Identity Or Interest in the Foreign Policy of the Early Republic?

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Review of International Studies (2000), 26, 599–622 Copyright © British International Studies Association American neutral rights reappraised: identity or interest in the foreign policy of the early Republic?

JAMES SOFKA1

Abstract. This article analyses the early American commitment to maintaining its neutral rights from several theoretical perspectives. Rejecting recent constructivist interpretations as unsubstantiated by the empirical evidence, it concludes that early American leaders largely mirrored traditional eighteenth century mercantilist practices to suit the interests of the United States. In particular, Jefferson’s ‘two-tiered’ approach to the international system was based on astringent calculations of power rather than prevailing notions of ‘republicanism’. This ideology, while manifest in partisan rhetoric, had little measurable impact on the conduct of early American neutral rights policy. By focusing on the relationship of theory and practice in this context, this article offers a case study of the role of norms and ideology in the shaping of foreign policy in a republican state.

In an important and perceptive essay Mlada Bukovansky provides a long-needed theoretical appraisal of early American attempts to secure and promote its neutral rights. Building on a tradition that began with the pioneering work of Louis Sears, Bukovansky explains the nearly obsessive American preoccupation with its neutral status in light of its identity as a republican state and its need to assert legitimizing principles in the international system to distinguish itself from the European Powers. Her thesis that ‘early US interpretations of neutrality were grounded in more general conceptions of, and discourse about the nature of, American republicanism’ contains two powerful arguments that can be expressed as follows: ﬁrst, that neutral rights policy after 1783 was ultimately dictated by norms, and second, that this policy was wholly distinct from European practice, given its uniquely American character.

Constructivist theory and the early American period

The essence of Bukovansky’s argument is the prevailing constructivist theory that ‘state identity shapes interests, which in turn shape policy over time’.2 Hence she concludes that the United States, because of its republican constitutional founda-

1 The author wishes to thank Robert J. Beck for his kind suggestions as well as Michael J. Smith, J.C.A. Stagg, Jeffrey Legro, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. Work on this article was aided by a research fellowship from the International Center for Jefferson Studies and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. I gratefully acknowledge numerous comments and suggestions I received from Jefferson scholars at a presentation of this argument at Monticello in June 1998. 2 Mlada Bukovansky, ‘American Identity and Neutral Rights from Independence to the War of 1812’, International Organization, 51 (1997), p. 210. 599 600 James Sofka tions, expanded prevailing definitions of neutrality law ‘in a more liberal direction’ than was common in eighteenth century commercial doctrines.3 In brief, the constructivist premise seeks to tie the frequently bifurcated spheres of domestic and international politics together by arguing that a state’s normative and ideological culture will, in Audie Klotz’s phrase, ‘reconstitute’ its foreign policy behaviour: identity shapes the perception, and pursuit, of national interests, especially in democracies.4 Moreover, constructivists seek to predict outcomes based on this characterization: if domestic institutions follow pattern X, then foreign policy choices will likely fall within set parameters of Y. While the term ‘constructivism’ first surfaced less than a decade ago, the idea is hardly new: Thucydides employed similar logic to explain Spartan behaviour in his History of the Peloponnesian War, and Fritz Fischer’s claim of German warmongering in 1914 ultimately rested on his conclusion that the militaristic and belligerent character of the Kaiser’s government led it to pursue hegemonic ambitions. Immanuel Kant, perhaps the first modern constructivist theorist, argued in 1795 that if all states had republican constitutions, ‘perpetual peace’ would be ‘guaranteed’.5 Constructivism can have great explanatory power in specific cases: Audie Klotz’s work on the revisal of American South African policy in the 1980s is the most frequently cited example, but the model can also clearly apply to instances such as the foreign policy of Hitler’s Germany, where national interests were clearly defined in accordance with the ideological framework of the regime and led Germany to ‘reconstitute’ the older Bismarck-Stresemann tradition of stability in favour of annexationism. In these cases constructivism cuts the Gordian knot of the old Primat der Innen- or Aussenpolitik question by admirably creating a coherent and unified whole from two distinct parts. To be effective, however, constructivist theory must accomplish two objectives: first, it must accurately identify the norms and ideology characterizing or ‘identifying’ a particular state, and second, it must clearly demonstrate that this ideology caused a shift in the definition of national interests and foreign policy goals. The first task is usually more straightforward than the latter, as governments routinely invoke normative justifications for policy. However, the ideas-to-practice aspect of constructivist theory can be its downfall in other, often less conspicuous, cases. Revolutionary France provides a useful illustration of this phenomenon: its radical consolidation of power internally and its obsessive quest with asserting its unique identity in Europe appear to render it a nearly perfect example of constructivism; yet as two of the ablest students of the period, Jeremy Black and Tim Blanning, have noted, in foreign policy its aims of primacy in Western Europe, antagonism towards Britain and Austria, and an entente with Spain, remained faithful to the ancien regime. As Black notes in a cautionary phrase, ‘though revolutionary emotion altered much of the tone of French policy it had much less effect on its substance and thus the situation after 1792–3 was one of the pursuit by greatly expanded means of aims which were not essentially new’.6

3 Bukovansky, pp. 211, 217, 233. 4 Audie Klotz, ‘Norms Reconstituting Interests: Global Racial Equality and US Sanctions Against South Africa’, International Organization, 49 (1995), pp. 451–78. 5 Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 99–102. 6 T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986); Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in An Age of Revolutions, 1783–1793, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 542. American neutral rights reappraised 601

