The ship slipped quietly out of Philadelphia’s port on a cold day in December 1794, before the customs collector knew it was gone, and headed downriver toward the sea. The collector was not fooled for long, however; he had been keeping an eye on the vessel, called Les Jumeaux, as it was being fitted up. His suspicions had been raised when the ship’s agent, a Mr. Guenet, had installed four cannon on board and loaded small arms, in addition to the usual equipment of an innocent merchantman. Now, the ship’s surreptitious departure heightened the customs official’s suspicion that the vessel was headed out on a voyage that would violate the nation’s neutrality regulations. He quickly alerted the militia.
That evening, off Bombay Hook, the ship was intercepted by the revenue cutter General Green, commanded by James Montgomery, who had forty militiamen on board to enforce the government’s orders. The Jumeaux was ordered to heave to, where it was boarded by Captain Dale of the militia, Deputy Customs Inspector Robinett, and Deputy Marshall Rothwell. They ordered the Jumeaux’s skipper to take his vessel back to port for inspection, and he made pretense of agreeing. But as soon as the government officials were seen off, he commanded his men to put on sail, and once again headed out toward the sea. When the cutter approached to cut him off, the Jumeaux’s skipper mustered his full ninety-five-man crew, ran out the cannons, and gave every sign of readiness to fight. An uneasy standoff developed, with the government officials unwilling to chance their lightly armed and manned cutter against the apparent determination and firepower of the Jumeaux. They did, however, obtain the skipper’s agreement to remain at anchor overnight. Their plan, naive in retrospect, was to return in the morning with a larger force.
It was a mistake. In the night the Jumeaux once again slipped away, and this time the ship reached the sea unnoticed, disappearing from American jurisdiction. The customs officials had to satisfy themselves, for the moment, with prosecuting Mr. Guenet, who was fined and sent to jail. But they would not forget the incident.
Eight months later, a French privateer called the Cassius turned up in Philadelphia, commanded by an American, Samuel Davis. The ship was easily recognized as the old Les Jumeaux, and Davis as one of the passengers who had been on the ship during its questionable outgoing voyage. It turned out that the customs collector’s suspicions had been justified, since the ship had sailed directly to St. Domingo. There, General Laveaux had commissioned it as a French vessel under the new name, with Davis as captain, and sent it out to harry enemy shipping. One of the ships it had captured had been an American schooner, the William Lindsay, which had then been condemned and sold as a prize by the St. Domingo admiralty courts.
The Cassius was quickly put under a court order, while the owners of the confiscated schooner sued Davis for damages. To their chagrin, the suit was dismissed when the judge ruled that only French courts had jurisdiction over a case that involved a ship caught on the high seas and taken into a French port.
The schooner’s owners were not to be turned away. They then initiated action against the impounded ship in Circuit Court, on the grounds that it was a vessel illegally armed as a privateer, in violation of neutrality laws. This of course threw the case into the diplomatic arena, where it became part of a running debate over the acceptability of France’s maritime seizures under America’s new legislation. As the case dragged its way through the court, it was also the subject of numerous angry exchanges between the French legation and the State Department. In the end, the court issued a ruling that pleased no one. The French won the legal argument when the court decided that it had no jurisdiction over what the legation claimed to be a French government ship. But the American authorities, in effect, won the day, because the ship had been kept out of action for over a year, and was no longer fit for sea.1
The Cassius case was one of many, many cases—French, British, and Spanish—that would clog the courts and the diplomatic exchanges during the European war. American mariners were, above all, enterprising. The profits that they could make during the hostilities were too good to pass up; the risk of capture by one of the belligerents became manageable. American shipping grew immensely, and successful ship owners grew prosperous. Few owners went so far as to fit out privateers in violation of the neutrality laws, but the temptation was there and the risks acceptable—Captain Davis had simply been stupid to bring the Cassius back to its original home port. Others were ready to take the risk of carrying contraband to one or another of the parties at war in the Indies and St. Domingo. Still others, in perfectly innocent trade, were seized under one pretext or another by the prize-hungry British or French navies, or by the swarms of privateers and even unlicensed pirates that infested the Caribbean from bases in St. Domingo and elsewhere. Their only recourse, in most cases, was to appeal to the government to add their case to the list of complaints for which reparations would eventually be sought.
