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The small group of historians who have paid particular attention to the impact of the French Revolution on the early American republic have generally concluded that the Revolution and the global war it unleashed exposed the United States to great peril. Popular sentiment in favor of the Revolution tended to nudge the United States toward involvement in the conflict. The activities of Edmond-Charles Genêt, the Girondin minister plenipotentiary sent to America in 1792, threatened to push the United States over the precipice. By organizing Democratic-Republican Societies, arming French privateers in U.S. ports, sending agents and propaganda into British Quebec, and organizing on American territory a military expedition against Spanish Louisiana, Genêt strove to involve the United States in the war.1 Realizing that even the slightest gesture of aid to revolutionary France could bring potentially fatal British retaliation on the weak new republic, the administration of George Washington clung to a policy of neutrality. Despite bitter differences between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, even these rivals agreed that the United States needed to stay out of the European war. The “struggle for neutrality,” as one historian put it, was the dominant theme of American foreign policy during the 1790s. The French Revolution had thrust America “between the two superpowers of that day.”2
While the international situation was indeed full of danger, domestic quarrels also menaced the integrity of the American republic. Differences of feeling toward revolutionary France and the ideals it was thought to incarnate became entangled with debates over the policies the United States ought to adopt toward France. The resulting “partisan divisions,” giving birth first to factions and then to parties, defined the political landscape of the United States for a generation or more.3 By the late 1790s the struggle between the “French faction” and the “English party” had grown so heated that the rampart between loyal opposition and treason—so necessary to maintain in a democracy—had been deliberately breached by the party in power.4 Upon leaving office in 1796, President Washington warned the country against the “insidious wiles of foreign influence.” Whether or not the Farewell Address was intended as an appeal for isolationism or merely as a cheap shot at the Jeffersonians is the subject of some debate. There can be no question, however, that Washington regarded the internecine divisions provoked by the French Revolution as a grave, even existential, threat.5
Marked by fear of war and domestic dissensions, the 1790s are portrayed by historians as a time of danger in which the United States had little to gain but much to lose, as a time when national survival was at stake. To be sure, some scholars have added nuance to this stark picture. They have discerned in “the strife of Europe” a silver lining for America.6 Some have noted the commercial “profits of neutrality”—although these brought with them increased opportunities for misunderstanding, which twice flared into armed conflict during the Quasi-War with France (1798–1800) and the War of 1812 with Great Britain (1812–15).7 The closest examination of how the United States benefited from the French Revolutionary Wars is Samuel Flagg Bemis’s study of Pinckney’s Treaty, a book tellingly subtitled America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress. In it Bemis examines the diplomacy that fixed the boundary between the United States and Spain (Louisiana and the two Floridas) in 1795, gave Americans access to the Mississippi, and thus ensured the prosperity of the American West.8 Pinckney’s Treaty (also known as the Treaty of San Lorenzo) was not the only North American territorial settlement of the 1790s. Jay’s Treaty (1794) demarcated the boundary between British North America and the United States. Moreover, in the Treaty of Greenville (1795) the confederacy of the Northwestern Indians agreed to peace with the United States and renounced its claims to sovereignty over the lands north of the Ohio River.9 Each of these treaties has been studied in detail, but their relation to one another, their contribution to the growth of American power, and, above all, their connection to the French Revolution have not been made explicit. This article seeks to do this. In it, I argue that the French Revolutionary Wars led Great Britain and Spain, the two European powers that had been opposing the territorial growth of the United States, to abandon their restrictive policies, thus opening the floodgates of America’s westward expansion. Perhaps any major European war involving Britain and Spain would have led those two powers to ease their effort at American containment. Even in the absence of European war, perhaps American continental hegemony was inevitable, given the demographic and economic growth of the United States. But it is the French Revolution and the wars it spawned that explains why, when, and how American continental hegemony happened as it did.
