From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (13 page)

These wars of new ferocity and scope left the United States little margin for safety. The great powers of Europe viewed the new nation as little more than a pawn—albeit a potentially useful one—in their struggle for survival. Perceiving the United States as weak and unreliable, neither wanted it as an ally. Each preferred a benevolent neutrality that offered access to naval stores and foodstuffs, shipping as needed, and the use of U.S. ports and territory as bases for commerce raiding and attacks on enemy colonies. They sought to deny their enemy what they wanted for themselves. They were openly contemptuous of America's wish to retain commercial ties with both sides and insulate itself against the war. They blatantly interfered in U.S. politics and employed bribery, intimidation, and the threat of force to achieve their aims.

Americans had long agreed they must abstain from Europe's wars, and the new nation's still fragile position in 1793 underscored the urgency of neutrality. Individuals as different as Hamilton and Jefferson could readily agree, moreover, that to become too closely attached to either power could result in a loss of freedom of action, even independence. Sensitive to the balance-of-power system and their role in it, Americans also quickly perceived that, as in the Revolution, they might exploit European conflict to their own advantage. They also recognized that war would significantly increase demands for their products and might open ports previously closed. As a neutral the United States could trade with all nations, Jefferson
observed with more than a touch of self-righteousness, and the "new world will fatten on the follies of the old."
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To proclaim neutrality was one thing, to implement it quite another. The United States was tied by treaty to France and by Hamilton's economic system to Britain, posing major threats to neutrality. Establishing a workable policy was also difficult because as a newly independent nation the United States lacked a body of precedent for dealing with the complex issues that arose. International law in the eighteenth century generally upheld the right of neutrals to trade with belligerents in non-contraband supplies and the sanctity of their territory from belligerent use for military purposes. It was codified only in bilateral treaties, however, which were routinely ignored in times of crisis. Within the general agreement on principles, there was considerable divergence in application. Following the practice of the small, seafaring nations of northern Europe, the United States interpreted neutral rights as broadly as possible. By contrast, Britain relied on sea power as its chief military instrument and interpreted such rights restrictively. Lacking a merchant marine and dependent on neutral carriers, the French accepted America's principles when it was useful, but when the United States veered in the direction of Britain, they reacted strongly. In the absence of courts to enforce international law and especially in the context of total war, power was the final arbiter. From 1793 to 1812, the United States could not maintain a neutrality acceptable to both sides. Whatever it did or refrained from doing, it provoked reprisals from one belligerent or the other.

Growing internal divisions also complicated implementation of a neutrality policy. Still sympathetic to France and seeing in the war an opportunity to free his country from commercial bondage to Britain, Jefferson persuaded himself that the United States could have both neutrality and the alliance with France. Increasingly alarmed by the radicalism of the French Revolution and more than ever persuaded that America's security and his own economic system demanded friendship with Britain, Hamilton leaned in the other direction, grandly indifferent to the consequences for France.
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The conflict surfaced when England and France went to war in 1793. In April, Washington requested his cabinet's advice on the issuance of a declaration of neutrality and the more prickly question of U.S. obligations
under the 1778 alliance. Hoping to extract concessions from England, Jefferson urged delaying a statement of neutrality. Hamilton favored an immediate and unequivocal declaration, ostensibly to make America's position clear, in fact to avoid any grounds for conflict with London. The French alliance bound the signatories to guarantee each other's possessions in the Western Hemisphere and to admit privateers and prizes to their ports while denying such rights to their enemies. Acceptance of these obligations meant compromising U.S. neutrality; rejection risked antagonizing France. Hamilton advocated what amounted to unilateral abrogation of the alliance, arguing that the change in government in France rendered it void. Jefferson upheld the sanctity of treaties, claiming that they were negotiated by nations, not governments, and could not be scrapped at whim, but he was motivated as much by a desire to avoid offense to France as by respect for principle. He contended on a practical level that France would not ask the United States to fulfill its obligations, a prediction far off the mark. Washington eventually sided with Hamilton on the issuance of a declaration of neutrality and with Jefferson on the status of the French alliance, a compromise that satisfied neither of the antagonists but established the basis for a reasonably impartial neutrality.
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France and its newly appointed minister to the United States, Edmond Charles Genet, challenged the policy at the start. The Girondin government was certain that people across the world—particularly Americans—shared its revolutionary zeal and would assist its crusade to extend republicanism. Genet was instructed to conclude with the United States an "intimate concert" to "promote the Extension of the Empire of Liberty," holding out the prospect of "liberating" Spanish America and opening the Mississippi. Failing this, he was to act on his own to liberate Canada, the Floridas, and Louisiana, and was empowered to issue commissions to Americans to participate. He was also to obtain a $3 million advance payment on America's debt to France. While these matters were under negotiation, he was to secure the opening of U.S. ports to outfit French privateers and bring in enemy prizes. The instructions, if implemented, would have made the United States a de facto ally against England.
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The new minister's unsuitability for his position exceeded his chimerical instructions. A gifted linguist and musician, handsome, witty and
charming, he was also a flamboyant and volatile individual who had already been thrown out of Catherine the Great's Russia for diplomatic indiscretions. Inflamed with the crusading zeal of the Girondins, he poorly understood the nation to which he was accredited, assuming mistakenly that popular sympathy for France entailed a willingness to risk war with England and that in the United States, as in his country, control of foreign relations resided with the legislature.