Neutrality, in short, was a headache for the Washington administration to maintain and implement. Still, and in spite of the clamor from the political parties to take sides, President Washington doggedly stuck by a policy which kept the nation both out of the war and prosperous. French minister Fauchet summed it up neatly when he said, “It is easier to understand the patience with which the United States puts up with the violations of their neutrality, when one sees the extent of the trade which it allows her to carry.”2
Justice Jay had been sent to London to damp down a superheated political debate that had threatened to lead to war with England, and his mission had mercifully bought almost a year’s time for tempers to cool on that score. But, with the European war raging and American neutrality regularly put to the test by one or another of the belligerents, the respite could only be temporary. Both political parties were poised to exploit the results of the negotiation for their own benefit, and—long before the results of the negotiation were officially known—had begun to put their particular spin on the news.
French minister Fauchet, in spite of his initial optimism concerning the Jay mission, had soon become concerned that the deck was stacked against French interests. Even before Jay left for London, Fauchet reported to Paris that Washington’s cabinet, with the possible exception of Edmund Randolph, were apprehensive about the spread of French revolutionary principles and were leaning toward Britain.3 On the other hand, the people, he said (here he followed Genet’s line of thought), favored France in its struggle against the monarchies, and he hoped to be able broaden support for France among the electorate. Moreover, he advised, the newly appointed American minister in Paris, James Monroe, would be a friendly intermediary and should be cultivated.
What Fauchet did not know was that infighting within the administration had become brutal, and that the pro-British party among the Federalists had tried to undercut Monroe from the beginning of his mission. The enthusiastically republican Monroe, sad to say, made their task all the easier by his ill-considered flattery of the French regime. Reported selectively back to Washington by his opponents, his effusions raised enough questions so that Secretary of State Randolph was required to call him to order for “the extreme glow of some parts of your address.” Monroe, he said, should “cultivate the French Republic with zeal, but without any unnecessary eclat.…”4
By the time the Jay mission reached its climax, the damage had already been done. Monroe had been compromised by his opponents, and he was given very little information about the London negotiation that he could pass on to the French, in spite of his repeated complaints that he needed to brief them. At the same time, Fauchet was also being offered little more than bromides by Randolph. The administration was determined to keep the French in the dark on the progress of negotiation with the British, so as to minimize the chances that they might play a spoiler role. In fact, the administration kept most Americans uninformed as well. But the French resented the treatment, and waited to get back.
The administration’s hesitancy in releasing the details of the treaty, even after the text finally arrived in Philadelphia in early 1795, was not entirely due to political machinations. The fact was that Washington and his colleagues did not know exactly what to do with the misbegotten text that Justice Jay had brought home. Jay, in short, had achieved only a few of his negotiating objectives. He had, it is true, gained peace with Britain, and with it a British promise to withdraw from the northwestern forts, the establishment of joint commissions to settle border claims and pre-revolutionary debts, and some trade concessions. But he had obtained no satisfaction on American shipping rights as neutrals, on impressments, on claims for slaves removed by the British, or on other demands dear to both the maritime and farming interests. Many Americans were unhappy with the terms, and thought the treaty a sellout. The treaty had another serious flaw, since ratification would in practice—even if not in explicit language—deprive France of the relative privileges it had enjoyed under its 1778 treaty.
The treaty created a firestorm of controversy and invective. The Republicans attacked it as a sellout of American interests, a capitulation to the British, and an insult to the French alliance, while Hamilton led the Federalists in an equally spirited defense. President Washington, trying to remain above all this partisan fury, had serious problems with the treaty, which he saw as generally unsatisfactory. He delayed advising the Senate on ratification because, quite simply, he was unsure what to do. Balanced against the text’s lack of merit, however, was the certainty that failure to ratify would expose the country once again to instability and war fever.
