of republican government or throw their support behind Federalists again if Republicans were unable or unwilling to stand up to the former mother country. See Roger H. Brown, The Republic in Peril: 1812 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); Richard Buel Jr., America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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ideological opposition to Europe and in particular to Great Britain, which had epitomized monarchical government to Republicans since the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, per se does not explain why the U.S. and Great Britain should find themselves in military conflict with each other. After all, it is conceivable that states with different political systems find a peaceful modus vivendi, if they do not have clashing interests that set them at odds with one another. Republicans’ attitude towards Great Britain, however, was complicated by a set of assumptions about the nature and foreign conduct of monarchies that led to a perception of British enmity, precipitating an uncompromising foreign policy towards the former mother country and consequently an escalation of tensions, which in turn resulted in a stronger perception of threat. This edifice of ideas, which underlay Republican foreign policy and fuelled the dynamic that eventually made war inevitable, could be called the theory of republican peace.15 Plans for a permanent peace had been suggested repeatedly since the Renaissance. These usually called for a European federation or a European council, in which all member states would be represented and which would arbitrate disputes between them.16 It was, however, only in the mid-eighteenth century that Baron de Montesquieu and JeanJacques Rousseau first contended that the form of government was the most important variable in determining whether a state was prone to wage wars. They argued that absolute monarchies depended on wars for their existence, whereas republics were inherently peaceful. “The spirit of monarchy is war and enlargement of dominion; peace and moderation

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Nowadays, the term “democratic peace theory” is used to refer to claims that democracies are less bellicose than non-popular forms of government and that they do not tend to wage war against each other. However, when dealing with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the term “republican peace theory” is more suitable, since peace theorists at the time spoke of republicanism (with its separation of powers, rule of law, and limited franchise) and not of democracy (with its universal suffrage and more direct forms of popular participation) as the solution to the problem of war. See Sylvester John Hemleben, Plans for World Peace through Six Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 87–95; James Turner Johnson, The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 193–198. See Elizabeth V. Souleyman, The Vision of World Peace in Seventeenth and EighteenthCentury France (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1941), 20–28; Hemleben, Plans for World Peace through Six Centuries, 31–41, 97–100; F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 13–45.

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are the spirit of a republic,” as Montesquieu put it succinctly in 1748.17 Rousseau – in a revision of the “perpetual peace”-plan of Abbé de SaintPierre – also linked Europe’s frequent wars to the imperatives of the monarchical form of government in 1761. “The whole life of kings . . . is devoted solely to two objects: to extend their rule beyond their frontiers and to make it more absolute within them.” The ministers the King appointed were – according to Rousseau – also “in perpetual need of war, as a means of making themselves indispensable to their master.”18 While neither Montesquieu nor Rousseau suggested that republicanism alone would be a sufficient precondition for world peace, particularly in view of their belief that republics could only work in city-states but not in larger territorial states, their claim that republics were by nature more peaceful than monarchies became widely accepted among European intellectuals in the second half of the eighteenth century.19 Even though it has been a matter of debate as to how much influence French philosophers had on American political thought in the revolutionary period, there is little doubt that the writings of Montesquieu and – to a lesser extent – those of Rousseau were fairly well known among America’s founding generation.20 In 1776, moreover, the main tenets of 17

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Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, transl. by Thomas Nugent, 2 vols. (New York: Hafner, 1959), Vol. 1, 127–128. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe and the State of War, transl. by C. E. Vaughan (London: Constable, 1917), 95, 100. In political science literature, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant is usually credited with developing the foundations for the modern democratic peace theory, because he argued in his “Perpetual Peace” essay that in republics those who had the power to declare war were also the ones who would have to pay the costs of – and would have to risk their lives in – the ensuing conflict and would hence refrain from taking such a step unless in self-defense. However, while Kant’s treatise was a brilliant synthesis of Enlightenment thought about how to achieve permanent peace, the claim that republics had a peaceful nature was not his invention but had already become popular before his essay was published in 1795. Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1795). See Paul M. Spurlin, Montesquieu in America, 1760–1801 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941). Donald Lutz found that in colonial British North America no other authority on government was quoted more often than Montesquieu. Donald Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” in: American Political Science Review, Vol. 78, No. 1 (1984), 189–197. Jefferson, for example, copied several excerpts from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in his commonplace book. See James F. Jones Jr., “Montesquieu and Jefferson Revisited: Aspects of a Legacy,” in: French Review, Vol. 51, No. 4 (1978), 577–585. For Rousseau, see Paul M. Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1976). For the interest that Kant’s “perpetual peace” essay generated in the U.S., see The Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser, August 22, 1796;

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the theory of republican peace became widely dispersed among the populace through the political activist and author Thomas Paine, who in his pamphlet Common Sense criticized monarchical institutions not only for their domestic tyranny but also for their international aggression.21 “In the early ages of the world . . . there were no kings; the consequence of which was, there were no wars,” he claimed, finding that only the ambitions and pride of monarchs had brought this scourge upon mankind.22 In his pamphlet Rights of Man, published in 1791, Paine continued to argue that once “Monarchical sovereignty, the enemy of mankind, and the source of misery, is abolished; and sovereignty itself is restored to its natural and original place, the Nation . . ., the cause of wars would be taken away.”23 Since Paine’s pamphlets were widely read – after two months of its first publication in January 1776 already 100,000 copies of Common Sense had been sold in America – and since his style of writing was easily comprehensible, a large proportion of the American people became acquainted with the theory of republican peace.24 Most Federalists rejected the claim that republics were more peace loving than monarchies, since they were convinced that the sources of war did not lie in a particular form of government but were rooted in human nature. “The seeds of war,” Hamilton held, “are sown thickly in the human breast.”25 Referring to the ancient democracies of Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage, which had often rushed to war out of ambition, he found that “There have been . . . almost as many popular as royal wars.” Consequently, he called on Americans to disregard “those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses and evils incident to society in every shape.”26 Jay was also convinced that “While there are knaves and fools

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City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Charleston), August 31, 1796; The Minerva, & Mercantile Evening Advertiser (New York), February 15, 1797; The Salem Impartial Register, April 13, 1801; Vermont Gazette (Bennington), November 29, 1802; Essex Register, August 27, 1807. See Thomas C. Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet: Tom Paine’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations,” in: International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2000), 51–72. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1776), 13. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1791), 78. David M. Fitzsimons, “Tom Paine’s New World Order: Idealistic Internationalism in the Ideology of Early American Foreign Relations,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1995), 569n. Hamilton, “Defense of the Funding System,” July 1795, in: PAH, Vol. 19, 56. Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 6,” November 14, 1787, in: Jacob E. Cooke (ed.), The Federalist (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 28–36.

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in the world, there will be wars in it.”27 Adams concurred expressing his belief that “wars are the natural and unavoidable effects of the constitution of human nature.” He therefore considered “all the speculations of divines and philosophers about universal and perpetual peace as shortsighted, frivolous romances.”28 He went even further, arguing that popular democracies were more likely to declare wars than monarchies, because they would more easily give in to feelings of resentment and nationalistic passions.29 In their rejection of the republican peace theory, Federalists could draw from Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith and from the Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli who had argued that wars were caused by humans’ desire to maximize their possessions in a world of limited resources and that republics did not change human nature but, on the contrary, encouraged citizens to follow their acquisitive instincts.30 While Federalists dismissed plans for a “perpetual peace” developed by European philosophers, most Republicans, by contrast, internalized the assumptions of the republican peace theory. The belief that republics were peaceful and monarchies belligerent indeed formed one of their core convictions. Philip Freneau explained in the Freeman’s Journal that monarchical power and the kings’ desire for fame were the causes of wars. “All wars are in a great measure produced by regal pride, generated by regal power; monarchs are the children of dischord, and to humour their ambition the world is for ever in a state of distraction . . . The stupid notions, also, of fame and unfading immortality have incited many to become monsters and

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Jay to Gouverneur Morris, September 24, 1783, in: Henry P. Johnston (ed.), The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 4 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1890–1893), Vol. 3, 84. Adams to Benjamin Rush, July 7, 1812, in: John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair (eds.), The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1966), 228. Adams, “Comments on Mary Wollstonecraft,” quoted in: Zoltán Haratzi, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress: A Study in the Intellectual and Political History of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 204. On the influence of David Hume and Adam Smith on eighteenth-century America, see Mark G. Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005); Samuel Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Reception among the American Founders, 1776–1790,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2002), 897–924. On the American reception of Machiavelli, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

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murderers.”31 The monarchical form of government was thus to blame for the frequent wars in Europe, as he asserted in the National Gazette. “Monarchy . . . is the fuel that supports the flame of discord in this world, that sets man against man to their mutual destruction.”32 In an article for the Jersey Chronicle, he concluded that it was “from false forms of government that the far greater part of human miseries and human vices are derived.”33 The Independent Chronicle also alleged that “Kings owe their origin to war.”34 Summing up this view more drastically, the Aurora claimed that “Despotism is the slaughter-house of the people.”35 Lasting peace could consequently only be achieved by replacing monarchies by republics. As the participants of a public celebration of Washington’s birthday in Boston put it in 1793: “Universal Liberty” was “the harbinger of universal and perpetual peace.”36 In an article entitled “UNIVERSAL PEACE,” Madison also argued that wars were caused either by non-republican forms of government or by the possibility of financing wars by incurring debt such that only after all monarchies were transformed into republics and if each generation was “made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expence of other generations,” would “the temple of Janus . . . be shut, never to be opened more.”37 Convinced that the theory of republican peace was accurate, Republicans drew two far-reaching conclusions. For one, they believed 31

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Anonymous [Freneau], “The Pilgrim, No. 16,” in: The Freeman’s Journal: or, the NorthAmerican Intelligencer (Philadelphia), June 19, 1782. Anonymous [Freneau], “For the NATIONAL GAZETTE,” in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), April 20, 1793. Anonymous [Freneau], “TOMO CHEEKI, the CREEK INDIAN in Philadelphia, No. III,” in: Jersey Chronicle (Mount Pleasant), June 13, 1795. “The Free Republican III,” in: The Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), December 8, 1785. “Considerations on the Organization of the Executive Departments of the Government of the U. States, No. I” by “Minos,” in: Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), April 13, 1811. Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), March 6, 1793. Anonymous [Madison], “UNIVERSAL PEACE,” in: National Gazette (Philadelphia), February 2, 1792. Armin Mattes emphasized the similarities between Madison’s “Universal Peace” article and Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” essay. The fact that Madison and Kant came to the same conclusions, even though they had not read each other’s work, demonstrates how widely known the theory of republican peace was in the late eighteenth century. Mattes, Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 106–114.

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that America as a republic was naturally pacific and, unlike Europe’s monarchies, could have no desire to attack foreign countries in search of glory, conquest, and riches. “Peace is the interest of all Republics, and war their destruction,” as Senator James Jackson of Georgia stated, inferring that “Peace . . . has been the ruling policy of the United States through all her career.”38 The House Committee formed to formulate a position in regard to the Louisiana Purchase noted that “Princes fight for glory, and the blood and treasure of their subjects is the price they pay.” By contrast, “in the United States the people rule.” As a result, the U.S. government’s “object is the happiness of man.”39 In this “land of liberty and peace,” the Political Observatory exulted, the rulers kept “aloof from the destructive turmoils and vindictive enmities of European powers,” because they were bound to consult “only the welfare of their constituents.”40 In fact, America was defined by her very peacefulness. Senator John Adair of Kentucky believed that peace was “the soul of our Government.”41 The Public Advertiser proclaimed that “We are a peaceful people.”42 To Jefferson, America was a “peace establishment.”43 Allegories representing America as a land of peace, such as the 1789 frontispiece for the Philadelphia Columbian Magazine, were therefore very common after the American Revolution (see Figure 6). On the lower left, it shows Columbia sitting under a palm-tree, “the emblem of Peace,” as the artist’s explanation offered in the magazine makes clear, around which a laurel wreath, a symbol for victory, is wound and against which a liberty pole is leaned. She rests her right arm on a shield bearing the Great Seal of the U.S. with a bald eagle holding an olive branch, another symbol for peace, in its left talon (the eagle also holds a bundle of arrows as a sign of America’s military preparedness, but by turning its head towards the olive branch it expresses a preference for peace). In her left hand, Columbia is holding a book as a sign of her education. Below her is a globe, representing her commerce; books, her science; a cornucopia, her prosperity; and a bow and arrows, her agriculture, as the artist’s explanation clarifies. The latter are also an attribute of the

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Jackson, February 23, 1803, in: AC, 7th Congress, 2nd Session, 149. “Report on the Louisiana Purchase,” January 12, 1803, in: ibid., 373–374. Political Observatory (Walpole), May 18, 1805. Adair, February 14, 1806, in: AC, 9th Congress, 1st Session, 108. “Investigator,” in: The Public Advertiser (New York), April 28, 1809. Jefferson to William Plumer, April 2, 1806, in: William Plumer, Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807, ed. by Everett Summerville Brown (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 470.

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figure 6: “America! With Peace and Freedom Blest,” etching by John Trenchard published in Vol. 3 of The Columbian Magazine; or, Monthly Miscellany in 1789 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

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Greek god Apollo who sits on a cloud opposite Columbia on the right holding a lyre, a symbol for the arts. As a prophetic deity, he points to the Temple of Fame in the background foretelling her a glorious future. “America! with Peace and Freedom blest, / Pant for true Fame, and scorn inglorious rest,” as the poem underneath the allegory reads. America appears as a republic engaged in peaceful pursuits such as trade, sciences, and arts and incapable of starting wars of aggression waged for national aggrandizement, territorial gain, or plunder. The fact that America waged a war against the French republic between 1798 and 1800 did not undermine Republicans’ belief in the theory of republican peace and America’s inherent peacefulness, as they interpreted the war as having been instigated by monarchical Federalists against the wishes of the American people. Americans could not be for war, Jefferson was convinced, since it would be “their sweat” that would “earn all the expences of the war, and their blood which” would “flow in expiation of the causes of it.”44 However, Federalists, who “wished war, . . . for the chance of changing the constitution,” manipulated the peace-loving people into believing that France posed a threat to make them support the war. “The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful manœuvres, & made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves.”45 However, once Federalists’ lies were exposed, so Jefferson’s interpretation continued, peace was re-established and “the nation” chased the warmongering monarchists from office replacing them with pacifically minded republicans in what he would later call the “revolution of 1800.”46 The other conclusion that Republicans drew from the theory of republican peace was that Europe had to be naturally aggressive. When the French Revolution failed, Republicans’ previous optimism about the possible attainment of a “perpetual peace” gave way to a pervasive fear that the monarchical forces would now seek to wipe out the American republic. It seemed logical to them that America, as the only republic left, would become the next target of counterrevolutionary forces. Interpreting the international sphere as being shaped by a universal struggle between

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Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799, in: WTJ, Vol. 9, 24. Also see Jefferson to Pinckney, May 29, 1797, in: ibid.,Vol. 8, 293. Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, March 12, 1799, in: ibid., Vol. 9, 63. Also see Jefferson, “The Anas,” in: ibid., Vol. 1, 181–182. Jefferson to Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819, in: ibid., Vol. 12, 136.

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republicanism in America and despotism in Europe, Republicans came to feel beleaguered and threatened. “From the very nature of things, all monarchical and despotic Governments must always be inimical to, and seek the destruction of, this Government, while it remains a free one,” James Fiske of Vermont told Congress.47 Republicans feared Great Britain in particular. On the one hand, as the leader of the monarchical alliance against revolutionary France in the 1790s, she had come to symbolize the established order, making Republicans conclude that Great Britain, as America’s former mother country, also had to scheme to re-conquer her lost colonies.48 On the other hand, because the Royal Navy exerted enormous power on the Atlantic Ocean and Great Britain and, through British North America, was a direct neighbor of the U.S., she was more capable of attacking the U.S. than any other monarchy. France, by contrast, no longer posed a threat to America after Napoleon had agreed to sell Louisiana to the U.S. Moreover, she did not provoke as much political resentment among Republicans as Great Britain, since, even under Napoleon, France did not represent monarchical government or even stand for a conservative ideology. After all, the French Emperor did not restore the privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy and legitimized his grasp of power through popular referendums.49 As a result, Republicans’ paranoid fears of 47 48

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Fisk, March 9, 1812, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 1189. Republicans frequently ridiculed British efforts to depict their struggle against Napoleonic France as a fight for liberty against universal despotism pointing to the large mass of Britons who lived under deplorable conditions and to the brutal subjugation of the Irish. Thus perceiving the former mother country as a tyranny rather than a parliamentary monarchy with a strong tradition of individual rights was a necessary precondition for them to believe that Great Britain posed a threat to the U.S. See Cornelius P. Van Ness, An Oration Delivered at Williston, July 4th, 1812, to a General and Very Numerous Meeting of the Republicans of Chittenden County (Burlington: Samuel Mills, 1812), 22–23. See Joseph I. Shulim, The Old Dominion and Napoleon Bonaparte: A Study in American Opinion (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 152–153, 163–164. Napoleon put the Constitution of the Year VIII (1800), which made him First Consul for ten years, the Constitution of the Year X (1802), which made him First Consul for life, and the Constitution of the Year XII (1804), which made him Emperor, to popular vote. Martin Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 111–114. Most Republicans, therefore, imagined Napoleonic France to meander somewhere between monarchism and republicanism, Monroe explaining that, on the one hand, “the armies . . . constitute the actual govt. of France,” but that, on the other hand, Napoleon “protects” French republicans “against the restoration of the Old Régime.” Monroe to unknown, June 21, 1804, quoted in: ibid., 155. Consequently, they were undecided whether they should be concerned about French intentions or not. If France leaned towards republicanism, she would be pacific, as the

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monarchical belligerence focused on Great Britain. “Every new occasion seems to countenance the belief that there lurks in the British Cabinet a hostile feeling towards this Country, which will never be eradicated . . . but by some dreadful pressure from external or internal causes,” as Madison told America’s minister in London.50 Since Republicans were convinced that the British government had hostile intentions towards the U.S., they attributed every foreign-policy problem America encountered to sinister British machinations.51 They were convinced, for example, that the violent clashes that frequently occurred along the frontier were stirred by the British. Instead of linking the problems with the Indians to the aggressive expansion of white settlers, which would have required Republicans to reassess their assumption that citizens of a republic were naturally peace loving, they blamed British intrigue. The Independent Chronicle found that “it is not rational to conclude that the Indians would have taken up arms against us, had they not been instigated by British mercenaries.”52 The Weekly Register also claimed that Great Britain was encouraging Indian resistance against American settlers. “We have had but one opinion as to the cause of the depredations of the Indians – which was, and is, that they are instigated and supported by the British in Canada, any official declaration to the contrary notwithstanding.”53 This perception was not confined to newspapers but was shared by Republican policy makers. Madison, for example, was convinced that Britons were stirring up Indians against the U.S., although the British officially disavowed that they had anything to do with Indian frontier raids.54 “It cannot be believed by any man who will reflect, that the savage tribes, uninfluenced by other Powers, would think of making war on the United States,” Republican Representative Felix Grundy maintained. It was clear to him that Great Britain “must have

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Richmond Examiner speculated. However, if she moved towards monarchism, she would “pursue the illusory phantom of grandeur, through the murderous paths of war and conquest.” The Examiner (Richmond), December 1, 1801, quoted in: Shulim, The Old Dominion, 107. Madison to William Pinkney, May 23, 1810, in: Gaillard Hunt (ed.), The Writings of James Madison, 10 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1900–1910), Vol. 8, 100. For Republicans’ paranoid fears of a British conspiracy to destroy the U.S., see Lawrence A. Peskin, “Conspiratorial Anglophobia and the War of 1812,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 98, No. 3 (2011), 647–669. Independent Chronicle (Boston), December 5, 1811. Also see Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), December 10, 1811. The Weekly Register (Baltimore), March 7, 1812. Also see The Reporter (Lexington), March 14, 1812. Stuart, War and American Thought, 98.

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intrigued with them, and turned their peaceful disposition towards us into hostilities.”55 In fact, however, there is no proof that British policy makers had aroused Indians against American settlers. On the contrary, “the Cabinet tried to prevent war between Indians and frontiersmen,” as a diplomatic historian examining the British sources made clear.56 The perception that Great Britain bore an ill will towards the American republic also made Republicans believe that the British government had given the Barbary pirates “permission” and, in fact, encouraged them to attack American merchantmen in the Mediterranean. Greenleaf’s New York Journal claimed that the British “instigated the Algerines and savages to cut our throats.”57 The Columbian Phenix also found that “there was too much reason to believe that she had incited the Indians and Algerines to make war upon us.”58 The Staunton Political Censor likewise accused the British of “corruptly bribing the Algerines to attack some of the American vessels.”59 There is, however, no evidence in the diplomatic records that Great Britain concluded a truce with the Algerian corsairs in order to instigate them to prey on American commerce.60 Adamant in their belief that Great Britain pursued malignant designs against the U.S., Republicans also interpreted her maritime policies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars not as being primarily motivated by a desire to defeat France but as part of a plan to destroy the U.S.61 It was two policies in particular that Republicans interpreted as proofs of British hostility: Britain’s interference with neutral trade and the British practice of impressment. As a primarily naval power, Great Britain could not defeat France on land but she could seriously disrupt her

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Grundy, December 9, 1811, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 425. Perkins, Prologue to War, 285. Also see J. Leitch Wright Jr., Britain and the American Frontier, 1783–1815 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 111. “For the New York Journal,” in: Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, March 21, 1795. “On the Election of President No. IV,” in: The Columbian Phenix (Providence), October 8, 1808. Staunton Political Censor (Staunton), June 22, 1808. See Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005), 183; Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 195–196. Peskin showed that Republicans – apart from misinterpreting the nature of British maritime policies – also falsely accused the British of sabotaging American manufacturing, bribing U.S. newspaper editors, and buying shares of the Bank of the United States in an effort to initiate a gradual re-colonization process. Peskin, “Conspiratorial Anglophobia,” 654–655.

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maritime trade by capturing French merchantmen in the hope of economically forcing her enemy to surrender. England’s naval strategy, however, would be undermined if neutrals, such as the U.S., took up the trade that French ships could no longer engage in.62 This is exactly what happened: after Great Britain and France resumed their war in 1803, American exports to Europe skyrocketed and about half of the increase in foreign trade resulted from the lucrative re-export trade, as Americans not only sold their home-produced goods such as wheat, flour, rice, fish, cotton, and timber but also transported goods produced in France’s and her allies’ colonies in the Western Hemisphere like sugar, coffee, and cocoa to Europe.63 In 1805, Great Britain therefore began to enforce the Rule of 1756, which stipulated that a trade closed in time of peace could not be opened in time of war and which was meant to prevent American merchants from transporting goods between France and her colonies in the West Indies (pursuing mercantilist policies, France had not opened her colonial ports to America until the Royal Navy swept her merchant marine from the oceans).64 Republicans, however, interpreted the Essex decision of 1805 – by which the High Court of Admiralty had declared that Great Britain would no longer accept America’s re-export trade between France and her colonies, even if American ships interrupted their voyage with a stop at an American port – as part of an insidious plan to put a halt to the rising prosperity of the U.S.65 Republicans in Salem complained that the British government was using wartime exigencies as “a mere pretext for predatory seizures.”66 Republican Representative Barnabus Bidwell of Massachusetts told Congress he believed that “Great Britain is acting upon a systematic calculation, and with a design to engross the commerce of the world.”67 To Senate Republicans, the Essex decision constituted a virtual declaration of war

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For British justifications of the Rule of 1756, see James Stephen, War in Disguise; or, The Frauds of the Neutral Flags, 4th edn. (London: C. Whittingham, 1806). Curtis P. Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 233–236. The weakness of the American position with regard to the re-export trade is revealed by Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 193. The Essex decision is reprinted in: William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford (eds.), The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (Washington: Naval Historical Center, 1985–2002), Vol. 1, 17–20. “Memorial of the Inhabitants of Salem to the President, Senate, and House of Representatives,” in: The Democrat (Boston), January 29, 1806. Bidwell, March 8, 1806, in: AC, 9th Congress, 1st Session, 654.

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by a hostile Great Britain that wished to strike a deadly blow to America.68 Economic warfare played an even larger role in the European conflict after 1806, as the war between France and Great Britain had turned to stalemate and hence took on a more indirect character. On October 21, 1805, at Trafalgar, the Royal Navy under the command of Lord Nelson had decisively defeated the combined navies of France and Spain, gaining unchallenged maritime supremacy along the entire French and Spanish coast. Napoleon’s army in turn first defeated the combined armies of Britain’s continental allies at the Battle of Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, and then the so-called Fourth Coalition at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt on October 14, 1806. Britain had effectively lost all of its major allies in Europe and Napoleon had become the unchallenged master of the European Continent. As Great Britain – without allies – could not challenge the mighty Grande Armée on the Continent and as Napoleon – having lost most of his fleet – could not invade England, each nation tried to defeat the other by economic means. Napoleon issued the decree of November 21, 1806 (the so-called Berlin Decree), which proclaimed a blockade of the British Isles, prohibited all trade and correspondence with Great Britain, and defined all articles of English manufacture or produce as lawful prize, even when owned by a neutral. The British retaliated with the order-incouncil of January 7, 1807, forbidding coastal trade with France and her allies, and the order-in-council of November 11, prohibiting all neutral ships from heading towards French-controlled ports, from which British vessels were banned, unless they passed through a system of British controls and taxes. The aim of these orders-in-council, which were enforced through a blockade of parts of Europe’s west coast, was to force France and her allies to open their ports again to British trade.69 Republicans, however, interpreted British wartime policy as being primarily motivated by a desire to harm America, put an end to her prosperity, discredit her republican form of government, and subdue her

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See Senate, “Report on British Aggressions,” February 12, 1806, ibid., 91. Also John Adair, February 14, 1806, ibid., 108. For the orders-in-council, see Perkins, Prologue to War, chapters 6–7; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, chapters 6–8; Hickey, The War of 1812, 17–19. Napoleon reacted to these orders-in-council by issuing the decree of December 17 (the socalled Milan Decree), stating that any ship submitting to British controls (visits and searches by British cruisers) and taxes or stopping at a British port would be treated as an enemy vessel.

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back into a colonial status. The “government of England” was not only “[j]ealous of our commercial advantages and progress” and “[j]ealous of our manufacturing progress,” but also “[j]ealous of our form of government and neutrality” and therefore “pursued an uniform system of masque hostility” towards the U.S., as the Aurora asserted.70 “The motives of the British ministers there can be no doubt of, are to have a color of excuse for keeping in force their orders in council. Not because they are injurious to France, for that illusion, like many others, has cured itself, but that they are destructive to American commerce,” the Republican flagship noted.71 According to the National Intelligencer, the purpose of the orders-incouncil was “not so much to retaliate on their enemy, as to monopolize the profits of the trade of the world, either by exclusively possessing it themselves, or by rendering what they do not themselves posses tributary to them.”72 Importantly, it was not just Republican newspapers that interpreted British policies in this fashion; Republican leaders such as Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe also believed that they were part of a plan to undermine American sovereignty and independence.73 In fact, however, the U.S. was “totally irrelevant to a Europe still in the throes of a great war,” as the historians Spencer C. Tucker and Frank T. Reuter put it.74 While the British government certainly viewed the U.S. as a commercial rival and therefore welcomed that its naval policies benefitted British merchants at the expense of American traders and shippers, their primary purpose was to help Great Britain win the war against Napoleonic France.75 The second issue that troubled Anglo-American relations and seemed to confirm Republican fears of British hostility was the British practice of impressment – forcing seamen into service – on the high seas.76 British 70 72 73

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71 Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), July 4, 1807. Ibid., October 26, 1811. National Intelligencer & Washington Advertiser, November 25, 1808. See Jefferson to Madison, April 19, 1809, and October 15, 1810, in: WTJ, Vol. 11, 106 and 150; Madison to Monroe and William Pinkney, May 20, 1807, in: Hunt, The Writings of James Madison, Vol. 7, 444–445; Monroe to General Armstrong, March 11, 1806, in: Stanislaus Murray Hamilton (ed.), The Writings of James Monroe, 7 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1898–1903), Vol. 4, 427–428. Spencer C. Tucker and Frank T. Reuter, Injured Honor: The Chesapeake–Leopard Affair, June 22, 1807 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 38. The British government, moreover, viewed the U.S. as a possible threat to British North America and hoped to erect barriers to further U.S. expansionism. See Troy Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For the practice of impressment generally, see Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Charlottesville:

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naval superiority, which alone protected Great Britain from an invasion of Napoleon’s superior army, depended on a steady influx of able-bodied seamen into her Royal Navy. In consequence, British law allowed any British male to be drafted into service at any time.77 As American trade profited immensely by the opportunities the war in Europe offered, the U.S. also felt a shortage of tars. Since the pay and working conditions on American merchant ships were much better than in the Royal Navy – with its harsh code of discipline, brutal punishments, poor food, bad medical care, its low pay, and the risk of dying in combat – thousands of British sailors deserted (when their ships anchored at an American port or when an American ship was in a British port) and enlisted in the American merchant marine.78 As a result, almost half of the seamen employed on American ships were Britons.79 The British government was convinced that it had to reclaim these deserters and prevent future absconsion in order to be able to keep up its war against France. As they could not impress these men on American territory or on American warships (which were considered an extension of the national territory), press gangs on British warships frequently boarded American merchant vessels on the high seas under cover of the belligerent right of search to look for British subjects. If they found deserters, they forced them back into service.80 Since it was difficult to distinguish between Americans and Britons – both looking alike and speaking the same language with no distinctive American accent having yet developed – and since deserters would hardly acknowledge their true identity, it could happen (and regularly did happen) that an all-too-eager British captain mistakenly impressed American seamen. The British, however, never claimed the right to impress Americans and as soon as the mistake had been revealed they released the Americans they had taken. In fact, impressment of foreign seamen was expressly forbidden by

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University of Virginia Press, 2013). On the impressment of American seamen, see most fully James Fulton Zimmerman, Impressment of American Seamen (New York: Columbia University, 1925); Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights. Walter R. Borneman, 1812: The War that Forged a Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 19–20; Perkins, Prologue to War, 86. Tucker and Reuter, Injured Honor, 62. This was the estimate of the Secretary of the Treasury in 1807. Albert Gallatin to Madison, April 13, 1807, in: James Madison Papers (Library of Congress), reel 25; Gallatin to Jefferson, April 13, 1807, in: Henry Adams (ed.), The Writings of Albert Gallatin, 3 vols. (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1879), Vol. 1, 332. Britain would also impress British seamen from American ships in British ports (a practice the American government did not protest) but would never claim the right to impress seamen in American territorial waters or from American warships. Perkins, Prologue to War, 88–89.

