From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (12 page)

Eager to avoid war and uphold American honor, the Washington administration capitulated to pressure from land speculators and settlers in Kentucky and elsewhere along the frontier. The administration continued to negotiate with the Indians, but it approached them in a highhanded manner that made success unlikely: "This is the last offer that can be made," Knox warned the northwestern tribes. "If you do not embrace it now, your doom must be sealed forever."
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By backing its diplomacy with force, moreover, the administration blundered into the war it hoped to avoid. In 1790, to "strike terror into the minds of the Indians," Washington and Knox sent fifteen hundred men under Josiah Harmar deep into present-day Ohio and Indiana. Returning to its base after plundering Indian villages near the Maumee River, Harmar's force was ambushed and suffered heavy losses. To recoup its prestige among its own citizens and the Indians with whom it sought to negotiate, the administration escalated the conflict in 1791, sending fourteen hundred men under Gen.

Arthur St. Clair into Indian country north of Cincinnati. St. Clair's small and ill-prepared force was annihilated, losing nine hundred men in what has been called the worst defeat ever suffered by an American army.
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On the eve of war in Europe, the United States' position in the Northwest was more precarious than before, its prestige shattered.

The terrifying reality of slave revolt in the Caribbean and specter of slave rebellion at home further heightened American insecurity in the early 1790s. Inspired by the rhetoric of the French Revolution, slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (the western third of the island of Hispaniola, present-day Haiti) rebelled against their masters in August 1791. At the height of the struggle, as many as one hundred thousand blacks faced forty thousand whites and mulattoes. The fury stirred by racial antagonism and the legacy of slavery produced a peculiarly savage conflict. Marching into battle playing African music and flying banners
with the slogan
DEATH TO ALL WHITES
, the rebels burned plantations and massacred planter families.
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Americans' enthusiasm for revolution stopped well short of violent slave revolt, of course, and they viewed events in the West Indies with foreboding. Trade with Saint-Domingue was important, the exports of $3 million in 1790 more than twice those to metropolitan France. Friendship with France also encouraged sympathy for the planters. Some Americans worried that Britain might exploit the conflict on Saint-Domingue to enlarge its presence in the region. But the U.S. response to the revolution derived mainly from racial fears. At this time, attitudes toward slavery remained somewhat flexible, but those who favored emancipation saw it taking place gradually and peacefully. The shock of violent revolt on nearby islands provoked fears of a descent into "chaos and negroism" and the certainty, as Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton put it, of "calamitous" results. Southerners like Jefferson harbored morbid dread that revolt would extend to the United States, setting off a frenzy of violence that could only end in the "extermination of one or the other race." State legislatures voted funds to help the planters on Saint-Domingue suppress the rebellion. Stretching executive authority, the Washington administration advanced France $726 million in debt payments and sold arms to the planters.
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Such efforts were unavailing. The rebel victory in June 1793 sent shock waves to the North. Defeated French planters fled to the United States, bringing tales of massacre that spread panic throughout the South. While Jefferson privately fretted about the "bloody scenes" Americans would "wade through" in the future, southern states tightened slave codes and began to develop a positive defense of the "peculiar institution."
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Nervousness on the northwestern frontier was exceeded by the horror of slave revolt in the South.

Republican ideology looked upon political parties as disruptive, even evil, but partisan politics intruded into foreign policy early in Washington's first term, a development that the president himself never fully accepted and that, throughout the 1790s, significantly influenced and vastly complicated the new government's dealings with the outside world. The struggle
centered around the dynamic personalities of Jefferson and Hamilton, but it reflected much deeper divisions within U.S. society. It assumed a level of special intensity because the participants shared with equal fervor the conviction of revolutionaries that each step they took might determine the destiny of the new nation.
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In addition, in a new nation any domestic or foreign policy decision could establish a lasting precedent.
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Tall, loose-jointed, somewhat awkward in manner and appearance, Jefferson was the embodiment of the southern landed gentry, an aristocrat by birth, an intellectual by temperament, a scholarly and retiring individual who hated open conflict but could be a fierce infighter. Small of stature, born out of wedlock in the West Indies, Hamilton struggled to obtain the social status Jefferson acquired by birth. Handsome and charming, a man of prodigious intellect and boundless energy, he was driven by insatiable ambitions and a compulsion to dominate. Jefferson represented the predominantly agricultural interests of the South and West. Optimistic by nature, a child of the Enlightenment, he had faith in popular government—at least the elitist form practiced in Virginia—viewed agriculture and commerce as the proper bases for national wealth, and was almost morbidly suspicious of the northeastern moneyed groups who prospered through speculation. To Hamilton, order was more important than liberty. A brilliant financier, he believed that political power should reside with those who had the largest stake in society. He attached himself to the financial elite Jefferson so distrusted. The dispute became deeply personal. Hamilton viewed Jefferson as devious and scheming. Jefferson was offended by Hamilton's arrogance and transparent ambition. He especially resented that the secretary of the treasury seemed to have Washington's ear.
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The Hamilton-Jefferson foreign policy struggle has often been portrayed in terms of a realist/idealist dichotomy, with Hamilton cast as the realist, more European than American in his thinking, coldly rational and keenly sensitive to the national interest and the limits of power, Jefferson as the archetypical American idealist, intent on spreading the
nation's principles even at costs it could not afford. Such a construct, although useful, imposes a modern frame of reference on eighteenth-century ideas and practices and does not do justice to the complexity of the diplomacy of the two men or the conflict between them.
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Both shared the long-range goal of a strong nation, independent of the great powers of Europe, but they approached it from quite different perspectives, advocating coherent systems of political economy in which foreign and domestic policies were inextricably linked with sharply conflicting visions of what America should be. Hamilton was the more patient. He preferred to build national power and
then
"dictate the terms of the connection between the old world and the new."
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Modeling his system on that of England, he sought to establish a strong government and stable economy that would attract investment capital and promote manufactures. Through expansion of the home market he hoped in time to get around Britain's commercial restrictions and even challenge its supremacy, but for the moment he would acquiesce. His economic program hinged on revenues from trade with England, and he opposed anything that threatened it. Horrified at the excesses of the French Revolution, he condemned Jefferson's "womanish attachment" to France and increasingly saw England as a bastion of stable governing principles. More accurate than Jefferson and Madison in his assessment of American weakness and therefore more willing to make concessions to Britain, he pursued peace with a zeal that compromised American pride and honor and engaged in machinations that could have undermined American interests. His lust for power could be both reckless and destructive.