The Senate finally convened in June. A long and stormy debate ensued, punctuated with insinuations that the French minister had attempted to bribe some of the lawmakers to block ratification. If he had tried, he was unsuccessful. The votes were there to ratify the treaty, but only after certain changes were made in the articles on trade with the British West Indies. The Republicans refused to admit defeat, even after ratification was approved in the Senate, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block the treaty in the House of Representatives by withholding funds for its execution. In July, almost a year after it was signed, the president had not yet moved to exchange the articles of ratification, and the treaty was still not in force.
It would take a bit of skullduggery to assure ratification. The British obligingly supplied the mechanism, in the form of intercepted copies of correspondence between Fauchet and Secretary of State Randolph. As Randolph was the lone holdout in the president’s cabinet arguing against immediate ratification, the British envoy in Washington knew what to do with his windfall. He passed the purloined file to the leading Federalist in the cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott. Although much of the correspondence was dated, and all of it was ambiguous, there was still enough in it to make a case—however weak—that Randolph had conspired with Fauchet, and perhaps had even solicited a bribe. Wolcott seized the opportunity with relish, writing dramatically to his mentor, Hamilton, that “one month will determine the future of our country.… I shall take immediate measures with two of my colleagues, this very day—they are firm and honest men. We will, if possible, to use a French phrase, save our country.”5
Walcott consulted with his even more pro-treaty colleague Timothy Pickering, the new secretary of war. They decided to show the intercepted communications to the president, hoping thereby to undercut Randolph and discredit his reservations about the treaty. Washington reacted exactly as Wolcott and Pickering wished; he began to question Randolph’s previous advice, and even his probity. When Washington confronted his secretary of state with the evidence, Randolph—protesting his innocence but unable to refute the charges in the rush of events and without further evidence—resigned. The Federalists had won; there were no Republicans left in the cabinet. Soon after, the trick played out: Washington agreed to ratify the treaty.
The treaty debate had been wrenching and polarizing, in an already highly partisan atmosphere. Few were fully happy with the result. But a bad treaty, and peace with Great Britain, was seen as preferable to war. Inevitably, it was recognized, France would find fault with this American move toward its English enemy. But Paris had been struggling with the aftermath of the Terror and seemed, at the time, to be less of a threat. How strongly it would react, and what it would demand in return, remained to be seen.
Toussaint’s victories over the Spanish and British occupiers had made him the colony’s most successful general, and defender of the mother country’s interests in St. Domingo. Toussaint, a small, wiry, and seemingly unimposing figure, had nonetheless begun to dominate the political as well as the military scene by his determination, sleepless energy, and skill at out thinking his opponents. General Laveaux, who had recognized his talents early, encouraged him to operate independently and build up the black army. Indeed, as news of the Spanish cession of Santo Domingo began to percolate through the island, more and more of the insurgents who had originally sided with the Spanish came over to Toussaint, who had adopted the highly symbolic surname of Louverture,6 reputedly because of his ability to seize every available opening for success. Even though Biassou and Jean François continued to fight for another year, their relevance to the situation disappeared, and their eventual exile was an anticlimax.
Toussaint and Laveaux, in the meantime, kept up such pressure on the British that, by late summer of 1795, they were left holding little more than a string of coastal towns: Port au Prince, St. Marc, Jérémie, and Môle St. Nicolas. And even in their reduced enclaves, they were threatened by disease as well as by periodic plots hatched by the blacks, unhappy as they were at the reinstitution of slavery. The black army, as Sonthonax had foreseen in abolishing slavery, had become the fist of the revolution in France’s prize colony.