Similarly, as James Joll reminds us in his critique of Fischer, in 1914 domestic political ideologies were partly but not wholly responsible for the outbreak of war, as even in the case of Wilhelmine Germany the linkage between identity of the regime and its foreign policy behaviour remains indeterminate.7 Constructivism is a useful tool in a multicausal array of explanations for state behaviour, but when invoked in monocausal terms it can become seriously misleading, as the tremendous controversy over the Fischer thesis on the First World War, the impact of the French Revolution on Europe, or the more vexing case of the the motives of Soviet behaviour in the early Cold War—to cite but three examples—demonstrates. These illus- trations suggest that the greatest weakness of constructivism is a tendency to take ideological pronouncements or stated identities at face value and to fail to rigorously measure their claims against actual practice. Rich in international and domestic political complexity, the early American period throws both the pitfalls and promises of constructivism—and its arch-enemy structural realism, which all but ignores domestic politics—into sharp relief. Like Fischer with the July crisis of 1914, Bukovansky explicitly rejects competing interpretations and argues that American conceptions of national identity were ‘constitutive rather than instrumental and principled rather than purely material’ and hence informed a commitment to a ‘liberal’ neutral policy after 1783. Norms and ideology, therefore, ultimately decided foreign policy questions even if the identity-to-interest process did not follow a perfectly ‘linear’ progression.8 Implicit in this thesis is the assumption that early American foreign policy should be understood as a precursor to the modern age; that is, the experiment launched in 1783 marked a radical departure in international relations and hence provides a basis from which to establish generalized ‘rules’ about the subsequent conduct of American foreign policy. This idea has certainly found its share of adherents in both the historical and social science ﬁelds, but it rests on a tenuous conceptual foundation.9 Applying late twentieth century conceptions of American identity, liberal internationalism, and international law to the political universe of the eighteenth century risks overgeneralization.10 More critically, if the causal link between identity and interest cannot be clearly deﬁned, a constructivist reading of foreign policy simply cannot hold, and therefore

7 James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1992), ch. 5. R.K. Ramazani has used the same focus on the causal link between ideology and interest to make a similar case regarding Khomenei’s Iran, which he notes did not radically reconstitute interests in line with Islamic fundamentalism despite its claims to the contrary, and retained many of the same goals of the Shah’s regime. R.K. Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 8 Bukovansky, pp. 210–11. 9 See Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas G. Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World (New York: Madison House, 1993); Nicholas G. Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (New York: Norton, 1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1993); Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). 10 Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 135. 602 James Sofka must logically be invoked only as a possible, rather than an absolute, explanation for behaviour. In the American case, if it can be demonstrated that Jefferson and Hamilton largely mirrored traditional British and French commercial practices, or that ‘republican’ American neutral rights policy was virtually identical to that of autocratic Catherinian Russia, the value of identity, ideology, or norms as an explanatory variable is sharply depreciated, and alternative interpretations are not only plausible but required. The purpose of this article is not to suggest that constructivism has no merit as an analytical tool, only that it is in itself insufﬁcient in explaining the complexities of early American diplomacy, as Bukovansky claims. In my view no ‘burden of proof’ standard exists to categorically prove or disprove an interpretive theoretical claim—be it realism or constructivism—other than the weighing of the empirical evidence itself for proof of sustainability and consistency. Thus the goal of the following interpretation is to provide a competing hypothesis intended to stimulate debate on American neutral rights policy rather than to suggest that it—or Bukovansky’s—is the sole possible explanation for foreign policy behaviour in the new republic. Contra constructivism, it is the thesis of this study that the American attempt to secure its neutral rights after 1783 was more an effect of eighteenth century international practices than a cause of future patterns of American policy. Traditional conceptions of interests—understood in large part in material terms without reference to norms or identity—resolutely and consistently governed the international thought of Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and other key actors in the early Republic. The demands of self-preservation, and of attaining and preserving power in an international system dominated by considerations of wealth, transcended the vague claims of republican or liberal identity. My objective, in short, is to square declared ideology against actual diplomatic practice. This enterprise suggests that a more plausible counter-hypothesis to Bukovansky’s interpretation is that early American diplomacy attempted to extend, rather than reject, accepted rules of eighteenth century statecraft and led American actors to adopt policies employed for decades by the major European trading powers and exploit them to their advantage. A survey of examples of American commercial policy in this period, especially Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807, reveals the conspicuous absence of a causal link between declared ideological and normative convictions and foreign policy behaviour in the early Republic. Given the lack of a decisive con- nection between ideas and behaviour, and the startling similarity between ‘republican’ American policy and that of ‘corrupt’ Britain and France, constructivism fails to adequately account for the strategic direction of American neutral rights policy. Traditional realism, with its emphasis on material interests and continuity of behaviour in the international system, is a more compelling approach to the subject and is in my view amply demonstrated in both Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s conceptions of American foreign policy after independence.

