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Although political divisions first emerged over domestic issues,
they deepened during a series of crises over foreign policy that
reopened the nagging issue of America’s relationship with Great
Britain. Domestic and foreign policy were, however, never entirely
separate, since decisions in one area frequently carried implications
for the other. Foreign and domestic policy (1789-1803) spans from the
foreign affairs of Washington, to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.
Between these times is the Election of 1796, Adams’s administration,
concerning various perspectives of historical figures on financial
policies and foreign countries, the XYZ Affair, and the Alien and
Sedition Acts, all in relation to the restrictions and powers of the
United States Constitution.
Under the term of Washington, there were many affairs to deal with,
mainly foreign. Hamilton saw much to admire in Britain. He modeled his
financial policies in part on those of William Pitt the younger, a
great British minister who took office in 1783, when Britain was so
burdened with debt that it seemed on the verge of bankruptcy, and whose
reforms restored his country’s financial health. The success of
Hamilton’s financial program, moreover, depended on smooth relations
with Britain: duties on imports provided a major source of federal
revenue, and most American imports came from Britain. Hamilton did not
advocate returning the Americans to British rule; he had, after all,
fought for independence as an officer of the Continental army. Nor did
he seek to establish a monarchy in the United States. But he thought an
amicable relationship with the onetime mother country would best serve
American interests. In contrast, Jefferson remained deeply hostile to
Britain, and his Anglophobia played a central role in his growing
opposition to Hamilton. The treasury secretary’s method of finance,
with a bank and large funded debt, seemed—as in part it was—based on a
British model, one that to Jefferson was dangerous because it allowed
abundant opportunity for corruption. Jefferson (like many contemporary
Americans) fascinated with British technology, but he did not regard
with pleasure an American future with large industrial manufacturing
complexes like those of England—or that planned for Paterson, New
Jersey. Americans’ independence and “virtue” depended for Jefferson on
the fact that so many of them were farmers who worked for themselves,
not for others. Jefferson was also deeply loyal to France, the
Americans’ old ally in the War for Independence. While serving as
minister to France during the 1780’s, Jefferson had witnessed the
beginnings of the French Revolution—which in his opinion only tightened
the bond between France and America, whose Revolution, he thought, had
inspired the French. Most Americans shared his enthusiasm for the
French Revolution until it took a turn unlike anything the American
Revolution brought, with escalating popular violence, the execution of
King Louis XVI (1793), and the establishment not of regular
constitutional government but the arbitrary violence of Maximilien
Robespierre and the Terror. Events in France horrified Hamilton, who
argued that the Franco-American Treaty of 1778 was with the French king
and so ceased once he died. Jefferson justified the violence and
declared that the treaty was with the French Nation, and so still
binding. These differences widened as issues in foreign policy came to
dominate Washington’s administration, and they gradually marked a
division not just in the cabinet but in Congress and the electorate. In
1790, Britain and Spain seemed likely to go to war; then Britain seemed
headed for the war with France that finally broke out in 1793.
Jefferson argued that Britain’s situation gave the United States an
opportunity to secure concessions in return for American neutrality;
and several issues stemming from the 1783 Treaty of Paris needed
settling. The British had never evacuated heir posts in the Northwest,
and westerners suspected the British of using those bases to provoke
Indian attacks on the American frontier. The United States also sought
compensation for slaves the British had carried off during the
Revolutionary War, and hoped to persuade Britain to open its West
Indian islands to American traders. But on April 22, 1793,
Washington—influenced by Hamilton, who desperately wanted to avoid any
altercation with Britain—issued a proclamation that essentially
announced American neutrality without even trying to secure any
concessions in return. A few months later, Jefferson submitted his
resignation as secretary of state, which took effect at the end of the
year. He was still in office, however, when a new French minister,
Edmond Genet, arrived in the United States—and promptly began hiring
American privateers to sail under the French flag against British ships
in the North Atlantic, attempted to raise a military expedition against
Spain, and in other ways violated American territorial sovereignty.
Jefferson tried to correct the situation, but what could he do with a
man like Genet? Finally, on July 12, 1793, Washington’s cabinet decided
to request Genet’s recall. By the time the request arrived in France,
the government that had appointed Genet had fallen, and the Jacobins
under Robespierre were in control. As a result, his story had an odd
ending. With the support of the Washington administration, Genet
remained in the United States, married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter
of NY’s governor, by whom he had six children, and then, after her
death, five more by a second American wife. Meanwhile, American
relations with Britain moved into a state of crisis over trade. New
British Orders in Council (regulations issued by the Crown) undercut
the old rule that “free ships make free goods,” which allowed American
traders to carry goods to and from the ports of European belligerent
powers. Instead, the British invoked the Rule of 1756, by which no
neutral nation could engage in trade during war from which it was
excluded during peacetime. Then, in December 1793, the British suddenly
began seizing American ships in the West Indies. A cry went up for
reprisals happened to lead to war, some Americans were ready. Mobs
harassed British seamen, and volunteer corps began organizing for a
possible return of the Revolutionary War.
Since the Farewell Address was understood as Washington’s parting
advice to his country, it was widely read and remains one of the most
frequently reprinted documents in American history. It was a moving
document, beginning with expressions of the sixty-four-year-old
Washington’s gratitude to his “beloved country” for the honors and
confidence it had invested in him and a reference to “the increasing
weight of years” that admonished him “more and more, that the shade of
retirement is as necessary to me as it is welcome.” Then the president
offered advice, based on “much reflection,” that might “contribute to
the permanency of your felicity as a People.” He urged his countrymen
to support the public credit, to “observe good faith and justice
towards all Nations” while avoiding permanent alliances with any, and
to disdain “over-grown Military establishments,” which were always
“inauspicious to liberty.” But the thrust of his message concerned the
country’s political divisions.
