From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (17 page)

The Federalists also bequeathed an enduring legacy of practice and doctrine. Inheriting a distrust of executive or legislative control of foreign policy, the Founders created a mixed constitutional arrangement with
little basis in historical experience. Without precedent to guide him, Washington molded the vagaries of the Constitution into a workable system. The result was not a democratic foreign policy in any real sense of the word. Constitutional ambiguities would lead to executive abuses of power and intense executive-legislative conflict. But the system subjected foreign policy to the popular will to a greater degree than in other governments to that time. The Washington administration also put into practice a body of doctrine that neatly assimilated the American experience and accurately reflected popular aspirations. Based on the premise of American exceptionalism, it called for independence from Europe and looked to the day when the American empire would rival the Old World in size and strength. Significantly, although Jefferson hailed what he called the "revolution of 1800," he did not repudiate the Federalist heritage. Rather, he and his successors refined it into a foreign policy of independence and expansion that would guide the nation for years to come.

No one personifies better than Thomas Jefferson the essential elements of a distinctively American approach to foreign policy. "He thought of America the way we like to think of ourselves," Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson have written, "and saw its significance as we still do, in terms larger than itself." Like his countrymen at the time and since, Jefferson drew a sharp distinction between the "high moral purpose" that animated America and the "low motives of power and expediency that drove others." He disclaimed ambition for the United States, and when engaged in disputes with other nations often took the high ground of moral principle. In theory, at least, he rejected the mechanisms of traditional European diplomacy. Viewing war as the foremost enemy of liberty, he claimed to spurn force as an instrument of diplomacy, preferring, as he put it, the "Quaker system." After the buffeting of the 1790s, he yearned for disengagement from Europe, speaking of "divorce" from Britain and France and even a China-like isolation from the outside world. "The promise of Jefferson's statecraft," Tucker and Hendrickson conclude, "was thus of a new diplomacy, based on the confidence of a free and virtuous people, that would secure ends founded on the natural and universal rights of man, by means that escaped war and its corruptions."
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Jefferson was also a "practical idealist" (often more practical than idealistic), and in this too he set an enduring tone for his nation's foreign policy. His invocation of principle masked grandiose ambitions. Republican ideology rested on the twin pillars of commercial and landed expansion, each of which required contact and on occasion provoked conflict with the outside world, rendering Jefferson's dream of economic engagement and political separation a chimera. Whether he came to recognize this is unclear. What is clear is his willingness to put aside his scruples to
achieve his goals. He sought to exploit the European system to America's advantage, all the while proclaiming his nation's moral superiority. He was willing, at times, to employ devious and even duplicitous means to achieve ends he considered noble or simply necessary.

Jefferson's successes and failures were of epic proportions, also typifying those of his nation. His ideological fervor and self-confidence gave a steely strength to his diplomacy. Through skillful maneuvering and extraordinary good fortune, he secured for the United States in his first term the great windfall of the vast Louisiana territory. As so often happens, success gave rise to a near-fatal hubris. His subsequent efforts to "conquer without war" in the bitter struggle with England over neutral rights failed miserably. He refused to compromise his principles or to fight for them, pushing his confidant and successor James Madison toward a war they both dreaded and that could have been disastrous. The United States survived, however, and that alone seemed to vindicate its policies and confirm in the eyes of its leaders and people the strength of its principles and institutions.
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Jefferson took office under unusually favorable circumstances. By the end of 1800, the European combatants had bludgeoned each other to a draw. Napoleon's defeat of Austria solidified French control of the Continent and left England without allies, but British dominance of the seas stood in the way of a complete French victory. Each side felt compelled to regroup. After a year of negotiations, the Peace of Amiens (March 1802) formally ended the war. The treaty left most of the central issues unresolved and would last less than a year. But it gave Jefferson precious breathing space to effect the transfer of power, what he called "the revolution of 1800," consolidate his position, and calm the divisions that had sundered the nation during Adams's last years in office.