Deeply committed to perfecting the republican triumph of the Revolution, Jefferson and his compatriot James Madison, the intellectual force behind republicanism and leader in the House of Representatives, envisioned a youthful, vigorous, predominantly agricultural society composed of virtuous yeoman farmers. Their vision required the opening of foreign markets to absorb the produce of American farms and westward expansion
to ensure the availability of sufficient land to sustain a burgeoning population. Britain stood as the major barrier to their dreams—it had "bound us in manacles, and very nearly defeated the object of our independence," Madison declaimed. Still, they were confident that a youthful, dynamic America could prevail over an England they saw as hopelessly corrupt and fundamentally rotten. Confirmed Anglophobes, they were certain from the experience with non-importation in the Revolutionary era that dependence on American necessities would force Britain to bend to economic pressure. They hoped to divert U.S. commerce to France. Although committed to free trade in theory, they proposed harsh discriminatory duties to force Britain to sign a commercial treaty.
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Jefferson and Madison were indeed idealists who dreamed of a world of like-minded republics. They were also internationalists with an abiding faith in progress who accepted, for the moment at least, the existing balance-of-power system and hoped to make it more peaceful and orderly through the negotiation of treaties promoting free trade and international law.
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Jefferson especially admired France and things French. He welcomed the French Revolution and urged closer ties with the new government. As a French diplomat pointed out, however, his liking for France stemmed in part from his detestation for England, and, in any event, Americans in general were "the sworn enemy of all the European peoples."
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He was also a tough-minded diplomatist, who advocated playing the European powers against each other to extract concessions. Jefferson and Madison saw Hamilton's policies as abject surrender to England. They viewed the secretary of the treasury and his cronies as tools "of British interests seeking to restore monarchy to America," an "enormous invisible conspiracy against the national welfare."
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In diplomacy, Jefferson was more independent than Hamilton and could be shrewdly manipulative, but his commitment to principle and his tendency to overestimate American power at times clouded his vision and limited his effectiveness.

The battle was joined when the new government took office. Conflict first broke out over Hamilton's bold initiative to centralize federal power and create a moneyed interest by funding the national debt and assuming
state debts, but it quickly extended to foreign affairs. In 1789, an Anglo-Spanish dispute over British fur-trading settlements at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest threatened war. Jefferson urged U.S. support for the side that offered the most in return. Hamilton did not openly dissent. Certain that American interests would best be served by siding with Great Britain, however, he confided in British secret agent George Beckwith (the secretary of the treasury was referred to as No. 7 in coded dispatches) that Jefferson's position did not represent U.S. policy. The differences became irrelevant when the threat of war receded, but they widened over commercial policy. Jefferson and Madison pushed for discriminatory duties against British commerce. Hamilton openly used his influence to block their passage in the Senate.
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Because of the sharp divisions within its own councils and primarily because of its continued weakness, the new government was little more successful than its predecessor in resolving the nation's major diplomatic problems. Britain in 1792 finally opened formal diplomatic relations, but Jefferson could not secure a commercial agreement or force implementation of the treaty of 1783. The United States was a relatively minor concern to Britain at this point. Content with the status quo, London did not take seriously Jefferson's threats of discrimination, in part because British officials correctly surmised that economic warfare would hurt America more than their own country, in part because of Hamilton's private assurances. In any event, Jefferson's bombastic rhetoric and uncompromising negotiating position left little room for compromise. The secretary of state fared no better with France and Spain. The French government refused even to negotiate a new commercial treaty and imposed discriminatory duties on tobacco and other American imports. Ignoring Jefferson's slightly veiled threats of war, Spain refused commercial concessions and would not discuss the disputed southern boundary and access to the Mississippi. On the eve of war in Europe, the position of the United States seemed anything but promising.

The outbreak of war in 1792 offered enticing opportunities to attain longstanding goals but posed new and ominous dangers to the independence and even survival of the republic. The Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon differed dramatically from the chessboard engagements of the age of limited war. The French Revolution injected ideology and
nationalism into traditional European power struggles, making the conflict more intense and all-consuming. Declaring war on Austria in August 1792, France launched a crusade to preserve revolutionary principles at home and extend them across the European continent. Alarmed by developments in Europe, England in February 1793 joined the Continental allies to block the spread of French power
and
the contaminating influence of French radicalism. Monarchical wars gave way to wars of nations; limited war to total war. The belligerents mobilized their entire populations not simply to defeat but to destroy their enemies, creating mass armies that fought with a new patriotic zeal. The conflict spread across the globe. Britain, as always, sought to strangle its adversary by controlling the seas. As with earlier imperial conflicts, colonies formed an integral part of the grand strategies of the belligerents. The war expanded to the Mediterranean, South Asia, and the Western Hemisphere.
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