Toussaint’s position was solidified as the result of a serious miscalculation by the mulattos. Joseph Villate, the leader of the mulattos in Cap François, had come to feel that his supporters’ position was threatened by the growing accord between Toussaint and Laveaux. Apparently egged on by André Rigaud from his redoubt in the south, Villate attempted a coup. In March of 1796, he and his followers rose to arms and arrested General Laveaux. But the crisis blew over as quickly as it had arisen, thanks to the forceful action of Toussaint, who issued an ultimatum. Either Laveaux would be released, he threatened, or the black armies would be unleashed once again upon the city. Villate’s rebellion rapidly collapsed, and in fact backfired; the mulattos were finished as a political force outside of Rigaud’s enclave. A grateful General Laveaux returned to his office a free man, and soon after formalized what was already evident: he appointed Toussaint lieutenant governor of the island.
A few months later, Commissioner Sonthonax reappeared on the island with still another group of commissioners from France. Somewhat surprisingly, he had been fully exonerated by the new and more conservative rulers in Paris, who had been convinced by his vigorous attacks on his accusers. The planters, he had charged, were reactionary “aristocrats of the skin,” and his radical measure had been necessary to save the revolution on the island. Sonthonax’s return was a joyous affair for the ex-slaves who, two years earlier, had been freed by his abolition decree. Riding this tide of popular acclaim, he tried to regain his leadership position by launching an investigation into the Villate rebellion, using it to turn sentiment against the mulattos. The effort was botched, however, and only succeeded in sparking more massacres in the south and strengthening Rigaud in his mulatto-governed area. The audacious young commissioner was frustrated. He no longer had any good cards to play. The military campaign against the British had taken the spotlight away from his political maneuverings, and Toussaint had come to rival him in the affection of the black islanders. The two leaders were bound to clash.
In this awkward situation, Toussaint proved to be a better politician than Sonthonax. One of the pieces of news that Sonthonax had brought back from France was that the new national legislature, the Council of Five Hundred, wanted to have two representatives from St. Domingue on its rolls. Toussaint, in short order, manipulated the elections that were held to fill those two posts, and saw to it that Laveaux and Sonthonax—neither of whom had actually requested the honor—were chosen. Laveaux, it turned out, was ready to go. He saw, correctly, that the military situation had improved markedly and that Toussaint was fully capable of prosecuting the remaining campaigns against the British successfully. He was happy at the opportunity to go home, and did so. Sonthonax, however, did not.
Sonthonax and Toussaint, beyond their rivalry for power, differed on many of the issues facing the colony. Both were adept at manipulation, but Sonthonax was much more ready to espouse dramatic and confrontational actions. Both wished to establish a system of contractual labor to replace the slave system, for example, but Toussaint was prepared to allow the return of some of the colony’s old plantation managers and even owners, in the interests of productivity. Sonthonax opposed, arguing that anybody who had owned slaves could not be trusted, and should be driven away or eliminated. Similarly, Toussaint was prepared to make use of the American traders who supplied the colony, both for the goods they brought and for the external political support they might muster. Sonthonax, to the contrary, considered the Americans—who were, of course, also supplying the British—to be opportunists who had no claim to protection and could be taken advantage of wherever possible. In consequence, he commissioned privateers freely, and in late 1796 authorized them to seize any American ships trading with British ports and to confiscate the cargoes. Soon, a rash of near-piratical attacks on American ships began to discourage the flow of vital American supplies to the colony. Eventually, this reckless policy would lead to a serious problem with the United States.
Over time, Toussaint wore Sonthonax down. Sonthonax and his fellow commissioners had only a short, eighteen-month mandate. He had achieved very little, and had seen his field of maneuver on the island, as well as his popularity, dwindle. After the departure of General Laveaux, Toussaint controlled most of the levers of power. Moreover, the increasingly conservative government in Paris was beginning to criticize Sonthonax, and his political back was no longer secure. In the summer of 1797, he finally agreed to return to France and take up his seat in the Council of Five Hundred.