Although much stronger and more secure in 1801 than when Washington had assumed the presidency, the United States remained weak by European standards. The population had doubled since 1776, exceeding by the turn of the century five million people (approximately one-fifth slaves) and reinforcing visions of future power and greatness, but it was
still scattered in largely isolated communities over a great expanse of land. Admission of Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky as states and the organization of territories in Indiana and Mississippi consolidated the domain of the original union. The ties between western settlements and the seaboard remained tenuous, however, and disunionist schemes and foreign intrigue persisted through the War of 1812. The United States had fattened on the European wars. Agriculture and commerce flourished. But prosperity hinged on war-induced foreign trade, making it highly vulnerable to external forces. The new capital in Washington, graced by a few pretentious buildings but otherwise a "place with a few bad houses, extensive swamps, hanging on the skirts of a too thinly peopled, weak and barren country," symbolized the grand aspirations and continuing backwardness of the new republic.
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In spite of his radical preelection image, Jefferson retained the instruments and followed the basic thrust of his predecessors' foreign policy. A champion of state power and congressional prerogatives in the Federalist era, in office he greatly enlarged the power of the central government and through personal persuasion and party discipline exercised firm control of Congress. He retained the cabinet system inherited from Washington. Having observed firsthand Adams's problems, he kept his own cabinet on a close rein, a system his secretary of state, Madison, found entirely acceptable. Anti-militarist in his philosophy and determined to slash government expenditures, Jefferson eagerly seized the occasion of peace in Europe to drastically scale back the army and navy. Adhering to republican doctrine, he shifted the focus of military policy from the regular army to the militia and from an oceangoing navy to small gunboats designed for harbor defense. But he maintained the basic military structure created by the Federalists. He even added to it by establishing the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to train an officer corps.
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The allure France once held for Jefferson waned with Napoleon's rise to power, and the third president was even more determined than his predecessors to pursue an independent foreign policy. His inaugural commitment to "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none" echoed in less qualified terms the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address and reaffirmed to skeptics his
independence of spirit. Viewing separation from the "cankers" and "sores" of European society and the "madmen" and "tyrants" of European politics as essential to the purity of American institutions, he scrupulously avoided any foreign ties, which, like the French alliance, might compromise America's freedom of action, inflame its domestic politics, or contaminate its councils. He refused to associate the United States with a league of armed European neutrals committed to defending freedom of the seas, even though it supported principles Americans agreed with. Jefferson was in no sense an isolationist, however, and his diplomacy was flexible and pragmatic. A shrewd observer of world affairs, he understood the workings of the European system of politics and was quick to exploit it. He was prepared to depart from principle to advance American interests, even to the point of contemplating an alliance with England during the Louisiana crisis.
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While following the paths staked out by his predecessors, Jefferson also introduced important changes in style and substance. Confirmed in his Americanism and republicanism, he integrated them into his diplomacy and even flaunted them. He had long viewed professional diplomats and diplomacy as the "pest of the peace of the world," and he reduced U.S. representation abroad to the essential minimum. Eschewing the pomp and display of the courts of Washington and Adams, he dressed plainly—slovenly, critics said—and opened the doors of the presidential mansion on equal terms to visitors of high station and low. His personal warmth and glittering conversation, along with the simplicity and studied casualness of his style, charmed some European visitors. His disdain for protocol scandalized other members of the small and generally unhappy diplomatic community in Washington. Outraged when received by the president in a tattered bathrobe and slippers and forced at a presidential dinner to conform to "pell-mell" seating arrangements respecting no rank, the British minister to Washington, Anthony Merry, bitterly protested the affront suffered at the president's table. Jefferson no doubt privately chuckled at the arrogant Englishman's discomfiture, but his subsequent codification of republican practices into established procedures betrayed a larger purpose. By adapting the new nation's forms to its principles, he hoped to establish a uniquely American style in diplomacy.
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Republican ideology influenced Jefferson's foreign policy in more important ways. In his view, the preservation of the principles of the American
Revolution at home was inextricably linked to the nation's foreign policy. Genuine political and economic freedom required a population of independent landowners engaged in productive enterprises, as distinct from the stockjobbers and manipulators who held power in England and the wage-labor class they dominated. A republican population demanded, in turn, access to foreign markets to ensure continued outlets for America's agricultural surpluses and the availability of sufficient land to provide an economic basis for freedom for a rapidly expanding people. Commercial and territorial expansion were therefore indispensable to the preservation of republican institutions, and thus essential ingredients of Republican foreign policy.
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Despite its relative weakness, moreover, Jefferson believed that the United States could achieve its goals. Persuaded that the virtue of its people and the nature of its institutions were more important measures of a nation's strength than military or even economic power, he viewed the United States as the "strongest government on earth." He clung doggedly to the belief that Europe depended on the "necessities" produced by the United States, while Americans could do without the "superfluities" manufactured by Europe, giving them a potentially powerful weapon in the form of trade restrictions. Certain of America's strength, Jefferson was less inclined than the Federalists to accommodate other nations in times of crisis. Philosophically, he tended toward pacifism—"peace is my passion," he proclaimed—but he was not above using force to uphold principles he believed in. In dealings with the Barbary States of North Africa, Spain, and France during the Louisiana crisis, and Britain and France in conflicts over neutral rights, he was more belligerent and assertive than his predecessors. Certain that the United States was a "chosen country," the "world's best hope," he was less inclined to respect foreign holdings in North America. He was aggressively expansionist.
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If Washington and the Federalists charted the basic course of U.S. foreign policy, Jefferson and the Republicans infused into it a peculiarly American spirit and style.

Jefferson's assertiveness is manifest in his handling of the Tripolitan War, America's first foreign war and the first of numerous intrusions into a region that, more than two centuries later, remained terra incognita for

most Americans. Raiders from the Barbary States continued to prey on American shipping in the 1790s; Algiers captured eleven ships and more than a hundred sailors in 1793 alone. An irate Congress voted the next year to create a navy to defend U.S. commerce, but crises with Britain and France forced a bow to expediency. Concluding that it would cost less to pay than to fight, Washington and Adams ransomed the release of prisoners. They concluded treaties with Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli at a cost of more than $1 million that protected U.S. trade in return for annual payments of money or the provision of ships, gunpowder, and naval supplies. As a gesture to local sensibilities, the treaty with Tripoli even explicitly avowed that the United States was "not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
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