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statute.81 Nonetheless, just as Republicans were unwilling to accept British interferences with neutral trade during the Anglo-French war, they showed no sympathy for Britain’s need for impressment, because they did not consider it a part of Britain’s war strategy against France, but rather a hostile measure towards the U.S. intended to undermine American sovereignty and independence. What made the issue even more explosive than the conflict over neutral rights was the fact that it complicated the development of an American identity. On the one hand, by reminding Americans that there was little that set them apart from Britons, it reinforced their post-colonial anxieties about their lack of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic distinctiveness, which was particularly painful to Anglophobic Republicans. On the other hand, it undermined their efforts to define themselves in opposition to their internal racial Others (an endeavor particularly important to slaveholders in the South who were predominantly Republican), because impressment bore semblance to the enslavement of Africans and thus seemed to demote white Americans to a status similar to that of black slaves.82 The Weekly Register, for example, likened the practice of impressment to “the business of negro-stealing on the coasts of unfortunate Africa.”83 Benjamin Waterhouse, an American surgeon who had been imprisoned by the British, bitterly complained after his release that, after boarding U.S. ships, British officers “would muster the crew, and 81

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Scott Thomas Jackson, “Impressment and Anglo-American Discord, 1787–1818” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1976), 53. The fact that Great Britain and America had different conceptions of citizenship, however, complicated the matter. The British government held up the principle that an Englishman could not dispose of his British citizenship. The American government in turn insisted that American citizenship could be acquired according to U.S. naturalization laws. As a result, both the British and the American government could lay claim to the same person. See Anthony Steel, “Anthony Merry and the Anglo-American Dispute about Impressment, 1803–6,” in: Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1949), 339; Denver Brunsman, “Subjects vs. Citizens: Impressment and Identity in the Anglo-American Atlantic,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2010), 557–586; Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015). Neatly capturing Americans’ double-edged sensitivity about their national identity that the dispute over impressment brought to light, the Weekly Register claimed, in an exercise of wishful thinking, that “A white man and a negro are not more certainly distinguishable from each other, than many persons impressed are from British subjects.” “The Point in Controversy,” in: The Weekly Register (Baltimore), January 9, 1813. “Impressed Seamen,” in: ibid., April 18, 1812. Also see ibid., September 26, 1812.

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examine the persons of the sailors, as a planter examines a lot of negroes exposed for sale.”84 By forcing American tars into service, the British hence questioned the existing racial hierarchies within the U.S.85 Simultaneously – and equally significantly – the racial implications of impressment also challenged American efforts to become an equal member of the “civilized world,” as the impressment of Americans and thus their relegation to a status similar to that of African slaves seemed an outright refusal by the British to treat white Americans in the same way they treated Europeans on the other side of the Atlantic. America’s chargé d’affaires in London complained to Lord Castlereagh that, on the one hand, “Great Britain discovered such zeal for the abolition of the [slave] traffic in the barbarous and unbelieving natives of Africa,” and that, on the other hand, “she could so obstinately adhere to the practice of impressing American citizens, whose civilization, religion, and blood, so obviously demanded a more favorable distinction.”86 The Lexington Reporter found that the practice of impressment found “no parallel amongst either savage or civilized nations – save those on the coast of Guinea whose principal trade is in the carcases of each other” – and that therefore no “civilized” nation could accept it without forfeiting “the privileges, or even the name of a republic.”87 Principled resistance to the practice was therefore necessary if Americans 84

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Benjamin Waterhouse, A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts (Boston: Rowe and Hooper, 1816), 65. While Republicans challenged Britain’s practice of impressing white sailors, because it undermined the racial foundation of black slavery in the U.S., they supported British efforts to eliminate the slave trade. After all, the Royal Navy searching American merchant ships under belligerent right of search and then taking black prisoners from slave ships and selling them on or transporting them back to Africa posed no challenge to slavery as such, since British efforts to eliminate the slave trade would not be associated with schemes to emancipate slaves until the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. In fact, the U.S. government attached little significance to the international slave trade. Even Southern slaveholders were not too interested in the trade, as, in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, they feared that if the black population in America became too large, slave insurrections would become more likely. As a result, all American states had prohibited the importation of slaves even before the national interdiction of their importation in 1808 (the fact that South Carolina allowed the slave trade again in 1803 being due to special circumstances relating to the Louisiana Purchase). For U.S. cooperation with Great Britain to bring an end to the international slave trade in the early republic, see Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 145–177. For South Carolina’s re-opening of the slave trade after the Louisiana Purchase, see Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2002), 263–290. Jonathan Russell to Monroe, September 17, 1812, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 3, 594. The Reporter (Lexington), December 10, 1811.

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were to remain attached to their nation. As the Independent Chronicle argued in a widely reprinted article, “if America be only a great nursery to replenish the navy of Great Britain, as Africa is to swell the black list of her colonial slavery,” Americans might just as well “call upon Kings and Nobles to save us.”88 Consequently, it was not only Republican newspapers and congressmen from the slaveholding South that called for energetic action against impressment; Republicans from the Middle States and New England, too, connected impressment to slavery and interpreted it as an exclusion of the U.S. from the “civilized world” that needed to be steadfastly resisted. America’s minister in Russia, John Quincy Adams from Massachusetts, for example, found that the impressment of seamen was “in all its most heinous features identically the same crime” as the slave trade.89 According to James Elliot of Vermont, impressed American seamen were even “in a state worse than that of African slavery.”90 The American Advocate from Maine also claimed that the impressed American seamen were “held in worse than barbarian slavery by Great Britain.”91 Insisting on a complete end of impressment on the high seas – this “badge of slavery,” as Jefferson called it – hence became a matter of foremost national importance, whereas any compromise on the issue that would indicate an American acquiescence in the practice could, so Republicans feared, very well destroy the fragile pillars on which American nationality was built.92 Any suggestions as to how the issue could have been, if not solved, at least mitigated – for example, by forbidding the recruitment of British subjects on American ships, imposing penalties on shippers who did not succumb to this regulation, and installing a system of citizenship papers that made forgery difficult – were consequently 88

89

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“Wallace, No. 2,” in: Independent Chronicle (Boston), September 19, 1811. The article was reprinted in Rhode-Island Republican (Newport), September 25, 1811; Columbian Phenix: or, Providence Patriot, September 28, 1811; New-Hampshire Patriot (Concord), October 1, 1811; Weekly Aurora (Philadelphia), October 1, 1811; Essex Register, October 2, 1811; American Mercury (Hartford), October 3, 1811; The Albany Register, October 11, 1811; The Centinel of Freedom (Newark), October 15, 1811; Long-Island Star (Brooklyn), October 16, 1811. Adams, November 10, 1812, in: Charles Francis Adams (ed.), Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874–1877), Vol. 2, 422. Elliot, March 8, 1806, in: AC, 9th Congress, 1st Session, 642. Also see John Smilie, March 6, 1806, in: ibid., 585. “IMPRESSED AMERICAN SEAMEN,” in: American Advocate (Hallowell), March 10, 1812. Also see Eastern Argus (Portland), reprinted in: Independent Chronicle (Boston), August 5, 1811. Jefferson to William H. Crawford, February 11, 1815, in: WTJ, Vol. 11, 451.

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dismissed out of hand.93 Henry Clay of Kentucky was against the issuing of “protections” – papers certifying the citizenship of American seamen – since it would imply that white Americans were little more than black slaves. “They resemble the passes which the master grants to his negro slave: ‘Let the bearer, Mungo, pass and repass without molestation.’”94 For the same reason, Republicans also rejected suggestions to interdict the recruitment of noncitizens on U.S. ships to defuse the issue, which Federalists – criticizing Republicans’ insistence on the employment of British subjects on American ships as an “ATTEMPT, to make American merchant ships an asylum for English, Scotch, and Irish runaway seamen” – frequently made.95 Indeed, by equating impressment with slavery Republicans made Federalists’ calls for a compromise solution to the issue not only fall on deaf ears but actually sound contemptible. After all, seeking an accommodation with Great Britain on this subject left Federalists open to the charge that they were, in principle, willing to let white Americans suffer enslavement. The North American, and Mercantile Daily Advertiser, for example, argued that “the number of English sailors employed by the American shipping” was far greater than that of falsely impressed American seamen concluding that the British position was not as untenable as Republicans claimed. The Federalist newspaper admitted that impressment was similar to slavery but emphasized that most impressed Americans were released once their true identity had been revealed. While, when reading Republican press outlets, one would get the impression that “all the American sailors taken on board British ships are doomed to

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Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 195; Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance, 62; Perkins, Prologue to War, 94–95; Lambert, The Challenge, 27; Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo, and the Republican Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 65. Admittedly, it is not likely that the British would have been willing to make a binding commitment in this matter, since they considered the ability to man their vessels of war a precondition for national survival and, therefore, repeatedly refused to renounce the practice of impressment in principle. However, since the eagerness of British boarding parties to impress seamen from American merchant ships fluctuated according to the changing desertion rates, it is likely that impressment would have ceased to be a pressing concern if British sailors had no longer been able to enlist in the American merchant marine and if, consequently, fewer British seamen had deserted from the Royal Navy. Clay, January 9, 1813, in: AC, 12th Congress, 2nd Session, 670. Also see “OUR SEAMEN IN SLAVERY,” in: Essex Register, reprinted in: Farmer’s Repository (Charles Town), February 1, 1811. Also reprinted in: The Carolina Gazette (Charlestown), February 22, 1811. Columbian Centinel (Boston), December 9, 1807.

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perpetual slavery,” in reality, it would “be nearer the truth to say, that three-fourths of those who prove to be Americans, are discharged.”96 If impressment, however, was tantamount to slavery, acceptance of the practice – even if it was relatively insignificant in actual numbers – was out of the question, as Republican newspapers argued. The Political Observatory was incensed that “we are told we have no cause of complaint,” just because the British government had returned some of the “AMERICANS IN SLAVERY,” even if others were still forced to labor in the service of the Royal Navy.97 By thus framing the issue as one of slavery, Republican print media put Federalists in an indefensible position making their attempts to solve the crisis through a reasonable quid pro quo sound almost treasonable. If Americans were to identify with the new nation, the U.S. had to gain an equal status with European nations, and “white slavery,” therefore, needed to be resisted in principle. To escape this discursive trap, Federalists tried to shift the frame of the debate by warning that Napoleon would turn Americans into “slaves” once he had conquered all of Europe and that the U.S. therefore had an interest in a British victory that would be jeopardized if the U.S. declared war against the former mother country. This threat of “slavery,” however, was too vague to be plausible and to turn Americans’ attention away from the actual impressment of Americans that had already occurred. To maintain their advantageous position in the public debate, Republican newspapers throughout the country, therefore, often printed the number of Americans forced to serve on British men-of-war – 6,257 – to make the case for principled if not armed resistance in 1812.98 As Republicans believed that the British government had hostile intentions towards the American republic, the Jefferson Administration and the Republican majority in Congress pursued a non-accommodating foreign policy that precluded an easing of the tensions arising from Britain’s naval

96

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“Carrying Trade, No. III,” in: The North American, and Mercantile Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), July 21, 1808. “Americans in Slavery” by “Plebeian,” in: Political Observatory (Walpole), December 26, 1808. The article was reprinted in several Republican newspapers across the U.S. See Republican Star or Eastern Shore General Advertiser (Easton), December 27, 1808; American Patriot (Concord), January 3, 1809. The Independent American (Ballston Spa), for example, printed the number in large bold letters on March 17, 1812. Also see “BRITISH IMPRESSMENTS” by S. Southwick, in: The Albany Register, March 10, 1812; Newburyport Herald. And Country Gazette, May 1, 1812.

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policies. Since the former mother country was perceived as a foe, which – by its monarchical nature – could not but seek to undermine the republic’s foundations, Republicans were averse to compromise. After they came to power, Anglo-American relations would hence be marked by a persistent refusal by the American government to make any concessions on issues Great Britain deemed vital to her security.99 After the commercial clauses of the Jay Treaty had expired in 1803, Jefferson decided not to renew them, although the British government sent signals to that end.100 When Anglo-American relations deteriorated after the Essex decision, he initially refused to send a special mission to England to settle the matters in dispute. Only reluctantly did he eventually agree to send William Pinkney to London to join Monroe, America’s minister to Britain, in a special diplomatic mission.101 However, by declaring a British renunciation of the practice of impressment on the high seas and their acceptance of American re-export trade sine qua non demands in their diplomatic instructions, Jefferson and his Secretary of State Madison made it unlikely that the negotiations would lead to an agreement.102 Not surprisingly, the British refused to renounce the practice of impressment, explaining to Monroe and Pinkney “the impossibility of our allowing seamen to withdraw themselves from our service during war.”103 By deciding to simply exclude the thorny issue from the treaty, Monroe and Pinkney still succeeded in negotiating an accord with the British government in 1806. The British government agreed to allow America’s re-export trade, accepted a narrow definition of contraband, promised to give America advanced warning of any blockade, not to interfere with American trade or seamen on American ships within five miles off America’s coast, to compensate for any seizure made in violation of the treaty, and to reduce the duties American 99

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101 102

103

Actually, in the first two years after Republicans came to power, Anglo-American relations remained fairly harmonious, since the European war that had caused AngloAmerican tensions over neutral rights temporarily ended with the Peace of Amiens in October 1801. In May 1803, however, war between Great Britain and France broke out again and would soon provide Republicans with “proofs” for what they believed to be hostile British designs. For British overtures to renew the treaty, see Lord Harrowby to Merry, August 4, 1804, in: Bernard Mayo (ed.), Instructions to the British Ministers to the United States, 1791–1812 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), 207–208. Jefferson to Monroe, March 10, 1808, in: TJW, Vol. 12, 5. The instructions can be found in: Madison to Monroe and Pinkney, May 17, 1806, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 3, 119–124. Henry Richard Lord Holland, Memoirs of the Whig Party during My Time, ed. by Henry Edward Lord Holland, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852–1854), Vol. 2, 102.

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ships had to pay in British ports, and once again opened up the highly profitable East India trade to American shipping.104 The British, moreover, pledged to practice “the greatest caution” when they looked for British seamen on board of American vessels and to afford “immediate and prompt redress” if any American was impressed by accident.105 The American concessions – by contrast – appeared minor. They involved a promise not to impose commercial sanctions on Great Britain if they did not apply to all nations (a standard stipulation in any commercial treaty), to renounce the “free ships, free goods” doctrine that, with the exception of contraband, neutral bottoms would protect enemy goods (which had already been abandoned in practice), and to close its ports to privateers of nations at war with Great Britain as well as to prohibit Americans from serving in the armies of Britain’s enemies (both practices being already illegal under existing American law).106 Most historians therefore agree that the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty was favorable to the U.S.107 Jefferson, however, who had never wished to conclude a treaty with Great Britain in the first place, had no intention to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification. “To tell you the truth,” he told Jacob Wagner, chief clerk of the Department of State, in secret, “I do not wish any treaty with Great Britain!”108 He justified his obstinacy by pointing to the fact that the British had not renounced the practice of impressment on the high seas.109 On February 2, 1807, the Cabinet decided that any treaty would be rejected that failed to end impressment.110 Even when Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin told him that British subjects constituted almost half of the total of seamen on American merchantmen and that Britain’s

104 105 106 107

108

109 110

The text of the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty is reprinted in: ASP:FR, Vol. 3, 147–151. Lords Holland and Auckland to Monroe and Pinkney, November 8, 1806, in: ibid., 140. Hickey, The War of 1812, 14–16. See Alfred L. Burt, The United States, Great Britain and British North America from the Revolution to the Establishment of Peace after the War of 1812 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 236; Anthony Steel, “Impressment in the Monroe–Pinkney Negotiation, 1806–1807,” in: American Historical Review, Vol. 57, No. 2 (1952), 364–365; Perkins, Prologue to War, 138–139; Patrick C. T. White, A Nation on Trial: America and the War of 1812 (New York: John Wiley, 1965), 32–33; Donald R. Hickey, “The Monroe–Pinkney Treaty of 1806: A Reappraisal,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1987), 74–76; Hickey, The War of 1812, 14; Tucker and Reuter, Injured Honor, 54. Jefferson, quoted in: Wagner to Pickering, July 21, 1813, in: Timothy Pickering Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 30. Jefferson to Monroe, March 21, 1807, in: TJW, Vol. 11, 168. Jefferson’s Cabinet notes, February 3, 1807 (filed under the March 5, 1806, records of Cabinet meeting), in: Thomas Jefferson Papers (Library of Congress), reel 035.

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position was therefore not as untenable as previously thought, Jefferson did not consider limiting or prohibiting the employment of Britons on American ships; on the contrary, his opposition to a compromise grew stronger.111 Jefferson, however, was unwilling to give the British anything in return for his demand that they renounce the practice of impressment and thereby ensured that it would not come to an agreement. When he sent the treaty back to London to be renegotiated, he knew that there was no chance of gaining more concessions from Great Britain. He, therefore, told Monroe to let the negotiation “die away insensibly.”112 This non-accommodating foreign policy led to an escalation of tensions, which reaffirmed the perception of British enmity. As no compromise with Great Britain was found in 1806, it was just a matter of time until a clash on the ocean would occur – an event that happened on June 22, 1807, when the HMS Leopard fired a broadside into the American warship USS Chesapeake, after its captain had refused to allow the British to look for deserters on his ship. The attack forced Commodore James Barron to strike his colors and permit a British boarding party onto his ship, which impressed four crew members.113 Once news of the naval encounter spread, anti-British protests erupted throughout the U.S. Many newspapers demanded a war declaration. In Vermont, the Bennington Epitome of the World predicted that “not a single soldier of Vermont will wait to be drafted into the service now required.”114 The New-York Herald was convinced that “every American citizen will at the call of the law fly in the standard of the law.”115 The Richmond Enquirer noted that war “now must certainly take place.”116 The Philadelphia Aurora also pleaded for

111 112 113

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Jefferson to Madison, April 21, 1807, in: WTJ, Vol. 10, 389. Jefferson to Monroe, March 21, 1807, in: ibid., 376. For the Chesapeake Affair, see Tucker and Reuter, Injured Honor; Dumas Malone, Jefferson and his Time, 6 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948–1982), Vol. 5, 415–438; Perkins, Prologue to War, 140–149; Robert E. Cray Jr., “Remembering the USS Chesapeake: The Politics of Maritime Death and Impressment,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2005), 445–474; Joshua Wolf, “‘To be Enslaved or Thus Deprived’: British Impressment, American Discontent, and the Making of the Chesapeake–Leopard Affair, 1803–1807,” in: War & Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2010), 1–19. The Chesapeake Affair was in part the result of the failure to ratify the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty, as it stipulated that Britain would not search American vessels within five miles off America’s coast. Moreover, the British government had promised to practice more caution when looking for deserters on American ships, which certainly meant not attacking an American warship. Epitome of the World (Bennington), reprinted in: Virginia Argus (Richmond), August 12, 1807. New-York Herald, July 1, 1807. 116 The Enquirer (Richmond), July 3, 1807.

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armed confrontation: “Every thing around us breathes the spirit of war.”117 Citizens at public meetings in Charleston, New York, Boston, and Cincinnati promised support to the government if it chose to answer the Chesapeake Affair by war.118 In view of the public indignation over the attack on the USS Chesapeake, war could have easily broken out in 1807. Had Jefferson asked Congress for a declaration of war, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager concluded, “he would have had war at the drop of a hat.”119 Yet, while the theory of republican peace created the perception of threat and thus produced the war crisis, it also tended to avert a declaration of war. After all, Republicans believed republics were naturally peaceful. The American system of government, Jefferson explained, was “not calculated for war.” He feared that the republican form of government could be subverted by warfare, as it created the need for an army and increased the power of the executive.120 Madison also believed that war would endanger the foundations of the American republic. “War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few,” as he summed up the detrimental effects of warfare on a nation’s domestic balance of power.121 Consequently, the pacifically inclined Jefferson, who had never intended to push the disputes with Great Britain to the breaking point, refrained from answering the Chesapeake Affair through a declaration of war. Instead, he used it as a justification for waging economic warfare against Great Britain, which, unlike actual war, he believed would not endanger America’s republican form of government. In December 1807, 117

118

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Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), July 14, 1807. Also see “PEACE OR WAR,” in: ibid., July 31, 1807. Augusta Chronicle, July 25, 1807; Henry Adams, History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 9 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891–1896), Vol. 4, 28–29; Western Spy and Miami Gazette, August 10, 1807. Several Congressmen also called for armed resistance against the British practice of impressment on the high seas. See Elbridge Gerry to Madison, July 5, 1807, in: James Madison Papers (Library of Congress), reel 9; Wilson Cary Nicholas to Jefferson, July 7, 1807, in: Thomas Jefferson Papers (Library of Congress), reel 038; William Plumer to Thomas Cogswell, August 3, 1807, in: William Plumer Jr., Life of William Plumer, ed. by A. B. Peabody (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1857), 362. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), Vol. 1, 403. Jefferson to William Plumer, April 2, 1806, in: Plumer, Memorandum of Proceedings, 470. Also see Jefferson to Caesar A. Rodney, February 10, 1810, in: WTJ, Vol. 11, 136. Madison, “Political Observations,” April 20, 1795, in: PJM:CS, Vol. 15, 518.

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Congress – at the urging of the President – passed the Embargo Act which prohibited all American exports: American ships were forbidden to sail for any foreign port, and foreign ships were only allowed to depart American ports if they did not carry any cargo.122 The intention of the measure was coercive: believing that Europe depended upon American commerce more than vice versa, Republican policy makers hoped that if they cut American trade with the belligerents, they would give in to American demands and revoke their policies that interfered with American trade.123 Although the embargo was total in prohibiting all foreign commerce, it was specifically aimed at Great Britain, as Jefferson reassured the French minister.124 While Napoleon could only stop Europe’s trade with Great Britain but could not interfere with America’s trade with Great Britain (unless American ships wished to touch both British and French ports on the same voyage), Great Britain could obstruct American trade with France and her allies due to her control of the high seas. The Embargo of 1807 thus injured Great Britain more than France because it stopped America’s trade with Great Britain, whereas America’s trade with France had already been impeded by the British sea blockade. Although the embargo legislation was a policy of economic warfare against Great Britain, Jefferson considered it inherently peaceful and therefore expressive of America’s identity.125 He called it “peaceable coercion.”126

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On the Embargo of 1807, see Louis Martin Sears, Jefferson and the Embargo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1927); Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis; Perkins, Prologue to War, 140–183; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, 101–122; Malone, Jefferson and his Time, Vol. 5, 469–490. Importation was not prohibited, but as most transatlantic voyages would only be profitable when ships could carry cargo both ways imports also fell dramatically. See Schuyler Dean Hoslett, “Jefferson and England: The Embargo as a Measure of Coercion,” in: Americana, Vol. 34, No. 1 (1940), 39–54. Louis Marie Turreau to Jean Baptiste de Champagny, June 28, 1808, in: Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères: Correspondence Politique, États-Unis (Photostats in the Library of Congress), Vol. 61, 171. Historians have mostly followed Jefferson’s and Madison’s interpretation of the embargo as a “peaceful” measure and either praised them for their pacifism or criticized them for their naivety. For positive judgements, see Sears, Jefferson and the Embargo, 4, 11, 30, 53, 74; Malone, Jefferson and his Time, Vol. 5, 472–475, 483–484; Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 885; Reginald C. Stuart, The Half-Way Pacifist: Thomas Jefferson’s View of War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 61–62. Negative judgements can be found in Adams, History of the United States, Vol. 1, 146, Vol. 4, 272–290; Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 122–124, 129–135, 177, 236. Jefferson to George Logan, March 21, 1801, in: WTJ, Vol. 9, 220.

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To the Governor of Virginia, he explained that his intention was to teach Europe “that there are peaceable means of repressing injustice.”127 In a series of anonymous newspaper articles for the National Intelligencer, Madison also justified the embargo by arguing that it was “the most signal of proofs that [America] delights in peace.”128 He called it a “measure . . . not of aggression” but “a measure of peace.”129 However, while Jefferson and Madison refrained from outright war in 1807, their policy of “peaceable coercion” was really yet another escalating step that fueled the dynamic ultimately leading to actual war, because it reduced the diplomatic options.130 If it failed – and it was doomed to fail, as Federalists warned Republicans – the federal government had only the choice of retreat or war. Jefferson acknowledged that it was “an universal opinion that war will become preferable to a continuance of the embargo after a certain time,” if Great Britain and France did not “withdraw these orders & decrees.”131 Madison even called the embargo a “weapon” that would “arm the nation” and warned Great Britain that, while the “sword is not drawn from the scabbard, . . . it may be drawn at a moment’s warning.”132 The embargo was thus a decisive step towards war rather than a substitute or alternative for it. The embargo indeed failed as a coercive measure, as it cost Americans much more than England, and consequently raised the specter of war to take its place. While American imports plummeted from $138 million in 1807 to $57 million one year later and American exports dropped from $108 to $22 million, Great Britain, on the other hand, hardly suffered under the embargo, particularly since Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas were opened to British trade at the time the embargo was installed and compensated for the loss of the trade with the U.S.133 127 128

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Jefferson to William H. Cabell, June 29, 1807, in: ibid., Vol. 10, 433. Anonymous [Madison], “Embargo,” National Intelligencer & Washington Advertiser, December 28, 1807. Irving Brant makes the case for Madison’s authorship of the “Embargo” essays. Irving Brant, James Madison, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1941–1961), Vol. 4, 402–403. Anonymous [Madison], “Embargo,” National Intelligencer & Washington Advertiser, December 23, 1807. Francis D. Cogliano concluded that, in Jefferson’s mind, the embargo was both an alternative to and a preparation for war in Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 328. Jefferson to Madison, March 11, 1808, in: WTJ, Vol. 11, 12, 16. Anonymous [Madison], “Embargo,” National Intelligencer & Washington Advertiser, December 25, 1807. Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 328; Sears, Jefferson and the Embargo, 276–301, 312–317; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, 135; Clifford L. Egan,

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In the second half of 1808, Jefferson and Madison acknowledged the ineffectiveness of the embargo. Nonetheless, they still tried to postpone a declaration of war, hoping that the European war, which had given cause to the Anglo-American disputes, would be over soon. In the end, however, they gradually realized that war was unavoidable, as the alternative measures of “peaceable coercion” they tried – such as a NonIntercourse Act of 1809, which opened American foreign trade except with Britain and France, and finally a prohibition of trade with Great Britain only in 1811 – also failed to produce any effect on British policy.134 As a result, the policy options of the American government had been reduced to war or acknowledgment of diplomatic failure. “War or submission alone remain,” former Senator and Congressman Wilson Cary Nicholas told Jefferson in 1810.135 If Congress did not declare war, Felix Grundy of Tennessee maintained in 1811, “I then say it, with humiliation, produced by the degradation of my country, we have submitted.”136 William Plumer of New Hampshire agreed. “Negociation & commercial restrictions failed to obtain redress. Submission or war were the only alternatives left.”137 While in this situation Madison, who succeeded Jefferson as U.S. President in 1809, initially tried to temporize, an aroused Republican public incited by the continuous Anglo-American tensions would soon force his hand.138 Ever since the Chesapeake Affair in 1807, a rising number of militant congressmen and newspapers had been calling for forceful measures against Great Britain. This pro-war, nationalistic

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136 137 138

Neither Peace Nor War: Franco-American Relations, 1803–1812 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 97; Jeffrey A. Frankel, “The 1807–1809 Embargo against Great Britain,” in: Journal of Economic History, Vol. 42, No. 2 (1982), 304. Taking at face value a vague (and eventually broken) promise by the French Foreign Minister duc de Cadore that France would stop seizing American vessels, Madison, on November 2, 1810, announced that non-intercourse against Great Britain would be installed on February 2, 1811, unless she revoked her orders-in-council. For critical views of Madison’s acceptance of the Cadore letter, see Burt, The United States, Great Britain, and North America, 283–284; Perkins, Prologue to War, 245–252. Nicholas to Jefferson, February 4, 1810, in: J. Jefferson Looney (ed.), The Papers of Jefferson: Retirement Series, 13 vols. to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004– ), Vol. 2, 195. Grundy, December 7, 1811, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 426. Plumer to John Quincy Adams, August 18, 1812, quoted in: Hickey, War of 1812, 26. The political dynamic ignited by American nationalism and described in the following paragraphs is analyzed in detail in Jasper M. Trautsch, “‘Mr. Madison’s War’ or the Dynamic of Early American Nationalism?,” in: Early American Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2012), 630–670.