It seems strange in retrospect, that the Adams administration had a
president from one party (Federalist) and vice-president from another
(Republican). But Adams and Jefferson had been allies in the struggle
for independence and, in the 1780’s, deepened their bonds while serving
together as diplomats in Europe. Most important, problems with France
remained pressing. After hearing about Jay’s Treaty, the French, who
began seizing American ships bound for England, would not recognize the
neutral rights of American ships and in December 1796 refused to accept
the new American minister to France, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of
South Carolina (a cousin of Charles Pinckney). Finally, in May 1797,
President Adams appointed a commission to France consisting of two
Federalists, Pinckney and John Marshall of Virginia, as well as a
Republican, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. In announcing the mission
to Congress, Adams also called for defensive military preparations,
which the Republicans objected to, believing they would only further
antagonize France. Henceforth, foreign affairs frayed the relationship
between Adams and Jefferson and rekindled old political divisions.
The French minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, refused for
several weeks to receive the American commissioners. Then, to their
surprise, three agents of Talleyrand (described subsequently only as X,
Y, and Z) visited the commissioners and demanded an American loan to
France and a bribe for Talleyrand of $250,000. “Not a sixpence,”
Pinckney was said to have replied; and he and Marshall set out for
home, leaving Gerry to represent the United States. Outrage greeted
Adams’s announcement of the transaction. Republicans in Congress
demanded to see the diplomatic papers, which Adams—unlike Washington
after Jay’s Treaty—supplied; after all, they fully supported his
administration’s position. Congress repealed the treaty negotiated with
France in 1778 and took additional steps to increase American military
strength. Republican fears escalated as Congress and the administration
built up the army. But the results of that policy, and particularly of
military contracting, were sometimes far different from what the
Republicans expected. When Benjamin Stoddert took office in June 1798,
the United States had only one ship at sea, but more were on the way.
In 1794, in an effort to check the attacks of the Barbary pirates on
American shipping, Congress had authorized the construction of six new
frigates—smaller than the ships of the line, the largest and most
powerful ships in the great navies of the era, but faster and more
maneuverable. Part of the order was canceled the next year, when the
United States signed a peace treaty with Algeria, but three ships
remained in production. They were built according to technologically
innovative plans that are generally attributed to Philadelphia master
shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys, although others contributed to the
designs. According to Humphreys, that design would make the American
ships “superior to any European frigate” and allow them to avoid action
except “on their own terms.” Stoddert worked to acquire by one means or
another, an additional six frigates as well as some forty smaller
ships. Stoddert built, virtually from scratch, a respectable naval
officers corps and established a program for the recruitment and
training of promising young midshipmen. Within a relatively short
period of time, the United States possessed a navy capable of providing
American merchant ships substantial protection and offsetting wildcat
fears of a French invasion, mounted from the West Indies, of the
American southern seaboard. All this Stoddert accomplished during a
trying two-year period, from 1798 to 1800, while American and French
ships engaged in an undeclared war on the seas that threatened
continually to blossom into a regular declared war.
As the war fever grew, Adams fell into Washington’s old position,
regarding critics of his government as seditious people who put their
confidence in France rather than their own government. Federalists in
Congress went further, passing a series of laws for the suppression of
the Republicans and the Republican press. Three Alien Acts, passed in
June and July of 1798, moved against immigrants, who were often members
of the Republican Party. The first, an Alien Enemies Act that allowed
the president to arrest or banish enemy aliens, would rake effect only
if war was declared. Another Alien Act allowed the president to deport
any foreigners he considered dangerous to the public peace and safety,
and a Naturalization Act increased the time of residence before
immigrants could become citizens—and thus acquire voting rights—from
five to fourteen years. Both of those laws would expire in 1802.
Finally, a Sedition Act provided punishments including imprisonment for
persons who combined “to oppose any measure or measures of the
government of the United States” or who wrote, printed, spoke, or
published “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings
against the government of the United States, or the President of the
United States, with intention to defame…or to bring them or either of
them, into contempt or disrepute.” That law would expire on March 3,
1801, when the next presidential administration took power.
As America’s population grew and increasing numbers of white
settlers looked westward for affordable land, events were unfolding
that would dramatically change the map of America and influence the
nation’s political, economic, and social development for much of the
nineteenth century. At issue was the so-called Louisiana Territory, a
vast area that stretched from the Mississippi River in the East to the
Rocky Mountains in the West and north to Canada. Like most Americans,
Jefferson harbored the belief that Louisiana would some day belong to
the United States. It was thought that control of Louisiana, long
considered a natural extension of the United States, loomed critical in
defending the country’s expanding frontier against Indian raids and
foreign adventurers as well as serving as a valuable source of raw
materials—most notable the lucrative western fur trade. Most important,
in Jefferson’s view, the Louisiana Territory would be America’s
ultimate safety valve: a seemingly limitless territory to which Indians
could be removed ahead of white settlement and, above all, a place
where landless immigrants from the East might move to carry on the
American agrarian tradition that he deemed so essential to the
well-being of the Republic.
Altogether, a new American nation emerged solely on these incidences
in history. They helped pave the way for future and current political
parties, and influenced their beliefs in domestic and foreign issues.
Though these perspectives are represented on a wide scale, they are
related in that all Americans seek perfection whether it is concerning
domestic and foreign policies, and how that relation is always
connected to our supreme United States Constitution.
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