Sonthonax’s departure left Toussaint, for the moment, as the leading French official on the island. Rigaud, Sonthonax’s choice as deputy in the south, was nominally Toussaint’s co-equal, but his actual writ only ran to the borders of his enclave. The remaining commissioners were nonentities, their mandate about to expire. The British were frozen in their coastal towns, the Spanish driven back into Santo Domingo (and in power there only until someone chose to take it over in the name of France). Throughout the rest of the island, Toussaint was the de facto ruler. The little coachman from Breda plantation had come a long way.
Unfortunately for St. Domingo, it was out of step with the mother country. The colony’s bloody history since 1790 had provided it at least with one distinction: it had come to exemplify the victory of revolutionary ideals, the Rights of Man, and abolition. But in mainland France, the times had changed, and the government had begun to turn away from revolution.
The end of the Terror had ushered in the Thermidorian response, a period of reconsolidation and even reaction. The surviving Girondists were readmitted to the assembly, the Jacobin clubs and the Paris Commune were stripped of power, and the business interests that had been silenced during the Terror began to regain their voice as the government struggled to resolve its financial crisis. A new constitution (the revolution’s third) produced not only the new legislature or Council of Five Hundred, but a new hydra-headed executive called the Directory.
By autumn of 1795, all internal insurrections had been put down, the domestic situation was stable, and the Directory, brimming with confidence, decided to take the offensive in the European war. Armies were sent into the Rhineland, and the young and ambitious general who had restored order in Paris with his “whiff of grapeshot,” Napoleon Bonaparte, was sent to drive the Austrians out of Italy.
It was not long before the Directory’s new and more assertive stance had an impact on its relations with the United States, as well as with the troubled St. Domingo colony.
The French had been watching the debate over the Jay treaty with great interest and no little exasperation, fueled by Fauchet’s bitter reporting from Philadelphia. Fauchet had voiced numerous complaints about America’s neutrality policy, which, he claimed, violated France’s treaty rights in a number of ways: not allowing French privateers to bring prizes in for adjudication, refusing to give French consuls jurisdiction over the French community in the United States, preventing French consuls from arresting French deserters, and more. But most of all Fauchet accused the administration of insincerity toward France in its handling of the Jay treaty negotiations. As he saw it, both he and Monroe in Paris were being deliberately kept in the dark, and President Washington and the pro-treaty, pro-British group had in effect decided not to listen to France’s views: “Everything proves, in fact, that hatred as much as the consciousness of weakness guided the American administration’s conduct toward us. General Washington ceased to view our republic with a fair eye as soon as he saw Lafayette and the King struck.… All the individuals who composed his council, excepting Mr. Jefferson, all who had the right by their reputations and former services to influence his conduct through their correspondence, all were united against us and strengthened him in his hostile intentions.… Mr. Hamilton was the soul of this enmity.”7
The Directory had, as a first step, decided to replace Fauchet with a still more assertive envoy, Pierre-Auguste Adet. Adet arrived in June 1795, just as the Senate was getting into the treaty ratification debate, and immediately tried to block approval though some energetic, controversial, and ultimately unsuccessful lobbying. His introduction to America was further embittered by a controversy surrounding Fauchet’s departure. One of the British warships that constantly patrolled the American coasts had intercepted a packet boat, in American waters, on which the departing French minister had been traveling a few days earlier. Since the British had clearly acted with good intelligence, and with the obvious intent of seizing Fauchet and his official papers, Adet angrily accused the administration of virtual complicity in this infringement of American neutrality.
It was not, all in all, a good beginning to Adet’s mission.