Commercial policy and neutral rights in a bipolar order: the realist alternative

Regardless of whatever form of ‘republican’ ideology American politicians may or may not have subscribed to domestically—and as Daniel Rodgers correctly notes American neutral rights reappraised 603 this concept is becoming long in the tooth—in international relations they operated from largely inherited assumptions.11 Having matured in an era of incessant Anglo- French conflicts for North American resources, and in an environment which consistently collapsed the ideas of ‘power’ and ‘wealth’ into a single strategic imperative, it is only natural that foreign policy actors in the new Republic based their policies on the existing structure and constraints of the international system. In short, American leaders approached foreign policy questions as disciples of eighteenth century thinking—and almost exclusively European thinking—about the nature and operations of the international system and based their policies upon this tradition. The most critical foreign policy problem facing the United States after independence, one which united even the most argumentative political elements in the new nation, was self-preservation. In the north, the British refused to abandon posts along the Canadian border and retained garrisons in American territory. To the west, hostile Indian tribes were often incited to violence against American settlements by British agents. To the southwest New Orleans remained under Spanish control, and with it came the ability to choke American trade on the Mississippi River. Consequently Jefferson referred to New Orleans as ‘the single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy’.12 To the east lay the Atlantic ocean, the medium upon which the United States hoped to trade its goods and prosper in an international system dominated by Britain and France, both eager to exclude the American carrying trade from their lucrative Carribean ports. In short, the systemic dynamics facing the United States were far from favourable. American officials, realizing the dangers on all fronts, looked to past European experience and thought for guidance in managing the nation’s strategic problems. British and French commercial thinking throughout the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century equated wealth and power and was based upon maintaining closed trading spheres which would enrich the mother country and deny assets to a rival.13 As one observer put it in 1725, ‘Trade is to the Body Politick, as the Blood is to the Human Body; it gives life and vigor to the whole; without this, no country can be happy within itself, or support herself without against the attacks of a powerful Neighbor’. This zero-sum thinking was predicated upon the idea that open trading networks would only benefit small powers seeking enrichment at the expense of British and French revenues.14 For this reason, both England and France, despite their continuous conflicts in the eighteenth century, had a vested interest in

11 Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘‘‘Republicanism”: The Career of a Concept’, Journal of American History,79 (1992), pp. 11–39. 12 Paul L. Ford (ed.), The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9 (New York: Scribner, 1903), p. 364. 13 See Michael Kammen, Empire and Interest (New York, Lippincott, 1970); Klaus Knorr, British Colonial Theories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1944); Nancy Koehn, The Power of Commerce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power (New York: Knopf, 1989); Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936) and Colonial Blockade and Neutral Rights, 1739–1763 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938); Philip Buck, The Politics of Mercantilism (New York: Henry Holt, 1942); George Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754–1765 (New York: Macmillan, 1907); Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2 vols. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935); Jacob Viner, ‘Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, World Politics, 1 (1948), pp. 1–30. 14 Cited in Knorr, p. 23. On this point, see also J.F. Rees, ‘Mercantilism and the Colonies’, in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929). 604 James Sofka maintaining the status quo of their trading regimes and they frequently encouraged acts of privateering and piracy against Swedish, Dutch, Italian, and after 1783, American, vessels in an attempt to maintain their privileged status.15 The most critical point to remember is that in the eyes of the British Board of Trade and the French Ministry of Marine this was a non-normative regime. Despite the weighty barnacles of literature that have grown around the term of late, ‘commerce’ was not interpreted by responsible ministers as a ‘virtuous’ or ‘corrupt’ enterprise, but rather as a completely material—indeed, purely statistical—construct which was dominated by fiscal rather than moral calculations. In an infamous expression of this logic, the British congratulated themselves on winning the asiento, an exclusive right to sell slaves in Latin America, from Spain in 1713.16 The goods in question—slaves or sugar, rum or naval stores—or the means used to protect them— professional navies or privateers, was rarely conceived by Foreign Ministries in ethical terms. Political theorists and pamphleteers may engage in the luxury of ideological reflection, but in the eyes of responsible ministers the rules of the game demanded attention to coldblooded calculations of profit and loss.17 In the predatory eighteenth century system, normative value yielded to necessity. ‘There is no situation in which wealth is not strength and in which commerce is not wealth’, William Burke noted unsentimentally during the Seven Years’ War. The ‘balance of trade’ was invoked, as David Hume and Adam Smith remind us, as a barometer of national power and a means of measuring capabilities against potential rivals. A contemporary British writer expressed the structural dynamics of this model with insight in 1762: Whichever of the two nations shall possess a Balance of Trade in her favor and a right in that Great Nursery of seamen, must of necessity become the most powerful both in Internal and External strength; and that the weakest must fall a victim to that State[‘s] power. And that whoever shall, in making a Peace with France, make such concessions to her as shall turn that Balance and restore her naval power, will infallibly raise the Greatness of France out of the ruins of Great Britain.18 With such an outlook it is not surprising that British and French statesmen sought to exclude neutral shipping from the ports of their rivals. The ‘Rule of 1756’ adopted by the British Cabinet in the Seven Years’ War sought to deny neutral powers access to ports closed to them in peacetime. This was done to prevent Swedish, Sardinian, Russian, and Dutch mercantile interests from seizing a share of a market during a period in which the British and French navies were distracted from routine patrol duties. In 1793, during the first phase of the French Revolutionary Wars, the British reapplied the Rule and dozens of American vessels were seized in the Carribean for carrying alleged ‘contraband’.19 British Admiralty