During the years 1783–89, the period between American independence and the French Revolution, Great Britain and Spain encouraged Native Americans to counter America’s westward expansion. By doing this, the Europeans sought to protect their North American colonies—Canada and the Floridas—by keeping U.S. power well distant from their borders. Their aid to the Indians, however, stopped short of direct involvement in armed hostilities against the Americans, for such an outcome would have undermined, not guaranteed, the security of the Europeans’ colonial possessions. The efforts of the Indians, British, and Spanish to discourage American settlement in the Ohio Valley were largely successful and did not provoke war with the United States. During the decade following American independence, relatively few American settlers crossed the mountains, mainly into what became Kentucky and Tennessee.
For its part, the American government failed to respond effectively to the Indian and European efforts against settlement. Hobbled by debt, the Confederation Congress had no interest in compounding its manifold woes by embarking on a costly war with the Indians, the European powers, or all at the same time. The young republic could barely support a military establishment. By mid-1784 the last of the Continental Army had been disbanded. The only military forces remaining were eighty soldiers—twenty-five at Fort Pitt and fifty-five at West Point—and one clerk who alone represented the Department of War. The Confederation Congress realized that such a force could not even guard the nation’s arsenals (the one in Springfield, Massachusetts, was undefended and would be seized during Shays’s Rebellion!), let alone a territory the size of western Europe.10 Its response, however, was inadequate: the creation of a seven-hundred-man regiment whose soldiers were described by one of its officers as “the offscourings of large towns and cities—enervated by idleness, debaucheries and every species of vice.”11 One western land speculator bemoaned the lack of protection such men afforded. “Purchased from the prisons…and brothels of the nation at two dollars per month, [they] will never answer our purpose for fighting of Indians.”12 The Americans had but this force to assert their sovereignty over the vast territories of the Ohio Valley. It is little wonder that Great Britain and Spain felt confident in pursuing measures to restrain American settlement there.
The most provocative of these was their retention of military posts in areas claimed by the United States. On territory it had ceded to the United States in 1783, Great Britain retained a cordon of eight forts, stretching from Dutchman’s Point on Lake Champlain in present-day New York to Mackinac in present-day Michigan.13 The British foreign minister emphasized their strategic importance in his instructions to George Hammond, Britain’s first minister plenipotentiary to the United States:
These posts are of great Service in securing the Fidelity and Attachment of the Indians, and as they afford to Great Britain the means of commanding the Navigation of the Great Lakes, and the communication of the said Lakes with the River St. Lawrence, they are certainly of great importance to the Security of Canada.14
Repeated American protests that British retention of the forts was costing the United States “blood and treasure” were ignored.15 South of the Tennessee River, in the present-day states of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, the Spanish established posts of their own. These guaranteed the Spanish the same advantages with the southern Indians that the British enjoyed in the north. Spain also insisted that the northern boundary of Spanish West Florida extended to the 32nd parallel, not to the 31st as the Americans claimed. On the ground the Spanish presence actually extended to the Tennessee River.16 In its extensive territorial claims, Spain was on firmer legal footing than Great Britain. Since the Spanish had not been signatories to the Treaty of Paris, it was with some justification that they refused to recognize the vast transfer of territory it had stipulated.
By retaining the posts, the British and Spanish were able to maintain influence and economic ties with the tribes of the Ohio Valley, which were necessary to attaining their “great object” of securing “a barrier against the American states by the intervention of the Indians.”17 To this end, the European powers provided the Indians with supplies, including arms and munitions. Although innocuously described as “provisions” or “merchandise,” careful research has revealed the military nature of these goods. One “list of merchandize absolutely necessary for the savages depending on Detroit,” drawn up in 1784, included “10,000 ball and shot,” “500 lbs. gunpowder,” and “500 riffle guns.”18 The vigorous commerce in nonmilitary goods carried out between Europeans and Indians at the posts reinforced their relationship. European material support, both military and nonmilitary, often ensured the Indians’ logistical superiority in their clashes with the Americans.
