When George Washington delivered his Farewell Address in March 1797, the United States was recognized by the world’s powers as a nation. That single fact was, in large part, his greatest accomplishment. In his speech, the outgoing president advised his fellow Americans to avoid “foreign entanglements,” to preserve the financial credit of the nation, and to beware of the dangers of political parties, which might fragment the nation.
Everyone agreed that the advice was good, but the second presidential election, in 1796, had already shown that political parties were dividing the nation. John Adams, a Federalist, was elected with 71 votes in the Electoral College. In those days, the runner-up became vice president, and that was Thomas Jefferson, leader of the Democratic-Republican party, with 68 electoral votes. Thus the president and vice president were of different parties and significantly different philosophies of government. Adams would have been called a conservative in his day, a believer in a strong central government. Jefferson, a liberal, wanted more authority entrusted to states and individuals. That these sharply different views did not tear the country apart was a measure of the essential strength of the new nation; yet its recently won liberty was put to severe tests as the 18th century yielded to the 19th.
Foreign Affairs
During Washington’s second term of office, intense friction developed between Britain and the United States. The British government refused to evacuate the frontier forts in the Old Northwest, despite having agreed to do so in signing the Treaty of Paris. Worse, many Americans were convinced that British traders as well as crown officials were encouraging the Indians to attack settlers. Finally, English naval vessels had begun seizing American merchant ships and impressing American sailors into the British service to fight its war against France. The British also complained that Americans had breached the terms of the Paris treaty by failing to pay pre-Revolutionary debts owed British creditors and by refusing to compensate Loyalists for confiscated property during the Revolution.
Anxious to avert a new war with Britain, Washington commissioned Chief justice John Jay to conclude a treaty, signed on November 19, 1794, to secure the British evacuation of the frontier forts and refer debt and boundary disputes to settlement by joint U.S.-British commissions. This amicable solution greatly alarmed the French, who feared that their former ally, the United States, would now unite with Britain against them. Certainly it was true that most Americans, especially the Federalists, recoiled in horror from the excesses of the French Revolution (1789-99). just a year before the Jay Treaty was concluded, Washington rebuffed the overtures of Edmond Charles Edouard Genet (1763-1834), a French diplomat sent to the United States to secure American aid for France in its war with England. “Citizen Genet” (as French revolutionary etiquette dictated he be addressed) defied Washington by plotting with American privateers to prey on British vessels in U.S. coastal waters. The president warned Genet that he was violating U.S. sovereignty. When Citizen Genet responded with a threat to make a direct appeal to the American people, Washington asked the French government to recall him.
In France, however, a new revolutionary party, the Jacobins, had replaced the Girondists, the party to which Genet belonged. In contrast to the United States, where political parties could “disagree without being disagreeable,” rival factions in revolutionary France settled their differences with the guillotine. The Jacobin government asked Washington to extradite Genet, but the president refused to compel Genet to return to France, whereupon Citizen Gen& chose to become a citizen of the United States.
As Easy as XYZ
The Genet episode, combined with the Jay Treaty, brought Franco-American relations to the verge of war. After the French Directory high-handedly refused to receive U.S. minister Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the new president, Adams, sent a commission consisting of Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry to attempt to heal the breach by concluding a new treaty of commerce. Incredibly, French prime minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838) sent three agents to greet the American commissioners in Paris in October 1797. The agents told the commissioners that before they could even discuss a treaty, the United States would have to loan France $12 million and pay Talleyrand a personal bribe of $250,000.
On April 3, 1798, an indignant President Adams submitted to Congress the correspondence from the commission, which designated the French agents as “X,” “Y” and “Z.” Congress, equally indignant, published the entire portfolio, and the public learned of the “XYZ Affair.” Americans of all political stripes united in outrage, the nation mobilized for war with its erstwhile ally, and, in fact, an undeclared naval war was sporadically fought from 1. 798 to 1800. Fortunately, that conflict was limited, and international tempers cooled as the French Revolution came to an end.
Overreaction
Yet something far more sinister than another war was brewing. In the summer of 1798, in response to the Genet episode, the XYZ Affair, and the escalating war fever, the Federalistdominated Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which included the Naturalization Act (June 18, 1798), raising the residence prerequisite for citizenship from 5 to 14 years; the Alien Act (June 25), authorizing the president to deport all aliens regarded as dangerous; and the Alien Enemies Act (July 6), authorizing the president, in time of war, to arrest, imprison, or deport subjects of an enemy power. Most tyrannical of all, the Sedition Act (July 14) prohibited assembly “with intent to oppose any measure … of the government” and forbade printing, uttering, or publishing anything “false, scandalous, and malicious” against the government. What made the dangerous Alien and Sedition Acts even more insidious in the fledgling democracy was the fact that many of the leading Anti-Federalists were recent refugees from Europe. The acts were aimed directly at neutralizing their power.
In 1798-99, Virginia and Kentucky published resolutions (written by James Madison and Jefferson) opposing the acts as unconstitutional and, therefore, not binding on the states. Jefferson maintained that a state had the right to judge the constitutionality of acts of Congress and to “nullify” any acts that it determined to be unconstitutional. Because to the resolutions, the Alien and Sedition Acts were (for the most part) short-lived.