15 Franklin reported that British Ministers frequently gloated about their ability to encourage client states to raid neutral shipping. One reputedly commented that ‘if there were no Algiers, it would be worth England’s while to build one’. Julian Boyd, et al. (eds.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 18 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 375. 16 See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Banning, Jeffersonian Persuasion; Knorr, Colonial Theories; Rees, ‘Mercantilism’; Pares, War and Trade,ch.1. 17 Walter Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740–1763 (New York: Harper and Row, 1940), ch. 6. 18 Cited in Knorr, p. 23; 22. 19 Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York: Norton, 1973), chs. 5–6. American neutral rights reappraised 605 courts tended to rule in favour of the government, even in cases when the ships in question carried no official ‘contraband’ goods, and the definitions of what con- stituted prohibited articles became increasingly elastic as necessity required.20 Throughout the eighteenth century this mercantilist practice was applied relentlessly by France but especially Britain against neutrals in an attempt to retain control of the commerce of critical markets during a period of increasingly expensive war.21 How could a neutral state protect its interests in such a hostile international climate? Essentially, a neutral trader had four options: First, stress ‘enlightened’ ideas of international law through the popular slogan ‘free ships make free goods’ to build a moral case, and hence hope for a Klotzian reconstitution of norms and interests. This was certainly attempted by the Dutch and several of the Italian states—and later the United States—but achieved little practical results. Weak states lacking military power customarily find solace in the finer points of international law, but no normative and certainly no institutional regime existed in the eighteenth century to enforce this position. Second, as Waltz argues in the structural realist mode, a state could build a military capability to deter predators. While attractive, and certainly popular in Russia after 1774 and the United States after 1794, this was a prohibitively expensive task. A third option would be for the state to follow an isolationist course and remove itself from the hostile trading network. This would require abandoning the commercial game altogether and redefining the sources of national power. Finally, a neutral could simply align itself with one power against the other in order to gain material advantages for itself, as in the case of factional politics in the Dutch civil war of 1787–88, the Swedish crisis of 1773, or Spain’s support of France in 1761 and 1779. A neutral state, therefore, would be compelled by structural pressures to relinquish its neutrality for material gain: at some point the benefits of neutrality would be met or exceeded by the benefits of belligerency. None of these alternatives provided much cause for optimism to a committed neutral in the eighteenth century.22 American policymakers in the new republic inherited these prevailing assumptions and sought to use them for their own purposes. For example, Jefferson and Hamilton, despite their manifold differences, both agreed on a fundamental point: the United States could not become truly independent as long as its assets were subject to seizure, especially in the Carribbean and Mediterranean.23 As John

20 Bukovansky, pp. 220–2. 21 Carl Kulsrud, Maritime Neutrality to 1780 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936); Pares, Colonial Blockade and Neutral Rights; Isabel de Madariaga, Britain, Russia, and the Armed Neutrality of 1780 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962). 22 Kulsrud, Maritime Neutrality to 1780; Madariaga, Britain, Russia, and the Armed Neutrality. Catherine’s ‘armed neutrality’ of 1780 attempted to solve the problem by allying Russia, Sweden, the United Provinces, and Denmark in a collective defence pact to deter French and British attacks on shipping. In reality this was directly as an anti-British measure during the American War, as Catherine resented British ‘meddling’ in Poland and argued after the Treaty of Teschen in May 1779 that England treated Russia like ‘an eastern Portugal’. Hence the League was in reality a tool of Russian diplomacy aimed at asserting its Great Power status to Britain. Madariaga, p. 6. 23 See James R. Sofka, ‘The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security: Commerce, the Atlantic Balance of Power, and the Barbary War, 1785–1805’, Diplomatic History, 21 (1997), pp. 519–44; Joseph Dorfman, ‘The Economic Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson’, Political Science Quarterly, 55 (1940), pp. 98–121; Merrill Peterson, ‘Thomas Jefferson and Commercial Policy’, William and Mary Quarterly, 22 (1965), pp. 584–610; Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton, ch. 4; Edward Meade Earle, ‘Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, and Friedrich List: The Economic Foundations of Military Power’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), ch. 8. 606 James Sofka

Crowley has recently noted, the mercantilist idea remained ﬁrmly rooted in Ameri- can commercial and strategic thinking after 1783, which is hardly surprising given that the chief actors of the new state had been nourished on British trade policy for decades.24 This logic held that America’s independence must be secured by economic power, and economic power depended on trade, which in turn depended upon access to overseas markets. Customs duties provided most of the nation’s revenue in the 1780s and 1790s and exports of shipping stores, cotton, and tobacco provided income to Northern and Southern commercial interests.25 If the United States was economically weak it would be vulnerable to European predators, much in the fashion that the small traders of Europe were throughout the eighteenth century. The real debate in the new Republic, therefore, was not about the need to secure independence or to increase American economic power: the issue was the means by which this should be achieved. Federalists and Republicans developed different domestic policies for the cultivation of wealth, and remained equally divided on foreign policy.26 However, an isolationist course was rejected by all but the most extreme Republican agrarians, who lacked real power over foreign policy. Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 and Jefferson’s warnings about ‘entangling alliances’ in 1801 have often been misread as illustrative of an ‘isolationist’ sentiment in the new republic. However, both were too aware of the realities of the international system to seriously counsel an isolationist course.27 Their argument was that the United States should avoid becoming a party in a direct or exclusive alliance which could lead the nation to become a pawn of one of the Great Powers in a bipolar order and leave American shipping open to assault or reprisals in the event of a separate peace, or worse, a possible invasion. Though this argument was rejected by Adams in 1798 and Madison in 1812 for different reasons, these were the exceptions of American foreign policy rather than the rule in this period.