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movement grew more vociferous after measures of “peaceable coercion” had failed to produce results.139 When the elections for the Twelfth Congress approached – voting in the various states took place at different dates in 1810 and 1811 – a majority of Republican newspapers throughout the U.S. criticized the federal government’s reluctance to declare war and campaigned for candidates advocating armed conflict. The Aurora – one of the most widely quoted American newspapers in the early nineteenth century – was utterly dissatisfied with the passivity of the current Congress and consequently pushed for a dramatic change in congressional membership. “The state of our foreign affairs is even worse than it was last year,” the Republican flagship complained in July 1810. “At the next election there are to be chosen, by our district, three members of congress – you all know how the tenth and eleventh congresses have betrayed the honor and interests of the nation,” the Aurora reminded its readers. “You have an opportunity now of evincing your sense of their imbecility by your choice of more suitable candidates in the place of any who you may find unfaithful or incapable.”140 About two weeks later, the Philadelphia newspapers noted again that “Little indeed have the people to expect from the eleventh congress,” and therefore concluded that “Our chief hope of salvation must rest on the patriotism of the people, who must speak through the twelfth congress.”141 In the spring of 1811, the Aurora became exasperated with “the ignorance or perfidy” of Congress at a time when there was “the absolute necessity of decision,” calling on “the people [to] look to it” that only candidates willing to vote for war would be elected.142 The Aurora – while one of the loudest and most frequently cited voices – was not alone in pushing for armed conflict and explicitly recommending war candidates to voters. The Richmond Enquirer – the most widely read newspaper in Virginia – was equally annoyed with “the imbecility which has marked our own Congress in steering the national barque” and urged its readers in June 1810 to vote for candidates eager 139

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For the early “war hawks,” see Reginald C. Stuart, “James Madison and the Militants: Republican Disunity and Replacing the Embargo,” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1982), 147–148. For divisions within the Republican Party in the run-up to the declaration of war, see J. C. A. Stagg, “James Madison and the ‘Malcontents’: The Political Origins of the War of 1812,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4 (1976), 557–585. Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), July 21, 1810. Also see ibid., September 27, 1809. “Dignified Moderation,” in: ibid., August 8, 1810. “Our Affairs with Europe, No. IIII,” in ibid., May 11, 1811.

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to enter armed conflict against Great Britain: “The people must arise in the mightiness of their elective franchise – & dismiss these unworthy representatives from their confidence.”143 A few weeks later, the Enquirer again complained about the unwillingness of the Eleventh Congress to declare war. “It is the twisting, and turning, & shrinking of the National Representatives, which have brought us to this situation” of national humiliation. The Republican newspaper, however, reminded voters who were “disgusted with the acts of their representatives” that they “hold their destinies in their own hands. If they come forward, as they ought to do, at the next Election – if they have energy enough to confide their interests to proper men . . ., we may yet be safe.”144 The Petersburg Intelligencer called for “WAR! WAR! WAR!”145 The Baltimore North American, and Mercantile Daily Advertiser accused the federal government of “passiveness and duplicity” and expressed its hope that “the voice of the people, thundering in their elections, will awake their rulers.”146 In Kentucky, the Lexington Reporter dismissed the Eleventh Congress as “pusillanimous,” criticized congressmen for making resolutions that were “not followed by deeds,” and urged the people to “rise in their own majesty and strength, and compel them to act.”147 In Tennessee, the Democratic Clarion likewise found that “the Congress of the United States must, at their next session, resolve to make a stand,” because “the reign of mere paper resolutions & paper provisions is at an end.”148 The Carthage Gazette demanded, “ARISE! Arise! COLUMBIA’s sons arise! And shake off the torper of sloth and inactivity.”149 The popular sentiment for change seemed indeed widespread, as the congressional election not only increased the majority of anti-British Republicans in the House from 66 to 75 percent, but also saw a profound change in the Republican membership: almost half of the Republican Representatives in the Twelfth Congress (50 out of 106) were 143

144

145 146 147

148 149

“Mr. Pinkney should be recalled,” in: The Enquirer (Richmond), June 12, 1810. The article was reprinted in: City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston), June 26, 1810; The Reporter (Lexington), July 7, 1810; Portsmouth Oracle, July 28, 1810. The Enquirer (Richmond), July 20, 1810. The article was reprinted in: City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston), July 31, 1810. Petersburg Intelligencer, reprinted in: The Star (Raleigh), January 19, 1809. The North American, and Mercantile Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), September 5, 1808. “From the Lexington Reporter,” in: American & Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), October 12, 1810. The Democratic Clarion and Tennessee Gazette (Nashville), September 7, 1810. “New Patriotic Song,” in: Carthage Gazette, March 8, 1811.

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new.150 Among the newcomers were numerous “war hawks” that had run on a war platform.151 Admittedly, the fact that the change in congressional membership was so high alone is hardly indicative of a general swing in public opinion. After all, during the Jefferson and Madison Administrations between about a third and about half of the members of Congress failed to return to the next Congress in each election.152 Since the congressional turnover was not unusual, Bradford Perkins and Norman K. Risjord concluded that the elections to the Twelfth Congress played no role in the coming of the war vote. Indeed, the failure of several representatives to return to the new Congress did not always result from a defeat by a more bellicose competitor. Some incumbents simply did not seek re-election. Moreover, not every new member had run on a war platform, and not every representative who was defeated had been a procrastinator on the war question.153 The popular interpretation according to which a group of young “war hawks” chased older

150

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153

There has been some confusion over the exact number of representatives that were replaced, the turnover between the Eleventh and Twelfth Congresses being one-third according to Troy Bickham; 37.9 percent according to James Sterling Young; almost half according to Doris A. Graber; and more than half according to Marie-Jeanne Rossignol. In fact, 62 new members entered Congress after the elections to the Twelfth Congress, not counting the Representative of Louisiana, which was admitted to the union only on April 30, 1812 (this explains the difference to the figure that Norman K. Risjord came up with (63)). Unlike Bradford Perkins, who claimed that only fifty-nine new members entered Congress, in the three cases, in which new elections took place within a few months after the regular elections due to the incumbents’ resignations, the replacements were counted, since the special elections took place before the declaration of war. Since there were 142 voting members in the House at the time of the war vote, one ends up with a figure of 44 percent of new representatives. Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance, 79; James Sterling Young, The Washington Community 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 90; Doris A. Graber, Public Opinion, the President, and Foreign Policy: Four Case Studies from the Formative Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 194; Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1812 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 188; Norman K. Risjord, “1812: Conservatives, War Hawks and the Nation’s Honor,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1961), 196; Perkins, Prologue to War, 262. Reginald Horsman, “Who Were the War Hawks?,” in: Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 60, No. 2 (1964), 125n7, 128n13. Also see Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, 186–187. For the use of the term “war hawk” in the early republic, see Donald R. Hickey, “‘War Hawks’: Using Newspapers to Trace a Phrase, 1792–1812,” in: Journal of Military History, Vol. 78, No. 2 (2014), 725–740. The lowest turnover in the Jefferson and Madison years was the one from the Ninth to the Tenth Congress (32.4 percent) and the largest from the Sixth to the Seventh Congress (52 percent). Young, The Washington Community, 90. Perkins, Prologue to War, 261–267; Risjord, “1812,” 196–200.

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Republicans who were too timid to declare war against the former mother country from office in 1810 and 1811 is therefore inaccurate, failing to account for the fact that a majority of Republicans who had already served in the Eleventh Congress also became convinced that war was the only solution to the foreign-policy impasse after their re-election.154 However, one should also not dismiss the importance of the elections to the Twelfth Congress, since they triggered a massive public debate over America’s foreign policy. In view of the unprecedented agitation by Republican newspapers and the fact that the war issue was the top concern of the campaign, the elections were perceived to be a popular referendum on the question of a war declaration. Consequently, historical contemporaries interpreted the large turnover as a sign for voters’ determination to bring matters with Great Britain to a head. In a widely reprinted article, the Independent Chronicle made clear that the election results prohibited Congress from further deliberating on the question of war. “Congress is now summoned on an occasion requiring action, and not to wait the result of further negociation.” Reminding Republican Representatives that “the voice of every American is for WAR,” the Boston newspaper called on Congress “to make immediate preparations for war.”155 The New-Hampshire Patriot also found that “An unusual expectation in the minds of the people in general has been raised of the proceedings of the Congress about to convene; and great will be the disappointment, . . . should that body long hesitate in the adoption of measures as decisive, prompt and energetic, as the plain case before them requires.”156 The Essex Register reminded representatives that

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Authors arguing that the war question figured prominently in the elections and that the change in congressional membership significantly contributed to the war declaration include Latimer, “South Carolina,” 923; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, 186; Graber, Public Opinion, the President, and Foreign Policy, 194; Rossignol, The Nationalist Ferment, 188; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 660–661; Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance, 79; Robert P. Watson, America’s First Crisis: The War of 1812 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 55. “WALLACE, No. 3,” in: Independent Chronicle (Boston), September 30, 1811. For the reprints, see Essex Register, October 5, 1811; Rhode-Island Republican (Newport), October 9, 1811; Eastern Argus (Portland), October 10, 1811; Columbian Phenix: Or, Providence Patriot, October 12, 1811; National Aegis (Worcester), October 16, 1811; American Mercury (Hartford), October 17, 1811; New-Hampshire Patriot (Concord), October 22, 1811; Long-Island Star (Brooklyn), October 23, 1811; The Centinel of Freedom (Newark), October 29, 1811; Vermont Republican (Windsor), November 11, 1811. Also see “WALLACE, No. 1” and “WALLACE, No. 2,” in: Independent Chronicle (Boston), September 2 and 19, 1811. “CONGRESS,” in: New-Hampshire Patriot (Concord), October 29, 1811.

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the election results were a popular call for war. “The people . . . require DECISION.”157 The National Aegis hoped that “every Representative of the people will represent them truly, as their sentiments, come to his knowledge,” telling Congress that “This is not time, to play with phrases, or ‘to tilt with the lips’” and that “aggravated injury has left no other remedy than War.”158 The Lexington Reporter demanded an immediate declaration of war, warning House members that “you must breathe our spirit, and speak our sentiment, or be remembered with indignation at our ensuing election.”159 In Ohio, the Fredonian asserted that “the people, their spirit aroused by the indignities they have witnessed, loudly call for measures of a strong character.”160 Even the mouthpiece of the Madison Administration, the National Intelligencer, admitted that the election results showed public dissatisfaction with a temporizing foreign policy. “The times and the spirit of the people, called for something substantial” – a sentiment Congress could not ignore: “All eyes will now be fixed on the Legislative body.”161 Members of Congress were aware of the public pressure they faced and understood that most Republican newspapers interpreted the election results as a popular call for more forceful measures. Robert Wright of Maryland told the House that the fact that half of the members of the Eleventh Congress had not been re-elected indicated that Americans wished a change of policy. He asked those who continued to oppose the war to compare “the returns of the twelfth Congress . . . with the eleventh” and predicted that they would “find nearly one half of the eleventh Congress removed.” They should not fail to interpret the election results “as the sentence of the nation against the doctrine of submission; it is certainly an expression of the nation’s will, in a language not to be misunderstood, and too serious in its application not to be respected.”162 John A. Harper of New Hampshire noted that the elections would have to result in a more militant policy. “There must, there will be a change of measures . . . The nation demands measures of spirit, of energy.”163 William Plumer also realized that “The nation has grown

157 158 159 160

161 162 163

Essex Register, October 30, 1811. National Aegis (Worcester), November 6, 1811. The Reporter (Lexington), June 13, 1812. Fredonian, January 29, 1812, quoted in: Stephen M. Millett, “Bellicose Nationalism in Ohio: An Origin of the War of 1812,” in: Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1973), 221–240. National Intelligencer (Washington), November 7, 1811. Wright, December 11, 1811, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 472. Harper, January 4, 1812, in: ibid., 653–654.

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tired of the exercise of its restrictive energies in the shape of embargoes and non-intercourse, and calls loudly for more active and efficient measures.”164 While many Republican Representatives, fearing the domestic effects of war, would have preferred staying at peace and might still have hoped that a peaceful resolution could be achieved at the last minute, the confluence of the newspaper campaign, the election, and pressure from their constituents forced them to support measures preparing the country for war once the Twelfth Congress convened in late 1811. Madison, too, could not fail to notice a change in public sentiment. In light of the absence of public opinion polls, Republican newspaper editorials were the best indicator of what the population expected him to do. Apart from the administration mouthpiece National Intelligencer, all the Republican flagships, which Madison most likely read and from which, as he knew, most other Republican newspapers throughout the country frequently reprinted articles, such as the Aurora, Niles’ Weekly Register, the Richmond Enquirer, and the Independent Chronicle, strongly advocated a declaration of war. The President, therefore, had to interpret the elections, which brought at least some bellicose new members into Congress, as “a popular mandate for war.”165 His administration’s subsequent interactions with the legislature, moreover, reconfirmed this impression, since Clay, as newly elected Speaker of the House, was able to place fellow “war hawks” into committees most immediately concerned with the war question such as the Foreign Relations Committee, the Military Affairs Committee, and the Naval Affairs Committee all of which were headed by advocates of a quick recourse to war.166 When the executive dealt with Congress, they would hence usually communicate with those representatives asserting a national will for armed conflict, adding to the perception that the people demanded war. In late 1811, Madison therefore realized that, even as he was against war, he could no longer oppose stronger measures in view of public opinion, but that the best that he could do was to stave off a declaration of war for a little bit longer hoping that either the European war that had given cause to the Anglo-American disputes would end soon or that Great Britain, taking note of the aroused state of the American public, would

164 165 166

Plumer to Samuel D. Mitchell, January 1, 1812, in: Plumer, Life of William Plumer, 400. Graber, Public Opinion, 201. Clement Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), 22–26.

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finally relent.167 Consequently, in his annual message to Congress delivered on November 5, 1811, one day after the new Congress had convened, Madison, on the one hand, called for military preparations such as the expansion of the regular army and the creation of a voluntary corps to accommodate the “war hawks.” On the other hand, he did not make clear whether he would support a declaration of war once the preparations had been completed in order to leave the door to a peaceful resolution open.168 However, when Congress enacted the program Madison had recommended and no good news from Europe reached the U.S., public and congressional pressures for an immediate declaration of war mounted, Republican newspapers calling on Republican Representatives to emancipate themselves from the temporizing President and even suggesting that Madison should be replaced in the next presidential elections.169 After a ninety-day embargo had bought him still more time, but no game-changing information was arriving from Europe, Madison, therefore, had no choice but to ask Congress for a declaration of war in the early summer of 1812. Only by thus putting himself at the helm of the war movement could he stay in control of the political process and thus, as wartime President, ensure that America’s republican institutions would not be subverted by war requirements.170 Although Republicans believed it necessary to declare war in 1812, they retained their conviction that America, as the land of liberty, was naturally pacific. They were able to interpret America’s declaration of war as a peaceful act, because they had modified the theory of republican peace. By arguing that republics could be forced into wars by monarchies, Republicans reconciled America’s professed peacefulness with the actual recourse to war in 1812. The existence of one monarchy would be enough to undermine any plan for world peace, Republican ideologist Philip Freneau had already argued in the 1780s with the recently concluded War of Independence freshly on his mind, because if one monarch “picks a quarrel with his neighbour,” the attacked nation was then

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Madison’s alter ego had already explained earlier that in a republic like the U.S. “the opinion of the public, even when it is wrong, ought to be respected to a certain degree.” Jefferson to Nicholas Lewis, February 9, 1791, in: WTJ, Vol. 6, 194. Madison, “Annual Message,” November 5, 1811, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 78–80. See Virginia Argus (Richmond), February 3, 1812; Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), March 9, 1812; The Enquirer (Richmond), March 27, 1812. For a detailed analysis of how public and congressional pressure came to bear on Madison after the Twelfth Congress convened, see Trautsch, “‘Mr. Madison’s War,’” 654–665.

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compelled “to resent such injuries or encroachments.”171 Jefferson also found that – while republics were inherently peaceful – they could remain at peace only with other republics, as monarchies would force war upon them. He noted that “all the wise [we] can do, will be to avoid that half of [the wars] which would be produced by our own follies . . .; and to make for the other half the best preparations we can.” As long as monarchies existed in the world, Jefferson concluded, war “must sometimes be our lot.”172 Republicans’ belief in the republican peace theory had thus the paradoxical effect not only of leading to a perception of foreign threat, an antagonistic foreign policy, and thus eventually to war; it also allowed the act of going to war to strengthen America’s identity as the pacific land of liberty, because the blame for the war was completely placed on Britain’s monarchical form of government. The War of 1812 was “purely a war of defence,” Richard Rush, Comptroller of the Treasury and one of Madison’s closest confidants, maintained in a public oration after the conflict had commenced.173 Despite the fact that the U.S. actually declared it, Republicans insisted that the War of 1812 had been forced upon America, because, as a monarchy, Britain had to be aggressive and hostile towards the U.S. Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky found that Great Britain’s “disposition is unfriendly, her enmity is implacable, she sickens at our prosperity and happiness.”174 Even though Great Britain was in the midst of a titanic struggle with Napoleonic France, Republicans feared an imminent British attack. “The enemies of republics are on the alert,” the Republican-dominated Massachusetts Senate declared. “The present is deemed the favorable time for the dismemberment of our union – that favorable project of the British government . . . Yes – we say with assurance, that a deep and deadly design is formed against our

171

172 173

174

Anonymous [Freneau], “The Pilgrim, No. 16,” in: The Freeman’s Journal: or, the NorthAmerican Intelligencer (Philadelphia), June 19, 1782. Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in: WTJ, Vol. 2, 241. Richard Rush, An Oration, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, at the Capitol, Washington, July 4, 1812 (Washington: Isaac and Walter R. Hill, 1812), 17. Also see Samuel Knox, A Discourse, Delivered in the 2nd Presbyterian Church, in the City of Baltimore, on Thursday, the 20th of August, 1812 (Baltimore: William Warner, 1812), 18–19. Richard M. Johnson, “Speech to Congress,” reprinted in: The Reporter (Lexington), January 11, 1812. Also see John H. Stevens, The Duty of the Union in a Just War (Poughkeepsie: C. C. Adams, 1813), 12–13; John Melish, Travels through the United States of America, in the Years 1806 & 1807, and 1809, 1810, & 1811 (Belfast: Jos. Smyth, 1818), 103.

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happy union.” The War of 1812 therefore was a “WAR for our republican form of government, against the machinations of despotism.”175 As a republic, the U.S., by contrast, was peaceful and could not wage offensive wars, Republican newspapers contended. “The whole spirit of our system of government, and the unanimous desire of all thinking men in America, direct to ‘peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations,’” the Weekly Register claimed.176 It was, in fact, Americans’ renunciation of war that made them truly exceptional and distinguished them from Europeans, as the Lexington Reporter asserted. “THE PROSPECT OF WAR, Is, and we trust ever will be, an ungrateful one to the people of America; . . . bred as we have been to the arts of peace.” The cause of Americans’ peacefulness was “to be sought for in our habit, in our manners, and even in our prejudices . . . we are unambitious of conquest, the common cause of European warfare.”177 Even after the U.S. had declared war, the Aurora maintained: “We are a peaceable nation.”178 As a consequence, Republican newspapers throughout the U.S. uniformly professed that America was coerced into war by Britain’s monarchical form of government. The National Intelligencer argued that the war was “forced on us” by the “distinguished hostility of her government to this country.”179 The National Advocate maintained that “we are driven into a state of open hostility, by our only commercial rival and ancient enemy. Pacific in our habits and dispositions, the world can bear witness that this war was not sought for by us.”180 “The wrongs of Great Britain had driven us into a war [of] defence,” the New-Hampshire Patriot asserted.181 The Lexington Reporter alleged that the U.S. had been “driven, goaded, dragged, forced, kicked, by the unaccountable madness, folly and desperation of the British government” into war.182 Admittedly, belligerents generally tend to legitimize their recourse to arms by depicting their conduct as merely defensive and their opponents 175

176 177 178 179 180 181 182

“Address of the Massachusetts Senate,” June 26, 1812, in: The Weekly Register (Baltimore), July 11, 1812. “Energy in War,” in: ibid., October 3, 1812. The Reporter (Lexington), February 1, 1812. “VOLUNTEERS,” in: Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), July 9, 1813. National Intelligencer (Washington), April 9, 1812. National Advocate (New York), December 15, 1812. New-Hampshire Patriot (Concord), March 7, 1815. The Reporter (Lexington), quoted in: James Wallace Hammack Jr., Kentucky and the Second American Revolution: The War of 1812 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 15.

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as the original instigators of the conflict. The assertion that the War of 1812 was forced upon and not chosen by the U.S., however, was not merely a rhetorical strategy that Jefferson, Madison and other leading Republicans used to justify the war in public speeches and publications and that Republican newspapers subsequently employed to generate support for the war. The private correspondence of Republican decision makers in the weeks and months before the declaration of war confirms that they really believed that a hostile Great Britain forced their hands. In February 1812, Jefferson complained to Charles Pinckney, member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, that the British monarchy “will force us . . . to become a nation of soldiers.”183 Madison told his predecessor in April that the British “prefer war with us” and that “We have nothing left therefore, but to make ready for it.”184 Clay, as speaker of the House of Representatives a major driving force of the movement towards war, wrote in a personal letter that Americans “are about to be driven by the aggressions of England” into war.185 In May, he spoke to his close friend Thomas Bodley of “a war brought upon us by the continued aggressions of a foreign government, and to avoid which every honorable effort has been made on the part of ours.”186 Republicans were convinced that American foreign policy, including the embargo, had been pacific and that Great Britain alone was to be blamed for the war. “Our Government have tried negociation until it is exhausted, and there is no doubt in my mind the Executive have observed the most perfect uprightness, and impartial neutrality,” Representative John Sevier of Tennessee asserted in a letter to his son.187 America’s declaration of war therefore did not call the notion that America, as a republic, was naturally pacific into question but became the very means through which its peacefulness was to be preserved, as Republican newspapers maintained after the conflict had officially started. By 1812, Americans had become “fully sensible that real peace could not be hoped for but as the blessed fruit of honorable war,” the Weekly Register declared. “To recede is impossible – the path to peace lies through the field of 183 184

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Jefferson to Pinckney, February 2, 1812, in: TJW, Vol. 18, 272. Madison to Jefferson, April 3, 1812, in: James Morton Smith (ed.), The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), Vol. 3, 1691. Clay to unknown, February 28, 1812, in: James Franklin Hopkins (ed.), The Papers of Henry Clay, 9 vols. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959–1988), Vol. 1, 633. Clay to Bodley, May 12, 1812, in: ibid., 653. Sevier to George W. Sevier, January 13, 1812, in: “Some Unpublished Letters of John Sevier to His Son, George Washington Sevier,” in: Tennessee Historical Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1920), 62–63.

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war.”188 The declaration of war, as the National Advocate claimed, was a measure of peace, as the U.S. was “[c]ompelled . . . to seek peace, through war.”189 The American Watchman and Delaware Republican concurred that America naturally preferred “safe and honorable peace to restless and warlike ambition – but to secure safe and honorable peace, she must prefer even the horrors of war to unsafe and inglorious peace.”190 The political convictions Republicans derived from the republican peace theory – i.e. the belief that the American republic was defined by its peacefulness, that it was permanently endangered by Europe’s aggressive monarchies, and that America’s wars were hence purely defensive – formed the ideological basis of Madison’s message to Congress on June 1, 1812, in which he justified America’s recourse to arms. The theory of republican peace also served as the ideological thread of the House Foreign Relations Committee report, which John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, as acting chairman, read out to Congress on June 3 and which recommended an immediate declaration of war against Great Britain. The common theme of both documents was the dichotomy of British aggressiveness and American peacefulness. U.S. foreign policy had been based on Americans’ “love of peace,” the House report read. As a republic, America had to be peaceful. “No people ever had stronger motives to cherish peace: none have ever cherished it with greater sincerity and zeal” than Americans. The British monarchy, by contrast, had engaged in a “system of hostile aggression” towards the American republic. Being “inflexibly hostile to this country, the British Government calmly looked forward to that moment when it might give the most deadly wound to our interest.” The House Foreign Relations Committee claimed that “there is no bound to the hostility of the British Government towards the United States.”191 Madison agreed, claiming that Great Britain, since the renewed outbreak of war with France in 1803, had engaged in “a series of acts hostile to the United States” and “wantonly spilt American blood,” while the U.S. had shown “moderation and conciliation” and “unexampled forbearance.”192

188 189 190 191

192

“Energy in War,” in: The Weekly Register (Baltimore), October 3, 1812. National Advocate (New York), December 15, 1812. American Watchman and Delaware Republican (Wilmington), July 15, 1812. “Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations,” June 3, 1812, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 1546–1554. Madison, “War Message,” June 1, 1812, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 3, 405–407. In his draft of the message, Madison had been even more explicit about the allegedly sinister motives of the

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The objective of both Madison’s message and the House report was to present an American declaration of war as a defensive measure. Obscuring the fact that America – by declaring and subsequently waging war – was being offensive, Madison based his justification of the war declaration on the assumption that there already was “on the side of Great Britain, a state of war against the United States,” while “on the side of the United States, a state of peace towards Great Britain” had been maintained. Madison did not even explicitly recommend a declaration of war but simply observed that Great Britain had already de facto declared war on the U.S. – her actions towards the U.S. falling “within the definition of war” – and that the decision before Congress was to acknowledge this fact and react to it.193 The House Foreign Relations Committee also found that by the order-in-council of November 11, 1807, which forbade neutral trade with France, “the British Government [had already] declared direct and positive war against the United States.” The report made clear that the War of 1812 was “forced on the United States” and, consequently, concluded by “an immediate appeal to arms.”194 After reading the report, Calhoun presented a war bill to the House, which passed on June 4. The Senate approved the war bill on June 17. One day later, Madison signed it into law and thus the War of 1812 began.195 As adherents of the theory of republican peace, Republicans came to believe that America, as the land of liberty, was inherently peaceful and that Anglo-American tensions were the result of Britain’s aggressiveness and hostility towards the U.S. Republicans interpreted Britain’s wartime policies against France – such as the Essex decision, the practice of impressment on the high seas, and the orders-incouncil – as part of a plan to destroy the American republic. As a result, the Jefferson and Madison Administrations had been unwilling to offer a quid pro quo agreement to Great Britain ever since war between her and France had been resumed in 1803. Republicans’ non-compromising policy became visible through Jefferson’s refusal to have the Senate consider the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty of 1806, the Embargo of 1807, Madison’s decision to prohibit any trade with Great Britain in 1810/1811 (while at the same time

193 195

British government. Madison, “Draft of a Message to Congress,” c. May 31, 1812, in: Robert J. Brugger et al. (eds.), The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, 8 vols. to date (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1984–), Vol. 4, 431. Madison, “War Message.” 194 “Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations.” For the Senate vote, see Leland R. Johnson, “The Suspense Was Hell: The Senate Vote for War in 1812,” in: Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 65, No. 4 (1969), 247–267.

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allowing it with France), and eventually the declaration of war in 1812. While not particularly mindful of Americans’ interests and their postcolonial sensibilities, Great Britain – by contrast – did not want an additional armed conflict with her former colonies in North America, as she found herself in the midst of a life-and-death struggle with Napoleonic France. In an attempt to prevent hostilities, Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, on June 16, 1812, proclaimed in Parliament that the British ministry would repeal the orders-in-council that had been responsible for the seizures of American vessels. By June 23, the entire system of blockades and licenses, which had interrupted America’s trade with the Continent, had been abolished.196 While the revocation of the orders came too late to prevent an American declaration of war, the British government initially hoped that the outbreak of actual violence could still be avoided and decided to delay any military action on the part of the Royal Navy until news of the repeal had reached the other side of the Atlantic.197 However, the Madison Administration, interpreting the suspension of the orders as a sign that the British government had relented to American pressure, hoped to be able to extract further concessions.198 On August 24, 1812, Jonathan Russell, America’s chargé d’affaires in London, informed Castlereagh that the U.S. would only be willing to agree to an armistice if the British government, in addition to repealing the orders, also stopped searching American vessels for deserters. In return, the U.S. would pass a law prohibiting the enlistment of British subjects on U.S. ships. If these demands were not met immediately, “Passions exasperated by injuries, alliances, or conquests,” Russell warned, would ensue making an end to the war on such “moderate” terms unlikely.199 Not surprisingly, the British government refused to accept these demands, which Russell made clear were non-negotiable and which would amount, so the British Foreign Minister informed the American diplomat, to a British termination of a practice deemed essential for

196 198

199

197 Perkins, Prologue to War, 336–338. Hickey, The War of 1812, 282–283. Since the Republican press reported very selectively about British politics exaggerating the domestic opposition to the orders-in-council and since most of the Madison Administration’s intelligence came from newspapers, Republican decision makers could easily have won the impression that “Britain was extremely vulnerable to American pressure, if not on the brink of a government collapse.” Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance, 89. Russell to Castlereagh, August 24, 1812, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 3, 589.