The British and Spanish encouraged the Indians to resist the Americans. As early as July 1783, Sir John Johnson, superintendent general of Indian affairs in British North America, promised Iroquois leaders that “should the Americans molest or claim any part of [your] country, we shall then ask assistance of the King.”19 Johnson’s lieutenant, Alexander McKee, offered further assurances to the more westerly tribes (the Wyandots, Mingos, Delawares, Shawnees, Ottawas, Potawatomis, and Ojibwas). The king “will continue to promote your happiness by his protection,” McKee promised, and the Americans would surely recognize Indian sovereignty north of the Ohio River.20 The Spanish pursued similar policies. By the end of 1784, they had concluded treaties with the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles.21 In the first of these, signed in Pensacola in June 1784, the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray promised that his people would “expose for the royal service of his Catholic Majesty [its] lives and fortunes.”22 By the agreement, McGillivray explained, “the Crown of Spain will Gain & Secure a powerful barrier in these parts against the ambitious and encroaching Americans.”23 Although current scholarship on European-Native American relations tends to emphasize the ways in which the latter manipulated the rivalries of the former for their own advantage, it is no less true that the European powers sought to enlist the Indians as allies or proxies in their own struggles. Those Indians, perhaps the majority, who viewed the oncoming Americans as the principal threat needed little encouragement. The resulting violence probably did more than anything else to discourage American settlement in the West during the American republic’s first decade.
American responses were ineffectual. Caught between settlers (often squatters they were supposed to evict) and Indians—and outnumbered by both—the soldiers were, according to a contemporary, “rather prisoners in [the West] than in possession of it.”24 Casualties were high, but from accident, disease, and murder rather than battle, which the army generally avoided. It was not until 1787 that it suffered its first death at the hands of Indians—a soldier captured and killed by Wyandot warriors, who later flaunted his scalp before Fort Harmer. The garrison did not retaliate.25 Territorial militias were more aggressive but less discriminating. They had a disturbing tendency to attack neutral villages. Noting this, some Americans worried that the militias were actually fueling frontier violence.26
The final factor inhibiting American expansion—and even threatening the integrity of the Union—was European control of the two waterways on which western settlements depended to export their products. The first of these was the St. Lawrence River, controlled by the British through the forts they retained in New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. British control of the St. Lawrence even prompted elements in Vermont to seek a free trade agreement with British Canada and contemplate political union with it.27 The second was the Mississippi River. It was guarded by a string of Spanish posts stretching north to St. Louis, patrolled by gunboats, and easily closed at New Orleans. Americans found on the river were generally arrested. Some were even imprisoned in Cuba. The economic dependence of western settlers on the river was so great that some considered placing themselves under Spanish sovereignty. Separatist sentiment was encouraged by the realization that the feeble United States military presence was incapable of preventing Indian attacks. During the 1780s Spain (and to a lesser extent Britain) tried to exploit these feelings. Prominent westerners, including Judge Sebastian, Colonel Sevier, Revolutionary War veteran George Rogers Clark, and General James Wilkinson all secretly accepted pensions, gifts, or offices from the Spanish. Even the most iconic westerner of all, Daniel Boone, eventually left Kentucky for a government position in Spanish Louisiana.28 American statesmen were painfully aware of these separatist currents and feared for the fate of the republic. “The lopping off of Kentucky from the Union is dreadful to contemplate, even if it should not attach itself to some other power,” wrote Secretary of State Edmund Randolph in 1794.29
In North America, the initial result of the French Revolution was to embolden the British and Spanish in their efforts against American expansion. With French finances in ruins and the country absorbed in its growing revolutionary crisis, chances were slim that it would intervene in a war between America and Britain or Spain. It was not until November 1792 that the British government even considered the possibility of conflict with France.30 When Britain did enter the war (1 February 1793), it became an ally of Spain. Thus assured of British military assistance, the Spanish adopted an “aggressive anti-American policy.”31 Led by the bellicose governor Carondolet, the Spanish in Louisiana extended their military frontier northward. Fort Nogales was erected in 1792 on a commanding height on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, near the site of present-day Vicksburg. Fort Confederación was established the following year in what is now Alabama.32 Located between Creek and Choctaw territory, Confederación was intended to reinforce the alliance between the Spanish and the Southeastern Indians.33
The British also encouraged the Indians to unite against the Americans. This aim dovetailed with the tribes’ own aspirations. Already in 1786, the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant had succeeded in forming a confederation, the “United Indian Nations.”34 The confederation, however, was loose, and the tribes— and even individuals in the same tribe—had different ideas about the best course of action to adopt vis-à-vis the Americans. Would war or negotiations be more effective in halting their advance? How much should be conceded in the event of talks? British agents worked to strengthen Indian unity.35 According to Richard White, the “confederation had in some ways become indistinguishable from a British alliance” by 1794.36
By 1789 war between the Americans and Northwestern Indians seemed inevitable. Although the American governor of the Northwest, Arthur St. Clair, had recently signed the Treaty of Fort Harmar (January 1789) with representatives of the confederation, the chiefs who had undertaken the negotiations were disavowed. Leadership of the confederation passed to the Shawnees, who forged a new coalition determined to use force to prevent Americans from settling north of the Ohio River.37 Violence flared up on the frontier, and beleaguered American settlers pleaded for help. Even though the United States had but a tiny standing army, limited resources from which to build a larger one, deep-seated anxieties about the nefarious political influence of permanent military forces, and concerns that war with the Indians might mean war with the British, public pressure for a muscular response proved too strong to resist.