In Paris, Monroe, who sincerely wanted to stop the decline in Franco-American relations, was facing increasing difficulties. The French told Monroe that they considered ratification of the Jay Treaty in late 1795 to have effectively annulled the 1778 Franco-American treaty of alliance, and that they intended to send a special mission to Philadelphia to remonstrate with the U.S. government. Monroe, realizing that such a mission would most likely simply add to the anti-French sentiment at home, was able to convince the French to drop the idea. However, he had no arguments to quiet French anger over the treaty, and could only offer bland assurances that the treaty would not harm their interests.8
Monroe, in fact, was being set up to fail by his own superiors in the cabinet, now solidly Federalist. The arch-Federalist Pickering, after having contributed to the downfall of Randolph, had surprisingly replaced him as secretary of state. Knowing he had been Washington’s seventh choice, he had at first shown appropriate humility by questioning his qualifications for the job.9 But the ambitious Pickering did not hold out for long. A man of Manichean views and strong partisanship, he would use the powers of his new job for political purposes, and one of his first objectives was to destroy the influence of the Republican and pro-French Monroe. It was not hard to prejudice Washington against Monroe; after all, even Randolph had been obliged to curb the envoy’s republican zeal. Pickering, once in office, was able to get the president’s approval for additional criticisms of Monroe’s job performance, including a blistering attack in mid-June.10
The ammunition with which to finish off Monroe came, interestingly enough, from St. Domingo. Hamilton wrote to President Washington in late June 1796 with a report that Sonthonax had authorized the confiscation of any American cargoes that could be intercepted by the privateers which swarmed around the island. Although the report turned out to be inaccurate, it nonetheless gave Hamilton grounds to suggest that the fault lay in Paris, where, as he archly put it, “the United States should have some faithful organ near the French Government to explain their real views and to ascertain those of the French.”11 The president, his mind already poisoned against Monroe, took the bait. He immediately asked Pickering for his advice, and the secretary—whether in collusion with Hamilton on this or not—had no trouble in recommending that Monroe be replaced. Completing the transaction took weeks more, but by September Pickering had the satisfaction of writing the following brutal notification to Monroe: “General Pinckney will be the bearer of this letter. He is to succeed you as the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States with the French republic.”12
Monroe left Paris in late 1796, in a rage at what he saw as the betrayal of his mission by the Federalists. With Minister Adet in Philadelphia also reproaching the Federalist administration to his own government, there were no more buffers in the way of a breakdown of Franco-American relations.
The Directory, in any case, was not that interested in smoothing over the situation. With a growing sense of confidence and assertiveness, inspired in part by Napoleon’s stunning victories in Italy, it had determined to take a new look at its relations with the United States, and to counter British successes across the Atlantic. Strengthening the American alliance had proven to be beyond France’s reach, and the United States had instead made its peace with Britain. Since the Jay treaty had effectively removed those few wartime advantages that France had enjoyed in America, the French concluded, it was time to punish the Americans for their abandonment of the 1778 alliance, and to pressure them into a more pro-French, or at least less pro-British, policy.
The Directory decided early in 1797 to strike back by hitting at American shipping, allied as that activity was with Federalist interests. American ships were, it was true, carrying much of France’s trade—a situation that rankled national pride but was a necessary evil in wartime. But they were also helping Britain’s war effort, and on an even larger scale. The Directory’s objective, then, was to make American trade with Britain and its colonies more expensive. It issued a decree to the effect that all American ships trading with the British West Indies, whether carrying contraband or not, would be subject to seizure.
By the middle of the year, hundreds of American ships had been taken in, trade with the West Indies was disrupted, and insurance rates were skyrocketing. When Sonthonax published still more punitive rules in November, the situation reached crisis proportions. The waters of St. Domingo, particularly in the Bight of Leogane, swarmed with armed gunboats, closer to pirates than privateers. They took shelter in the many creeks and inlets of the coast, coming out to overpower merchantmen with their large cannons and crew, and few ships once seized were not considered fair prizes.
A few merchants, even those who had been in the trade for years, found it too dangerous: “The risks to which our flag is exposed in navigating your waters, and the insults etc. we receive daily from the pirates (a more suitable term than that of armed vessels) leaves me to give up for a time shipments to the islands,” wrote one longtime trader to his agent in Cap François.13 However, most American skippers wanted to continue the trade in spite of its risks. Demand for imported foodstuffs and war material remained high, while highly remunerative return cargoes were still available in spite of the damage caused by years of war and the partial collapse of the plantation system. Both groups, of course, demanded that their government find some way to ease the French “depredations.” In St. Domingo and other parts of the West Indies, then, the Directory’s pressure seemed to be working.