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national survival in exchange for a simple promise to enact a possibly ineffective piece of legislation.200 As Castlereagh told Russell on September 16, “no administration could expect to remain in power that should consent to renounce the right of impressment, or to suspend the practice, without the certainty of an arrangement . . . to secure its object.”201 Angered by the fact that the American government did not consider the revocation of the orders-in-council sufficient grounds for agreeing to an armistice and that it demanded a British renunciation of impressment prior to any give-and-take negotiations, which Russell was not allowed to conduct anyway, the British government also rejected a new version of the demands, which was forwarded a few weeks later and according to which the American government would accept informal British promises to discontinue impressment on the high seas.202 In view of America’s uncompromising foreign policy over the last ten years, the British government had little trust in the sincerity of American proposals. Contrary to Republicans’ belief that the U.S. was naturally peaceful, it was the American republic that sought war in 1812 and not the British monarchy.203 Admittedly, even though the British public received most of its American news from Federalist papers (because of New England’s dominance of the transatlantic trade) and therefore might have been under the false impression that opposition to a war with Great Britain was widespread in the U.S., the British government was aware that its maritime policies carried the danger of provoking a war with the U.S. and preferred armed conflict to giving up the practice of impressment. Therefore, part of the blame for the outbreak of hostilities rests on policy makers in London.204 Subordinating Anglo-American relations to the requirements of the more important European war, it simply hoped that the American people were too divided and America’s republican institutions too weak to declare war against the mighty British Empire. 200 201 202

203

204

Castlereagh to Russell, August 29, 1812, in: ibid., 589–590. Russell to Monroe, September 17, 1812, in: ibid., 594. Russell to Castlereagh, September 12, 1812, and Castlereagh to Russell, September 18, 1812, in: ibid., 591, 592. For an analysis of the diplomatic correspondence between Russell and Castlereagh, also see Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance, 100; Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 14–15. See Donald R. Hickey, Don’t Give Up the Ship: Myths of the War of 1812 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 8. Ironically, when British ships arrived off New England’s coast in the summer of 1812 with news of the repeal of the orders-in-council, they were the first to be taken as prizes of war. Borneman, 1812, 178. Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance, 90, 94.

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Nonetheless, in 1812, the American government felt forced to declare war not because the British government left it no other choice but because a nationalistically aroused Republican public demanded it, after the Jefferson and Madison Administration had failed to reach a modus vivendi with the former mother country and tensions between both countries had consequently deteriorated continuously.205 Having internalized the assumptions of the theory of republican peace, Republicans, however, interpreted the American declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812 as a defensive measure, putting the blame for the war entirely on Britain’s monarchical form of government. The belief that America, as a republic, was peaceful by nature was thus both a major cause of the War of 1812, as it had created the perception of a British threat and resulted in an antagonistic U.S. foreign policy, and a major result of the war, since the actual armed confrontation with the former mother country would reaffirm Republicans’ belief that Britain was aggressive and America peaceful.

205

Since the intransigence of the Madison Administration on the impressment issue strengthened war critics’ argument that the war had been avoidable and that the federal government unnecessarily carried it on after the orders-in-council had been revoked, the Seamen’s Bill was introduced to Congress at the request of the President in January and passed in February 1813. The bill stipulated that it should be forbidden to employ any other than U.S. citizens on American vessels once the current war was over, that foreigners could only be naturalized after five years of residence, and that ship owners not complying with the law would be fined. The British government thus seemed to obtain a guarantee that the employment of Britons on U.S. ships would be prohibited if it agreed to end the conflict by suspending the practice of impressment. However, since the British government, having refused such a deal on earlier occasions, could hardly be expected to trust that the American government would actually enforce the law, it was apparent that the bill served domestic rather than diplomatic purposes. As Monroe told John Adams, the purpose of the act was “to unite the country in a vigorous prosecution of the war.” Monroe to Adams, February 15, 1813, in: Hamilton, The Writings of James Monroe, Vol. 5, 243. The bill is reprinted in: AC, 12th Congress, 2nd Session, 937–939. For the bill as a domestic measure, see J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 295–297.

6 Disentangling America from Great Britain

Most Republicans rejoiced upon learning that Congress had declared war against Great Britain in June 1812. In Annapolis, Republicans marched round the town and fired salutes upon hearing of the war declaration.1 At a public meeting in Charleston, Republicans expressed their satisfaction that “the Members of Congress from this State” who voted for war “have done their duty, and have deserved well of their country” calling on the citizens of South Carolina to march into battle.2 In Richmond, salutes were fired both in the morning and in the evening.3 Raleigh Republicans fired off shots into the air to express their approval of the decision to go to war.4 Pennsylvania Republicans promised to support the war efforts and Republicans in Kentucky fired cannons and muskets and illuminated their houses in joy.5 In Tennessee, Republicans responded to news of the declaration of war by publicly celebrating, parading through the streets, lighting bonfires, saluting with their rifles, and toasting.6 In Baltimore, Republicans “heartily greeted” the President’s message requesting Congress to declare war and his formal proclamation that a state of war now existed.7 During 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

National Intelligencer (Washington), June 23, 1812. City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston), June 30, 1812. The Enquirer (Richmond), June 23, 1812. Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, Frustrated Patriots: North Carolina and the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 190. Victor Sapio, Pennsylvania & the War of 1812 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 163–164; James Wallace Hammack Jr., Kentucky and the Second American Revolution: The War of 1812 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 14. Tom Kanon, Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014), 34. “Triumph of Principle,” in: The Weekly Register (Baltimore), July 11, 1812.

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the Fourth of July festivities in Washington, Republicans toasted the Twelfth Congress, the President, and the war.8 While Republicans overwhelmingly welcomed the declaration of war, Federalists on the other hand were petrified.9 In New England, flags on public buildings and ships were hung at half-mast, many shops closed, and bells were tolled in the churches and meeting-houses.10 In Boston, an assembly of thousands of Federalists passed antiwar resolutions condemning the declaration of war as “rash, unnecessary and ruinous.”11 A group of Federalists in Augusta, Maine, hung Madison in effigy to show their disapprobation of the decision to go to war.12 New York Federalists organized an antiwar rally in August.13 The Federalist Governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, Caleb Strong, Roger Griswold, and William Jones, issued proclamations appointing July 23 a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.14 Federalists in neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate voted for the war in 1812 and most Federalists voted against previous and subsequent war-supporting measures (to raise men, finance the war, and cut the trade with the enemy).15 The so-called Old Republicans – a faction of the Republican Party which insisted on a narrow interpretation of the Constitution and was principally opposed to any measures that would enhance the power of the federal

8 9

10

11 12

13

14

15

“Fourth of July,” in: National Intelligencer (Washington), July 8, 1812. For Federalist opposition to the War of 1812, see Lawrence Delbert Cress, “‘Cool and Serious Reflection’: Federalist Attitudes toward War in 1812,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1987), 123–145; James H. Ellis, A Ruinous and Unhappy War: New England and the War of 1812 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2009). For Federalist opposition to the Republican administrations in general, see Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). Columbian Centinel (Boston), June 24, 1812; The Rhode-Island American, and General Advertiser (Providence), June 26, 1812; American Advocate (Hallowell), July 2, 1812; Christopher Ellery to Madison, June 24, 1812, in: James Madison Papers (Library of Congress), reel 14. Columbian Centinel (Boston), July 18, 1812. James W. North, The History of Augusta, from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Augusta: Clapp and North, 1870), 407. Harvey Strum, “The Politics of the New York Antiwar Campaign, 1812–1815,” in: Peace & Change, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1982), 9. The Yankee (Boston), July 3, 1812; Connecticut Herald (New Haven), July 7, 1812; Rhode-Island Republican (Newport), July 23, 1812. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler (eds.), Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004), 571–574.

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government such as taxes and a standing army – also protested against the decision to start a war with the former mother country.16 For one, Federalists and Old Republicans did not share Republicans’ belief in the theory of republican peace and thus did not perceive the same threat from the British monarchy. Therefore, they attacked the War of 1812 as an unnecessary and offensive war. It was “a war not of defence, but of conquest, of aggrandizement, of ambition,” one opponent of the war maintained, making Republicans and not the British monarchy responsible for its outbreak.17 Therefore, Federalists only supported legislation strengthening maritime defenses but voted against all military measures relating to the army and the militia, as these would be used to attack Canada.18 To demonstrate the incompatibility of Republicans’ avowals of their peaceful intentions and their decision to wage war against Great Britain, Federalists introduced two resolutions to Congress aimed at actually restricting the war to defensive operations and thus at preventing an attack on Canada. Republicans, however, voted down both resolutions with large majorities, justifying the attack on British North America as an expedient and necessary way of defending the U.S.19 When the President asked Congress for more troops in 1813, Federalist Congressmen used the occasion to again portray the war as an “offensive” one by pointing to the invasion of Canada, which was “totally inconsistent with the spirit and genius of our Constitution,” since “Republics . . . ought never to be engaged in a foreign offensive war,” as Federalist Representative Elijah Brigham of Massachusetts pointed out, revealing the contradictory nature of Republican foreign policy.20 Federalist efforts to question the legitimacy of the war declaration, however, came to no avail. The modification of the theory of republican peace, according to which republics had to engage in wars against monarchies, since they posed a permanent threat to them, made Republicans immune to the charge that they were responsible for the conflict and put the war guilt exclusively on British shoulders. Moreover, the fact that there were actual American grievances such as the British impressment of sailors from

16

17 18

19

20

For Old Republicans, see Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). John Randolph, December 10, 1811, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 441. For an analysis of party voting during the War of 1812, see Donald R. Hickey, “Federalist Party Unity and the War of 1812,” in: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1978), 23–39. For the proposals, see AC, 13th Congress, 2nd Session, 939, 1054. For the rejection of the proposals, see ibid., 939, 1056. Brigham, January 4, 1813, in: ibid., 12th Congress, 2nd Session, 512.

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American merchant ships gave some plausibility to Republican claims of British hostility. Unlike in the Jay Treaty debate, Federalists were therefore not able to successfully impress their image of Republicans as warmongers who pursued an un-republican foreign policy upon the larger public. Not only did Federalists and Old Republicans oppose the war because they believed it was avoidable but also because it would effectually help Napoleon in his quest for universal dominion. They believed that the U.S. should rather support Great Britain to uphold the balance of power in Europe, fearing that France would turn on the U.S. once Great Britain had been subdued. When declaring war against Great Britain in 1812, Republicans, however, gave assistance to France’s imperialistic designs and made the U.S. de facto France’s junior partner, as Representative Daniel Sheffey of Virginia complained. Even if the U.S. was not allied to France in name, “we are united in fact.”21 The Federalist-dominated General Assembly of Connecticut also claimed that through the declaration of war in 1812 the U.S. had formed “a coalition, not less evident than if defined by the articles of a formal treaty, . . . between the national administration and that fearful tyrant in Europe, who was aspiring to the dominion of the world.”22 In an “Address of the Minority to their Constituents,” which they published to explain their opposition to the war, Federalist Representatives expressed their concern over the French alliance in a similar way. “It cannot be concealed, that to engage in the present war against England is to place ourselves on the side of France, and expose us to the vassalage of States serving under the banners of the French Emperor.”23 John Randolph, the leading spokesperson of the Old Republicans and one of the most vociferous critics of Madison’s foreign policy, warned to the same effect that by declaring war against Great Britain, America would help Napoleon “establish his empire over the ocean and over the land that gave our fathers birth – to forge our own chains!”24 21 22

23

24

Sheffey, January 11, 1813, in: ibid., 698. “Report by the General Assembly of Connecticut,” October 1814, in: Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), November 19, 1814. Also see “Resolutions of the Federal Republicans of Providence (RI),” April 7, 1812, in: Newport Mercury, April 11, 1812; “Memorial to the President of the United States by the Inhabitants of Plymouth,” July 20, 1812, in: New-England Palladium (Boston), August 7, 1812. “Address of the Minority to Their Constituents,” in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 2220. The only Federalist Representatives who did not sign the document, which had been written by Josiah Quincy, were Robert Le Roy Livingston and Daniel Sheffey. Randolph to the Freeholders of Charlotte, Prince Edward, Buckingham, and Cumberland, May 30, 1812, in: Hugh A. Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1850), Vol. 1, 300–301.

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Federalists’ and Old Republicans’ opposition to what they considered a virtual alliance with France, however, was not only based on diplomatic calculations and the fear that a French victory would permanently upset the balance of power in Europe and turn the U.S. into a quasicolonial dependency of France. More importantly, they objected to the war declaration against Great Britain and the indirect alliance with France because of the likely effects they would have on America’s domestic order. After all, Great Britain and its mixed constitution stood for the traditional political and social order marked by conservative values, stable classes, fixed social hierarchies, and elite rule. Napoleon’s expansionist dictatorship, by contrast, was, so Federalists believed, the logical result of the French Revolution and the concomitant leveling of social distinctions and popular political participation. It represented those forces seeking to destroy the established order and served as a dire warning of what would happen in America if Republicans successfully implemented their democratic-egalitarian agenda.25 As Great Britain and France represented competing ideologies, Federalists continued believing that the shape of America’s domestic order was intrinsically intertwined with the outcome of the European war and that U.S. foreign policy had thus an immediate influence on domestic politics, even after the French republic had been overthrown and Republicans had given up their Francophilia and consequently ceased believing that America’s fate would be determined by the outcome of the conflict in Europe. Federalists and Old Republicans therefore feared that waging war against Great Britain would further undermine the conservatism that Federalists championed and turn the U.S. into a fully fledged democracy, in which the system of checks and balances would be upset, the rule of law would be suspended, and demagogues would rise to power. Federalist editor Robert Walsh Jr. noted that Republicans who “are so industriously labouring to convert our mild republic into a furious democracy . . . exulted in the opportunity . . . of ripening the popular discontents against 25

Federalists remained opposed to France, even after Napoleon had usurped power and she ceased being a democracy, since the Corsican emperor, whom they considered an illegitimate upstart, still held high the revolutionary ideals. In fact, Federalist Francophobia even increased when Napoleon seized power, since he exported the principles of the French Revolution by military force, undermining the traditional hierarchies in the countries he conquered. See Joseph I. Shulim, The Old Dominion and Napoleon Bonaparte: A Study in American Opinion (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 90–91, 105.

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England.”26 Randolph was appalled that Republicans chose to wage war against those “from whom every valuable principle of our own institutions has been borrowed – representation, jury trial, voting the supplies, writs of habeas corpus.”27 As an Anglo-American war would “de-Anglicize” America, i.e. subvert the traditional social hierarchy, it would simultaneously “Frenchify” American society, i.e. promote democratic-egalitarian values. Daniel Webster, who would shortly be elected to the House of Representatives to represent New Hampshire, warned that the alliance with France would have profound repercussions on America’s domestic order. “What People hath come within the grasp of HER power, that hath not . . . communed of her principles?”28 Federalist William Ellery Channing, an influential Massachusetts minister, also claimed that “French domination” threatened “the minds, the character, the morals, the religion, of our nation,” maintaining that “The character of that nation authorizes us to demand, that we be kept from the pollution of her embrace.”29 “An alliance with France,” Federalist John Lowell Jr. concluded, was therefore “more dreadful than a century of war,” or, as the Gleaner and Luzerne Advertiser put it, Napoleon’s friendship was “more to be dreaded than his enmity.”30 In fact, as Federalists were as much concerned about the de facto alliance with France as they were about the war against England itself, they preferred a war against both nations to one against England solely, pointing to the fact that French depredations of American trade equaled those of Great Britain.31 After the House had voted in favor of a declaration of war against Great Britain on June 4, 1812, Federalists and some dissatisfied Republicans in the Senate, therefore, pushed a motion calling for a limited naval war against both British and French 26

27 28

29

30

31

Robert Walsh Jr., “An Inquiry into the Past and Present Relations of France and the United States,” in: The American Review of History and Politics, and General Repository of Literature and State Papers, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1811), 3. Randolph, December 10, 1811, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 452. Daniel Webster, An Address Delivered before the Washington Benevolent Society (Portsmouth: Treadwell, 1812), 25. Channing, April 5, 1810, in: William Henry Channing (ed.), Memoir of William Ellery Channing, 10th edn., 3 vols. (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1874), Vol. 1, 332–333; William Ellery Channing, A Sermon, Preached in Boston, July 23, 1812 (Boston: Greenough and Stebbins, 1812), 14. John Lowell Jr., Mr. Madison’s War (Boston: Russell & Cutler, 1812), 5; The Gleaner, and Luzerne Advertiser (Wilkes-Barre), April 17, 1812. Also see Timothy Dwight, A Discourse, in Two Parts, Delivered July 23, 1812 (Utica: Ira Merrill, 1812), 43. For the debate on a “triangular war,” see Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 393–394.

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shipping. However, even though all Federalist Senators voted in favor of a limited “triangular war” against both belligerents, the resolution was narrowly defeated by seventeen to fifteen votes on June 12.32 Federalist concerns over the war’s possible effects on America’s domestic order were not unfounded. Republicans indeed resented the influence that Great Britain wielded in the U.S. and it was not just the cultural similarity with the former mother country – both sharing inter alia the same language, religion, and (for the most part) ethnicity – or the economic dependence on British manufactures and credits that offended Republicans’ post-colonial sensibilities, undermined the growth of an American sense of self, and made Niles’ Weekly Register complain that Americans “are semi-Englishmen, and have not a national character.”33 More importantly, Republicans feared that the political attraction that they assumed the British monarchy held for Federalists posed a threat to America’s republican form of government. Jefferson’s aversion to a renewal of the commercial clauses of the Jay Treaty, his refusal to submit the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty to the Senate for ratification, and the

32

33

For the vote on the “triangular war” resolution, see AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 270; Leland R. Johnson, “The Suspense Was Hell: The Senate Vote for War in 1812,” in: Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 65, No. 4 (1969), 266. “Retrospect and Remarks,” in: Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), June 25, 1814. Also see Richard M. Johnson, “Speech to Congress,” reprinted in: The Reporter (Lexington), January 11, 1812; William B. Giles, February 11, 1811, AC, 11th Congress, 3rd Session, 206; Benjamin Rush to John Adams, August 14, 1805, in: John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair (eds.), The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1966), 31. For a careful reconstruction of Americans’ anxieties about remaining culturally and economically dependent on Great Britain after achieving independence, see Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Joseph Eaton, The Anglo-American Paper War: Debates about the New Republic, 1800–1825 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Moreover, as Alan Taylor showed, America’s post-colonial identity grew even more fragile through continued transatlantic migrations in the early nineteenth century. Particularly in the Canadian–American borderlands, frequent migrations in both directions blurred national distinctions and loyalties. Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). For the continuing importance of familial rhetoric for characterizing America’s relation to Great Britain in the post-revolutionary period, see Jennifer Clark, “The War of 1812: American Nationalism and Rhetorical Images of Britain,” in: War & Society, Vol. 12, No. 11 (1994), 1–26.

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Embargo of 1807 were certainly encouraged by his desire to disentangle the U.S. from its former mother country, which he believed corrupted American society and bolstered the Federalist Party.34 When Republicans felt forced to enter into armed hostilities in 1812, they hence hoped that the war would end Britain’s pernicious political sway in the U.S. and thereby protect American republicanism. “If . . . our republican freedom, . . . has a foe more deadly than any other,” Richard Rush, Madison’s future Attorney General, explained, it was a monarchical “spirit which can make its way slowly and unperceived, but surely and fatally.” Since the spirit of monarchy entered the U.S. through British contacts, Rush recommended staying “farther off – much farther off – from Britain” in order to “be more safe from the poison of her political touch.” To him, the objective of the War of 1812 was therefore to “escape . . . the errors of their misleading philosophy” and to produce “the effect of throwing us at a safer distance from so contaminating an intimacy, making our liberty thrive more securely.”35 Jefferson similarly considered the War of 1812 “this second weaning from British principles, British attachments, British manners & manufactures.”36 He therefore wished that the War of 1812 would lead to the “acquisition of Canada” and thus to “the final expulsion of England from the American continent” such that British influence on the U.S. would wane permanently. In that case, “British principles” would lose their lure. Jefferson went so far as to suggest that Great Britain should not give in to American demands such that the war could continue bolstering the Republican cause. “We have a rumour now afloat that the orders of council are repealed,” he told William Duane on August 4, 1812, hoping that this information was incorrect because it would deface the image of the English enemy: “The repeal of the orders of council would only add recruits to our [Anglophile] minority.” Instead, he wished for the war to drag on to “eradicate” the Federalists’ “English partialities.”37 34

35

36

37

Because of its stimulating effects on Anglo-American trade, Jefferson was happy to be rid of the Jay Treaty’s commercial stipulations or this “millstone round our necks,” as he called it. Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, 3 vols. (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1858), Vol. 3, 315. Richard Rush, An Oration, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, at the Capitol, Washington, July 4, 1812 (Washington: Isaac and Walter R. Hill, 1812), 19. Jefferson to William Duane, April 20, 1812, in: Thomas Jefferson Papers (Library of Congress), reel 045. Jefferson to Duane, August 4, 1812, in: ibid. Duane in turn had already lamented the lack of a hostile British action that would rally the nation behind the Republican administration a year before: “nothing can save us but true foreign aggression such as will unite all men.” Duane to David Baillie Warden, July 11, 1811, quoted in: J. C. A. Stagg,

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So when Republicans declared war against Great Britain in 1812, they sought to disassociate America from the former mother country and to discredit Federalists’ political persuasion. However, Republicans did not perceive their wish to extinguish Anglophilia and conservatism in the U.S. as a partisan move. They believed that democratic egalitarianism was the only true form of Americanism and that hence only the Republican Party represented the American nation. “For the republicans are the nation,” as Jefferson put it.38 In turn, they viewed Federalists who championed a competing ideology not as legitimate political opponents, but as “anti-American,” as the Baltimore Whig put it, since Republicans equated Federalists’ conservatism with monarchism and thus as incompatible with America’s republican form of government, the defining feature of the American nation that set it apart from the former mother country.39 As the Aurora explained it, “the people of the two nations [Great Britain and America] resemble each other in face.” It was only “the mind” that constituted “the distinguishing characteristic between a real American and a British subject . . . It is not where a man was born, or who he looks like, but what he thinks, which ought at this day to constitute the difference between an American and a British subject.” According to this definition, “there are some in America whose souls are perfectly British.”40 Moreover, it was not just Federalists’ conservatism as such but also the fact that they justified their political ideology by pointing to the British example that made Republicans accuse them of having a compromised loyalty or even of favoring Great Britain over America. The American Watchman defined Federalists as “those who have always worshipped the divinity of monarchy, and believed in the infallibility of all crowned heads,” and who were hence “the partisans of England.”41 The Governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry, too, warned of “royalists in principle and in practice” who pursued “a monarchical project” and were consequently “vehement partisans of the British government.” Federalist editors were British “ministerial printers here to aid in

38 39

40

41

Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 74. Jefferson to Duane, March 28, 1811, in: WTJ, Vol. 11, 193. Whig (Baltimore), reprinted in: The Enquirer (Richmond), June 30, 1812. Also see The Satirist (Boston), February 3, 1812. “AN AMERICAN FARMER,” in: Aurora (Philadelphia), reprinted in: Republican Star or Eastern Shore General Advertiser (Easton), June 29, 1813. American Watchman and Delaware Republican (Wilmington), June 26, 1812.

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destroying our own, and in re-establishing over us a British government.” If America, “at this momentous crisis,” did not forcefully resist British encroachments on American trade and seamen, “every principle of patriotism, and of national attachment” would “be annihilated” and – encouraged by “American royalists” – Americans would consequently “supplicate his Britannic Majesty to admit us again into his royal favour as penitent subjects.”42 Republican Representative Joseph Varnum from Massachusetts, the Speaker of the House, also charged Federalists with being not only opposed to America’s republican form of government but also of plotting a reunification with the former mother country. He claimed that “there was a party in our Country, fully determined to do every thing in their power, to Subvert the principles of Our happy Government, and to Establish a Monarchy on its ruins.” What made their political project even more reprehensible was the fact that “with a view of Obtaining the Aid of G.B. in the Accomplishment of their nefarious Object; they have Inlisted into her Service, and will go all lengths to Justify and Support every Measure which she may take against this Nation.”43 Republicans thus believed themselves to be acting in the interest of the American nation when they tried to permanently crush Federalism. The most suitable way to discredit Federalists’ conservatism and their attachment to Great Britain was to wage war against her, since – in a wartime situation – Federalists could no longer define American identity by positive reference to the former mother country. Even though he was not certain “how far the War will be popular in the eastern states,” William Plumer predicted that “A declaration of War must necessarily produce a great change in public opinion & the State of parties – British partisans must then either close their lips in silence or abscond.”44 The purpose of the declaration of war was hence to disentangle the U.S. from Great Britain or, in the words of the Aurora, “to crush the British faction” and to cement Republicans’ domestic agenda.45 War would force Federalists to renounce their Anglophilia or remove

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44

45

Elbridge Gerry, Speech of His Excellency the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to Both Houses of the Legislature at the Session Commencing on the Second Wednesday in January, 1812 (Boston: State Press, 1812), 3, 6, 7, 14–15. Varnum to George Washington Campbell, March 19, 1810, in: George Washington Campbell Papers (Library of Congress), container 3. Plumer to John A. Harper, April 27, 1812, in: William Plumer Papers (Library of Congress), reel 3. “From the Aurora,” in: Public Advertiser (New York), June 30, 1812.

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themselves from the national community. The National Intelligencer made clear that “he that is not for us must be considered as against us and treated accordingly,” because the “happiness of the people, their liberties, their existence perhaps, and certainly their honor and that of republican institutions, will all depend upon the undivided exertions of the whole nation against a common enemy.”46 The Republican majority in the Massachusetts Senate agreed: “He that is not for his Country, is against it.” Only “the Enemies of Republics” would obstruct the war efforts in order to instigate a revolution in favor of monarchism.47 “There is no middle course,” the Governor of New Hampshire asserted, “we must support our government, or oppose it – afford aid to our country, or countenance her enemies.”48 The National Aegis maintained that the war situation required the display of undivided loyalty: “When War is declared, there are but two parties, Citizens Soldiers, & Enemies – Americans, and Tories.”49 As soon as a state of war existed between the U.S. and Great Britain Republicans could therefore denounce Federalists who did not renounce their Anglophilia as traitors. The “advocate of England is the enemy of America,” as the Aurora put it succinctly.50 To the Weekly Register, Federalists who were opposed to the war were “mere creatures of England” – “a body of men destitute of national feeling.”51 Republicans also classified Old Republicans who criticized the war as national deserters. “Not that their hearts are with their country – But with the British agents and U. States aristocracy,” the Lexington Reporter claimed.52 Republicans’ very use of the terms “patriot” and “tory” to distinguish themselves from the Federalists during the war was a potent rhetorical strategy to place critics of the war outside the national community, as it associated Federalists with the Loyalists who had opposed the American Revolution. Randolph complained bitterly that he was ousted, that the proponents of war enrolled “their illustrious names among those of the 46 47

48

49 50

51 52

National Intelligencer (Washington), May 14, 1812. Massachusetts Senate, “Address to the People of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” June 26, 1812, in: Independent Chronicle (Boston), June 29, 1812. William Plumer, “Speech to the Senate and House of Representatives of New Hampshire,” November 18, 1812, in: Concord Gazette, November 24, 1812. “Political Duty,” in: National Aegis (Worcester), July 7, 1812. Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 3, 1813, quoted in: Albert Matthews, “Uncle Sam,” in: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 19 (1908–1909), 30. “Energy in War,” in: The Weekly Register (Baltimore), October 3, 1812. The Reporter (Lexington), March 14, 1812. Also see ibid., February 15, 1812.

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heroes of the Revolution,” and that opponents of the war were called “tories” and threatened with being “tarred and feathered” like the Loyalists in the American Revolution.53 Calling the War of 1812 the “Second War of Independence” or the “Second American Revolution” followed the same rationale. These labels characterized critics of the War of 1812 as opponents of American independence. Federalists were aghast at Republicans’ attempts to depict the war in this way, pointing to fundamental differences between the War of Independence and the War of 1812. “Whoever compares the revolutionary war, with the present, will find the causes and circumstances extremely different,” John Lathrop, minister of the Second Church in Boston, argued. “In the former case Great Britain attempted to take from the American colonies, some of their important civil rights, and this was attempted by the force of arms. Our country was invaded with a force determined to make our subjection absolute,” he explained. “In the present case, there is no professed design on the part of the British government to take from the American people, any of their civil rights: no attempt has been made to bring the United States under subjection. No part of our country has been invaded by the troops of Great Britain.”54 The war situation thus enabled Republicans to push Federalists into the discursive corner – with Federalists no longer able to publicly defend their Anglophilia without casting doubt on their national loyalty. In the nationalistic hysteria the war produced, Republicans also felt encouraged to physically threaten Federalists who refused to revoke their political positions. “Party distinctions would be lost” in a war with England, the Baltimore Whig had already predicted in 1811, warning that “tories would be purged from the country.”55 By exposing disloyal elements of the body politic, the war would give Americans the chance to purify the nation, as the Weekly Register suggested after the war had begun. “One of the happiest effects of the war will be – the cleansing of the republic of such abominable rubbish.”56 The Richmond Enquirer concurred, opining that those who remained unconvinced of the necessity of the war were “not fit to live here.”57 At the 1812 Fourth of July 53 54

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Randolph, May 6, 1812, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 1400. John Lathrop, The Present War Unexpected, Unnecessary, and Ruinous (Boston: J. W. Burditt, 1812), 14. Whig (Baltimore), reprinted in: Alexandria Daily Gazette, Commercial & Political, November 4, 1811. “Energy in War,” in: The Weekly Register (Baltimore), October 3, 1812. The Enquirer (Richmond), February 18, 1815.

