From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (11 page)

Ratification took place between December 1787 and the summer of 1788. Convention leaders wisely decided not to submit the document to Congress or the state legislatures but rather to state conventions created expressly for that purpose. As a matter of expediency, they sent the draft constitution to Congress in the fall of 1787. That body—soon to be voted out of existence—approved its submission to the states. In many states, the debate provoked frantic political maneuvering and bitter debate. Virginia and New York were vital, and their approval solidified the Union, although New York's endorsement came after the necessary nine states had already ratified, putting the Constitution into effect. More than anything else, the commitment of the Constitution's sponsors to add a Bill of Rights ensured its approval. A new constitution "had been extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant nation," the young diplomat John Quincy Adams concluded without exaggeration.
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Whatever its ambiguities and defects, the Constitution corrected where foreign affairs were concerned the most glaring deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. It gave the new national government clear authority to handle trade and foreign policy matters and responsibility to protect the nation's security and advance its global interests. These changes came none too soon. In 1789, France was swept by revolution. Three years later, war broke out in Europe, providing for the United States a challenge as great as the Revolution and its aftermath.

George Washington's 1796 musings about a United States so powerful that none could "make us afraid" reflected the fear that gripped the nation throughout the turbulent 1790s, a time of dire threats from without and bitter divisions within. They also put into words the first president's vision of an American empire invulnerable to such dangers. If the United States could avoid war for a generation, he reasoned, the growth in population and resources combined with its favorable geographic location would enable it "in a just cause, to bid defiance to any power on earth."
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Washington and his successor, John Adams, set important precedents in the management of foreign and national security policy. Conciliatory at the brink of war, they managed to avert hostilities with and wring important concessions from both England and France. They consolidated control of the western territories awarded in the 1783 peace treaty with Britain, laying a firm foundation for what Washington called the "future Grandeur of this rising Empire."
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The Federalists' conduct of U.S. foreign policy significantly shaped the new nation's institutions and political culture. Through skillful diplomacy and great good fortune, the United States emerged from a tumultuous decade much stronger than at the start.

During the first years under its new Constitution, the United States faced challenges in foreign relations unsurpassed in gravity until the mid-twentieth century. In 1792, Europe erupted in a war that for more than two decades would convulse much of the world in bitter ideological and military struggle. Americans agreed as a first principle of foreign policy that they must stay out of such wars, but neutrality afforded little shelter. Europe "intruded" on America "in every way," historian Lawrence Kaplan
has written, "inspiring fear of reconquest by the mother country, offering opportunity along sparsely settled borderlands, arousing uncertainties over the alliance with a great power."
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The new nation depended on trade with Europe. The major belligerents attempted to use the United States as an instrument of their grand strategies and respected its neutrality only when expedient. The war also set loose profound divisions within the United States, and the internal strife in turn threatened America's ability to remain impartial toward the belligerents. Nor did the United States, while claiming neutrality, seek to insulate itself from the conflict. Rather, like small nations through history, it sought to exploit great-power rivalries to its own advantage. Sometimes brash and self-righteous in its demeanor toward the outside world, assertive in claiming its rights and aggressive in pursuing its goals, the nation throughout the 1790s was constantly embroiled in conflict. At times its very survival seemed at stake.

The United States in 1789 remained weak and vulnerable. When Washington assumed office, he presided over fewer than four million people, most of them concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard. The United States claimed vast territory in the West, and settlement had expanded rapidly in the Confederation period, but Spain still blocked access to the Mississippi River. The isolated frontier communities had only loose ties to the federal union. British and Spanish agents intrigued to detach them from the United States while encouraging the Indians to resist American expansion. Economically, the United States remained in a quasi-colonial status, a producer of raw materials dependent on European credits, markets, and manufactured goods. Washington and some of his top advisers believed that military power was essential to uphold the authority of the new government, maintain domestic order, and support the nation's diplomacy. But their efforts to create a military establishment were hampered by finances and an anti-militarist tradition deeply rooted in the colonial era. On the eve of war in Europe, the United States had no navy. Its regular army totaled fewer than five hundred men.

The Constitution at least partially corrected the structural weaknesses that had hampered the Confederation's conduct of foreign policy. It conferred on the central government authority to regulate commerce and conduct relations with other nations. Although powers were somewhat ambiguously divided between the executive and legislative branches,
Washington sure-handedly established the principle of presidential direction of foreign policy.