The Directory had also decided to send the Americans another strong message of displeasure by refusing to receive the new American minister, Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina, when he arrived in late 1796. It was not a smart move. Pinckney, a cordial and moderate Federalist who had declined the post of secretary of state, was well respected in Philadelphia and would have been a fine envoy. The French may have made their point, but at a high cost: the action was taken as an insult in America.
Another source of potential leverage for the Directory was the 1796 American presidential elections. But however much the French may have preferred to see Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson, or even Aaron Burr, replace the departing President Washington, they steered clear of overt interference. The active and pugnacious Adet was nonetheless widely accused of doing so, as when, for example, shortly before the elections, he issued a public letter to Secretary Pickering in which he scathingly listed French complaints against United States policy. He also “suspended” the functions of the French mission, as if preparing for war. But even if he had had the intent of scaring the electors into a more pro-French policy, it did not work. John Adams emerged as the narrow but clear winner for the presidency, and the Federalists were still in power.
Adet was scornful about the new president. At the same time, he was hopeful, reporting that Adams’s “inflexible vanity, absolute self-confidence, and headstrong character will never permit him to listen to or follow the advice of anyone, much less that of Alexander Hamilton, whom he detests.” Adams, he commented accurately, was not necessarily pro-British. Nor, he continued, could Jefferson be truly considered pro-French, being, “I repeat, an American, and as such cannot sincerely be our friend. An American is the enemy of all Europeans.”14
The Directory decided that it would be useful, tactically at least, to extend a small olive branch to the new administration. Early in 1797 it backed off a bit from its hurtful shipping policy. A new decree limited seizures somewhat by giving French vessels the right to confiscate only enemy cargo on neutral ships. Stringent new documentation requirements, and a tendency to interpret “enemy cargo” liberally, meant however that the new rule made little real change in French harassment of American shipping.
The Directory’s long-range worry was that the Jay treaty, and continuation of the Federalists in power, might mean eventual alliance with Britain. They needed some point of strategic pressure. As a way of both neutralizing America’s growing importance and thwarting possible British expansion, the idea of regaining possession of the Louisiana colony began to look attractive. Fauchet, Adet, and others had been arguing for some time that France should look to Louisiana to cement its place in the Americas, hem in the United States, and feed its West Indies colonies. Fauchet had contended strongly that France could, by possessing Louisiana, supply its West Indies colonies itself and break the American trade “monopoly.” He was especially motivated to make this argument after Jefferson had pointed out, cynically but accurately, that the war “hands over the French colonies to us; France enjoys the sovereignty and we the profit.”15
The French government was indeed interested in regaining Louisiana from Spain, but it was not a priority. They had, in fact, tried to get it back in the negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Basle, but had had to settle for Spanish Santo Domingo. In the following year, the Spanish had even offered to sell Louisiana, but the Directory had considered the price too high. But in 1797 the arguments for regaining the colony found an influential new spokesman.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Perigord, ci-devant bishop of Autun, had just been made minister of foreign affairs. Obliged to leave France during the Terror because of his aristocratic background, the brilliant but slippery Talleyrand had found exile in England and then the United States. During his two years as a luminary of the French colony in Philadelphia, Talleyrand had tried to recoup his fortunes through trading in commodities and speculating in land, and had become friendly with leading politicians, including Hamilton. He also developed during his stay some lasting and not necessarily friendly attitudes toward America. First of these was his conviction that Americans had a natural affinity for the British, and that they could never be counted on as friends of France. Second was his belief, shared by Fauchet and Adet, that France should regain Louisiana as a counterweight to the United States. Permitted to return to France after the end of the Terror, Talleyrand had published a long article on that subject, successfully drawing attention both to himself and to the project. Now, as minister, he was in a position to push the idea forward.