In June 1790 preparations began for an offensive against the Northwestern Indians.38 According to the plan formulated by Governor St. Clair and General Josiah Harmar, who was to lead the expedition, a force of 1,500 composed primarily of militia from Kentucky and Pennsylvania was to march 150 miles from Cincinnati into the heart of Indian territory. Its destination was Kekionga (called Miami Town by the Americans), a concentration of Indian villages near present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana. Indians who stood to defend their homes would be killed and all crops in the vicinity destroyed, leaving the survivors to starve when winter came. The expedition failed to go as planned. The militia were late to arrive, did not appear in the numbers expected, and lacked military qualities. One observer noted that they included “a great many hardly able to bear arms, such as old, infirm men and young boys.”39 Moreover, the Americans forfeited the advantage of surprise when St. Clair informed the British commander at Detroit of the expedition and its target—a precaution intended to prevent a broader war. The British commander sent messengers throughout the Northwest to alert the tribes. Under the leadership of the war leader Little Turtle, the confederation’s warriors mounted a series of devastating ambushes that killed more than a third of the American force, shattered its morale, and sent the survivors fleeing back to Cincinnati.
The following year the Americans raised a new army and sent it against the confederation. Commanded by St. Clair, who had held the rank of general during the Revolutionary War, the force was to number 3,000, a figure considered more than sufficient to overcome Indian resistance. Again, the operation misfired. Although St. Clair employed all means at his disposal—recruiting on the east coast, emergency levies, and appeals to governors to supply militia—the force never exceeded 2,000. Underpaid and ill supplied by a corrupt logistical administration, the troops suffered from disease, drunkenness, and desertion. Their leader, confined to his tent by gout and “rheumatic asthma,” suffered as well.40 The march started out slowly, averaging at first only one and a half miles a day. After plodding eighty-nine miles through the trackless forest, St. Clair finally reached what he thought (erroneously) to be the St. Mary’s River and ordered his force to encamp. No security precautions were taken as the troops went to sleep that night. At dawn of the following day, 4 November 1791, they were attacked by more than a thousand well-armed and well-supplied warriors under Little Turtle and Blue Jacket. Alongside them were a number of British officers and Indian department agents, as well as “scores of English and French traders.”41 The result was the worst American defeat at Indian hands. The Americans suffered more than nine hundred casualties (to the Indians’ hundred), and the army disintegrated.
The Indians were exultant. So too were the British, who hoped that the Americans would see the hopelessness of military action and resign themselves to “settling all disputes,” particularly that of the U.S.-Canada boundary, “in the manner and upon the terms proposed by His Majesty’s Government.”42 George Hammond was instructed to propose to the Americans the creation of an independent Indian buffer state from the lands north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi.43 The proposal was rejected by the Americans, who saw it as a ploy to turn the Old Northwest into a “British protectorate.”44 Despite the American rejection, the British sought to extend their influence in the Northwest by encouraging and materially supporting Indian resistance. If the Americans could be excluded from the area, British thinking went, the much-desired buffer state would become a reality even if the United States did not accept it. British officials in Canada continued to urge united resistance to American encroachment and made repeated statements that suggested the possibility of direct support.