American neutrality as Realpolitik

Federalist and Republican leaders, therefore, could agree on several positions: ﬁrst, that the new nation was economically and military weak and hence vulnerable in a system dominated by Britain and France; second, that the internal economic con-

24 John Crowley, The Privileges of Commerce: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). See also Richard Mannix, ‘Gallatin, Jefferson, and the Embargo of 1808’, Diplomatic History, 3 (1979), pp. 151–72; James Hutson, ‘Intellectual Foundations of Early American Diplomacy’, Diplomatic History, 1 (1977), pp. 1–19. 25 Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 65–74; Peterson, ‘Jefferson and Commercial Policy’; McCoy, Elusive Republic,ch.3. 26 See especially Albert Bowman, ‘Jefferson, Hamilton, and American Foreign Policy’, Political Science Quarterly, 71 (1956), pp. 18–41; Lawrence Kaplan, ‘Entangling Alliances With None’: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), ch. 5; Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order; McCoy, Elusive Republic; Banning, Jeffersonian Persuasion; Elkins and McKitrick, ch. 2. 27 See especially Gilbert, Farewell Address; Tucker and Hendrickson, pt. 5. Indeed, Jefferson frequently expressed rhetorical yearnings for a ‘meridian of partition’ across the Atlantic and argued that ‘were I to indulge my own theory I should wish us to practice neither commerce nor navigation but to stand with respect to Europe on precisely the same footing as China. We should thus avoid wars’. But he quickly rejected this as ‘theory only, and a theory which the servants of America are not at liberty to follow’. Boyd, vol. 8, p. 633. American neutral rights reappraised 607 dition of the country required substantive attention, and finally that neutrality best served American interests during a period of Anglo-French conflict and internal political and economic disarray.28 Neutrality was certainly invoked in normative terms to satisfy domestic constituencies, but at bottom it was the only realistic means of keeping the nation out of a potentially catastrophic war, gaining access to markets and—most optimistically—possibly manipulating the Anglo-French conflict to American advantage. Such a policy had long antecedents: Russia, the United Provinces, Sardinia, and Sweden had all charted the same course decades earlier and for similar reasons.29 Hamilton and Jefferson addressed this question in the early 1790s from the perspective of this European tradition and their policy positions are worth noting in the context of their alleged constructivist reading of national interests. American leaders shared a vaguely defined—but passionately held—attachment to the notion that in regard to commerce the Atlantic system was governed by a ‘tripolar’ distribution of power, anchored on the three legs of the United States, Britain, and France.30 Almost all of the trade of the western hemisphere flowed to and from Canada, the Carribean, and the ports of the Atlantic seaboard. The effects of this balance, however, were directly in proportion to the relative strength of its constituent actors in a specific temporal context. Hamilton and Jefferson both subscribed to this theory, but differed strenuously as to the actual and potential power of the United States vis-à-vis Britain and France.31 Hamilton accepted American economic and military inferiority as an unfortunate but real dilemma which constrained American options in the Atlantic system.32 While America was weak it must compromise, and in a predatory universe it must seek outside guarantees of its security. Hamilton’s preferred model was an entente with Britain which would allow the United States the protection of the Royal Navy and access to English markets. This position had been foreseen by authorities in London as early as 1783, and the view that the colonies must continue a trading relationship with Britain was a constant reassurance to Parliament after American independence.33 The ties of culture, language, and creditors bound the American and British markets, Hamilton reasoned, and hence the United States should largely accept London’s expansive definition of restrictive trade in exchange for a workable commercial treaty that could afford the United States protection, especially in the Mediterranean where American ships were being captured by North African pirates at an alarming rate, and the evacuation of the Northwest posts. Hamilton stressed the importance of neutrality, but clearly indicated that such a policy would be benevolent towards England. This logic became the conceptual basis for the Jay Treaty of 1795, which Hamilton, freed from Jefferson’s objections, negotiated largely

28 See Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), ch. 2. 29 Kulsrud, Maritime Neutrality;Pares,Colonial Blockade. 30 On this point see Sofka, ‘Jeffersonian Idea of National Security’; Max Savelle, ‘The American Balance of Power and European Diplomacy, 1713–1778’, in Richard Morris (ed.), The Era of the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Hutson, ‘Intellectual Foundations’; Jonathan R. Dull, A Diplomatic History of The American Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Kaplan, ch. 8. 31 See Alexander DeConde, Entangling Alliance: Politics and Diplomacy under George Washington (New York: Knopf, 1958), Conclusion, on this point. 32 Stourzh, Hamilton, ch. 4; Elkins and McKitrick, ch. 9; Bowman, ‘Jefferson and Hamilton’. 33 Charles Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution (New York: Norton, 1969), ch. 2; Black, British Foreign Policy,ch.1. 608 James Sofka himself. The cost to the United States was that it would be compelled to concede the British key advantages in trade, and would be forced to abide by the Rule of 1756. With the American ‘leg’ of the triad hobbled by exhorbitant debt, little military power, and partisan cleavages internally, compromise with Britain was essential to securing a stable financial system.34 The Jeffersonian vision of American neutrality, on the other hand, was based upon the same logic of expediency over norms but took the strategic argument in a markedly different direction. In Jefferson’s view, American neutrality could become a potential weapon to be used in bargaining with the Europeans over increased access to markets. His reading of the incessant Anglo-French struggles in North America since the 1680s convinced him that America possessed resources too valuable for the Europeans to lose, especially in time of war.35 Jefferson stressed the value of the American market to London and Paris to advance the sophisticated argument that a properly managed neutral policy could encourage the Europeans ‘to treat us with justice’. Nowhere was this better expressed than during the Nootka Sound crisis in the Pacific Northwest in 1790, when American leaders assumed that France, Spain, and Britain would soon be at war. Jefferson enthusiastically commented that ‘in that case I hope the new world will fatten on the follies of the old. If we can but establish the principles of the armed neutrality [of 1780] for ourselves, we must become the carriers for all parties as fast as we can raise vessels’.36 With the European navies involved in distant combat, and their economies strained by war, Jefferson hoped that these states would compete with each other in petitioning America for ‘benevolent neutrality’ and would offer access to previously closed and lucrative markets as bait to outbid their rivals. Far from advancing uniquely ‘republican’ ideals, Jefferson proposed what might most accurately be termed a ‘parasitical’ theory of neutrality—deriving strength by feeding upon temporary European weaknesses. Never was Bemis’ famous formula of ‘America’s advantage from Europe’s distress’ more acutely demonstrated than in Jefferson’s conception of American commercial power. In short, Jefferson believed that America’s value in the tripolar system was greater than at first appeared because the statistics quoted by Hamilton took no notice of intangible ingredients of power: intimations of friendship, hints of retaliation, and a constant willingness to be receptive to offers from all parties provided the United States with a comfortable margin of choice in the international system. As he put it in 1806, ‘What an awful spectacle does the world exhibit at this moment. One man bestriding the continent of Europe like a Colossus, the other roaming unbridled on the ocean. But even this is better than that one should rule both elements. Our wish ought to be that he who has armies may not have the dominion of the sea, and that he who has dominion of the sea may be one who has no armies. In this way we may be quiet’.37 As in the later cases of Bismarck with Austria and Russia, and Nixon with the Soviet Union and China, Jefferson sought to place the United States in an avowedly neutral position between rivals and manipulate their enmities in order to