France’s tough new line had not won it friends in America, but it had drawn attention. The number of American ships lost to French cruisers, and particularly the privateers operating out of St. Domingo and Guadeloupe, continued to mount, and with it the need for some government response. America’s leaders, however, were not of one mind as to how to deal with this nominally friendly nation, which had such important strategic and commercial ties to the United States.
The first response was noncontroversial. Concerned over the plight of the many American seamen who had been stranded in St. Domingo after confiscation of their ships, Washington appointed consular officials to the island to protect American interests, headed by Jacob Mayer for Cap François. Minister Adet at first objected to this American presence in France’s troubled colony, but in the end acquiesced, recognizing the need for someone to help sort out the complications of the war being waged on neutral commerce.
President Washington, typically, had continued a cautious path, and in his last message to Congress before retiring he had limited himself to urging that consideration be given to strengthening the country’s defenses by rebuilding the neglected navy.
It took French rejection of Pinckney’s credentials to light the tinder. Yet, even as popular indignation grew over this French insult to American pride, President Adams—new on the job, but not to public controversy—remained cautious. He did not want bad relations with France and was aware that, for all the clamor about French depredations, the British had seized as many American ships, if not more.16
Adams however had made the unfortunate mistake of keeping Washington’s old cabinet (which now included still another henchman of Hamilton, Secretary of War James McHenry). As a result, he was getting uniformly anti-French views. His cabinet colleagues all represented the moneyed and commercial interests of the port cities, and were “men of order,” while Pickering was, from the beginning, the leader of a faction that was willing to go to war. The secretary of state, self-righteous and intolerant, was in fact so outspoken that Hamilton not only preferred to do his backstage work with the calmer Wolcott but found it necessary on occasion to advise that Pickering show “steady resolution rather than feeling.”17
Adams was—as Adet had predicted—a man who would follow his own inclination, not his cabinet’s fulminations. He favored a measured response to the Directory’s insult. The United States, he proposed, should send a mission to replace Pinckney, with instructions to secure a renewal of the 1778 treaty. He suggested that Madison be the leader. His cabinet, however, balked at the nomination of a Republican, and one who had opposed the Jay treaty at that. In the end, they would agree only on a delegation of Federalists: Pinckney once again, John Marshall from Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, whom Pickering tried to oppose as an inconsistent loyalist, but who was chosen anyway because he was an old friend of the president’s. The president got Congress’s approval in May, balancing this peaceful gesture toward France with the recommendation that the country begin at the same time to strengthen its defenses, just in case hostilities became necessary.
The president’s overture failed. In Paris, the American commissioners were received that autumn by a government brimming with confidence after its recent victories in the Rhineland and Italy. The commissioners were ignored, slighted, and, in the end, told that they could only begin the negotiations with Minister Talleyrand if they agreed to finance a war loan, including a substantial bribe to the minister himself. In what became known as the XYZ Affair, the commissioners reported home their anger, their defiance in face of the French demands, and their failure. Marshall and Pinckney returned home in a huff, but not before leaking their bad news to prepare public opinion. Gerry, on the other hand, stayed on in Europe under a very liberal interpretation of his instructions, to see if there was any way he could pick up the pieces from the fiasco.
News of the new French insult to young America’s pride gave the war hawks the opportunity they had been seeking. When President Adams laid the full accounts of the humiliating non-negotiation before Congress in April of 1798, public opinion swung sharply in favor of war. Jefferson and the remaining friends of France were thrown on the defensive, and even though they suspected that the news was being deliberately manipulated, they recognized that public opinion had taken a major turn. As Jefferson later wrote to Gerry, “The people, in many places, gave loose to the expressions of their warm indignation, & of their honest preference of war to dishonor. The fever was long & successfully kept up, and in the meantime, war measures as ardently crowded.”18
War with France, it seemed, was inevitable.