Taking the lead was the governor of Canada, Lord Dorchester. Increasingly worried about the “progress of French intrigue” (that is to say, Genêt’s propaganda) among the Canadian population and “the influence it seems to have acquired over the councils of the United States and the passions of its people,” Dorchester feared that the conflict in Europe would spread to North America.45 He shared his apprehensions freely with superiors, subordinates, and allies. In a speech to representatives of the Seven Nations of Canada in October 1793, he stated that “war between the United States and Great Britain was inevitable” and “that a new western boundary would be set by the warriors.”46 On 10 February 1794 he told a delegation from the Northwestern confederation much the same thing:
From the manner in which the people of the States push on, and act, and talk on this side, and from what I learn of their conduct towards the Sea, I shall not be surprized if we are at war with them in the course of the present year; and if so a Line must be drawn by the Warriors…. I shall acknowledge no Lands to be theirs which have been encroached on by them since the year 1783; they then broke the Peace, and as they kept it not on their part; it doth not bind on ours…. All their approaches towards us since that time… I consider as an Infringement on the King’s Rights; and when a Line is drawn between us, be it in Peace or War…those people must all be gone who do not obtain leave to become the King’s subjects…. Our patience is almost exhausted.47
Dorchester backed up his words with action. He increased the provision of supplies and arms to the Indians. More significantly, one week after his speech, upon learning of the advance of yet another American expedition into the Ohio Valley, Dorchester ordered the construction of a new post, Fort Miami, in the heart of the confederation’s territory.48 Located at the foot of the Maumee Rapids, near present-day Toledo, Ohio, it represented a significant extension of the British military presence into territory ceded to the United States in 1783. Although intended by Dorchester as a defensive measure, to cover the strategically critical post of Detroit in case of what he considered to be the “inevitable” outbreak of hostilities with the Americans,49 his Indian allies interpreted the measure differently. To the Northwestern Indians, the establishment of Fort Miami, with its garrison of redcoats and artillery, could only mean that the British would support them in their struggle against the Americans. The effect of British reassurances, material support, and military preparations was “intoxicating” for the Indians of the Northwest. By mid-1794 the British-Indian alliance “appeared strong and secure.”50
St. Clair’s defeat in late 1791 had come as a rude wake-up call for the Congress of the United States. Belatedly it realized that American sovereignty over the western territories was at stake. Although the lands north of the Ohio were American on paper, it was now clear that they were not American in fact. If the United States could not exert actual control over them, it was now apparent that either the British, or more likely the Northwestern Indians backed by Britain, would eventually replace the United States not merely as the de facto power in the region, but also as its internationally recognized ruler. To impose American authority there, however, required an army, and this the United States no longer possessed. The military establishment would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Shortly after the St. Clair disaster, the Washington administration sent Congress a memorandum outlining the kind of force it believed was necessary to take control of the West. It was to be a legion of five thousand long-service, professional soldiers. Swallowing its distaste for standing armies and the expenditures they entailed, Congress granted Washington the army he requested in March 1792.51 The president promptly appointed another Revolutionary War general, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, to organize and command the new force. In the ensuing campaign Wayne would prove himself an aggressive leader, but he was neither rash nor imprudent. He understood that the raw recruits who came trickling in were in no condition to fight the seasoned warriors of the Northwestern confederacy. He thus spent 1792 and most of 1793 training his army. When he finally ordered it into action in October 1793, it had been transformed into a disciplined fighting force.