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celebrations in Lincoln, Kentucky, Republicans demanded that “Tories” may “never be permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of a citizen of America.”58 Republican Representative Robert Wright of Maryland warned that as soon as “the signs of treason and civil war discover themselves in any quarter of the American Empire . . . the evil would soon be radically cured, by hemp and confiscation.”59 No other than Jefferson – champion of civil liberties and pedantic critic of government powers – concurred with Wright. While he considered Federalists in the South so weak that “a barrel of tar to each state South of the Patomac will keep all in order,” he feared that “to the North they will give you more trouble” and told the President that in New England he might “have to apply the rougher drastics of Govr. Wright, hemp and confiscation.”60 The Vermont Green-Mountain Farmer also suggested radical measures to eradicate Anglophilia. “[S]hould a British faction show itself in our climes, nothing but taking an active part in annihilating it . . . would satisfy our feelings.”61 Republican threats were not hollow. On the night of July 27, 1812, a group of Republican hotheads dismantled the office of the Federal Republican, a Federalist newspaper in Baltimore that had taken a decidedly antiwar stance. On the next day, the mob – aroused by an editorial published in the Republican Whig that called the Federalists “murderous traitors” and opined that “THE PEOPLE OUGHT TO HAVE RAZED THEIR GARRISON TO THE GROUND AND PUT EVERY MAN TO DEATH” – stormed the prison in which the Federalists who had tried to defend the office the previous night had been taken in protective custody.62 They tortured the Federalists who failed to escape, beating them, stabbing them with penknives, and dropping hot candle wax into their eyes. One Federalist was tarred and feathered and afterwards set on fire. James M. Lingan, an officer of the Continental Army during the War of Independence, died of the wounds he received when he was stabbed in the chest. Alexander C. Hanson, the editor of the Federal Republican, was seriously injured and never fully recovered from his wounds, dying seven years later at the age of thirty58 59 60

61 62

“Lincoln County,” in: The Reporter (Lexington), July 18, 1812. Wright, May 6, 1812, in: AC, 12th Congress, 1st Session, 1413. Jefferson to Madison, June 29, 1812, in: Thomas Jefferson Papers (Library of Congress), reel 046. Green-Mountain Farmer (Bennington), February 24, 1812. Whig (Baltimore), July 28, 1812, reprinted in: Federal Republican, and Commercial Gazette (Georgetown), August 5, 1812.

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three. Revolutionary War hero General Henry – “Light-Horse” Harry – Lee received serious internal injuries and remained an invalid. None of the participants in this crime were punished. Baltimore Republicans were not willing to tolerate opposition to the war in 1812.63 Nonetheless, most Republicans did not seek civil war but only wished to make Anglophilia politically unacceptable, irrevocably discredit Federalists’ conservative ideology, and thereby unify the American nation under a liberal consensus. The Aurora hoped that the war would encourage moderate Federalists to break with “die-hard” Federalists who did not give up their idolatry of the British monarchy. “‘Ye gallant Feds, wherever spread, Come, and share our glories, Your sword should cut the cobweb thread That links you to the tories.”64 The external threat was supposed to unite all members of the American nation in the common defense of their country. The Charleston Courier expressed its conviction that “The hour of danger will be to our citizens the hour of union, and whilst repelling the outrages of daring enemies, they will be designated by no other appellation than that of American citizens. In the common efforts for the public good, the names of federal and democratic republicans will be no longer heard.”65 Republicans were optimistic that waging a war against Great Britain would make most Federalists rally to the defense of the nation and view England as a national enemy rather than a model to be emulated. They hoped that war would promote American nationalism rather than deepen political divisions. “[M]ay common perils and common triumphs bind us more closely together!” Richard Rush proclaimed in an oration before the House of Representatives on the Independence Day of 1812.66 “May danger from abroad ensure Union at home,” as Bostonians celebrating the victory of the USS Constitution over the HMS Guerrière in the first major sea battle of the war at Faneuil Hall on September 5, 1812, expressed their hope that the foreign threat from Great Britain would promote American nationalism.67 “Nothing united the public mind so much as danger,” the Western Intelligencer of

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64 65

66 67

For the Baltimore riots, see Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 56–67. “From the Aurora,” in: Public Advertiser (New York), June 30, 1812. “Address of Isaac Auld,” in: Charleston Courier, July 21, 1812. Also see Freeman’s Journal (Cincinnati), reprinted in: The Supporter (Chillicothe), July 4, 1812; Military Monitor, and American Register (New York), March 15, 1813. Rush, An Oration, 22. “Tribute to American Gallantry,” in: Independent Chronicle (Boston), September 7, 1812.

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Worthington, Ohio, concurred.68 The Trenton True American also expected the war to have unifying effects: “Danger binds us all together.”69 Republicans’ efforts to force their Federalist opponents to renounce their Anglophilia through the creation of a war situation were largely successful.70 While all Federalist members of the House and the Senate were opposed to the declaration of war, once it was declared some of them chose to support it. Although he considered the declaration an “astounding act of Madness,” Maryland Federalist Felix H. Gilbert called on his fellow party members to “rally round the Standard” and fight for the nation.71 “We must in such times as these cling to the National Government, as our only Rock of Safety against the Storm,” as former Federalist President John Adams maintained at the outset of the war.72 The New York Commercial Advertiser, a leading Federalist newspaper, made clear to its readers that they had no choice but to “submit” and support the war in order to unequivocally demonstrate their national loyalty. “Federalists aim at nothing but the good of their country . . . and should the war eventuate in the restoration and security of our violated rights and in establishing and perpetuating our republican Institutions, and our republican blessings, they would be the first to rejoice.”73 The Charleston Courier declared that “as our rulers have designated the aggressor against which they are of opinion they have the greatest cause of complaint, it is the duty of their fellow citizens to support them in the stand they have taken.” The Federalist newspaper, therefore, told its readers to “rally round the government of their country.”74

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71 72

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Western Intelligencer (Worthington), January 31, 1812, quoted in: Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 101. “THE TIMES: An Ode for the Fourth of July, 1812,” in: The True American (Trenton), July 6, 1812. Some Federalists such as John Quincy Adams had already reconsidered their Anglophilia and turned to the Republican Party in response to the Chesapeake Affair and the unresolved issue of impressment. See Robert R. Thompson, “John Quincy Adams, Apostate: From ‘Outrageous Federalist’ to ‘Republican Exile,’ 1801–1809,” in: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1991), 161–183. Gilbert to Sarah Hillhouse, June 20, 1812, quoted in: Hickey, The War of 1812, 52–53. Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, March 11, 1812, in: Worthington Chauncey Ford (ed.), Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784–1822 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1927), 76–77. “Extract from the Vermont Washingtonian,” printed in: Commercial Advertiser (New York), July 2, 1812. “Address of Isaac Auld,” in: Charleston Courier, July 21, 1812.

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Conservative as they were, Federalist leaders asked their followers to obey public authorities, reminding them that – whether they liked it or not – the war declaration was now the law of the land. The editor of the Washingtonian, Josiah Dunham, lamented the commencement of war against Great Britain but accepted that “the die is now cast” calling on Federalists not to obstruct the war efforts, but to support the administration. “If the laws are not liked, we have the constitutional and only remedy in our hands – by the exercise of our elective franchise.”75 Channing told his fellow Federalists “to avoid all language and conduct which will produce a spirit of insubordination – a contempt of laws and just authority,” even though he considered the war unjust. Instead, they should use the “elective form of government” to express their dissent.76 “Resistance and Insurrection form no part of our creed,” as Webster put it. Federalists should seek to win the next elections but were meanwhile bound to pay taxes to finance the war and to render, if legally obliged, personal services.77 Still, while most Federalists decided not to obstruct the government’s efforts, many remained opposed to the war and did not actively support it. Especially in New England, opposition remained notable, as it was the first region that would be threatened by a British counter-offensive from Canada, the region that suffered most heavily under the war economically (the 1811 law prohibiting the importation of British goods, the 1812 complete embargo on trade with the enemy and the doubling of customs duties, and the 1813 prohibition of coastal trade hit New England more than other regions), and the region in which Federalism was strongest and in which Republican nationalistic pressure was thus slowest to bear. Evading the wartime embargo, many New Englanders continued trading with the British in Canada (some even sold provisions to the British navy). At the beginning of the war, the Federalist Governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, moreover, rejected the federal government’s demands to call their states’ militias into national service arguing that they should only be used for defensive purposes but not for an invasion of a foreign country. Moreover, they preferred retaining local control of them to subordinating them to the regular army, as they might be needed to defend New England against a possible British counterinvasion.78 75 76 78

“Washingtonian No. 104,” in: The Washingtonian (Windsor), July 13, 1812. 77 Channing, A Sermon, 1812, 17. Webster, An Address, 21. Hickey, The War of 1812, 23–24, 49–50, 168–173, 259–260.

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It was for two reasons that most Federalists eventually did come around to support the war and give up their Anglophilia. For one, by linking the British to the blacks and Indians who took up arms against white Americans, Republicans could appeal to Federalists’ racial solidarity that would trump partisan attachments and their veneration for Great Britain. Even before the war had started, Republican newspapers had already begun complaining that the British government, boasting about its “noble” efforts to ameliorate the plight of Africans, was blurring the racial divide, thus threatening a basic pillar of American society in the early national period.79 Reporting about an English mechanic who had been legally punished for seeking to emigrate, the Aurora argued that the trial was “a proof that white slavery can exist even in Britain” and concluded that British claims that “a slave cannot breathe on its soil” was only “true in respect to black slaves.”80 Painting the working conditions in England in a dark light, the Lexington Reporter maintained: “How much better off is the negro in the West Indies, than the mechanic in Britain.”81 The New-York Columbian found it distressing that the British Parliament took exception to any “savage treatment of blacks” such as tearing families apart, while simultaneously assuming that “white people . . . are not possessed of so fine feelings and social affections as blacks.” After all, the British also separated family members from each other when they impressed white men into the Royal Navy.82 During the war, Republican newspapers intensified their warnings about racial attitudes prevalent in Great Britain that posed a fundamental threat to the U.S. with its large black slave population. Not only did they contrast British attempts to subdue the international black slave trade with the simultaneous impressment of white American sailors wondering, as did the Daily National Intelligencer, whether “commiseration for the black

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81 82

Republicans were not necessarily wrong in their assessment of the views of the British elite, which considered class more meaningful than race and doubted that common whites, as they would classify most Americans, could lay claim to any inherent superiority over blacks and Indians. Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 137. “British Freedom,” in: Aurora. General Advertiser (Philadelphia), January 11, 1806. Also reprinted in: The Witness (Litchfield), February 12, 1806; Republican Star or Eastern Shore General Advertiser (Easton), April 22, 1806. “Politics for Mechanics No. VI,” in: The Reporter (Lexington), October 24, 1809. New-York Columbian, reprinted in: City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston), October 23, 1810. The article was also reprinted in: Republican Messenger (Sherburne), October 23, 1810; Farmer’s Repository (Charles Town), October 26, 1810; The Carolina Gazette (Charleston), November 2, 1810.

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[was] more laudable than for the white” and whether “the African claims on humanity” were “not known to the American.”83 More importantly, when the British enlisted black soldiers in their armies to fight white Americans, Republican newspapers accused them of attempting to provoke a race war in the U.S., in which black slaves would rebel, rape white women, and kill their masters, thus making it difficult for Federalists to continue arguing that Great Britain was an example worth emulating.84 Republican newspapers also sought to undermine Federalists’ Anglophilia by linking the British to the Native Americans who fought against the U.S. during the war. Seeking to disrepute those whom Federalists held in such high esteem, they wrongly accused the British of inciting Native Americans to take action against American settlers and kill their women and children and therefore of disregarding “all the rules of civilized warfare.”85 To this effect, Republican propagandists frequently called Native Americans “British savages” or “Anglo-savages” thereby simultaneously denying the indigenous tribes any agency of their own (and thus their claim to equality) and associating the British with barbarism.86 Importantly, Republican newspapers did not just lambaste individual soldiers for personal misconduct but alleged that the entire British nation was behind the atrocities on white Americans. “In England at this day it is matter of boast and joy that the red man mingles in battle by the side of his white friend,” that “the rude dress of the savage” could be seen next to “the splendid costume of the disciplined soldier,” and that “the yell of the savage” combined “with the shout of the civilized barbarian,” as the Albany Argus claimed.87 A Pennsylvania Republican argued at a Fourth of July celebration in 1813 that the British revealed their savage nature when they publicly delighted in Indian atrocities. The British troops in North America were not only “Allied with the savages in arms,” but also “almost assimilated with them in nature,” as he contended. Worst of all, however, this “thirst of blood” received “the sanction of an organized government.”88 83

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Daily National Intelligencer (Washington), May 7, 1814. Also see “BRITISH IMPRESSMENTS” by S. Southwick, in: The Albany Register, March 10, 1812. For the British use of black soldiers in the War of 1812, see Gene Allen Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Baltimore Patriot, March 15, 1813. See, for example, The Reporter (Lexington), March 14, 1812; “Anglo-Savages,” in: Independent Chronicle (Boston), October 5, 1812; “Shocking Murder,” in: Nashville Clarion, reprinted in: The Reporter (Lexington), November 20, 1813. The Albany Argus, April 8, 1814. Richard Bache, Oration, Delivered at Spring Garden, July 5, 1813 (Philadelphia: Johns Binns, 1813), 6.

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An etching from William Charles, a popular political cartoonist at the time, illustrates how Republican propagandists sought to discredit Great Britain by depicting the British as instigators of Indian atrocities (see Figure 7). On the right, an Indian is scalping a dead American soldier. On the left, another Indian is presenting the scalp of an American soldier, whose deformed head can be seen on the very right, to a British officer, who says “Bring me the Scalps and the King our master will reward you.” Both Indians carry tomahawks from “G[reat] B[ritain]” as well as knives bearing the inscription “G[eorge] R[ex]” referring to King George III. Furthermore, one Indian has a musket with the price tag “Reward for Sixteen Scalps” attached. The British officer, also wearing the insignia “GR,” has brought “Secret Service Money,” as a label on his coat suggests, to pay for the trophies. The caption underneath the cartoon calls on “Columbia’s Sons” to take up arms to “redress” their “Country’s wrongs” driving the “Savage Indian . . . back for Refuge to the Woods” and forcing “Their British leaders” to make restitution “for those wrongs.” In the background, British officers and Indian women are dancing together around a fire in celebration of the mutilation of white American bodies. By blaming the British for cruelties committed by Native Americans (in this case probably the so-called Massacre at Fort Dearborn) and depicting them as being as savage in nature as their Native American proxies, the caricature tried to generate support for the war and encourage Federalists to renounce their Anglophilia. Moreover, Republicans also accused the British of directly violating the rules of civilized warfare, as when they burned the American capital and conducted raids along the Chesapeake in 1814.89 In early 1815, Republican polemicists even falsely claimed that the British soldiers had been promised the women of New Orleans as their reward if they defeated the American forces.90 Republican newspapers therefore also employed the term “British savages” to refer to British soldiers, who allegedly violated the laws of war and abused American settlers and prisoners of war.91 Another epithet

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For violations of the laws of war during the War of 1812, see Jasper M. Trautsch, “Atrocity and Reciprocity: The Burnings of Washington D.C. and Toronto and the Challenges to the Laws of War in the War of 1812,” in: Antonio S. Thompson and Christos G. Frentzos (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History: The Colonial Period to 1877 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 190–197. Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 203–218. See “The New England Convention,” in: Columbian Gazette (Utica), November 8, 1814.

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figure 7: “A Scene on the Frontiers as Practiced by the Humane British and Their Worthy Allies,” etching by William Charles from 1812 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Republican newspapers heaped upon the British was “white savages” or “white Indians,” seeking to undermine the admiration many Federalists felt for what they held to be the highly advanced civilization of the former mother country.92 They thereby redefined a term that had previously been used exclusively by the British and the Federalists for American settlers living under rather primitive circumstances along the frontier to allege their degeneration to a social state closer to the indigenous than the metropolitan populations.93 Admittedly, some Federalist newspapers, particularly at the war’s beginning, protested against Republican depictions of the conflict, denying that the British had instigated Native Americans to commit atrocities, 92

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See “Chilicothe,” in: The Times (Charleston), October 29, 1812; “Disastrous Event,” in: National Intelligencer, reprinted in: Weekly Aurora (Philadelphia), February 16, 1813; “Sacket’s Harbour,” in: Baltimore Whig, reprinted in: The Statesman (New York), May 4, 1813. Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1986), 8; David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).

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insisting that Western frontiersmen and American soldiers committed more war crimes than the British and their native allies, and accusing Republicans of untruthful war propaganda.94 The Providence Gazette, for example, reprinted an advertisement from a Republican newspaper in Pittsburgh in which inhabitants of the Allegheny county had been promised a reward for Indian scalps, concluding that the “scalping mode of warfare” could not be attributed exclusively to “the Red Savages of the wilderness” but was also characteristic of those “WHITE INDIANS” who professed to be “enlightened, Christian, white” and who charged the British with war measures “of a character disgraceful to civilized nature.”95 However, while some initially waged a rearguard battle against Republican efforts to link the British and Native Americans, most Federalists embraced Republican interpretations of the war as a race conflict, as the war dragged on. After all, unlike the tales about French invasion schemes that High Federalists had made up in 1799 to keep up the war fever against France, Republican allegations about British attempts to instigate Indians and run-away slaves to commit atrocities against white civilians, while also untrue, appeared more plausible, as many Native and African Americans were indeed fighting on Britain’s side. As a result, Federalists’ denials that the British could be held responsible for war crimes by their allies did not find a receptive audience in the U.S. To the contrary, when Federalist newspapers defended British war policies, Republican newspapers were eager to reprint their claims as proof that Federalists were unpatriotic.96 Many Federalists, therefore, joined Republicans in denouncing what they, too, had come to view as British-inspired atrocities. For example, on July 30, 1813, both Federalist and Republican Representatives, after hearing the report of the bipartisan committee appointed to enquire into “the spirit and manner in which the war has been waged by the enemy,” decided to publish 5,000 copies of the document, which inter alia accused British military officers of being responsible for the massacres of American prisoners of war by Native 94

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See “Kentucky Volunteers!,” in: Trenton Federalist, reprinted in: Salem Gazette, January 26, 1813; “Magnanimity of ‘our Indians,’” in: Trenton Federalist, reprinted in: Salem Gazette, August 24, 1813; “Speech of the Honourable Mr. Miller of New York on the Army Bill,” in: Rhode-Island American, and General Advertiser (Providence), February 25, 1814; Northern Whig (Hudson), June 7, 1814. “WHITE INDIANS,” in: Providence Gazette, reprinted in: Federal Republican, and Commercial Gazette (Georgetown), June 21, 1813. See “BRITISH SAVAGES,” in: Ontario Messenger, reprinted in: Saratoga Patriot (Ballston Spa), September 23, 1812; Daily National Intelligencer (Washington), April 13, 1813.

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Americans near the River Raisin in Michigan Territory on January 23, 1813.97 By linking the British to African and Native Americans and representing the War of 1812 as a race war, Republicans thus discredited the former mother country, put enhanced pressure on Federalists to renounce their British attachments, and united the nation behind the war. The second reason why most Federalists came to see England as a national enemy that needed to be repelled and consequently renounced their Anglophilia was the fact that Great Britain became an imminent threat when British forces invaded American territory and the U.S. was on the verge of losing the war in 1814. France’s defeat at the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in October 1813, the taking of Paris by Russian, Prussian, Austrian, Swedish, and British forces on March 31, 1814, and Napoleon’s abdication on April 11, 1814, allowed Great Britain to redirect many of her resources and manpower from Europe to North America. By the end of 1814, the British government had sent about 20,000 veterans from the Napoleonic Wars to North America to fight the U.S.98 General Sir George Prevost, Governor General of Canada and Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s forces in British North America, whose principal task in 1812 and 1813 had been to defend Canada, now had the troops and the supplies at his disposal to engage in offensive operations.99 Moreover, at this point, America’s warships were all destroyed or stuck in American harbors – as was most of America’s merchant marine. The British blockade of the East Coast reached from the Southern states to New England. By 1814, American exports had hence dramatically fallen to about one-tenth and imports to less than a quarter of what they had been in 1811. The country’s foreign commerce was thus in shambles leading to dramatically declining federal revenues. Despite a doubling of customs duties, revenues from this source shrunk to less than half of pre-war levels. In the fall, the U.S. was basically bankrupt. Furthermore, the British engaged in a series of coastal raids, looting towns and villages and burning vessels they encountered, and cut off coastal islands like Nantucket from the mainland.100 Most dramatically, the British invaded the Chesapeake region in August and burned the White 97

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AC, 13th Congress, 1st Session, 492. The report was published as Barbarities of the Enemy (Worcester: Isaac Sturtevant, 1814). Walter R. Borneman, 1812: The War That Forged a Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 200. For an excellent biography of Prevost, see John R. Grodzinski, Defender of Canada: Sir George Prevost and the War of 1812 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). Hickey, The War of 1812, 165–167, 182–183, 214–216, 221–225.

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House, the Capitol, and other public buildings in Washington on the night of August 24.101 On September 1, they, moreover, invaded the state of New York with a force of 15,000 men.102 “We should have to fight hereafter,” Albert Gallatin’s brother-in-law, Joseph H. Nicholson, told Secretary of the Navy William Jones, “not for ‘free Trade and sailors rights,’ not for the Conquest of the Canadas, but for our national Existence.”103 In his Sixth Annual Message, Madison also warned that Great Britain was “aiming, with his undivided force, a deadly blow . . . at our national existence.”104 The direct British threat transformed Federalists’ attitude towards the war. In 1812, they had criticized Republicans for starting an unnecessary armed conflict and many had refused to actively support (and some had even chosen to obstruct) what they perceived as an offensive war. By 1814, however, they had come to feel imperiled, as the character of the war turned increasingly defensive and as the American nation now indeed seemed to be in existential danger. “Altho’ the Declaration of war was unnecessary and highly inexpedient,” as a paper – signed by most Federalists in Congress – argued, “the manner in which it has been prosecuted by the enemy, and the avowed purpose of waste and destruction that he proclaims have so changed the character of the war, that it has become the duty of all to unite in the adoption of vigorous measures to repel the invaders of the country.”105 When the British invaded the U.S., the war became, in the words of the Federalist Governor of Vermont, “a common and not a party concern,” requiring the support of every American: “the time has now arrived when all degrading party distinctions and animosities, however, we may have differed respecting the policy of declaring, or the mode of prosecuting the war, ought to be laid 101

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For the burning of Washington, see Anthony S. Pitch, The Burning of Washington (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000); Donald E. Graves, “Why the White House Was Burned: An Investigation into the British Destruction of Public Buildings at Washington in August 1814,” in: Journal of Military History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (2012), 1095–1127. For the invasion of New York that was repulsed in the Battle of Plattsburgh, see David G. Fitz-Enz, The Final Invasion: Plattsburgh, the War of 1812’s Most Decisive Battle (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001). Nicholson to Jones, May 20, 1814, quoted in: Hickey, The War of 1812, 182. Madison, “Sixth Annual Message,” September 20, 1814, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 1, 88. Also see James Monroe to William B. Giles, October 17, 1814, in: Walter Lowrie, Matthew St. Clair Clarke, Walter S. Franklin, Asbury Dickins, and John W. Forney (eds.), American State Papers: Military Affairs, 7 vols. (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832–1861), Vol. 1, 514. “Paper of Federalist Congressmen,” October 1814, in: LCRK, Vol. 5, 423.

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aside.”106 Channing also changed his mind about the nature of the conflict when British forces invaded the U.S. and the war became a defensive one. “The question now is – not whether we will carry invasion, slaughter, and desolation into an unoffending province – but whether we will defend our firesides and altars – whether we will repel from our shores an hostile army.”107 Rufus King, former Federalist Senator and Vice-Presidential candidate, who had initially opposed the war and refused to support it, also began denouncing Great Britain as an inveterate foe and called for a vigorous defense of the country, after the British invaded American territory. “However much we may have differed among ourselves respecting the declaration of war,” he told William Scott in December 1814, now “all will be called upon to unite in defending our Country against . . . the rooted and vindictive animosity of England.”108 At a public meeting in New York, he asked the local merchants to make loans for the defense of the city: “The enemy . . . is at our doors, and it is now useless to enquire how he came here – he must be driven away – and every man join heart and hand, and place shoulder to shoulder to meet him.”109 King himself also lent $20,000 to New York City to prepare for a possible British attack.110 Although he had been against the war in 1812, the direct threat by the British army allowed “but one course; which was to avow a firm purpose to defend the Country against the invasion of the Enemy, and to concur in granting the necessary supplies for this object.”111 As Federalists came to view the war as defensive and the U.S. in imminent danger, they began supporting war legislation in Congress. While opposing a conscription bill that was intended to garner enough recruits for another invasion of Canada as well as a new enemy trade bill that would have suspended habeas corpus, Federalists, between November 1814 and February 1815, did support an army bill to raise 40,000 volunteers for the army and to accept an equal number of state troops to be drafted into federal service for local defense; a bill providing for the creation of a board of commissioners to supervise the

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108 109 110

111

“Proclamation by the Governor of Vermont,” in: Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), October 15, 1814. William Ellery Channing, A Sermon, Delivered in Boston, September 18, 1814, Published at the Request of the Hearers (Boston: Henry Channing, 1814), 13, 16. King to Sir William Scott, December 11, 1814, in: LCRK, Vol. 5, 443. “Merchant Meeting,” in: New-York Evening Post, September 2, 1814. Robert Ernst, Rufus King: American Federalist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 335–336. King to Gouverneur Morris, February 12, 1815, in: LCRK, Vol. 5, 468.

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building and deployment of warships; and a naval expansion bill that authorized the purchase or construction of twenty schooners for the navy. Federalists, in 1814, also helped impose new taxes on carriages, spirits, auction sales, gold and silver watches, jewelry, and other products as well as a direct tax to finance the war efforts, and they voted for a modified national bank bill (which Madison, deeming it insufficient, vetoed).112 Not only did most Federalists begin supporting the American war efforts; they also reconsidered their positive view on Great Britain. In particular, the British attack on the American capital and the subsequent burning of government buildings on the night of August 24, 1814 (an act of revenge for the American burning and looting of York, the capital of Upper Canada, the year before), stirred American nationalism and united Americans in hatred of the former mother country.113 The destruction of parts of Washington is depicted in dramatic fashion in an engraving published by the British printer George Thompson shortly after the event (see Figure 8). On the left, the Navy Yard at Washington is burning, having been set on fire by Americans to keep the British from taking possession of the new frigate Columbia and sloop of war Argus, which were still in the docks. Right next to the shipyard, the arsenal is burning. The building with the columns and dome that is on fire to the right of the Arsenal is the Capitol. Flames are also rising from the War Office and the Treasury situated above and to the right of the Capitol. At the center of the image, the bridge over the Potomac has been blown up by Americans wishing to delay the British advance on Washington. Above the bridge, the President’s Mansion is burning. On the hill on the righthand side, the British are advancing under the command of General Robert Ross capturing three American cannons. At the bottom, the American flotilla stationed on the Potomac is being destroyed. 112

113

Hickey, The War of 1812, 241–252; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, 436–468. The army bill, as approved on January 27, 1815, is printed in: AC, 13th Congress, 3rd Session, 1896–1899. For the board of commissioners bill, as approved on February 7, 1815, see ibid., 1908. The naval expansion bill, as approved on November 15, 1814, can be found in: ibid., 1834. The bills to lay duties on carriages, spirits distilled in the U.S., sales at auctions, licenses to retail wines, spirituous liquors, and foreign merchandise, household furniture, gold and silver watches, gold, silver, and plated ware, jewelry and paste work, and other goods, wares, and merchandise, as approved between December 15, 1814, and February 27, 1815, are printed in: ibid., 1839–1843, 1844–1852, 1852–1855, 1879–1888, 1888–1895, 1925. For the direct tax bill, as approved on January 9, 1815, see ibid., 1859–1879. The enemy trade bill, as approved on February 4, 1815, can be found in: ibid., 1899–1906. Walter Lord, The Dawn’s Early Light (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 344.