34 On this point see Samuel F. Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923), chs. 5 and 13; Earle, ‘Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton’. 35 On this point see Sofka, ‘Jeffersonian Idea of National Security’, pp. 520–4. 36 Boyd, vol. 16, p. 601. 37 Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress. Hereafter ‘JPLC’. Reel 56: 11 January, 1806. American neutral rights reappraised 609 keep the nation out of a war from which it could gain little and to bargain for individual concessions from rival states. During the 1793 crisis over the legitimacy of the 1778 Treaty with France, therefore, Jefferson became incensed by Hamilton’s ‘backchannel’ negotiations with British Minister George Hammond aimed at assuring London that America would not ‘tilt’ towards France. Jefferson expressed incredulity at Hamilton’s policy and scathingly remarked that ‘My objections to the impolicy of a premature declaration were answered by such arguments as timidity would readily suggest. I now think it extremely possible that Hammond might have been instructed to have asked it, & to offer the broadest neutral privileges, which was exactly the price I wanted that we should contend for’.38 In Jefferson’s view Hamilton’s policy would render the United States a ‘second Portugal’, and he refused to give away what the British may buy at considerable price. This policy was not anchored on constructivist moorings, as Jefferson’s diplomatic strategems differed little from Catherine’s in 1780. Unlike Hamilton, who preferred immediate and unconditional assurances of security, Jefferson hoped to achieve the same end through a policy of studied ambiguity and lack of commitment. Neutrality, with its inherent vagueness as an idea and certainly as a practical policy, provided time for deliberation, room for diplomatic manouevre, and above all the prospect of economic gain.

Jefferson’s schema of a two-tiered state system

In his ‘Report on the Privileges and Restrictions of the Commerce of the United States’, presented to Congress on 16 December 1793, Jefferson forcefully—and brilliantly—summarized the traditional European mercantilist logic underpinning his conviction that America’s ascent to world power would be fuelled by its commerce. ‘As a branch of industry’, he wrote, commerce is valuable, but as a resource of defense, essential. Its value, as a branch of industry, is enhanced by the dependence of so many other branches on it. In times of general peace it multiplies competitors for employment in transportation, and so keeps that at its proper level; and in times of war, that is to say, when those nations who may be our principal carriers, shall be at war with each other, if we have not within ourselves the means of transportation, our produce must be exported in belligerent vessels, at the increased expense of war-freight and insurance, and the articles which will not bear that, must perish on our hands. But it is as a resource of defense that our navigation will admit neither negligence nor forbearance. The position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to fear on their land- board, and leave them nothing to desire beyond their present rights. But on their seaboard, they are open to injury, and they have there, too, a commerce which must be protected.39 Examined in the context of the hundreds of mercantilist tracts penned in the eighteenth century, Jefferson’s formula rested on such commonplace assumptions about national power as to be bland orthodoxy.40 No discernable constructivist premise—or even a liberal or republican ideology—is evident in its presentation: the