There was nothing original in Wayne’s campaign plan.52 His legion was to advance cautiously and methodically toward the heart of the confederacy, building a string of forts along its line of march. It spent the winter of 1793–94 in one of these, Fort Recovery, from which the decisive phase of the operation would be launched. In July 1794 Wayne began his attack. Perceiving the strength of the Americans, worried about rifts in the Indian alliance, and beginning to doubt British trustworthiness,53 Little Turtle now urged that a peaceful accommodation be sought. But other leaders, encouraged by British Indian Department officials who made clear that they wanted the Americans stopped before they reached Fort Miami, overcame his objections. The confederacy would fight. They chose as their battleground an area two miles south of the British fort, a zone of fallen timber that had been created by a tornado sometime in the distant past. The tangle of tree trunks and branches—which gave the battle its name, Fallen Timbers—formed a natural fortification behind whose protection they would shoot down the oncoming Americans. Wayne and his troops arrived on 20 August 1794. Instead of falling into the trap, he sent forward skirmishers against whom the Indians—supported by a company of Canadian militia—prematurely unleashed their volley.54 Wayne immediately ordered the main body of his troops to charge. Faced by this disciplined, numerically superior force, the defenders panicked and sought shelter in the nearby British fort. To their dismay, they found its gates shut against them.
The action of the fort’s commander was consistent with British policy, whose principal aim was to protect Canada by blocking the American advance (through retention of the forts and aid to the Indians) without provoking a war with the United States.55 But when viewed in the context of the recent British actions and declarations, the shutting of the fort’s gates seemed like a direct betrayal. It marked a turning point in British-Indian relations. The “chain of friendship” that had existed since 1783 had been severed. It would be mended—incompletely—only from 1807 on as tensions again mounted between Britain and the United States. When the War of 1812 began, and Britain incited the Indians to attack the Americans, the Ohio Valley tribes responded tepidly.56 They had not forgotten what had happened at Fort Miami. According to Jonathan Adler, a young adoptee of the Shawnees, that episode “did more towards making peace betwixt the Indians and Americans than any one thing.”57 British encouragement and promises had proven illusory. The defeated war leader Blue Jacket turned on the British, calling them “nothing.” Indian Department agents began to report that rumors were spreading among the tribes that “the French were likely to beat the English in Europe.”58 Abandoned to the tender mercies of the Americans, the leaders of the confederacy were forced to sign the Treaty of Greenville (3 August 1795), renouncing their claims to sovereignty over the lands north of the Ohio River.
Although unaware of the events transpiring in the Ohio Valley, events that threatened to embroil Britain in a North American war, the British government had already resolved to abandon its risky policy of retaining its forts on United States territory and encouraging Indian resistance to American settlement. The War of the French Revolution, which Britain had entered in early 1793 fully expecting to overcome the chaotic republic, had not been going well. At the end of June 1794, word had reached London of General Jourdan’s victory at Fleurus (26 June 1794), which opened the way for the French occupation of Belgium and Holland. By January 1795 Belgium was under French control, and Holland, now the Batavian Republic, had switched sides, abandoning the coalition and putting its financial and naval resources at the service of France. Despite the initial, ideological nature of the French Revolutionary Wars, deeply rooted patterns of behavior determined by long-standing geopolitical concerns were beginning to assert themselves. The existential threat posed by the enemy’s occupation of the Low Countries now dictated (as it had a century earlier and as it would again a century later) British actions.
Word of Fleurus, moreover, arrived at the Foreign Office at the same moment as a shipment of half a year’s backlog of dispatches from North America. These warned of rising tensions with the United States. In particular, they informed foreign minister Grenville of Dorchester’s inflammatory speech, the angry responses it had elicited from the Washington administration, Wayne’s progress, and the construction of Fort Miami.59 Faced with an uncertain European war, concluded Grenville, Great Britain could not afford the additional burden of war with the United States. It was urgent to defuse the explosive situation in North America so that Britain could avoid an unnecessary war with the Americans and concentrate its resources on the French threat.
