Political parties, therefore, are peculiarly dependent upon public opinion. They are creatures of sentiment. They possess no power save that of persuasion as to the proper lines of conducting the administration. Choosing positions on great questions largely from previous policy, they must appeal to the people for justification and support. They live by opposition. No party can exist alone. In their modern aspect, political parties were unknown in Revolutionary days. Whig and Tory were simply reflections from the parties in England supporting or opposing the Administration. There were divisions among men, largely of a social nature; "court and country" parties, as John Adams called them in reminiscence. The royal governor, surrounded by his place-men and followers, residing in the city and opposed by the rural element, represented the monarch. The opposition became the patriotic party of the Revolution. After a decade, the patriots themselves divided into Federalists and Anti-Federalists upon the advisability of changing from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. These divisions were not political parties in the modern sense. Neither developed any policy of administration or offered any candidate for office at the time.
When the Constitution was finally adopted, the Anti-Federalists ceased their opposition. Since the impetus of adopting the new Government was sufficient to place its supporters in power, its enemies held off and awaited the day of failure when they should have the pleasure of saying, "I told you so." In a few instances they made a demonstration, as when Patrick Henry, according to Madison's belief, had Virginia redistricted in order to keep him out of the Senate. After the new venture had passed beyond the experimental stage under the Federalist party, the name "Anti-Federalist" gradually passed from use. As policies of administration were developed, an opposition was bound to be formed, and thus modern political parties were born. A preliminary line-up was caused by Hamilton's measure for a government bank; but the real cleavage was produced by opposing opinions concerning the side which the United States should take in the war between France and England.
If Great Britain, toward whom the animosity of the recent war was still strong, had not been a monarchy, or if the revolution which changed our Revolutionary benefactress, France, into a republic, had happened in England, or if the French Revolution had not so closely followed in form the change in the United States from monarchy to republicanism, party animosity in America would have been checked instead of advanced by the Old World contest. The same end might have been reached if John Adams had been sent as Minister to France and Thomas Jefferson to England. But Britain being the token of centralisation, the general tendency of the United States toward unionism seemed to Jefferson to be the certain road to monarchism. This he conceived to be the ultimate aim of Hamilton, born in the British West Indies, and Adams, who had returned from Britain with his obnoxious theory that the "well-born" ought to rule the remainder of the people.
The attempt of France, on the contrary, to secure the rights of man, with which Jefferson had grown familiar during his residence in that country, appealed to him both from a national and a personal standpoint. "I still hope," he said in one of those periods of French excess which bade fair to ruin the whole, "that the French Revolution will issue happily. I feel that the permanence of our own leans in some degree on that, and that a failure there would be a powerful argument to prove that there must be a failure here." "A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious," said Hamilton, in giving a Cabinet opinion that the treaty made with France in 1778 had been annulled by the abrogation of the monarchy and the execution of Louis XVI. "But if sullied by crimes and extravagance it loses respectability. It appears, thus far, too probable that the pending Revolution in France has sustained some serious blemishes." In another place he voiced the sentiments of the anti-French by saying that thus far no proof had come to light sufficient to establish a belief that the execution of the King was an act of national justice. But the French sympathisers thought otherwise. "If he was a traitor he ought to be punished as well as another man," wrote Madison to Jefferson, quoting the sentiment among the plain people of Virginia.
Public sentiment in the United States was thus crystallising into political parties on the policy to be pursued toward the new French Republic. One faction was of the opinion that the people of the United States were bound to aid the new sister not only by the sympathy of a common struggle for liberty, but by the still stronger bonds of gratitude for assistance in gaining their own freedom. They considered the alliance of 1778, which France had signed at the expense of a war with England, as still binding upon the United States. It pledged the United States to guarantee France in the possession of her West Indies, to admit her ships with prizes to American ports, to keep out those of the enemy, and to prohibit the enemy from using American ports to fit out privateers. From this last provision, some friends of France deduced the opinion that it tacitly gave her permission to fit out privateers by denying the right to her enemies.
Hamilton and others, who thought the French movement, begun for the sake of liberty, was deteriorating into a frenzied propaganda destructive of rights and property, insisted that the change of government in France had abrogated all claims which the alliance gave to monarchical France; that, even if this were not so, the United States was pledged to aid her only in a defensive war, and this war with England was entirely offensive on her part; that to give aid to the maddened revolutionists was to identify ourselves irrevocably with destructive fanatics, bloody regicides, and wild propagandists. These zealots, they said, had already pledged themselves to treat as enemies any people "who, refusing or renouncing liberty and equality, are desirous of preserving their prince or privileged castes, or of entering into an accommodation with them." Our forefathers had been satisfied with securing liberty for themselves without trying to impose it on all other nations. It was this proselyting spirit which caused their war against Britain. Hence, the anti-French element allied itself with England. That nation was rapidly being forced into a position where she alone would stand between French fanaticism and the disruption of all society. These pro-British were, in the eyes of the French sympathisers, base ingrates, as culpable as a nation would have been who sided with Great Britain during the Revolutionary War.