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figure 8: “The Taking of the City of Washington in America,” engraving published by George Thompson in 1814 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

The engraving is a distortion in so far as the events are portrayed as happening all at the same time, even though they really happened one after the other. The representation is, however, accurate in that only the public buildings are on fire, as the British, in accordance with the laws of war, did not destroy private property (in fact, it was American citizens who – once the British had left the scene – looted the houses of those residents who had fled from the enemy). As the Niles’ Weekly Register noted, with the burning of the federal capital “the contest, begun for unalienable rights on the sea, is becoming a struggle for liberty and property on the land.” Under these circumstances, the Republican newspaper concluded, even Federalists had to acknowledge that Great Britain was an implacable enemy unworthy of any American’s admiration. “The scales are falling from the eyes of our people; if the blaze of the capitol shall enlighten their mind, and remove their prejudice, so that they may see the character of our enemy as it really is, the war’s aim had been achieved.” As a result of British aggression,

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American nationalism would be promoted. “We shall become an united people.”114 As Niles’ Weekly Register predicted, Federalists’ image of Great Britain was indeed transformed in 1814. The conversion of Francis Scott Key offers an illustrative example of the effects the War of 1812 had on Federalists’ changing definitions of American identity. An Anglophilic Federalist, who had opposed the declaration of war in 1812 and sharply criticized attempted invasions of Canada in 1813, he enlisted in the militia in the face of the emerging British threat against the Chesapeake, fought the British at the Battle of Bladensburg, and authored the Anglophobic “star-spangled banner” poem – later to become the text for the national anthem – when he witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814.115 Admittedly, Federalists still used the predicament the U.S. was in to criticize that Republicans had started this avoidable war in the first place, and in the face of the British invasions and raids Federalists also did not fail to complain about the apparent inability of the Madison Administration to organize an effective defense and to carry out the war more successfully. Moreover, they insisted that Republicans should accept reasonable peace terms and not prolong the war unnecessarily. They also continued to resist giving support to any offensive operations, as when the Governor of Massachusetts refused a request by the federal government to fund a risky attempt to expel the British from Castine in the province of Maine.116 However, few Federalists continued defending British actions. To the contrary, they mostly stopped invoking Great Britain as a positive example and joined Republicans in condemning what they now perceived as British outrages. The publication of the territorial demands that Great Britain made in the peace negotiations taking place in Ghent further reinforced the Anglophobic nationalism that Republicans wished to promote and 114 115

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“Editorial Address,” in: Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), September 10, 1814. See Marc Leepson, What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). There might have been a mutual understanding between the Massachusetts government and the British that they would refrain from expanding the war in New England – an agreement that would become void if the Bay State attacked the British post at Castine. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, 476. In any case, Strong was probably correct when he maintained that a military expedition to drive the British from Castine was bound to fail in view of the British blockade of the New England coast and the fact that thousands of redcoats were stationed at Fort George. Samuel Eliot Morison, “Dissent in the War of 1812,” in: idem, Frederick Merk, and Frank Freidel (eds.), Dissent in Three American Wars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 13.

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fostered most Federalists’ emerging perception of Great Britain as a national enemy. When, in view of America’s military and financial predicaments, the British envoys asked for territorial concessions, Madison laid the diplomatic documents he had received from the American peace commission before the public on October 10, 1814, in order to rally the American nation against the British foe. In consequence, it became known throughout the U.S. that the British demanded an Indian buffer state in the Northwest and peace upon terms of uti possidetis, which would allow them to keep the territory that they were occupying in the Northeast of the U.S.117 In the middle of the negotiations, Great Britain was thus once again portrayed as the aggressor against which the U.S. had to defend itself. The British government was incensed about this lack of discretion. “Mr. Madison has acted most scandalously in making this communication,” as Prime Minister Lord Liverpool complained to the Duke of Wellington.118 The publication of diplomatic proceedings still in progress, Liverpool added in a speech to Parliament, was an unprecedented act “on the part of any civilized government.”119 In America, however, the publication of the documents set in motion a wave of nationalism and further contributed to Federalists’ conversion from Anglophiles to Anglophobes. The sentiments that the publication of the documents “excited in both houses were purely national, and almost unanimous,” Niles’ Weekly Register reported.120 Alexander C. Hanson, former editor of the Federal Republican and now Federalist Representative from Maryland, who had almost been killed by a Republican mob because of his vitriolic opposition to the war in 1812 and who had written in June of that year that Federalists should “use every constitutional argument and every legal means” to oppose the war,121 now proclaimed that the war “ceased to be a party war, and of necessity became national.” He pledged to support “the most vigorous system of 117

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Hickey, The War of 1812, 291; Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 111. For the peace negotiations in general, see Fred L. Engelman, The Peace of Christmas Eve (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962). Liverpool to Wellington, November 26, 1814, in: Duke of Wellington (ed.), Supplementary Despatches, Correspondence, and Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington, K. G., 15 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1858), Vol. 9, 456. Liverpool, November 21, 1814, in: T. C. Hansard (ed.), The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time: First Series, 41 vols. (London: T. C. Hansard, 1812–1820), Vol. 29, 368. Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), October 15, 1814. Federal Republican, and Commercial Gazette (Baltimore), June 20, 1812.

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honorable war, with the hope of bringing the enemy to a sense of justice.”122 Federalists supported a motion to distribute 10,000 copies of the papers documenting British demands in order to arouse Americans’ nationalism.123 John Jay told Timothy Pickering that “we cannot be too perfectly united in a determination to defend our country.”124 While most Federalists still viewed the declaration of war as a mistake, only a few of them continued obstructing the war efforts, since the conflict seemed to have turned into a war for national survival. The Boston Gazette criticized Madison for pretending that the conflict had always been “a war of defence commenced on the part of our enemy” rather than one deliberately chosen by Republicans. However, the Federalist newspaper acknowledged that by now the struggle had become “a war of defence,” that Great Britain was an “unprincipled and powerful foe,” and that it was Americans’ “holy duty” to “defend their native soil.”125 The Federalist Alexandria Gazette called upon Americans to leave behind their differences and to continue the war until it could be terminated upon honorable terms.126 The Federalist Norfolk Ledger demanded vigorous support for the war. “These are no times to enter into party disputes, as to the causes & origin of the war; the only object before us, is to meet & chastise a perfidious & arrogant government.” Great Britain was an “insolent foe,” which should be taught a lesson by “the manly and patriotic spirit of the nation.”127 The Federalist New-York Evening Post even insisted that the American peace commissioners, in response to British territorial demands, should “have broken off the negotiation and come home.”128 Those Republicans who had opposed a declaration of war in 1812 also adopted an Anglophobic nationalism in the face of the British threat. Restating that he had considered the declaration of war “improvident and very wrong,” former Pennsylvania Governor Thomas McKean proclaimed that he had changed his mind: “War . . . is the order of the day: We will never be 122 123 124

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Hanson, October 10, 1814, in: AC, 13th Congress, 3rd Session, 382. Thomas J. Oakley, October 10, 1814, in: ibid., 382. Jay to Pickering, November 1, 1814, in: William Jay, The Life of John Jay, with Selections from His Correspondence, 2 vols. (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), Vol. 2, 365. Also see King, “Commissioners at Ghent,” October 13–14, 1814, and King to Gouverneur Morris, February 12, 1815, in: LCRK, Vol. 5, 420, 468. “President’s Message,” in: Boston Gazette, October 3, 1814. Alexandria Gazette, Commercial and Political, October 13, 1814. Also see United States’ Gazette (Philadelphia), October 14, 1814. Norfolk Ledger, reprinted in: Daily National Intelligencer (Washington), October 22, 1814. New-York Evening Post, October 12, 1814.

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British colonies again.”129 Senator Thomas Worthington of Ohio, who had also opposed the declaration of war in 1812, now hoped that the nation would unite against an enemy that sought to cut off parts of his home state.130 As Republicans had hoped, in consequence of the war the majority of Federalists renounced their Anglophilia and instead defined America in opposition to Great Britain. While a faction of New England Federalists continuously obstructed the war efforts – by discouraging enlistments, withholding federal taxes, and buying British instead of American war bonds – only a minority spoke of secession and stressed American communalities with “the country of our forefathers,” as Pickering put it.131 He was not, however, speaking for Federalists at large. Josiah Quincy, Federalist leader in the House, expressed what had probably become a consensus among most Federalists when he explained to his wife that profession of an emotional attachment to the former mother country by any Americans did “little credit to their patriotism . . . The truth is,” he maintained, that “the British look upon us as a foreign nation, and we must look upon them in the same light.”132 Republicans’ strategy to use the War of 1812 to disentangle America from Great Britain and to unite the nation in opposition to the former mother country was largely successful. Before the war, Republican publisher Mathew Carey found, the U.S. had been “literally the colonies of Great Britain . . . And so strong has been . . . the partiality of large proportions of our citizens for English habits, and English manners . . . that it required but little care to have maintained her influence here unimpaired.” The military conflict, however, “emancipated us from our former slavish dependence on the looms, and the anvils of Great Britain.”133

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McKean to John Adams, October 15, 1814, quoted in: Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams, 112. Worthington, Diary, October 10, 1814, in: Thomas Worthington Papers (Library of Congress), reel 2. Pickering to Edward Pennington, July 12, 1812, in: Henry Adams (ed.), Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1800–1815 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1877), 389. Quincy to Eliza S. Quincy, March 26, 1812, in: Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 254. Mathew Carey, The Olive Branch: Or, Faults on Both Sides, Federal and Democratic, 7th enlarged edn. (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1815), 362, 351. Also see John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Loan Bill,” February 25, 1814, in: Robert L. Meriwether (ed.), The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959–2003), Vol. 1, 237.

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More specifically, the War of 1812 prompted most Federalists to dispose of their attachment to Great Britain. “But its best effect has been complete suppression of party,” as Jefferson noted approvingly. “The federalists who were truly American, and their great mass was so, have separated from their brethren who were mere Anglomen, and are received with cordiality into the republican ranks.”134 Indeed, those Federalists who chose to support the war were often able to cooperate with Republicans after the conflict was over. Oliver Wolcott Jr., for example, who had been a staunch Federalist serving as Washington’s and Adams’ Secretary of the Treasury in the second half of the 1790s, won Republicans’ esteem when, in 1814, he publicly supported the war.135 As a result, the Republican press approvingly called him a member of the “American federalists” as opposed to the “British party.”136 In 1816, he could even become the candidate of the Republican Party in the gubernatorial elections of Connecticut in 1816, one year later winning the governorship.137 Josiah Quincy is another case of a Federalist who not only renounced his attachment to Great Britain during the war but afterwards – realizing that Federalists’ elitist attitude irrevocably undermined their political appeal in a democratizing era – also came to support an expansion of the suffrage in Massachusetts thus allying himself with Republicans against “diehard” Federalists still hostile to popular politics.138 With many Federalists giving up their Anglophilia, American nationalism was strengthened. “I know my disposition is sanguine,” Hezekiah Niles assured his readers, “but I apprehend the time is at hand, when the party designations of ‘republicans’ and ‘federalists’ will fall into disuse, 134

135 136 137

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Jefferson to the Marquis de Lafayette, May 14, 1817, in: Gilbert Chinard (ed.), The Letters of Lafayette and Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929), 389–390. “Patriotic Meeting at New-York,” in: Boston Patriot, August 17, 1814. “American Federalism,” in: New-Hampshire Patriot (Concord), May 10, 1814. “American Ticket,” in: American Mercury (Hartford), March 26, 1816. Also see Richard J. Purcell, Connecticut in Transition, 1775–1818 (Washington: American Historical Association, 1918), 332–335, 348. Matthew H. Crocker, The Magic of the Many: Josiah Quincy and the Rise of Mass Politics in Boston, 1800–1830 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). Yet another example of a Federalist successfully cooperating with Republicans after the war is Rufus King. Since he had started supporting the war efforts in 1814, a Republican faction around Martin van Buren, hoping to win Federalist favor in the gubernatorial contest against the DeWitt Clinton faction, was willing to help him remain U.S. Senator until 1825. Shaw Livermore Jr., The Twilight of Federalism: The Disintegration of the Federalist Party, 1815–1830 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 71–72.

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and the people have one proud American feeling.”139 While Federalists had vehemently criticized Republicans’ decision to declare war against Great Britain in 1812 and many of them had subsequently refused to support offensive operations in Canada, only very few continued hailing the British example or defending British actions once the British invaded U.S. territory and demanded territorial concessions in the peace negotiations. Naturally, not all Federalists who renounced their attachment to the former mother country also endorsed democratic egalitarianism and made common cause with the Republican Party. Quite a few Federalists, proudly clinging to their elitism, kept up their hostility to widespread political participation by the people. As a result, they were ostracized and excluded from political office in a rapidly democratizing society. As a defeatist Federalist resigning to the fact that conservatism was doomed to irrelevance in the U.S. remarked in 1816, “This American world was made for Democracy.”140 However, the fact that these Federalists refused to embrace Republicans’ liberalism and continued championing a competing political ideology does not mean that they were disloyal. Some historians have pointed to the Hartford Convention to accuse Federalist leaders from the Northeast of national treachery, claiming that the U.S. was in imminent danger of break-up by the end of the war.141 However, the Federalists convening in Connecticut in 1814 – while stressing discontent with Madison’s war policy – did not seek New England’s separation from the union (only one delegate to the convention advocated secession). Instead, the Hartford Convention criticized the federal government’s plans to conscript parts of the state militias into national service, proposed that the states use some of the federal taxes to organize their own defense, and called for the abolition of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause; the prohibition of embargos lasting more than sixty days; the requirement of two-thirds majorities in both Houses of Congress for the admission of new states to the union, for embargoes of a duration of less

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“War Prospects,” in: The Weekly Register (Baltimore), October 23, 1813. Also see “Address of John Dickinson,” March 18, 1815, in: Daily National Intelligencer (Washington), March 27, 1815; “To Moderate Federalists,” in: New-Hampshire Patriot (Concord), March 7, 1815. Thomas R. Gold to David Daggett, May 13, 1816, quoted in: Livermore, The Twilight of Federalism, 43. See Richard Buel Jr., America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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than sixty days, and a declaration of war; and an amendment to the Constitution stipulating that Presidents could serve only one term and that a President could not be succeeded by a candidate from the same state (in order to end the rule of the “Virginia dynasty”).142 Admittedly, the threat of nullifying federal conscription legislation, discussed in Congress at the time, demonstrated the delegation’s continued refusal to support the national war effort and cooperate with the Madison Administration. However, this was not necessarily tantamount to disloyalty to the nation. Fearing that the British might seek to extend their area of occupation from Maine southwards towards Boston, they did not want their states’ militias to be used for another attack on Canada but wished them to be fully available to thwart another possible British invasion of New England.143 Moreover, since Massachusetts had paid more federal war taxes than any other state in the union, the request to use some of the revenue to pay for the defense of New England was not entirely unreasonable.144 Finally, their demands for constitutional amendments – repeatedly discussed in Congress – were hardly subversive.145 In sum, Federalist leaders met in Hartford not to discuss secession but regional defense. By 1814, the war had reached New England. As hardly any help 142

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The report is reprinted in the memoirs of the secretary of the convention: Theodore Dwight, History of the Hartford Convention: With a Review of the Policy of the United States Government, Which Led to the War of 1812 (New York: N. & J. White, 1833), 352–379. It needs to be noted that in their report the convention’s members threatened to re-adjourn if their demands were not met. A second meeting could have suggested more drastic measures such as a separate peace with Great Britain – at least that was the speculation of John Quincy Adams who claimed that New England Federalists had deliberately made impossible demands at Hartford in order to obtain a justification for bringing matters to a head at a second meeting. Adams, “Reply to the Appeal of the Massachusetts Federalists,” in: Adams (ed.), Documents, 321–322. More likely, however, the “threat” to meet again was meant to put pressure on the Madison Administration not to unnecessarily prolong the war by insisting on peace terms unacceptable to Great Britain. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, 469–470. Possibly, it was the fear of an imminent attack on Boston that also prompted Governor Strong at about the same time to send an agent to Halifax to negotiate an armistice with the Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia Sir John Coape Sherbrooke. Ibid., 472–473. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765–1848, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), Vol. 2, 98–99. Authors questioning that the Hartford Convention was a secessionist plot include Samuel Eliot Morison, “The Massachusetts Embassy to Washington, 1815,” in: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 48 (1914/1915), 344; James M. Banner Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 313–350; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, 482–483; Hickey, The War of 1812, 270–280.

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was forthcoming from the federal government, delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island convening in Hartford, therefore, primarily sought to organize an effective defense of their home states.146 The claim that the Federalist leadership planned to break up the union is a myth, which Republicans created at the end of the war to consolidate their nation-wide political dominance.147 “If I do not much mistake, we shall . . . crush domestic faction. Never was there a more glorious opportunity for the Republican party to place themselves permanently in power,” as Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story realized upon simultaneously receiving news of the Treaty of Ghent and the Hartford Convention.148 In periods of crisis, during which an aroused nationalism prevails, dissent can easily appear as national disloyalty and the fact that the Hartford Convention met behind closed doors provided Republicans with an opportunity to impute the wish for secession to the Federalists.149 They thus sought to place all Federalists who did not join the Republican Party outside the national community, even though most of them had remained loyal to the American nation during the war.150 The most famous etching by William Charles exemplifies how Republicans used the Hartford Convention to discredit Federalists in 1814 (see Figure 9). Standing on a cliff, a man representing Massachusetts is pulling two other men standing for Connecticut and

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Donald R. Hickey, “New England’s Defense Problems and the Genesis of the Hartford Convention,” in: New England Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1977), 587–604. Morison, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Vol. 2, 171; idem, “Our Most Unpopular War,” in: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 80 (1968), 53. Also see David H. Fischer, “The Myth of the Essex Junto,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1964), 191–235. Story to Nathaniel Williams, February 22, 1815, in: William W. Story (ed.), Life and Letters of Joseph Story, 2 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), Vol. 1, 254. While the practice of holding political meetings in secret had many precedents (e.g. the Constitutional Convention) and was fairly common at the time (e.g. in the U.S. Senate), it fueled suspicions and gave room for speculation and rumors. See Borneman, 1812, 254–257. The recent characterization of the War of 1812 as a “civil war” by the historian Alan Taylor is, therefore, slightly misleading, since it implies that Federalists wished to secede from the union or were willing to take up arms against their Republican countrymen. Yet, Federalists did accept their electoral defeats and did not violently resist Republican policies. Initially, they simply refused to support a war that they found unnecessary and offensive, but once Great Britain began threatening America’s territorial integrity they mostly decided to give assistance to the defense of their country. Taylor, The Civil War of 1812.

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figure 9: “The Hartford Convention or Leap No Leap,” etching by William Charles from ca. 1814 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Rhode Island to the edge telling them that it is “a dangerous leap,” but insisting that Connecticut “must jump.” Connecticut responds that he wishes to “pray and fast some time longer” but suggests that “little Rhode will jump the first.” Rhode Island is terrified: “Poor little I, what will become of me? this leap is of frightful size – I sink into despondency.” George III sitting across the water on the right is trying to lure the men on the precipice into the leap, stretching out his arms calling from below, “O’tis [a reference to Federalist Harrison Gray Otis] my Yankey boys! Jump in my fine fellows: plenty of molasses and Codfish; plenty of goods to Smuggle; Honours, titles and Nobility into the bargain.” Meanwhile, Timothy Pickering, the former Secretary of State and an extremely Anglophilic so-called High Federalist from Essex, is kneeling at the bottom of the cliff on the shore, with his hands clasped, praying “I, Strongly and most fervently pray for the success of this great leap which will change my vulgar name into that of my Lord of Essex. God save the King.” In the lower left, underneath the cliff, a medallion honors American war heroes, a ribbon on its top reading: “This is the produce of the land they wish to abandon.” Charles’ satire accuses the Hartford Convention of a secessionist plot and of being in league with the national enemy. Pickering is represented as a monarchist who dreams of becoming a lord

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of his home county, and Federalist leaders of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut are shown to be willing to desert their country in exchange for special privileges – an allusion to the fact that many New Englanders circumvented the wartime embargo and illegally traded with the British enemy. They are negatively compared to the heroes that saved America from a defeat in this war that Republicans had brought about against united Federalist opposition. Republicans’ hope that their claim that Federalist leaders meeting at Hartford were secessionists would give the coup de grace to the Federalist Party became reality. After Rufus King’s dismal failure to get even close to the presidency in 1816 (he only carried three states), they abandoned the national scene, not even nominating another presidential candidate such that James Monroe faced no competition four years later.151 In New England and some of the Middle States, they could successfully compete for a little longer, because local issues were more prominent in state election campaigns, and anger at the Madison Administration’s mismanagement of the war somewhat offset the doubts about Federalists’ national loyalty. In Massachusetts, the separation of Maine in 1820 also helped Federalists retain power, since the Northeastern province had been a basis of Republican strength in the Bay State. However, even in their New England strongholds, they would eventually be chased from office, as they could not shake off the image Republicans had stamped on them. When the last Federalist governorship fell in 1823, the accusation of treachery again played a significant role. After the moderate John Brooks announced that he would not seek another term as Governor, Federalists nominated Harrison Gray Otis to run as their candidate, and Republicans were quick to turn his participation in the Hartford Convention to maximum partisan advantage.152 As the gubernatorial elections of 1823 turned into “a referendum on the Hartford Convention,” the Republican candidate, William Eustis, carried the election in a sweeping victory.153 “The Federalist party,” the historian David Mayers concluded, “were fatally victimized. Republican leaders effectively linked it in the public mind to dishonor, deceit, and

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153

See Lynn W. Turner, “Elections of 1816 and 1820,” in: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (ed.), History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), Vol. 1, 299–346. Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 120–123. Buel, America on the Brink, 233.

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disunion,” as they “misportrayed the Hartford Convention as secessionist plotting.”154 When Federalists complained about a distortion of facts, their arguments fell on deaf ears. “I can affirm with confidence,” Federalist Noah Webster would later tell Daniel Webster, “that no body of men, of like number, ever convened in this country, has combined more talents, purer integrity, sounder patriotism and republican principles, or a more firm attachment to the constitution of the United States, than the gentlemen who composed the Convention.” The dichotomy of the wartime situation, however, allowed Republicans to make mere dissent appear treasonous. “The history of this convention presents full proof that [Republican] party spirit may impose misrepresentations, upon a whole people, and mislead a great portion of them into opinions directly contrary to facts.”155 In the end, linking their internal opponents to America’s external enemy at the war’s conclusion allowed Republicans to end the War of 1812 by permanently crushing the Federalist Party and discrediting any definition of America by a positive reference to England. At first sight, it would, therefore, appear that Republicans had achieved their domestic war aims. Closer inspection, however, reveals that the results were more ambiguous. While Federalists disappeared as a viable political force, Republican policy makers – in view of their wartime experience – embraced many Federalist policies of enhancing the powers of the federal government in order to further develop the union. These included the call for a renewal of the charter of a national bank, taxes, internal improvements, protective tariffs for American manufacturing, a standing army in peacetime, and a naval build-up.156 According to Gallatin, “the war has laid the foundation of permanent taxes and military establishments, which the Republicans had deemed unfavorable to the happiness and free institutions of the country.”157 While these policies were not necessarily conservative per se, as tariffs, banks, and internal 154

155

156

157

David Mayers, Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 54. Noah Webster, “A Letter to Daniel Webster, 1834,” in: American Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1903), 104. See Madison, “Seventh Annual Message,” December 5, 1815, in: Gaillard Hunt (ed.), The Writings of James Madison, 10 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1900–1910), Vol. 8, 335–344. For federal state-building efforts after the war, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 79–89. Gallatin to Matthew Lyon, May 7, 1816, in: Henry Adams (ed.), The Writings of Albert Gallatin, 3 vols. (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1879), Vol. 1, 700.

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improvements could also be used to ameliorate economic inequalities, support small-scale manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and farmers, and thus advance liberal causes, their adoption did mark a profound break with Republicans’ previous insistence on minimal government on the federal level.158 In fact, Republicans’ endorsements of many Federalist policies, in addition to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, deprived Federalists of partisan rallying grounds. As a result, in post-war state elections candidates often ran under changing partisan labels, and, in 1817, both parties actually ran as the “Federal Republican party” in Connecticut.159 Moreover, while the War of 1812 was a catalyst for the breakthrough of democratic egalitarianism as the reigning political ideology in the U.S. and ushered in the so-called period of Jacksonian democracy, which was marked by the expansion of the suffrage, popular political participation, and the “market revolution,” this transformative process had actually begun much earlier.160 American society had already begun democratizing in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution as a result of its egalitarian promises, and by 1800, Federalists – desperately seeking to defend the status quo – had lost the hegemony in the public discourse and were fighting rearguard battles ever since.161 Even though the wartime services of ordinary soldiers fighting as volunteers in the army or in militias made it even more difficult to justify franchise limitations based on steep property qualifications after 1815, it is unlikely that war was necessary to help liberal forces achieve dominance in the U.S.162

158

159

160

161

162

See Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004); Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Andrew Siegel, “‘Steady Habits’ under Siege: The Defense of Federalism in Jeffersonian Connecticut,” in: Doron S. Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (eds.), Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 222–223. For the War of 1812 as a catalyst for the liberalization of the U.S., see Watts, The Republic Reborn. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick demonstrated convincingly that Federalists’ elitism and conservatism was already out of touch with political and social realities by the time of the “Revolution of 1800” in The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 164, 182.

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Furthermore, while the War of 1812 was successful in disentangling America from the former mother country and in discrediting definitions of American identity by positive reference to Great Britain, Anglo-American relations actually improved markedly after the war – not only because the European war that had led to the maritime issues over neutral rights between the U.S. and Great Britain ended at about the same time, but possibly also because American independence from the former mother country had been more firmly established through the War of 1812. America hence did not need to express its emerging national identity as sharply as before through an aggressive foreign policy. This is not to deny that Anglophobia remained a constituent part of American nationalism and that Americans were still in need to set themselves apart from the former mother country after 1815. To the contrary, America’s persisting cultural dependence on Great Britain continued irritating American nationalists. They chastised Americans who, in an attempt to prove that they were as sophisticated and refined as their European brethren, imported increasing amounts of consumer products from the Old World and followed European tastes and habits. Critical of the derivative nature of American culture, promoters of American nationalism called on Americans to develop their own fashions, styles, and modes of production in order to emphasize America’s uniqueness.163 Still desperately longing for British respect and measuring U.S. cultural achievements according to British standards, Americans, moreover, were deeply insulted by the condescension British observers displayed when writing about the former colonies on the other side of the Atlantic and often reacted with Anglophobic language similar to that used before and during the War of 1812. Many Americans were also concerned about the continuing economic and financial dependence on Great Britain that made U.S. independence seem to be built on sand.164 Finally, American leaders such as James K. Polk continued conjuring the image of a traditional English enemy and tapping into the reservoir of anti-British prejudices when they needed to generate support for a divisive foreign policy.165

163 164

165

Yokota, Unbecoming British, 62–114. For Americans’ persistent feelings of inferiority towards the former mother country after 1815, see Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). For Polk’s political use of Anglophobia to justify the annexation of Texas in the midnineteenth century, see Sam W. Haynes, “Anglophobia and the Annexation of Texas: The Quest for National Security,” in: idem and Christopher Morris (eds.), Manifest

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No administration, however, really sought to embroil the U.S. in another avoidable war with Great Britain and the invocation of British enmity in the antebellum period was situational and instrumental – unlike in the era of the early republic in which Anglophobia had not only been a cornerstone of the Republican Party but also a major cause of the War of 1812.166 Furthermore, while in political debates negative references to the former mother country remained frequent, neither did Americans perceive Britain to pose as big an ideological threat nor did the former mother country possess the same symbolic significance in partisan battles as in the early republic. This was not only due to the fact that American nationality was more firmly established than before 1815, but also the result of an increasing liberalization of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, which facilitated an Anglo-American rapprochement. England ceased to be a symbol of conservatism but emerged as one of Europe’s most liberal nations, which was characterized by an extension of the franchise and led the opposition to the autocratic powers in Central and Eastern Europe. In fact, Jefferson had anticipated that improved Anglo-American relations would follow the War of 1812. If the war led to “a regeneration of its principles,” intercourse with Great Britain would no longer be “contaminating. A republic there like ours . . . might render their existence even interesting to us.”167 As Great Britain liberalized, she no longer served Republicans as the major template for constructions of American otherness. As a result, American governments could pursue pragmatic policies and find compromise solutions to Anglo-American issues.168

166

167

168

Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 115–145. In the 1840s, James K. Polk, for example, stirred up American public opinion in the Oregon Boundary Dispute to put pressure on the British government to agree to a borderline advantageous to the U.S. However, the President had no desire to actually declare war against Great Britain and eventually offered a compromise solution. Jefferson to William Duane, August 4, 1812, in: Thomas Jefferson Papers (Library of Congress), reel 046. For Jefferson’s changing perception of Great Britain in the aftermath of the War of 1812 also see Walter LaFeber, “Jefferson and an American Foreign Policy,” in: Peter S. Onuf (ed.), Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 370–391; Lawrence S. Kaplan, “Jefferson as Anglophile: Sagacity or Senility in the Era of Good Feelings?” in: Diplomatic History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1992), 487–494. In the wake of the War of 1812, a new commercial treaty was negotiated with Britain in 1815. The Rush–Bagot Agreement of 1817 demilitarized the Great Lakes, and in the Convention of 1818 the U.S. and Britain agreed on the U.S.–Canadian boundary west of the Lake of the Woods. The Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842 settled the remaining boundary disputes in the east of North America.