From the moment he came ashore, Genet was the proverbial bull in the china shop. Landing in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was widely feted by the governor and local citizenry, he commissioned four privateers that soon brought prizes into U.S. ports. The lavish entertainment he enjoyed along the land route to Philadelphia confirmed his belief that Americans supported his mission, a conclusion reinforced by early meetings with Jefferson. Hoping to persuade Genet to proceed cautiously lest he give Hamilton reason to adopt blatantly anti-French policies, the secretary of state took the minister into his confidence and spoke candidly, even indiscreetly, about U.S. politics, encouraging the Frenchman's illusions and ardor.

In fact, the two nations were on a collision course. After long and sometimes bitter debates and frequently over Jefferson's objections, the cabinet had hammered out a neutrality policy that construed American obligations under the French alliance as narrowly as possible. The United States denied France the right to outfit privateers or sell enemy prizes in its ports and ordered the release of prizes already brought in. It flatly rejected Genet's offer of a new commercial treaty, as well as his request for an advance payment on the debt, and ordered the arrest of Americans who had enlisted for service on French privateers.

The U.S. policies violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the alliance, giving Genet grounds for protest, but his blatant defiance of American orders undercut his cause. He responded intemperately to Jefferson's official statements, insisting that they did not reflect the will of the American people. Ignoring U.S. instructions, he commissioned a privateer,
La Petite Democrate,
under the government's nose in Philadelphia and began organizing expeditions to attack Louisiana by sea and land, the latter to be manned primarily by Kentuckians headed by revolutionary war hero George Rogers Clark. In defiance of Jefferson's request to delay sailing of the ship and while the cabinet was heatedly debating whether to forcibly stop its departure, he ordered
La Petite Democrate
out of reach of shore batteries and eventually to sea. Responding to repeated official protests, he threatened to take his case to the nation over the head of its president.

Genet's actions sparked a full-fledged, frequently nasty debate in the country at large. Supporters of France and its minister accused the government of pro-British sympathies and monarchical tendencies, calling them "Anglomen" and "monocrats." Those who defended the government denounced the opposition as tools of France and radical revolutionaries. The outlines of political parties began to take form. Jeffersonians took the name Republicans, Hamiltonians became Federalists. Political dialogue was impassioned, street brawls were not uncommon, and old friendships were severed. Newspapers aligned with Hamilton or Jefferson and frequently encouraged by them waged virulent war, debating the basic principles of government while indulging in name-calling and calumny from which even the demigod Washington was not immune. Discussions in the cabinet reflected the increasingly bitter mood of the nation, provoking a harried and thin-skinned president (the first of many holders of the office, in this regard) to explode that "
by god
he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation."
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The Genet affair ended in anticlimax and irony. By July 1793, the administration felt compelled to ask for his recall, even Jefferson agreeing that the appointment had been "calamitous" and confiding in Madison that he saw the "necessity of quitting a wreck which could not but sink all who cling to it."
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Hamilton and Knox sought to do it in a way that would discredit the French minister and his American supporters. Washington wisely sided with Jefferson, seeking to do so without alienating France. By the time the United States asked for his recall, the Girondins had been replaced by the Jacobins, who, though more radical at home, did not share their predecessors' zeal for a global crusade. Suffering disastrous defeats on land and sea and in desperate need of American food, the new government readily acceded, denouncing Genet's "giddiness." In one of those bizarre twists that marked the politics of the French Revolution, it accused him of complicity in an English plot. Had he returned home, he would likely have been guillotined. Aware of what awaited him, Genet requested, and as a humanitarian gesture was granted, asylum in the United States.
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He lived out his life as a gentleman farmer and unsuccessful amateur scientist in New York, becoming an American citizen in 1804 and marrying the daughter of New York governor George Clinton.

Genet's shenanigans were generally counterproductive. The escape of
La Petite Democrate
did not provoke British reprisals; the minister's grand scheme for the liberation of Louisiana quickly collapsed from shortage of funds and lack of American support. On the other hand, the cautious and at least mildly pro-British definition of neutral obligations set forth piecemeal by the Washington administration was enacted into law in 1794, forming the basis for U.S. neutrality policies into the twentieth century. Frustration with Genet contributed to Jefferson's decision to leave office in late 1793, removing from the cabinet a voice sympathetic to France and eventually contributing to a tilt in policy toward Britain.

More than anything else, the Genet mission exposed the fragility of American neutrality, the extent to which the European powers would go to undermine it, and the depth of internal conflict on foreign policy. It marked the beginning, rather than the end, of a twenty-year effort to steer clear of the European war while profiting from it, and it divided Americans into two deeply antagonistic factions.

Even while the Genet affair occupied center stage, the United States and Britain edged toward war. Still sometimes portrayed by Americans as the ruthless aggression of an arrogant great power against an innocent and vulnerable nation, the crisis of 1794 was considerably more complex in its origins. It provides, in fact, a classic example of the way in which conflicts of interest, exacerbated by intense nationalism on one side, a lack of attention on the other, and the ill-advised actions of poorly informed and sometimes panicky officials miles from the seat of government can create conditions for war even when the governments themselves have reason to avoid it. In this instance, war was averted, but only narrowly and only because both nations and especially the United States found compelling reason for restraint.

By early 1794, the long-simmering conflict along the Great Lakes threatened a clash of arms. Increasingly concerned with the explosive frontier, the British after St. Clair's defeat devised a "compromise" that would have set aside specified lands for the Indians in territory claimed by the United States. By this time, however, neither of the other parties was inclined to negotiate. Buoyed by their victory, the Indians demanded lands from the Canadian border to the Ohio River and murdered under flags of truce several U.S. agents sent to treat with them. Americans never understood the pride and suspicion with which the Indians viewed them. They would concede only limited territory to people Hamilton dismissed as "vagrants." Even after a humiliating defeat, they patronized the victors. They blamed
the British for the tribes' exorbitant claims and violently protested their interference in what they viewed a purely internal matter.
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