38 Ford, vol. 7, p. 421. 39 Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 112–3. 40 See especially Crowley, pp. 156–63 on this point. 610 James Sofka same logic could have been promulgated by any French or British government at any time since the 1660s. Jefferson’s concern for promoting a neutral policy so as to enrich the economic foundations of national power led him to advance a ‘two-tiered’ approach towards the international system. Distinguishing between Britain and France—undisputed masters of the Atlantic system—and smaller and weaker states that violated American commerce, such as Spain in the West or the ‘Barbary’ States in the Mediterranean, Jefferson proposed that America meet those challenges at levels determined by the power of the states in question. In practical terms, this meant adopting a strategy of commercial retaliation in dealings with England and France and the use of military force against weaker secondary states. Ideally, these policies would be mutually reinforcing in their attempt to gain respect for American neutral rights and consequently extend the reach of its trade. The commercial retaliation strategy was first advanced by Madison in a Congressional speech in 1791 but was formally articulated in Jefferson’s ‘Report on Commerce’ of 1793.41 Madison and Jefferson favoured diplomacy as the policy of first resort in gaining access to closed markets and protecting American assets on the high seas. Jefferson attempted negotiations with the French over access to the Carribean while in Paris from 1784–89, but the impotence of the Confederation government provided him with little leverage.42 Indeed, one of his main objectives in supporting the liberal aristocrats of the First Estate who fomented the process which became the French Revolution was to buttress support for American commercial rights. Jefferson reported to Madison that since this faction looked to America as ‘their fraternal model’ and were disciples of the doctrine of free trade, they would likely provide the United States with greater access to the Carribean market than the Bourbon regime would ever authorize.43 But if negotiations failed—as they did during Jefferson’s Parisian embassy—the United States was devoid of practical diplomatic options short of Hamilton’s entente with London or isolation, both of which Jefferson rejected as shortsighted. The idea of commercial retaliation was formulated as a means of compelling concessions from the British and French short of a war which the United States could not win. This policy mandated that the United States would respond in kind against any European power that imposed discriminatory tariffs or prohibitive duties on American articles or that excluded American vessels carrying specific goods from its ports. As Jefferson put it in 1793: ‘Should any nation, contrary to our wishes, suppose it may better find its advantage by continuing its system of prohibitions, duties, and regulations, it behooves us to protect our citizens, their commerce and navigation, by counter prohibitions, duties, and regulations, also. Free commerce and navigation are not to be given in exchange for restrictions and vexations; nor are they likely to produce a relaxation of them’.44

41 McCoy, Elusive Republic, pp. 137–46; Crowley, ch. 5; J.C.A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the early American Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), ch. 1. 42 See Boyd, vol. 13, pp. 52–91; vol. 18, pp. 516–77. 43 Ibid., vol. 15, pp. 364–5; Robert Palmer, ‘The Dubious Democrat: Thomas Jefferson in Bourbon France’, Political Science Quarterly, 72 (1957), pp. 388–404. 44 Ford, vol. 8, p. 112. American neutral rights reappraised 611

Jefferson’s advocacy of commercial retaliation has long been misinterpreted as a pacificist or idealistic approach to international relations; but in reality it was predicated upon the same unsentimental calculations followed by most European governments since the late seventeenth century.45 Jefferson conceded that war with England or France was ‘not the best engine for us to resort to’ at least while the United States remained militarily underdeveloped, but he strenuously argued that ‘nature has given us one in our commerce, which, if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice … When once it shall be perceived that we are either in the system or in the habit of giving equal advantages to those who extinguish our commerce and navigation by duties and prohibitions, as to those who treat both with liberality and justice, liberality and justice will be converted by all into duties and prohibitions’.46 Jefferson hoped to use this policy to seize the initiative from the Europeans, especially in time of a general war. Rather than interpret American independence as a source of weakness, as Hamilton argued, Jefferson saw it as an asset. For commercial retaliation to work the United States must be strictly neutral; neither side must have the luxury of believing that America would grant it special status. The relative freedom of choice afforded by a sophisticated neutral policy left American diplomatic options open in times of crisis. In a masterful expression of this Realpolitik during the tense negotiations over Louisiana in 1802, Jefferson noted that he would ‘marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation’ as a not-so-subtle hint to Napoleon, a threat he would invert against London in 1806–7.47 Moreover, realizing that the war footing of European economies required constant nourishment from the western hemisphere, Jefferson believed that he could manipulate the tripolar Atlantic system to his advantage. A neutral—and fiercely uncommitted—actor could gain advantages unobtainable to a ‘client’ state of a great trading power. ‘It is not to the moderation and justice of others we are to trust for fair and equal access to market with our productions, or for our due share in the transportation of them’, Jefferson noted, ‘but to our own means of independence, and the firm will to use them’.48 Neutrality was, of course, the most conspicuous ‘means of independence’ that the United States possessed. The ‘first-tier’ policy of commercial retaliation was a plausible strategy in American negotiations with Britain and France given their superior military power and large volume of trade with the United States. In cases where ‘second-tier’ states with less trade in American ports and limited military capabilities attacked American shipping, Jefferson was quick to threaten—and use—military force to protect the nation’s commercial assets. The logical extension of this thinking was that the United States required a strong Navy to project American power and to protect its interests. As early as 1784 Jefferson championed the creation of a Navy to fight the ‘frequent wars, without a doubt’ which the United States would have to wage in order to assert its power relative to secondary maritime predators. With characteristic realism Jefferson commented that it was likely that American property

