Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

He immediately gathered his Cabinet about him for a momentous decision. Genêt, young, dashing, audacious, had arrived in Charleston and would soon present his credentials as the Minister of the French Republic. He might even refer to the treaty in which we had pledged ourselves to guarantee the French possessions in the West Indies, and to throw open the ports of America to the prizes of the privateers of our ally while closing them to her enemies. It was a treaty we had been delighted to get, and now it rose to plague us—but there it was. Worse still, the people in the streets understood the nature of the pledge.

It was not Hamilton’s way to concede to Jefferson a primacy where foreign relations were involved, and he had not been inactive while awaiting the return of Washington. Jay and King had been consulted particularly as to the receiving of Genêt. Neither could find any pretext for refusing to receive him; both thought he should be received with qualifications. Uppermost in the minds of all three was the treaty—the necessity of evading its obligations.[769] Having decided on the policy of Jefferson’s department, Hamilton took no chances, and prepared the list of questions to be submitted to the Cabinet, which Washington copied in his own handwriting, but Jefferson was not deceived as to the authorship.[770] There were no illusions on Jefferson’s part as to his position that April day in the room in the Morris house. There was Hamilton, eager, not a little domineering, who had prepared Washington’s questions on which the Secretary of State had not been consulted; and Knox, big, pudgy, a bit flamboyant, complacent, and proud of his utter subserviency to Hamilton; and Randolph, with a legalistic mind capable of refining away any position he might take.

Should Genêt be received?

Yes, said Hamilton, with qualifications. Yes, said Jefferson, unqualifiedly. Yes, with qualifications, said Knox, dutifully echoing Hamilton, and, says Jefferson, ‘acknowledging at the same time, like the fool he is, that he knew nothing about it.’[771] Randolph agreed with Jefferson.

Let him be received, said Hamilton, with the distinct understanding that we must reserve for future consideration the binding force of the treaties. There was no proof that Louis had been guilty, and evidence that the republicans in France had actually premeditated a plan to get rid of monarchical power.[772] There was no proof that the execution was an act of national justice, and all the courts in Europe held a different view.[773] In truth, ‘almost all Europe ... seems likely to be armed ... with the intention of restoring ... the royalty in the successor of the deceased monarch.’[774] If our treaty obligations proved disadvantageous, we should have the right to renounce them.[775] Respect the right of a nation to change its form of government? Yes. Receive its ambassador? Yes. But to throw our weight into the scale for the new republic might be lacking ‘in national delicacy and decorum.’[776] As to our obligations under the treaty, there were none, for France was waging an offensive war. The coalition of the monarchs to crush the republic forced the war? Perhaps—but France made the first formal declaration of hostilities.[777]

Jefferson approached the question from a diametrically opposite point of view. ‘The reception of the Minister at all,’ he said, ‘is an acknowledgment of the legitimacy of their government; and if the qualifications meditated are to deny that legitimacy, it will be a curious compound which is to deny and admit the same thing.’ The abrogation of the treaties? ‘I consider the people who constitute a society as the source of all authority in that nation,’ he said: ‘as free to transact their common concerns by any agents they think proper; to change these agents individually, or the organization of them in form or function whenever they please; that all the acts done by these agents under the authority of the nation, are obligatory to them and inure to their use, and can in no wise be annulled or affected by any change in the form of government.... Consequently the treaties between the United States and France were not treaties between the United States and Louis Capet, but between the two nations of America and France; and the nations remaining in existence, though both of them have since changed their forms of government, the treaties are not annulled by these changes.’[778] All the Cabinet agreed to a proclamation forbidding Americans from participating in the war, to the unqualified reception of Genêt while holding the treaties in abeyance, and to the issuing of a proclamation.

With the appearance of the proclamation, the storm broke.

VI

This had seemed inevitable to Jefferson from the beginning.[779] Madison, then in Virginia, wrote that the proclamation ‘wounds the national honor by seeming to disregard the stipulated duties to France,’ and ‘wounds the popular feeling by a seeming indifference to the cause of liberty.’[780]

The party issue was made. The Hamiltonians were sympathetic toward monarchical France, hostile to revolutionary France, friendly to England; the Jeffersonians were friendly to revolutionary France, hostile to the Bourbons, and unfriendly to the policy of Pitt in England. The heart of the Hamiltonians beat in tune to the martial steps of the Coalition of the Kings marching on the French frontier; that of the Jeffersonians was with the French peasants hurrying to defend their soil and revolution. And the overwhelming sentiment of the Nation was with Jefferson.