The first president created a Department of State to handle the day-to-day management of foreign relations, as well as domestic matters not under the War and Treasury departments. His fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson assumed the office of secretary, assisted by a staff of four with an annual budget of $8,000 (including his salary). The other cabinet officers, particularly the secretaries of war and treasury, inevitably ventured into foreign policy. Washington made it a practice to submit important questions to his entire cabinet, resolving the issue himself where major divisions occurred. In keeping with ideals of republican simplicity—and to save money—the administration did not appoint anyone to the rank of ambassador. That "may be the custom of the old world," Jefferson informed the emperor of Morocco, "but it is not ours."
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The "foreign service" consisted of a minister to France, chargés d'affaires in England, Spain, and Portugal, and an agent at Amsterdam. In 1790, the United States opened its first consulate in Bordeaux, a major source of arms, ammunition, and wine during the Revolution. That same year, it appointed twelve consuls and also named six foreigners as vice-consuls since there were not enough qualified Americans to fill the posts.
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A keen awareness of the nation's present weakness in no way clouded visions of its future greatness. The new government formulated ambitious objectives and pursued them doggedly. Conscious of the unusual fertility of the land and productivity of the people and viewing commerce as the natural basis for national wealth and power, American leaders worked vigorously to break down barriers that kept the new nation out of foreign markets. They moved quickly to gain control of the trans-Appalachian West, encouraging emigration and employing diplomatic pressure and military force to eliminate Native Americans and foreigners who stood in the way. Even in its infancy, the United States looked beyond existing boundaries, casting covetous eyes upon Spanish Florida and Louisiana (and even British Canada). Perceiving that in time a restless population that was doubling in size every twenty-two years would give it an advantage over foreign challengers, the Washington administration accepted the need for patience. But it prepared for the future by encouraging settlement of contested territory. Rationalizing their covetousness with the
doctrine that superior institutions and ideology entitled them to whatever land they could use, Americans began to think in terms of an empire stretching from Atlantic to Pacific long before the population of existing boundaries was completed.
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The most urgent problem facing the new government was the threat of Indian war in the West. The "condition of the Indians to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence," Chief Justice John Marshall would later write, and clashing interests as well as incompatible concepts of sovereignty provoked conflict between them.
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Most of the tribes scattered through the trans-Appalachian West lived in communal settlements but roamed widely across the land as hunters. American frontier society, on the other hand, was anchored in agriculture, private property, and land ownership, and Americans conveniently rationalized that the Indians had sacrificed claim to the land by not using it properly. The Indians only grudgingly conceded U.S. sovereignty. Increasingly aware that they could not hold back American settlers, they sought to contain them in specified areas by banding together in loose confederations, signing treaties with the United States, seeking assistance from Britain or Spain, or attacking exposed frontier settlements. Following precedents set by the colonial governments, the United States had implicitly granted the Indians a measure of sovereignty and accorded them the status of independent nations through negotiations replete with elaborate ceremony and the signing of treaties. As a way of asserting federal authority for Indian affairs over the states, the Washington administration would do likewise. From its birth, however, the United States had vehemently—and contradictorily—insisted that the Indians were under its sovereignty and that Indian affairs were therefore internal matters. The various land ordinances enacted by the Confederation presumed U.S. sovereignty in the West and sought to provide for orderly and peaceful settlement. But the onrush of settlers and their steady encroachment on Indian lands provoked retaliatory attacks and preemptive strikes.

The Washington administration desperately sought to avoid war. With limited funds in the treasury and no army, the infant government was painfully aware that it could not afford and might not win such a war. At this time, Americans in the more settled, seacoast areas accepted the Enlightenment view that all mankind was of one species and capable of
improvement. In addition, Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox insisted that the United States, a bold experiment in republicanism closely watched by the whole world, must be true to its principles in dealing with the Indians. For the short term, the administration sought to avert war by diplomacy, building on the treaties negotiated under the Confederation to keep Indians and settlers apart and achieve cheap and peaceful expansion. For the long term, Knox promoted a policy of expansion with honor that would make available to the Indians the blessings of American civilization in return for their lands, a form of pacification through deculturation and assimilation.
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Washington's diplomacy achieved short-term results in the Southwest. The powerful Creeks had traditionally preserved their independence by playing European nations against each other. Eager to bind the autonomous groups that composed the tribe into a tighter union under his leadership and to fend off onrushing American settlers, the redoubtable half-breed Alexander McGillivray journeyed to New York in 1790 and amidst pomp and ceremony, including an audience with the Great Father himself (Washington), agreed to a treaty. In return for three million acres of land, the United States recognized the independence of the Creeks, promised to protect them from the incursions of its citizens, and agreed to boundaries. A seemingly innocent provision afforded a potentially powerful instrument for expansion with honor. "That the Creek nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization, and to become herdsmen and cultivators, instead of remaining in a state of hunters," the treaty solemnly affirmed, "the United States will from time to time furnish gratuitously the said nation with useful domestic animals and implements of husbandry."
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The United States also provided an annuity of $1,500. The bestowing of such gifts would help civilize the Indians and, in Knox's words, have the "salutary effect of attaching them to the interests of the United States."
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A secret protocol gave McGillivray control of trade and made him an agent of the United States with the rank of brigadier general and an annuity of $1,200.

In the short run, each party viewed the treaty as a success. It boosted the prestige of the new U.S. government, lured the Creeks from Spain, and averted conflict with the most powerful southwestern tribe. It appeared to the Creeks to recognize their sovereignty and protect them from American settlers, buying McGillivray time to develop tribal unity and strength. In fact, the state of Georgia did not respect the treaty and the United States would not or could not force it to do so. Boundaries were not drawn, and settlers continued to encroach on Creek lands. To entice McGillivray away from the United States, Spanish agents doubled the pension provided by Washington. The Creek leader died in 1793, his dream of union unrealized, conditions in the Southwest still unsettled.
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The Northwest was far more explosive. The Confederation government had signed treaties with Indians north of the Ohio River, but some tribes had refused to go along, and those who had were dissatisfied. With British encouragement, the Indians sought to create a buffer state in the Northwest. As settlers poured into the area, tensions increased. Frontier people generally viewed the Indians as inferior savages and expendable and preferred to eliminate rather than pacify them. Eventually, their view prevailed.