The fortuitous arrival of John Jay five days after the tardy dispatches was the final element prompting the British policy shift. Jay had been appointed envoy extraordinary in April 1794 and had left for England in May. His mission was to halt the slide toward war and negotiate a comprehensive treaty with Great Britain—aims that corresponded exactly to Grenville’s desires. As Gouverneur Morris noted upon learning of the battle of Fleurus, “the success of French arms will have secured that of Mr. Jay’s mission” to conclude a comprehensive understanding between the United States and Great Britain.60 Even before Jay and Grenville sat down to discuss the many contentious issues dividing the two countries, they held an informal conversation about the crisis on the American frontier. Jay immediately gave Grenville “the most explicit assurances” that Wayne had no orders to attack the British or invade their territory. They quickly agreed that immediate steps had to be taken to prevent war—or stop it if it had already begun. In consequence, Grenville wrote to Hammond that the two men had agreed
that, during the present Negotiation, and until the Conclusion of it, all things ought to remain and be preserved in Statu Quo; that, therefore, both Parties should continue to hold their Possessions, and that all Encroachments on either side should be done away; that all Hostile Measures (if any such should have taken place) shall cease; and that, in case it should unfortunately have happened that Prisoners or Property should have been taken, the Prisoners shall be released, and the Property restored.61
Orders were immediately issued to the authorities in Canada to take the greatest precautions to avoid hostilities with the Americans.62 These were accompanied by a stern dispatch to Dorchester, rebuking him for his speech and his decision to establish Fort Miami. His words and deeds played into the hands of a “considerable” and “most violent party” in the United States and were more likely to “provoke hostilities rather than prevent them.”63 Unapologetic, Dorchester resigned, defending his policy to the last. Given that the feelings of the Americans had been “moving as by French impulse rapidly towards hostilities” in support of “their Jacobin friends,” he felt that he had done no more than take necessary precautions against an imminent threat. “Without troops, without authority, amidst a people barely not in arms against the King,” and “abandoned to our own feeble efforts for our preservation” because British military resources were being absorbed by the war against France, he had to do whatever he could locally to ready Canada’s defenses.64
Having calmed the immediate threat of war between their countries, Grenville and Jay began to negotiate a comprehensive treaty.65 The resulting document, known as Jay’s Treaty, was signed on 19 November 1794 and ratified the following year by the Senate, but only by the slimmest of margins. The treaty was deeply unpopular in America, because, on almost every point it contained, the United States had acquiesced to British demands. The only concession won by Jay concerned the controversial posts, from which Great Britain finally agreed to withdraw.66 Viewed in the light of Grenville’s determination to avoid a North American war, this was as much a British as an American victory. By abandoning the posts, Grenville had removed a potential trigger to an unwanted conflict. The French government, however, viewed the treaty as an Anglo-American alliance and a direct violation of the Franco-American Treaty of 1778. French anger at this perceived American betrayal contributed mightily to the outbreak of the Quasi-War several years later. From the British perspective, this was an unexpected benefit of a treaty whose primary purpose had been to reduce the likelihood of war with America so that Britain could concentrate on the struggle with revolutionary France.
The settlement of the boundary dispute between the United States and Great Britain prompted Spain to seek a resolution of its differences with America. Within less than a year of the signature of Jay’s Treaty, Pinckney’s Treaty was concluded between Spain and the United States.67 Treating the issues of America’s southwestern border, navigation of the Mississippi, and access to the port of New Orleans, Pinckney’s Treaty represented no less of a policy reversal for Spain than Jay’s Treaty had been for Great Britain. Ever since American independence in 1783, Spain had rebuffed American overtures. Negotiations in the 1780s between John Jay and the Spanish envoy Diego de Gardoqui had been characterized by Spanish foot-dragging and inflexibility. The draft agreement finally obtained by Jay in 1786 offered so few concessions to the United States that it was rejected by the Senate. There followed a period of deadlock during which, as noted above, Spanish officials in Louisiana built new forts far into the territory claimed by the United States, aided the Southeastern Indians, and encouraged separatism among the American settlers. Spain’s entry into the war against France made the Spanish less inclined to negotiate with the Americans. Emboldened by its military alliance with Britain, Spain felt more confident than ever that the Americans would not dare to attack Spanish possessions in North America. By the beginning of 1794, Spanish-American relations were in a “languishing condition.”68
That year, however, would see an unexpected reversal of Spain’s foreign policy, not only toward the United States, but toward the French republic as well. British military policies had begun to trouble Spain. Admiral Hood’s decision to destroy the French warships that he had captured at Toulon in 1793 made Spain suspicious of Britain’s real war aims. It appeared to many in the Spanish government that Britain’s true goal was to secure global hegemony by destroying French naval power—in Spanish eyes, a necessary counterweight to the Royal Navy. Lord Howe’s victory over the French Atlantic fleet on 1 June 1794 confirmed Spanish fears. As a colonial power with a relatively weak navy, Spain could not stand idly by while Britain achieved this level of maritime superiority. Within the Spanish government, minds had already been made up to leave the unnatural alliance with Great Britain; all that remained was the precipitant required to convert these feelings into action.