Divided into these hostile factions during this summer of 1792, the United States reached the first parting of the ways upon her foreign policy. Hitherto she had been of small moment to European nations, touching them only on boundary questions connected with the New World. But in the mighty struggle between one people bursting the bands of centuries of repression and monarchical rule, and another nation in authority who saw prerogative, property, and person in danger from the deluge, the United States would become important as a place for fitting out and as a base of food-supply. Belligerents in the heat of war are not inclined to be over-regardful of the rights of non-combatants. To maintain a strict neutrality had been well-nigh impossible in the history of European nations. In nearly every war of the past, kingdom after kingdom had become involved. The "armed neutrality," headed by Russia during the American Revolutionary War, was formed by non-maritime nations ostensibly to protect their commerce from the belligerents; but in reality to gather up the fragments of trade as they were scattered by the warring sea powers.
The United States was fortunately located for announcing and maintaining a new idea of neutrality, a nationality based on individual development through peaceful methods. Time alone was needed in their isolated geographical condition to develop an industrial strength more efficient in Europe than an armed force at that time As Washington said, just before issuing a proclamation warning all citizens of the United States neither to aid nor to carry contraband goods to either belligerent: "I believe it is the sincere wish of America to have nothing to do with the political intrigues or the squabbles of European nations; but, on the contrary, to exchange commodities and live in peace and amity with all the inhabitants of the earth." To another he made the prediction that "if we are permitted to improve without interruption the great advantages which nature and circumstances have placed within our reach, many years will not revolve before we may be ranked, not only among the most respectable, but among the happiest people on this globe." Notwithstanding the demands of the French sympathisers that the United States should anticipate the payments due on the French debt, should allow French privateers to be fitted out in American ports and prizes to be brought in and sold, and regardless of the insolent demands of the French Minister, Genet, and the haughty tone of the Republic he represented, President Washington issued the proclamation, April 22, 1793, warning the citizens of the United States to take no part in the war. He was aided in maintaining this neutrality by the continued trespass of each belligerent on American rights. If either had suddenly shown any regard for the neutral position of the young American Republic, sentiment would have demanded immediate war upon the other. But when England tried to cut off the supplies which France was receiving from America, France adopted similar tactics toward England. Each accused the other of instituting these war measures. Between the two millstones, American commerce bade fair to be ground to powder. Britain, in order to recruit her navy, revived her practice of retaking her seamen who had deserted, wherever they might be found. She took a large number of men from American vessels, some of whom claimed to be American citizens instead of British deserters. This system of impressment she continued until it resulted in the War of 1812. Her refusal to yield possession of the forts on the American side of the boundary line remained as an additional grievance.
So strong was the hostile feeling toward England, that if the French revolutionists had not plunged into such excesses as to compel their most ardent admirers to pause, the firm hand of Washington could scarcely have prevented a declaration of war against Britain instead of the temporary embargo which was adopted. As it was, a non-intercourse measure was killed in the Senate only by the deciding vote of Vice-President Adams. A war at this time, when the new Government had scarcely gotten upon its feet, when it was still obliged to borrow money from Holland to meet its expenses, when its borders were harassed by hostile savages and its forts occupied by the enemy, would have been ruinous if not suicidal. A foreign war would have been fatal to the adopted policy of a disinterested neutrality, not dependent upon force, and to an uninterrupted home development which was to continue for over a century. Neither the clamour nor defamation of the Democratic clubs, nor the insinuations of the opposition press that the President was biassed toward a monarchy because he wished eventually to transform his office into a kingship, could drive the cool Washington from his stand of neutrality. It was such self-control which drew from England's Minister, Canning, many years after, the tribute: "If I wished for a guide in a system of neutrality, I should take that laid down by America in the days of the presidency of Washington and the secretaryship of Jefferson."
Jefferson was worn out by the onerous duties of his office during this period of dominant foreign politics. He was harassed by constant complaints of impressments and seizures. He was placed in an unfortunate position by the presumptions of Genet. Distressed by the license into which liberty in France was plunging he received small comfort in contemplating the British monarchical tendency in America. He was greatly disappointed because Washington, whom he had pronounced at first "purely and zealously republican," had been so frequently influenced by Hamilton and Knox in the Cabinet, by John Adams in the Senate, and by John Jay in the Supreme Court. These were all Northern men and all in favour of effective government. Most statesmen cling more closely to the vessel during a time of party danger, but Jefferson chose to withdraw, believing his continuance in office useless, and trusting, as he said, that the people could not be permanently led away from the true principles of government. After his withdrawal, this monarchical tendency seemed to him to have no check. The President, instead of advising war upon Great Britain both to avenge her insults upon us and to aid the French Republic, sent John Jay to England as a special envoy to try to secure some concessions from her. Jay eventually sent home a treaty, which provided for the evacuation of the Western forts, for a commission to consider payment for the slaves carried away upon the evacuation of New York, and for the withdrawal of the discriminating tax on American shipping; but it purchased commercial entrance to the British West Indies at the expense of Southern commodities. Above all, it made no mention of impressment, of the search of American vessels, and the hindrance of their neutral trade.