Conclusion

When news of the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 reached the U.S., the reception was almost universally positive. The first city to hear about the peace agreement was New York on February 11 when the HMS Favorite arrived with Henry Carroll, Henry Clay’s secretary, and the British representative Anthony St. John Baker aboard, who both carried with them the official copies of the treaty. The city burst out in spontaneous jubilation. At the Battery, cannons fired salutes; bonfires illuminated the entire city; public buildings were decorated; and torchlight parades proceeded through Lower Manhattan. As news of America’s victory against British forces in the Battle of New Orleans had arrived only eight days earlier, both the treaty and the victory were celebrated together. One day later, there was general rejoicing in Philadelphia upon news of the treaty and a public festivity took place.1 When Boston, which was a Federalist stronghold, learned of the treaty on February 13, it was welcomed with the illumination of public buildings and private homes, parades, artillery salutes, bells, the closing of schools and stores, and the hissing of flags.2 Bell ringing, cannon salutes, music performances,

1

2

New-York Spectator, February 15, 1815; Fred L. Engelman, The Peace of Christmas Eve (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), 289–290; Walter R. Borneman, 1812: The War That Forged a Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 295–296; Frank A. Updyke, The Diplomacy of the War of 1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1915), 365–366. Columbian Centinel (Boston), February 15, 1815; Boston Gazette, February 16 and 20, 1815; The Yankee (Boston), February 17, 1815; John Bach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, From the Revolution to the Civil War, 8 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883–1913), Vol. 4, 275. Also see The Weekly Messenger (Boston),

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illuminations, and the display of the stars and stripes also took place in New Haven, Providence, Hartford, and Washington.3 In Raleigh, North Carolina, the peace generated “so general, so animated a picture of public satisfaction . . . in all ranks,” the Raleigh Register reported. It was celebrated by bonfires, the firing of cannons, “heart-cheering huzzahs, music, a procession, and a general and brilliant illumination.”4 Jonathan Russell’s brother-in-law told him that “Grand illuminations are making throughout the United States.”5 As Americans celebrated on the streets, Republican newspapers claimed that Americans had given their former mother country a good drumming. The American Mercury boasted that “the stars and stripes of America have in almost every instance waved triumphant over the flag of Britain” and concluded that “the Americans are decidedly superior to their insolent opposers.”6 The Boston Yankee called the treaty “AN HONORABLE PEACE! OBTAINED BY American Bravery!!”7 Federalist newspapers also welcomed the peace agreement, although the Madison Administration had not “obtained one single avowed object, for which they involved the country in this bloody and expensive war,” as the New-York Evening Post did not fail to notice.8 Unlike the declaration of war, which had been highly controversial and had been adopted only by a strictly partisan vote, the Treaty of Ghent was ratified unanimously on February 16, 1815.9 But why did Americans celebrate the treaty so enthusiastically? After all, in strictly diplomatic terms, the war had been a tie and all the hardships and deprivations of war had hence been for nothing. The American peace commission did not win any material concessions from Great Britain on the concrete issues that had supposedly caused the war, namely neutral rights and impressment. Not only did the Treaty of Ghent merely re-establish the status quo ante bellum, but the American war effort had,

3

4

5

6 7 8

February 24, 1815; New-England Palladium & Commercial Advertiser (Boston), February 24, 1815. American Mercury (Hartford), February 21 and 28, 1815; Daily National Intelligencer (Washington), February 18 and 20, 1815; Updyke, The Diplomacy of the War of 1812, 366. Raleigh Register, February 24, 1815, quoted in: Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, Frustrated Patriots: North Carolina and the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 200. Otis Ammidon to Russell, February 20, 1815, in: “Letters of Jonathan Russell,” in: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 54 (1920–1921), 78. American Mercury (Hartford), February 21, 1815. The Yankee (Boston), February 17, 1815. 9 New-York Evening Post, February 13, 1815. SEJ, Vol. 2, 620.

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in fact, been highly calamitous and Americans had suffered humiliating defeats. The capital had been burned, Madison and other public officials had rather disgracefully escaped at the last minute, American troops had performed poorly at Bladensburg with the militia running away from the approaching Britons in disorderly fashion, all invasions into Canada had failed, and by 1814 the U.S. had become practically bankrupt. Some Federalists therefore hoped that they could benefit from the peace settlement, as the Treaty of Ghent proved that they had been right all along when arguing that the U.S. simply was not powerful enough to force Great Britain to accept American definitions of neutral rights and to renounce impressment on the high seas and that the war was hence pointless. “The treaty must be deemed disgraceful to the government who made the war and the peace, and will be so adjudged by all, after the first effusions of joy at relief have subsided,” Federalist Senator Christopher Gore predicted to Governor Caleb Strong.10 Republicans, however, had never conceived of the conflict as an offensive one in which the U.S. would seek to push through its diplomatic interests by force. Perceiving Great Britain to pose a direct threat to the American republic, they had justified the declaration of war as a defensive step, as Chapter 5 demonstrated. In Republicans’ eyes, Great Britain had been the aggressor in the conflict. They therefore argued that by acknowledging the status quo in the Treaty of Ghent, it was in fact Great Britain that gave up her offensive designs. In turn the U.S. could claim victory. Some Federalists quickly realized that the Treaty of Ghent could actually be politically advantageous to Republicans and possibly devastating to the Federalist Party. James Robertson of Philadelphia warned Pickering that the Republican press would deemphasize the issues of neutral rights and impressment and instead depict the conflict as “a war on our part of pure self-defence against the designs of the British to reduce us again to subjection – and they will tell us that this resistance has been completely successfull. Of course, as we are an unambitious peacefull people, we have obtained every thing we ought to fight for.” If Republicans could impose this interpretation of the conflict on the American public, Americans would come to consider the treaty a great American triumph, Robertson predicted. “The President, therefore, will only have to call it a glorious peace, and the party here will echo it.”11

10

11

Gore to Strong, February 18, 1815, in: Henry Cabot Lodge (ed.), Life and Letters of George Cabot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1877), 563. Robertson to Pickering, February 14, 1815, in: Timothy Pickering Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), reel 30.

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Robertson’s analysis proved to be accurate. Republicans indeed claimed that they had attained their war aims, since they had repulsed British aggressions in the War of 1812. Just as Robertson foresaw, Madison – arguing that the conflict had been a defensive one – called the War of 1812 “a success” in a speech to Congress and boasted that the Treaty of Ghent was the result of “a campaign signalized by the most brilliant successes.”12 Most Republican newspapers endorsed his assessment. “This second war of independence,” the National Advocate found, “has been illustrated by more splendid achievements than the war of the revolution.”13 The National Intelligencer alleged that the U.S. had achieved all of its objectives.14 According to the Yankee, the U.S. had “wretched” peace “from the enemy.”15 The American Mercury boldly asserted that “in the second war forced upon America for her Independence, she lowered the arrogance of Britain to a greater degree than it had been lowered by the twenty years conflict in Europe which preceded it.”16 The National Aegis emphatically insisted: “Yes, we have triumphed – let snarling malcontents say what they will, we have gloriously triumphed!”17 In particular, the publication of the British government’s territorial demands in 1814 made it possible for Republicans to argue that America had compelled British negotiators to give up their offensive war aims. Israel Pickens of North Carolina, for example, called the peace treaty “highly honorable,” because Great Britain had allegedly been forced to dispense with her “arrogant demands.”18 However, Republicans’ depiction of the diplomatic proceedings was not veracious. In fact, at the beginning of the negotiations, the American commissioners had demanded that Great Britain give up the practice of impressment on the high seas as a sine qua non condition. Since the American diplomats eventually dropped their key demand and the treaty would consequently no longer appear as an American victory, the Republican majority in the Senate decided to keep the documents relating to the treaty secret.19 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

Madison, February 18, 1815, in: AC, 13th Congress, 3rd Session, 255. National Advocate (New York), February 20, 1815. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington), February 23, 1815. The Yankee (Boston), February 17, 1815. American Mercury (Hartford), February 21, 1815. National Aegis (Worcester), February 22, 1815. Pickens to his Constituents, February 20, 1815, in: Noble E. Cunningham Jr. (ed.), Circular Letters of Congressmen to their Constituents, 1789–1829, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), Vol. 2, 912. SEJ, Vol. 2, 621. The Federal Republican criticized the decision and noted that its aim was to conceal the fact that the American war aims had not been achieved. Federal Republican (Georgetown), February 24, 1815.

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figure 10: “Peace of Ghent 1814 and Triumph of America,” engraving by Alexis Chataigner from c. 1815 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

A hyperbolical engraving by the French printmaker Alexis Chataigner gives striking expression to the strong bias of the Republican interpretation of the Treaty of Ghent (see Figure 10). On the right, we see Columbia passing through a triumphal arch on a horse-drawn chariot holding a liberty pole that is simultaneously used as a flagstaff for the stars and stripes in her right hand and a bow in her left hand, carrying a quiver with arrows on her back, and wearing a feathered crown. She is accompanied by a flying Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, who holds a laurel wreath over her head. The American eagle is watching Columbia from above carrying a palm branch, the symbol of victory, in his claws. A crowd is cheering as she proceeds towards the Temple of Victory (here called Temple of Peace) in the background on the left-hand side, where the spoils of war – visible between the chariot and the temple – are brought. Among them is a banner on which “America forever independent” is inscribed. Behind the crowd are the ruins of the Capitol. In the very back, a rebuilt President’s House, which leaves no trace of America’s most humiliating

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defeat in the war, is visible. On the left, we see Minerva representing America’s wisdom, Mercury her commerce, and Hercules her strength, as the inscription underneath the allegory tells us. Minerva is carrying a shield on which the names of America’s peace commissioners – John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, James A. Bayard, Jonathan Russell, and Henry Clay – are written. She “dictates the conditions of peace,” which Mercury, the messenger of the gods, with the winged helmet and the caduceus, “presents to Britannia,” and which Hercules, a Roman hero famed for his strength, leaning on a club, wearing the fur of a slain lion (the personification of England), and standing on Neptune’s trident (symbol of the Royal Navy), “forces her to accept.” Desirous of peace, as indicated by the olive branch in her right hand, Britannia – kneeling under an obelisk, which names American war heroes, and next to the pedestal, which commemorates American military victories in the war – is covering her head in shame, as she receives the peace terms. Her throne has collapsed and the British flag, having been pushed over, lies on the floor at the center. Since many Americans believed Republicans that the war had been forced on America in 1812 and that they had repelled an unprovoked foreign attack, American nationalism reached a peak in 1815 and Americans throughout the country assured each other that an American national identity had been firmly established as a result of the war. “We have triumphed,” the Southern Patriot found and concluded that Americans had “established a NATIONAL CHARACTER.”20 The citizens of Baltimore declared that the War of 1812 had “raised up and consolidated a national character, dear to the hearts of the people, as an object of honest pride.”21 A South Carolinian maintained that the “war has given strength and splendor to the chain of the Union . . . Local feelings are absorbed in the proud feelings of being an American.”22 Not just newspapers and citizens noted a rise in American nationalism. Republican policy makers, too, were content with the strength of American nationalism. Charles Jared Ingersoll told Congress that after

20

21

22

Southern Patriot, July 3, 1815, quoted in: Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 205. “Address to the President by the citizens of Baltimore,” April 10, 1815, in: Henry Wheaton, Some Account of the Life, Writings, and Speeches of William Pinkney (New York: J. W. Palmer, 1826), 135. Russell B. Nye, “The American as Nationalist,” in: idem, This Almost Chosen People: Essays in the History of American Ideas (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966), 65.

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the War of 1812 “we can all feel alike – we are all of one mind – all hearts leap to the embraces of each other.”23 With the War of 1812 “our Union has gained strength, our troops honor, and the nation, character,” Monroe found. By fighting the British, Americans had grown firmly attached to the American nation, he believed. “We cannot go back. The spirit of the nation forbids it,” because, as he continued to explain, “The privations to which our fellow citizens have been exposed, the losses which they have suffered with extraordinary patience and fortitude, and the blood which has been gallantly shed in defence of our rights . . . impose on us new obligations to pursue it.”24 In a letter to Matthew Lyon, Gallatin observed that before the war “we were . . . too much confined in our political feelings to local and State objects.” The military conflict, however, changed Americans’ attitudes. “The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and character which the Revolution had given, and which were daily lessened. The people . . . are more Americans; they feel and act more as a nation; and I hope that the permanency of the Union is thereby better secured.”25 While an American national consciousness had only existed in rudimentary form in 1789, a large number of Americans had come to identify with the American nation by 1815. Federalists and Republicans had differed sharply in their definitions of American identity and had divided the country in their struggle to determine the character of the emerging nation in the early years of the republic. Nonetheless, by arguing over American identity, they had created it and established the assumption that there was an American nation as a common point of departure for their debates. Furthermore, by using the power of the federal government to bolster their partisan definitions of American identity, both parties promoted American nationalism. Federalists provoked the Quasi-War with France in 1798 in order to disentangle America from her Revolutionary War ally; Republicans declared war against Great Britain in 1812 to disentangle America from her former mother country. As a result, a consensus had emerged by 1815 that America was defined by her otherness from Europe at large.

23 24

25

Ingersoll, February 16, 1815, in: AC, 13th Congress, 3rd Session, 1159. Monroe to the Military Committee of the Senate, February 22, 1815, in: Stanislaus Murray Hamilton (ed.), The Writings of James Monroe, 7 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1898–1903), Vol. 5, 321–322. Gallatin to Lyon, May 7, 1816, in: Henry Adams (ed.), The Writings of Albert Gallatin, 3 vols. (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1879), Vol. 1, 700.

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The Quasi-War and the War of 1812 thus firmly established the twospheres concept.26 Americans successfully dissociated their nation from its European reference points and set the New World, which was allegedly subject to unique social laws and followed its own path of development, apart from the Old World, which they believed was historically determined to be shaped by monarchy and warfare. “What in short, is the whole system of Europe towards America but an atrocious and insulting tyranny?” Jefferson asked.27 America, including America’s evolving sister republics in Latin America, should “no longer . . . be involved in the neverceasing broils of Europe,” since she was fundamentally different, as he wrote Alexander von Humboldt.28 While the U.S. could not yet help Latin American colonies become independent directly, he was sure that as soon as “our strength will permit us to give the law of our hemisphere, it should be that the meridian of the mid-Atlantic should be the line of demarkation between war and peace, on this side of which no act of hostility should be committed, and the lion and the lamb lie down in peace together.”29 Europe consisted of “nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property and lives of their people.” In America, by contrast, “never had a people so favorable a chance of trying the opposite system, of peace and fraternity with mankind, and the direction of all our means and faculties to the purposes of improvement instead of destruction.” In the Western Hemisphere, a zone of perpetual peace could be created.30 Jefferson, therefore, suggested completely shutting off America from European influence. “We cannot too distinctly detach ourselves from the European system, which is essentially belligerent, nor too sedulously cultivate an American system, essentially pacific.”31 The failure of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had so frustrated Jefferson that he considered the redemption of the Old World impossible. Any attempt “to reform all Europe, and bring them back to principles of morality and a respect for

26

27 28 29 30 31

For the hemispheric element in American nationalism after 1815, see Caitlin A. Fitz, “The Hemispheric Dimensions of Early U.S. Nationalism: The War of 1812, its Aftermath, and Spanish American Independence,” in: Journal of American History, Vol. 102, No. 2 (2015), 356–379. Jefferson to Clement Caine, September 16, 1811, in: WTJ, Vol. 11, 214. Jefferson to von Humboldt, December 6, 1813, in: ibid., 352. Jefferson to John Crawford, January 2, 1812, in: TJW, Vol. 13, 119. Jefferson to Monroe, June 11, 1823, in: WTJ, Vol. 12, 292. Jefferson to Madison, March 23, 1815, in: ibid., Vol. 11, 466.

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the equal rights of nations” was fruitless.32 Europe’s “forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us.”33 The two-spheres concept that became prevalent and won widespread acceptance in the early republic was synthesized by Monroe in 1823. In his famous doctrine, which was as much a statement of American nationalism as a foreign-policy dogma, America’s fifth President proclaimed that Europe and America were two independent spheres developing according to divergent historical trajectories and operating according to different political and social laws. The proclamation expressed in unambiguous terms that Americans considered their continent to be fundamentally different from Europe. Consequently, Americans would not meddle in European affairs but also would not suffer their sphere (which included both Americas) to become the “subject for future colonization by any European power.” As a result of the Quasi-War and the War of 1812, the notion of American exceptionalism, by 1823, had become a central part of American identity that few Americans would question by defining America in appropriation of Europe.34 The creation of the American nation has not been a peaceful and inclusive enterprise. On the contrary, for the U.S. to acquire a sense of uniqueness, American nationalism, in its formative phase, required the violent separation of America from Europe and resulted in two wars. It was through the perception of foreign threats that Americans came to develop a national identity. Both Federalists and Republicans waged war for partisan motives and sought to define the emerging nation in terms conducive to their political interests. Even though their wars were hence met with opposition in the beginning, the nationalistic pressure that the war situations produced forced their respective opponents to demonstrate their undivided loyalty to the American nation by renouncing any attachment to Europe. While the Quasi-War and the War of 1812 were thus a boost to American nationalism, the unity they produced, however, would not

32

33 34

Jefferson to William Wirt, May 3, 1811, in: ibid., 200n. Besides the monarchical form of government, Jefferson believed that Europe’s excess population and limited space corrupted the Old World beyond repair and made Europeans incapable of attaining liberty and preserving peace. In America, by contrast, “room is abundant, population scanty, and peace the necessary means for producing men, to whom the redundant soil is offering the means of life and happiness.” Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820, in: TJW, Vol. 15, 263. Jefferson to Monroe, June 11, 1823, in: WTJ, Vol. 12, 292. The Monroe Doctrine is reprinted in: ASP:FR, Vol. 5, 245–250.

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endure for long. After having disentangled America from the Old World and having strengthened American nationalism by setting America apart from its European Others through two wars, Americans turned inward in the ensuing “Era of Good Feelings” and – ironically – by concentrating on themselves, they took the road to disunion.35 As the Federalist Party disappeared and the conservatism that they championed became irrelevant in American politics, the issue of slavery that divided the sections gradually moved to the center of political debate. As a result, the unnatural connection of Southern slaveholders and Northern middling entrepreneurs, which had formed the basis of the Republican Party, slowly disintegrated. Admittedly, slavery was not the only issue that characterized the Second Party System emerging in the wake of the dissolution of the Republican Party: the Jacksonian Democrats emphasized states’ rights, minimal interference by the federal government in domestic affairs, maximum independence for the individual, and rapid westward expansion, whereas Whigs favored slow territorial expansion and an orderly path towards economic development guided by strong central institutions and social elites. However, as the issue of slavery increasingly dominated the political agenda during the 1850s, these parties progressively came to represent the two sections of the country, with the Whigs eventually turning into the Northern-based Republican Party.36 As a result, by 1860 the sections had begun to fear each other more than external foes. This is not to say that this development was preordained. After 1815, foreign policy could still serve as a cement binding the sections together whenever a danger from abroad threatened the U.S. and hence united Americans in defense of their country, arguably preventing an earlier break-up of the union.37 Promoting American nationalism by warning 35

36

37

In 1817, the Columbian Centinel entitled one of its articles “Era of Good Feelings.” Subsequently, it became a catchword to describe the post-war period. Columbian Centinel (Boston), July 12, 1817. For the social philosophy, political program, and electoral base of the parties, see Glyndon G. Van Deusen, “The Whig Party,” and Michael F. Holt, “The Democratic Party, 1828–1860,” in: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (ed.), The History of U.S. Political Parties, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), Vol. 1, 333–363, 497–536. Admittedly, this mechanism did not work in the Mexican–American War, because in view of the significant power imbalance few Americans would consider Mexico an existential menace and because it was too obvious that the war had been brought about by the expansionistic agenda of the Polk Administration rather than by any aggressive designs on the part of Mexico. The war was, therefore, highly controversial and deepened existing domestic divisions over the institution of slavery. For the vociferous opposition to the Mexican–American War, see Frederick Merk, “Dissent in the Mexican War,” in:

Conclusion

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of a foreign threat continued being effective above all when it came to the former mother country whose strong military power made it possible for American leaders to prompt feelings of imminent danger whenever a crisis in Anglo-American relations erupted. Clashes between the U.S. and Great Britain over the slave trade issue in particular tended to rally Americans from all sections behind the federal government even in matters concerning the “peculiar institution.”38 These conflicts resulted from the opposing developments of slavery in both countries after 1815. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the British Empire and subsequently the Royal Navy, which had already started controlling merchant ships along the African coast in 1808 to ensure international compliance with the Slave Trade Act of 1807, multiplied its efforts to suppress the international slave trade. Moreover, the British government also sought to convince other powers to do away with slavery itself.39 “Increasingly, the British government seemed to be acting virtually as international sponsor of the antislavery movement,” as one historian put it.40 In the U.S., by contrast, the institution of slavery became more entrenched after unified Native American resistance to westward expansionism had been crushed in the War of 1812 and lands in the West were hence opened up to an extension of the slavebased plantation system. Furthermore, the American government refused to cooperate in the elimination of the transatlantic slave trade despite the fact that Americans promised “to use their best endeavors” to stop

38

39

40

Samuel Eliot Morison, Frederick Merk, and Frank Freidel (eds.), Dissent in Three American Wars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 33–63; John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973); David Mayers, Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 109–137. Compensation for slaves who had absconded behind British lines during the war and whom the British refused to return after the conflict became an issue immediately after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 1815. Only in 1826 did both governments finally agree on the amount of indemnification due to American slave-owners. For the liberations of slaves by the British during the War of 1812, see Gene Allen Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). For the abolition of the British slave trade and the development in size of the West Africa Squadron, see Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), 3–11, 61–78, and 123–129. For the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, see Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 121.

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the trade in the Treaty of Ghent in 1814.41 Above all, it refused to allow the Royal Navy to search ships suspected of transporting slaves if they flew the American flag. “By 1840 the United States was the only important seafaring nation that had refused to join any form of treaty arrangement aimed at suppressing the slave trade,” as two experts on Anglo-American relations in the antebellum period concluded.42 As a result, Great Britain and America repeatedly clashed over the issue during the 1840s and 1850s. Importantly, it was not only Southern slaveholders, who feared that “a resolute attack on the slave trade might too easily be interpreted as the preliminary to an attack on slavery itself,” that were averse to cooperation with Great Britain on the slave trade issue.43 The strong nationalistic emotions that the issue of impressment had caused prior to the War of 1812 also made Northerners reluctant to consent to an agreement by which the Royal Navy could search American ships under suspicion of transporting slaves on the high seas, even though most other European and Latin American powers had concluded treaties with Great Britain to that effect.44 For example, John Quincy Adams, who was highly critical of 41

42

43

44

“Treaty of Peace and Amity between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America,” December 24, 1814, in: ASP:FR, Vol. 3, 748. Admittedly, in the Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the U.S. committed itself to station enough ships off the West African coast to search potential slave ships flying American flags. However, the American government did not keep its promise to supply a sufficient number of war ships. Charles S. Campbell, From Revolution to Rapprochement: The United States and Great Britain, 1783–1900 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 60. Howard Jones and Donald A. Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: AngloAmerican Relations in the 1840s (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 73. Hugh G. Soulsby, The Right of Search and the Slave Trade in Anglo-American Relations, 1814–1862 (Baltimore: Hopkins Press, 1933), 9. Many Southerners also accused British authorities, which liberated American slaves when on board ships that wrecked in the Bahamas, of intending to incite slave rebellions in the U.S. and even to use blacks from the Caribbean to invade the U.S. in an attempt to crush the American republic. Moreover, they were concerned that the British planned to have slavery abolished in the Republic of Texas in order to undermine the “peculiar institution” in the U.S. Edward B. Rugemer, “Robert Monroe Harrison, British Abolition, Southern Anglophobia and Texas Annexation,” in: Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007), 169–191. For Southerners’ fear of British abolitionism also see Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 114–120. See Matthew Mason, “The Battle of Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in: William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2002), 665–696. For Great Britain’s international campaign to put a halt to the Atlantic slave trade through mutual right to search agreements, see Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 191–197.

Conclusion

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the “peculiar institution,” nonetheless refused to collaborate with the British in eliminating the international slave trade. When the British minister Stratford Canning asked Adams in 1822 whether he “could conceive of a greater or more atrocious evil than this slave-trade,” the U.S. Secretary of State responded: “Yes: admitting the right of search by foreign officers of our vessels upon the seas in time of peace; for that would be making slaves of ourselves.”45 As Americans associated British searches of American vessels for slaves with the sensitive impressment issue that had troubled Anglo-American relations during the Napoleonic Wars, Southern slaveholders such as Secretary of State Lewis Cass could successfully use British efforts to suppress the international slave trade to unite Americans in defense against British encroachments on American independence and turn the domestically explosive issue of slavery into one of asserting U.S. sovereignty and national prestige abroad.46 Similarly, when British abolitionists toured the U.S. to support anti-slavery forces there, their campaigns “helped to give the anti-slavery movement an alien character,” as Americans in both sections condemned British interference in U.S. domestic affairs.47 The fact that the British government refused to extradite the many slaves who had escaped to Canada to win freedom also united the American nation in opposition to Great Britain, since it appeared as if the former mother country intended to weaken the American republic.48 Similarly, several Northerners consented to the annexation of Texas as a slave state, because they feared that the British government supported Texan independence to fence in the U.S.49 Finally, when the Royal Navy – in an attempt to disrupt the mushrooming shipments of slaves to Cuba – began searching all vessels headed toward the 45

46

47

48 49

Adams, June 29, 1822, in: Charles Francis Adams (ed.), Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874–1877), Vol. 6, 37. As a result, slavers could hoist the American flag once a British war ship came in sight to avoid the risk of being searched. American obstinacy thus prevented an effective international system of halting the slave trade. Campbell, From Revolution to Rapprochement, 57–58. For the slavers’ use of American flags as protection from the Royal Navy, see W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1896), 141–146. See James C. Duram, “A Study of Frustration: Britain, the USA, and the African Slave Trade, 1815–1870,” in: Social Science, Vol. 40, No. 4 (1965), 224. Christine Bolt, The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction: A Study in AngloAmerican Co-operation, 1833–1877 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 23–24. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 101–103. Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (London: Little, Brown, 2007), 340.

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Caribbean island in early 1858, Americans of all sections condemned the practice and several Congressmen called for armed resistance.50 Simply put, the more pressure Great Britain exerted to eliminate the slave trade and to encourage the abolition of slavery around the world, the more Americans from both sections united in defense of the institution. However, when the Conservative government under Lord Derby, who did not attach too much importance to the suppression of the trafficking in human cargo, replaced the Whig government headed by the zealous opponent of the slave trade Lord Palmerston in February 1858, British efforts to put an end to the abominable trade became weaker. As a result, the invocation of British enmity became less plausible and the domestic antagonism over slavery in the U.S. would hence no longer be overshadowed by a foreign crisis.51 “The withdrawal of this foreign threat removed another common bond of North and South,” the historian Harral E. Landry concluded, and thus “had a serious and direct relation to the outbreak of the Civil War.”52 When Americans no longer found an external outlet for their divisions and thus could no longer be united by an external threat, the North and the South were set on a path of escalating tensions that the American nationalism fostered by the Quasi-War and the War of 1812 could not mitigate. As Northerners and Southerners began perceiving each other as the most existential threat to the nation, Secretary of State William H. Seward made a last attempt to prevent secession and unite the nation through a foreign war. He tried to convince the President to use Spain’s acceptance of the bankrupt Santo Domingo government’s offer to resume control of the former colony (and rumors that she and France were about to also annex Haiti) as a pretext to declare war against both countries in order to defuse the sectional crisis at home. After all, Spain’s re50 51

52

Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 179–185. Not only did the new government immediately order the West Indian fleet to discontinue their aggressive approach; it also gave in to the American interpretation of the laws of nation with regard to the distinction between right of search and of visit. Since the British were not allowed to “search” American vessels to look for slaves, they had been insisting – in view of the fact that many slave-carrying ships fraudulently hoisted the American flag to avoid inspection – on their right to “visit” vessels flying the American flag to verify their nationality causing diplomatic tensions with the U.S. government that denied a legal difference between right of search and right of visit. However, in June 1858, the British government acknowledged that the distinction between right of search and right of visit was a fiction. See Richard W. Van Alstyne, “The British Right of Search and the African Slave Trade,” in: Journal of Modern History, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1930), 37–47. Harral E. Landry, “Slavery and the Slave Trade in Atlantic Diplomacy, 1850–1861,” in: Journal of Southern History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1961), 207.

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colonization of Santo Domingo constituted a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Seward hoped that another foreign war would arouse American nationalism and divert attention from the fundamental disagreements over the issue of slavery at home. The diplomatic historian William Earl Weeks found that “Seward’s idea, though fraught with risks, may have represented the best chance for averting a split in 1861.” Abraham Lincoln, however, rejected Seward’s plan of a “foreign war panacea” being determined to solve the sectional crisis once and for all and not simply postpone a satisfactory settlement of the issue of the expansion of slavery by creating an international crisis.53 The American nation was created through violent demarcation from its major reference points in two wars, but when Great Britain and France lost their existential importance as foreign templates for the domestic struggle over America’s identity after 1815, the sections gradually began defining America in opposition to each other rather than to foreign Others. It would finally break apart when a foreign threat could no longer unite the sections and overshadow the contradictions and diverging interests between its constituent parts. The union would have to be reborn in a civil war.

53

William Earl Weeks, Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 243. Also see Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 281–283; Kinley J. Brauer, “Seward’s ‘Foreign War Panacea’: An Interpretation,” in: New York History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (1974), 133–157; Lawrence M. Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis: The Effort to Prevent Civil War (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), 143–144.