Two events in July 1794, the French political coup of 9 Thermidor and the arrival in Madrid of reports of Jay’s mission to England, sparked the Spanish foreign-policy reversal. By making it possible to claim (rightly or wrongly) that the French government had become more moderate, Thermidor opened the door for a Spanish rapprochement with France. In September 1794, Spain’s foreign minister, Manuel de Godoy, opened secret talks with French officials. These resulted in the Treaty of Basel (22 July 1795), by which Spain formally renounced its alliance with the British and allied with France.69 Word of Jay’s appointment as envoy extraordinary to England arrived in Spain in early July 1794. The Spanish royal council concluded that the Anglo-American negotiations could have only one purpose—territorial expansion in the Americas at Spain’s expense. To preempt this, the Spanish government hastened to neutralize the Americans by granting them substantial concessions. A message was sent to Philadelphia urging the president to send a special representative to Madrid to negotiate a treaty. The man chosen for this mission, Thomas Pinckney, departed in April 1795. By the time he arrived, the Franco-Spanish entente was on the verge of being concluded, prompting Spanish fears of British retaliation. These concerns added urgency to Godoy’s talks with Pinckney and led the Spanish minister to make far greater concessions than the Americans had anticipated. In the Treaty of San Lorenzo, the Spanish acknowledged the 31st parallel as the northern boundary of the Floridas, withdrew their military presence accordingly, recognized American navigation rights on the Mississippi, and granted citizens of the United States the right of deposit at New Orleans. The West now had a viable commercial outlet—the necessary precondition for any large-scale American settlement. The shift in Spanish policy did not, however, immediately open the lands of the Southeastern Indians to American occupation. Even without substantial European aid, the Southeastern Indians—more numerous and better organized than their counterparts in the Old Northwest—held off the Americans for another two decades.
With the fixation of America’s boundaries and the “comparative peace” achieved with the Indians, the pace of western settlement increased rapidly.70 South of the Ohio, the principal route into Kentucky and beyond, the Wilderness Road, was opened to wagons in 1796. In the same year Tennessee became a state. North of the Ohio, the end of the war and the Treaty of Greenville made large-scale settlement by Americans possible for the first time. The opening of the West to American expansion was made possible by this “first rapprochement” (with the British, Spanish, and Indians alike), and the rapprochement, in turn, was a consequence of the wars of the French Revolution. Americans at the time were fully aware of the causal link between military events in Europe, the three treaties, and the destiny of their republic. Like Gouverneur Morris, James Monroe, then serving as ambassador to France, believed that French military fortunes were the key determinant of European attitudes toward the United States:
When Toulon was taken and fortune seemed to frown upon the arms of this republic [France],…an order was issued for those spoliations [British orders-in-council] of which we so justly complain. We likewise saw afterwards when the spirit of this nation [France] was roused and victory attended its efforts, that that order was rescinded and some respect shewn to the United States.71
Lesser figures than Monroe were equally aware of the impact of French victories on America’s standing in the world. Even before the battle of Fleurus, one obscure Georgia congressman, commenting to his constituents on “the almost incredible Success of the French Republicans,” perceived that their victories would force Great Britain to respect the United States. “So Long as the Brave Gallicans are prosperous Great Britain will be cautious how she insults us.”72 Although unintentional and unanticipated, a significant outcome of the French Revolution and the global war that ensued was the relative disengagement of the European powers from geopolitical rivalry on the North American continent. Perhaps the most important consequence of this withdrawal was the lifting of barriers to the westward expansion of the United States. This ultimately led to the emergence of the United States as a respected actor on the international stage and was one of the factors that led to its eventual rise to superpower status.