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Index

Adair, John, 178 Adams, John as conservative ideologue, 48, 49, 158 decision not to seek declaration of war against France, 124, 159 decision to end Quasi-War, 36, 122, 158, 159–161 diplomatic nominations of, 116, 161 elected President, 158 losing presidential elections of 1800, 107 message to Congress of December 8, 1798, 160 message to Congress of March 19, 1798, 124 message to Congress of May 16, 1797, 113–114, 115, 127, 159 on connection between French Revolutionary Wars and America’s first party system, 69 on French Revolution, 55 on Genet Affair, 76 on Great Britain, 158 on High Federalists, 159, 162 on nationalism as demarcation process, 9 on public virtue and faction, 39 on republican peace theory, 176 on state of American nationalism in 1798, 156 on War of 1812, 158, 229 patriotic addresses to, 140–141 pressing for British compensation for liberated slaves, 93

Adams, John Quincy as peace commissioner, 260 on connection between French Revolutionary Wars and America’s first party system, 69 on Hartford Convention, 247 on impressment, 190, 266, 267 renouncing Anglophilia, 229 Adet, Pierre Auguste, 91, 117 African Americans as internal Others, 19–23, 188–189, 231–232, 236 compared to Europeans, 145 escaping to Canada, 267 liberated from slavery in War of 1812, 265 liberated from slavery in War of Independence, 92, 93, 94 siding with British in War of 1812, 231, 232, 235 Alien Enemies Act (1798), 151 Alien Friends Act (1798), 151 Allen, Ira, 75 Allen, John, 133, 151 American exceptionalism, 144–146, 167, 262–263 American nationalism as demarcation process, 8–10, 17–23, 262–263, 264–265 before and during American Revolution, 1–7 connection to U.S. foreign policy, 10–15 contested, 28

304

Index failing in 1860/1861, 268–269 historiography of, 7–8 importance of newspapers for emergence of, 23–24, 28–29 leading to War of 1812, 199–206 promoted by Quasi-War, 132, 155 promoted by War of 1812, 244–246, 260–261 promoters of, 15–17 American Revolution abolition of entail, primogeniture, and monopolies in, 49 Americanization of foreign-policy makers in, 15–16 classical republicanism in, 43 compared to War of 1812, 225–226 debts incurred in, 40 egalitarian promises of, 42, 45, 252 fragility of the union in, 1–2 French Revolution and, 18, 34, 35, 54, 57, 65, 141, 143 politicization of population in, 25 state of American nationalism at the time of, 3–5, 6, 8–9 Ames, Fisher, 71, 79, 105–105, 124, 135, 161 Ames, Nathaniel, 71 Ammidon, Otis, 256 Anglo-Saxonism, 36, 149–150, 152 Anti-Federalists, 14, 15 Articles of Confederation, 5, 12, 13 Austria, 113, 129, 157, 157, 236 Bache, Benjamin Franklin, 91 Baker, Anthony St. John, 255 Barbary States, 12, 13, 17, 18, 183 Barron, James, 195 Bastille Day, 58 Battle of Austerlitz (1805), 185 Battle of Jena–Auerstedt (1806), 185 Battle of the Nations (1814), 236 Battle of the Nile (1798), 152, 157 Battle of Trafalgar (1805), 185 Bayard, James A., 260 Belgium, 113, 128, 136, 146 Bellamy, Pierre, 120 Bidwell, Barnabus, 184 Bingham, William, 3 Blount, William, 3 Bonaparte, Joseph, 164 Bonaparte, Napoleon

305

abdication of, 236 as viewed by Federalists, 192, 218–220 as viewed by Republicans, 141, 181–182 continental system of, 185, 197 coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, an VIII, 141, 172 invasion of Russia, 170 legitimizing his rule through popular referendums, 181 Louisiana Purchase and, 166–166, 181 military successes of, 185 Brigham, Elijah, 217 British West Indies, 12, 83, 84, 85, 88, 94, 231 Brooks, John, 250 Ça ira, 58, 64, 109, 140 Cabot, George, 51, 55, 56, 83, 95 Cadore, duc de. See Champagny, JeanBaptiste Nompère de Calhoun, John C., 210, 211 Callender, James, 151 Canning, Stratford, 267 Carey, Mathew, 151, 244 Carmagnole, 64, 140 Carroll, Henry, 255 Cass, Lewis, 267 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Lord, 169, 212, 213 Champagny, Jean-Baptiste Nompère de, 199 Channing, William Ellery, 220, 230, 238 Charles, William, 233, 248, 249 Chataigner, Alexis, 259 Chesapeake Affair of 1807, 195–196, 199 Chittenden, Martin, 237 Christie, Gabriel, 105 citizenship, 6, 20, 21, 23, 150, 188 civic humanism. See classical republicanism Civil War, 268–269 Clark, Abraham, 82 classical republicanism, 39–40, 43–45, 48 Clay, Henry, 16, 191, 205, 209, 260 Cobbett, William, 27, 99, 153 cockades, 58, 109, 138 Confederation Congress, 2, 3, 10, 12, 13 Constitution, 5–6, 13–15, 31, 42, 246, 247 Constitutional Convention, 3, 13, 14 Continental Army, 2, 4, 15, 16, 227 Continental Congress, 1, 2, 5, 15, 16, 38 Convention of 1818, 254

306

Index

Convention of Mortefontaine (1800). See Quasi-War Convention of Paris (1803). See Quasi-War Cooper, Thomas, 151 Coxe, Tench, 104 Craik, William, 150 Crawford, William H., 16 creole nationalism, 4 Dallas, Alexander James, 97, 98, 104 Dana, Francis, 116 Davie, William R., 161 Declaration of Independence, 1, 4, 8, 14, 99 democratic egalitarianism, 45–48 as marker of American identity, 35, 144–146 becoming dominant political ideology in U.S., 167, 252 championed by immigrants, 146–149 Federalist attempts to discredit, 35, 62, 64, 72, 82, 89, 111, 122, 126, 130, 131, 133 influence of French Revolution on, 34, 55–56, 57–58 linked to Anglophobia, 58–59, 95, 96 linked to Francophilia, 57–58, 109–110 supplanting classical republicanism, 48 Democratic-Republican societies, 43, 47, 58, 59, 65, 66, 74, 80, 81, 89, 90, 98, 100 Derby, Edward Smith-Stanley, Lord, 268 Dickinson, John, 1 Dorchester, Guy Carleton, Lord, 80 Duane, William, 52, 222 Dunham, Josiah, 230 elections for Twelfth Congress, 200–205 elitist conservatism, 48–51 disappearing after War of 1812, 246, 264 linked to Anglophilia, 56–57, 223 linked to Francophobia, 55–56 Republican attempts to discredit, 68, 172, 223, 224–225, 228 Elliot, James, 190 Ellsworth, Oliver, 83, 161 Embargo of 1807, 170, 196–197, 211, 222 failure of, 198–199 viewed as peaceful measure by Republicans, 197–198, 209 Essex decision (1805). See Great Britain

ethnic composition of America, 149 Eustis, William, 250 Fauchet, Joseph, 117 Federalists accusing Republicans of national disloyalty, 63–65, 132–133, 135–136, 138 disappearing after War of 1812, 250–251 domestic program of, 40–41 elitist conservatism of, 48–51 equating elitist conservatism and Americanism, 28, 34, 147 fearing French political influence, 55–56, 219 fearing immigrants, 146–149 Hartford Convention. See War of 1812 nativism of, 149–150, 152 opposition to War of 1812, 216, 230, 241, 244, 247 reactions to declaration of war in 1812, 216 reasons for opposition to war declaration in 1812, 217–221 supporting war measures after war declaration in 1812, 229–230, 238–239, 243–244 views on French Revolution, 55–56 views on Great Britain, 56–57, 146, 152–155, 237–244 views on impressment, 191–192 views on Napoleon, 192, 218–220 views on Republicans, 51–52 voter base, 41 voting against declaration of war in 1812, 171, 216 Fiske, James, 181 Fleurieu, Charles-Pierre Claret de, 164 Ford, Timothy, 49 Fort Dearborn Massacre, 233 Foster, Augustus John, 169 France as America’s external Other, 17–19 as international champion of democratic egalitarianism, 28, 55–56, 57–58, 70, 71, 219 decree of August 16, 1798, 160 decree of December 17, 1807, 185 decree of February 19, 1793, 79 decree of July 2, 1796, 108 decree of July 31, 1798, 160

Index decree of March 2, 1797, 112, 113, 116, 117, 120 decree of May 9, 1793, 90 decree of November 21, 1806, 185 decree of October 29, 1798, 161 desire to maintain Franco-American alliance, 164 efforts to end Quasi-War, 160 foreign policy towards U.S., 75–76, 108–109, 112 foreign-policy motivations, 108–109, 117–119 Louisiana policy, 157, 166 meddling in U.S. politics, 76, 110, 127, 128, 157 military successes. See French Revolutionary Wars Franco-American alliance of 1778 celebrated by Republicans, 58, 109 Federalist efforts to suspend, 34, 35, 71, 72, 88, 89, 95, 112, 116 Franklin, Benjamin, 4, 99 French flag, 58, 109, 139 French Revolution American Revolution and, 18, 34, 35, 54, 57, 65, 141, 143 democratic egalitarianism in America and, 34, 55–56, 57–58 initial reception in America, 54–55 radicalization of, 34, 53, 55, 72 French Revolutionary Wars, 72, 79–80, 108, 113, 128, 146, 157 connection to America’s first party system, 28, 53, 56, 59, 60, 69, 71 French West Indies, 12, 79, 80, 82, 109, 160, 184 Freneau, Philip, 176–177, 206 Gallatin, Albert as peace commissioner, 260 on effects of War of 1812 on American nationalism, 261 on impressment, 194 on Quasi-War, 125 on Republican adoption of Federalist policies after 1815, 251 on unlikelihood of a French invasion, 157 Genet Affair, 75–76, 110 Genet, Edmond Charles. See Genet Affair George III, 233, 249 Germany, 128, 146

307

Gerry, Elbridge discussions with Talleyrand, 160 nomination as envoy extraordinary, 116 on Federalists, 223 role in XYZ Affair, 119–122 Gilbert, Felix H., 229 Godoy, Don Manuel de, 86 Godwin, William, 136 Goodrich, Chauncey, 56 Gore, Christopher, 257 Great Britain as America’s external Other, 17–19 as international champion of conservatism, 28, 56–57, 58–59, 70, 93, 219 as international sponsor of anti-slavery movement, 265 cultural influence on U.S., 11, 18, 188, 221, 253 efforts to suppress slave trade. See slave trade Essex decision (1805), 184, 193, 211 foreign policy towards U.S., 12, 82, 183 foreign-policy motivations, 186, 212, 213 importance of impressment to, 186–188, 191 liberalization after 1815, 254 order-in-council of August 6, 1794, 84 order-in-council of January 7, 1807, 185 order-in-council of November 6, 1793, 79, 83, 88 order-in-council of November 11, 1807, 168, 169, 185, 211, 212 Rule of 1756, 79, 86, 184 trade policy during French Revolutionary Wars, 79–80, 82 trade policy during Napoleonic Wars, 183–185 Greene, Nathanael, 2 Grenville, William Wyndham, Lord, 84, 85, 86, 93 Griswold, Roger, 216 Grundy, Felix, 182, 199 Haitian Revolution, 21, 109, 166, 189 Hamilton, Alexander as Federalist leader, 40, 72, 158 as nationalist, 16, 132 defending Jay Treaty, 92, 103, 127 financial and economic program, 40–41, 43

308

Index

Hamilton, Alexander (cont.) for limited war against France, 123, 124 on French Revolution, 61, 62 on immigration, 148 on need for assertive foreign policy, 14 on need for ethnic homogeneity, 149 on need to strengthen union, 6 on possibility of French victory over Great Britain, 113 on Proclamation of Neutrality, 72 on republican peace theory, 175 on Republican success in shaping public opinion on Jay Treaty, 91 on Republicans, 51, 55 plans to conquer Louisiana and Florida, 162 role in provoking Quasi-War, 35, 111, 112, 113, 114–115, 116 role in sending peace mission to Great Britain in 1794, 83, 88 Hammond, George, 74, 81 Hanson, Alexander C., 227, 242 Harper, John A., 204 Harper, Robert Goodloe, 115, 133, 147, 150 Hartford Convention. See War of 1812 Hauterive, Alexandre, 118 Henry, Patrick, 161 Hopkinson, Joseph, 140, 148 Hottinger, Jean Conrad, 120 Hume, David, 176 ideology definition of, 32 reality and, 156 U.S. foreign policy and, 32–33 impressment, 168, 169 British refusal to renounce practice, 191, 193, 213 compared to slavery, 22, 188–192, 231–232, 266–267 Federalist views on, 191–192 in negotiations of Monroe–Pinkney Treaty, 193 reasons for practice, 186–188 Republican refusal to compromise on issue, 190–191, 193–195, 258 Republican views on, 188, 190–191, 192 unresolved in Jay Treaty, 106 unresolved in Treaty of Ghent, 256

Independence Day, 7, 26, 58, 139, 152, 155, 216, 226, 228, 232 Ingersoll, Charles Jared, 260 Irish Rebellion of 1798, 147 Italy, 128, 130, 146 Jackson, James, 145, 178 Jay Treaty (1794), 82–106 change in public opinion towards, 101–105 expiration of, 106, 169, 193, 221 French reaction to, 112 historiography of, 85–88 instructions to Jay, 88–89 issue of slavery and, 93–94 negotiations leading to signing of, 84–85, 93 ratification of, 85 Republican opposition to, 89–101 Jay, John as conservative, 50 as nationalist, 16 negotiating Jay Treaty, 84–85, 93 negotiating Jay–Gardoqui Treaty, 13 nomination as envoy extraordinary, 35, 83 on America’s ethnic homogeneity, 149 on nationalism as demarcation process, 10 on republican peace theory, 175 on War of 1812, 243 Jay–Gardoqui Treaty (1786), 13 Jefferson, Thomas accused of national disloyalty, 136–138 as classical republican, 45 as nationalist, 16 as Secretary of State, 72, 94 changing views on France during QuasiWar, 141, 144 decision not to seek war in 1807, 196 decision not to submit Monroe–Pinkney Treaty to Senate, 194 Declaration of Independence, 4 non-compromising on impressment, 190, 193, 194–195 on connection between French Revolutionary Wars and America’s first party system, 53, 59, 69 on Embargo of 1807, 197–198, 199 on Federalists, 41, 68, 227, 245 on French Revolution, 54–55, 59–60

Index on Great Britain, 209, 254 on issue of slaves liberated in War of Independence, 94 on Jay Treaty, 96, 97, 101, 193, 222 on nationalism as demarcation process, 10 on need for assertive foreign policy, 14 on need for expansion of national postal service, 26 on need for unity during war, 135 on need to strengthen the union, 6 on orders-in-council of 1807, 186 on origins of Quasi-War, 115, 133–134, 180 on Proclamation of Neutrality, 73 on public opinion, 206 on republican peace theory, 178, 196, 207 on Republicans, 42, 223 on trade discrimination against Great Britain, 76–77, 78–79 on War of 1812, 222 role in Genet Affair, 76 seeking to undermine peace mission of 1797, 118–119 threatening war against France in 1803, 165–167 two-spheres concept, 262–263 Johnson, Richard M., 207 Jones, William, 216 Kant, Immanuel, 174, 177 Key, Francis Scott, 241 King, Rufus as minister to Great Britain, 166 changing perception of Great Britain in War of 1812, 238 cooperating with Republicans after War of 1812, 245 Federalist presidential candidate in 1816, 250 role in sending peace mission to Great Britain in 1794, 83 Lafayette, Marquis de, 68 Lathrop, John, 226 Lee, Charles, 64, 122 Lee, Henry, 228 Lee, Richard Bland, 57, 61 Létombe, Joseph Philippe, 117, 118 liberty poles, 58, 62, 66, 99, 109, 139, 259 Lincoln, Abraham, 269

309

Lingan, James M., 227 Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord, 242 Livingston, Brockholst, 104 Livingston, Edward, 126 Livingston, Robert Le Roy, 218 Livingston, Robert R., 166 Lloyd, James, 133 Logan, George, 72 Logan Act (1799), 72 Louisiana Purchase, 157, 165–167, 178, 181, 189 Lowell, John Jr., 61, 220 Loyalists, 20, 80, 225, 226 Luxembourg, 128 Lyon, Matthew, 151 McHenry, James, 123 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 176 McKean, Thomas, 144, 243 Madison, James as classical republican, 45 as nationalist, 17 attempts to stave off war declaration against Great Britain, 199, 205–206 considered as envoy extraordinary to France by Federalists, 114, 116 decision to ask Congress for a declaration of war in 1812, 206 during War of 1812, 239, 242, 257, 258 message to Congress of June 1, 1812, 210–211 on Embargo of 1807, 198, 199 on Federalists, 41, 52, 68 on fragility of the union, 2 on Great Britain, 182, 209, 237 on Jay Treaty, 83, 92, 105 on need for assertive foreign policy, 14, 15 on need for expansion of national postal service, 26 on need to strengthen the union, 6 on orders-in-council of 1807, 186 on Proclamation of Neutrality, 73 on public opinion, 31 on republican peace theory, 177, 196 on Republicans, 47 on trade discrimination against Great Britain, 77–79 perception of public opinion in 1811 and early 1812, 205

310

Index

Madison, James (cont.) refusal to compromise on impressment, 193 signing declaration of war in 1812, 169, 211 Manning, William, 98 Marseillaise, 109, 140 Marshall, John nomination as envoy extraordinary, 116 returning home from France, 133 role in provoking Quasi-War, 116 role in XYZ Affair, 119–122 Martin, Alexander, 27 Martin, Luther, 14 Mason, Stevens T., 91 Mazzei, Philip, 137 Mercer, John F., 47 Mexican-American War, 264 Mifflin, Thomas, 132 Mississippi River question, 12, 13, 17, 86, 101 Monroe Doctrine of 1823, 263, 269 Monroe, James as envoy extraordinary to France, 166 as minister to France, 72, 90, 136 elected President, 250 negotiating Monroe–Pinkney Treaty, 193–195 on Jay Treaty, 96, 101 on Napoleon, 181 on orders-in-council of 1807, 186 on Seamen’s Bill, 214 on U.S. foreign-policy makers, 30 on War of 1812, 261 Monroe–Pinkney Treaty (1806), 193–195, 211 Montesquieu, Baron de, 173, 174 Morris, Gouverneur, 16, 93 Murray, William Vans, 131, 160, 161, 164 Napoleonic Wars, 170, 185, 193, 197, 236 national identity, definition of, 7, 28 nationalism, definition of, 7 Native Americans accused of atrocities, 28, 105, 232–233, 236 accused of being instigated by the British, 20, 23, 28, 32, 80, 182–183, 232–233, 236 as internal Others, 19–23

ceding lands in Treaty of Greenville (1795), 87 coordinated resistance against white expansionism crushed in War of 1812, 265 in Jay Treaty, 92 in War of 1812, 22, 171, 235, 242 in War of Independence, 20, 22 resisting white expansionism, 12, 20, 22, 32, 101 united by Tecumseh, 23 Naturalization Act (1790), 151 Naturalization Act (1795), 151 Naturalization Act (1798), 150 Nelson, Horatio, Lord, 152, 157, 185 Netherlands, 72, 90, 128, 129, 136, 146, 157 Neutrality Act (1794), 73 newspapers as conveyors of public opinion, 25, 31–32 as nationalizing medium, 23–24, 28–29 contents of, 32 expansion of, 24–25 importance of postal service for, 26–27 interaction with U.S. foreign policy, 31–34 lack of objectivity, 28 partisanship of, 27 reach of, 25–26 reflective of prevailing ideologies, 32–33 role in elections for Twelfth Congress, 200–201 selection of, 29–30 Nicholas, John, 157 Nicholas, Wilson Cary, 199 Nicholson, Joseph H., 237 Niles, Hezekiah, 245 Non-Intercourse Act (1809), 199 Ocean Plot, 162 Old Republicans, 216–220, 225 Oregon Boundary Dispute, 254 Otis, Harrison Gray, 147, 149, 150, 152, 249, 250 Paine, Thomas, 99, 136, 175 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, Lord, 268 Papal States, 129 Patterson, William, 5 Pichon, Louis, 160, 166 Pickens, Israel, 258

Index Pickering, Timothy, 122, 124, 135, 161, 244, 249 Pinckney, Charles, 166 Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth nomination as envoy extraordinary, 116 not accepted as U.S. minister by France, 112, 117 returning home from France, 133 role in XYZ Affair, 119–122, 155 Pinckney’s Treaty (1795), 86, 101, 102, 106 Pinkney, William, 193–194 Plumer, William, 199, 204, 224, 225 Polk, James K., 253, 264 Portugal, 129, 198 Post Office Act (1792), 27 postal service, 8, 26–27 Prevost, George, 236 Proclamation of Neutrality (1793), 72–74 Prussia, 113, 236 public opinion as expressed by newspapers, 25, 31–32 factor in coming of War of 1812, 199–206 molded by foreign-policy makers, 33–34 on Jay Treaty, 90–92, 101–105 on Quasi-War, 126–130, 141, 155, 156–158 on War of 1812, 217–218 Quasi-War Adams’ decision to end, 158, 159–161 Convention of Mortefontaine (1800), 163–165 Convention of Paris (1803), 167 effects on Federalists’ views on Great Britain, 146, 152–155 effects on Republicans’ views on France, 138–142 French motives in 1797, 117–119 historiography of, 107–109 pressure on Republicans to give up their Francophilia in, 132, 135–138 provoked to nullify Franco-American alliance of 1778 and undermine Francophilia in U.S., 109–110, 111–115, 131–133 reaction of Adams Administration to XYZ Affair, 122–124 reaction of public to XYZ Affair, 155 reaction of Republicans to XYZ Affair, 125

311

reasons for Federalists’ success in shaping public opinion on origins of, 126–128 Republicans on origins of, 133–134, 180 unofficial declaration of, 125–126 XYZ Affair, 119–122 Quincy, Josiah, 218, 244, 245 Ramsay, David, 38, 51 Randolph Affair, 85 Randolph, Edmund, 5, 72, 83, 85 Randolph, John, 217, 218, 220, 225 Republicans accusing Federalists of national disloyalty, 68, 223–224, 225 adoption of American exceptionalism, 144–146 classical republicanism of, 43–45, 48 declaration of war in 1812 and, 171 democratic egalitarianism of, 45–48, 143, 144, 146 disintegrating after War of 1812, 264 domestic program of, 42–43 endorsing Federalist policies after War of 1812, 251–252 equating democratic egalitarianism and Americanism, 28, 68, 223 fearing British political influence, 59–60, 78, 89, 95–96, 98–99, 221–222 policy of commercial restrictions (1794), 76–77, 78–79, 81–82 policy of commercial restrictions (1807). See Embargo of 1807 reactions to declaration of war in 1812, 215–216 slavery and, 42, 48, 52, 93, 94, 172, 188, 264 views on Federalists, 52, 99–100 views on French Revolution, 57–58, 141, 143 views on Great Britain, 58–59, 66–68, 80–81, 96–97, 99–100, 180–183, 184–186, 188, 207–208 views on impressment, 188, 190–191, 192 views on merchants, 78, 168–169 views on Napoleon, 141, 181–182 voter base, 42–43 Robertson, James, 257 Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 164 Ross, Robert, 239 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 136, 173, 174

312

Index

Rule of 1756. See Great Britain Rush, Benjamin, 104 Rush, Richard, 207, 222, 228 Rush–Bagot Agreement of 1817, 254 Russell, Jonathan, 16, 189, 212, 260 Russia, 157, 170, 236 Saint-Pierre, Abbé de, 174 Sardinia, 128, 136 Savage, Edward, 66 Savoy, 128 Schuyler, Philip, 2 Seamen’s Bill (1813), 214 Sedgwick, Theodore, 133 Sedition Act (1798), 151 Sevier, John, 209 Seward, William H., 268–269 Sheffey, Daniel, 218 slave trade American attitude before 1833, 189 American refusal to cooperate in suppression of, 265–267 British efforts to suppress, 189, 231, 265 Great Britain and U.S. clashing over, 265–268 in Treaty of Ghent, 266 slavery abolished in British Empire, 265 abolished in French Empire, 94 becoming more entrenched after War of 1812, 265 compared to impressment, 22, 188–192, 266–267 dominant issue after 1815, 264 in Jay Treaty, 93–94 in War of 1812, 265 leading to Civil War, 269 Republicans and, 42, 48, 52, 93, 94, 172, 188, 264 Smith, Adam, 176 Smith, Samuel, 104, 115 Smith, William Loughton, 42, 62, 78, 79 Spain, 12, 13, 17, 86, 113, 128, 129, 157, 162, 165, 185, 198, 268 Stoddert, Benjamin, 125 Story, Joseph, 248 Strong, Caleb, 216, 241, 247 Sweden, 236 Switzerland, 129, 130, 146, 157

Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice de, 117–121, 160–160 Tate, William, 75 Taylor, John, 46, 52 Taylor Plot, 162 Texas, annexation of, 253, 267 theory of republican peace as distinguished from democratic peace theory, 173 declaration of war in 1812 and, 206–210 Federalist rejection of, 175–176, 217 informing Madison’s war message and House Foreign Relations Committee report in 1812, 210–211 leading to Republican perceptions of a British threat, 180–183, 184–186, 188, 207–208 leading to Republican perceptions of American peacefulness, 177–180, 208 origins of, 173–174 promoting peace in war crisis of 1807, 196 Quasi-War and, 180 Republican internalizations of, 176–177 Republican policy of economic coercion and, 196–198 spread in U.S., 174–175 Thompson, George, 239 Thorn, Stephen, 75 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 24 Treaty of Alliance (1778) abrogation of, 112, 125, 165 Federalist efforts to abrogate, 111, 116, 164 Federalist interpretation of, 72, 111 French interpretation of, 75–76 Jay Treaty and, 88, 99 Republican interpretation of, 110, 111 Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1794). See Jay Treaty (1794) Treaty of Ghent (1814), 256–257 Federalist interpretation of, 256, 257 public reaction in U.S. to news of, 255–256 ratification of, 256 Republican interpretation of, 256 slave trade in, 266 Treaty of Greenville (1795), 87, 101, 102, 106

Index Treaty of Paris (1783) American failure to meet stipulations of, 12, 80, 82, 83, 88 British failure to meet stipulations of, 12, 80, 82, 83, 88 dispute with Spain resulting from, 12 issue of liberated slaves in, 93 Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795). See Pinckney’s Treaty (1795) Tub Plot, 162 U.S. foreign policy as nation-building instrument, 10–15 ideology and, 32–33 interaction with newspapers, 31–34 under Articles of Confederation, 11–13 under Constitution, 13–15 U.S. foreign-policy makers, definition of, 30–31, 71–72 Varnum, Joseph, 224 Venice, 136 Volney, Comte de, 99, 136 Voltaire, 136 Wagner, Jacob, 194 Walpole, Robert, Sir, 44 war crisis of 1794, 80–82 war crisis of 1807, 195–196 War of 1812 Baltimore riots, 227–228 Battle of Bladensburg (1814), 241, 257 Battle of New Orleans (1815), 233, 255 Battle of Plattsburgh (1814), 237 British counter-offensive in 1814, 236–237 burning of Washington, 233, 237, 257 compared to War of Independence, 225–226, 258 conclusion of. See Treaty of Ghent (1814) declaration of, 168, 169, 170, 171–172, 211 declared to undermine Anglophilia in U.S., 221–222, 224–225 effects on Federalists’ views on Great Britain, 237–244 Federalist criticism of Madison Administration’s war management, 241

313

Federalist opposition to, 216, 217–221, 230, 241, 244, 247 Federalist reaction to declaration of war, 216 Federalist support for war measures, 229–230, 238–239, 243–244 Hartford Convention, 246–251 historiography of, 168–172 interpreted as defensive war by Republicans, 206–210 invasion of Canada in, 169–171, 217, 222, 230, 237, 238, 241, 246, 247, 257 pressure on Federalists to give up their Anglophilia, 224–229 publication of British territorial demands, 241–242, 258 represented as race war by Republicans, 171, 231–233, 234–236 Republican reaction to declaration of war, 215–216 resulting from American nationalism, 199–206 slaves liberated in, 265 triangular war proposal, 220–221 war guilt for, 211–214 War of Independence, 68 American cockade worn in, 138 Americanization of foreign-policy makers in, 15–16 compared to War of 1812, 225–226, 258 failure to produce American nationalism, 1, 2, 3, 6 French aid in, 65, 111, 132 Native Americans in, 20, 21, 22 slaves liberated in, 92, 93, 94 Washington, George attacked by Jefferson, 137 creole nationalism of, 4 decision not to seek third term, 110 desire to remain above party, 72 diplomatic nominations of, 16, 72, 83 elected President, 39 Farewell Address, 107–108, 110–111, 127, 146 key to Bastille given to, 68 nomination as Lieutenant General and Commander in Chief, 125 on Jay Treaty, 85 on need for expansion of national postal service, 26 on Quasi-War, 114, 132

314

Index

Washington, George (cont.) on Republicans, 51 Proclamation of Neutrality, 72 Waterhouse, Benjamin, 188 Webster, Daniel, 220, 230 Webster, Noah, 55, 61, 251 Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842, 254, 266 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 242 Wolcott, Oliver Jr.

aligning himself with Republicans after War of 1812, 245 as Secretary of the Treasury, 16 fearing French influence, 56 for limited war against France, 123 on Republicans, 63 role in provoking Quasi-War, 112, 114 Worthington, Thomas, 244 Wright, Robert, 204, 227 XYZ Affair. See Quasi-War