45 For the classical idealist reading see Louis Sears, Jefferson and the Embargo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1927); McCoy, Elusive Republic; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History. For the neomercantilist reading see Crowley, ch. 7; Mannix, ‘Gallatin, Jefferson, and the Embargo’; Hutson, ‘Intellectual Foundations’; Dull, Diplomatic History of the American Revolution. 46 Ford, vol. 8, p. 117; p. 293. 47 Ibid., vol. 9, pp. 365–6; DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Knopf, 1976), pp. 173–5. 48 Ibid., vol. 8, p. 117. 612 James Sofka will be violated on the sea, and in foreign ports, their persons will be insulted, emprisoned, &c. for pretended debts, contracts, crimes, contraband, &c. &c. These insults must be resented, even if we had no feelings, yet to prevent their eternal repetition. Or in other words, our commerce on the ocean and in other countries must be paid for by frequent war. The justest dispositions possible in ourselves will not secure us against it. It would be necessary that all other nations were just also. Justice indeed on our part will save us from those wars which would have been produced by a contrary disposition. But how to prevent those produced by the wrongs of other nations? By putting ourselves in a condition to punish them. Weakness provokes insult and injury, while a condition to punish it often prevents it. This reasoning leads to the necessity of some naval force, that being the only weapon with which we can reach an enemy. I think it to our interests to punish the first insult: because an insult unpunished is the parent of many others. We are not at this moment in a condition to do it, but we should put ourselves into it as soon as possible.49 Later Republican reluctance to endorse a capital fleet during the naval debate of 1794 was more the exception than the norm of their strategic thinking.50 Republican leaders feared Federalist dominance of this institution in the 1790s due to their power in the northeastern states that provided most of the country’s naval officers, and the reluctance to build a fleet was more a political than a strategic issue. After his inauguration in 1801, Jefferson quickly reversed course and modernized American naval yards. His penchant for small gunboats rather than ships of the line has often been criticized as inefficient and timid; yet there was a strategic logic to this assumption.51 These manoeuvrable vessels excelled in close inshore combat in theatres such as the Mediterranean and Mississippi which is where they were intended to fight. Jefferson’s critique of Adams’ naval war with France in 1798–9 demonstrated his conviction that the United States should not risk direct confrontation with either France or Britain while it was militarily and financially emaciated. Hence a lighter naval squadron was more useful to the type of operations the Republicans envisioned. Jefferson’s advocacy of neutral rights and his incessant repetition of the common eighteenth century formula of ‘free ships make free goods’ mated well with the structural realities of the late eighteenth century international system and it was designed to maximize American diplomatic options. Rejecting isolationism as im- possible and Hamilton’s call for an entente with Britain—and some Republican calls for exclusive cooperation with France—as shortsighted, Jefferson saw neutrality as a brilliant vehicle through which to increase the trade and consequently economic power of the state. He interpreted the international system as a two-tiered order and the policy of commercial retaliation was intended to increase American leverage in the Atlantic balance-of-power system. Given that this policy only worked when the actors in question relied heavily on American trade, Jefferson created a second track in dealings with weaker states who violated American rights: that of the direct use of force. Believing that the United States should only risk war in cases where it was likely to prevail, Jefferson refused to champion a capital fleet equal to that of Britain or France but rather favoured a more manouevrable force designed to challenge predators in the Mississippi Delta or the Mediterranean.

49 Boyd, vol. 8, pp. 425–7. 50 On this important point see Craig Symond, Navalists and anti-Navalists: The Naval Policy Debate in the United States, 1785–1827, (Newark, DL: University of Delaware Press, 1980). 51 See Spencer Tucker, The Jeffersonian Gunboat Navy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), on this point. American neutral rights reappraised 613

Neutral rights in practice

The second tier: the West and the Mediterranean

The Jeffersonian penchant for rattling the sabre to augment American trade and demonstrate its resolve to the Great Powers was pronounced. As early as 1786, and again in 1792, Jefferson championed an aggressive campaign against Spain should the right of deposit of the Mississippi be suspended, a policy he revived in 1802. ‘Whatever power, other than ourselves, holds the country east of the Mississippi’, Jefferson warned, ‘becomes our natural enemy’.52 In the American southwest where the United States possessed a clear military advantage, Jefferson was unhesitating in threatening force rather than resorting to negotiation.53 Madison, who dryly noted that ‘Spain can no more ﬁnally stop the current of trade down the river than she can the river itself’, fully supported this view.54 Even after acquiring Louisiana and its strategic port of New Orleans in 1803, Jefferson and Madison targeted the Spanish territory of West Florida, which contained Pensacola and Mobile Bay. In his desire to increase American trade by acquiring this province Jefferson attempted, in the words of John Randolph, to ‘excite France by money to bully [Spain] out of its property’.55 Madison put the issue most bluntly in 1803 when he ordered the American Minister in Madrid to inform the Spanish government that the balance of power was not in their favour: Spain dreads, it is presumed, the growing power of this country, and the direction of it against her possessions within its reach. Can she annihilate this power?—No. Can she sensibly retard its growth?—No. Does not common prudence then advise her, to conciliate with every proof of friendship and conﬁdence the good will of a nation whose power is formidable to her; instead of yielding to the impulses of jealousy, and adopting obnoxious precautions, which can have no other effect than to bring on prematurely the whole weight of the calamity which she fears? 56 One searches in vain for any reference to the identities or ideologies of either liberalism or republicanism in this astringent syllogism of power. Jeffersonian Realpolitik argued that in the Floridas, Spain would be forced to yield to American pressure and in the absence of the support of its ally France—increasingly unlikely after 1803—the United States could gain more by the threat of force than negotiated

52 Boyd, vol. 17, p. 113; vol. 23, pp. 299–303; Dumas Malone (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and Pierre Samuel DuPont deNemours (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930), p. 74. 53 This thesis is developed well in Mary P. Adams, ‘Jefferson’s Reaction to the Treaty of San Ildefonso’, Journal of Southern History, 21 (1955), pp. 173–88; Arthur P. Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 1795–1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934); Clifford Egan, ‘The United States, France, and West Florida, 1803–1807’, Florida Historical Quarterly, 47 (1969), pp. 227–52 and Neither Peace Nor War: Franco-American Relations 1803–1812 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Isaac Cox, ‘The Pan-American Policy of Jefferson and Wilkinson’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1 (1914), pp. 212–39 and The West Florida Controversy (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1918). The Lewis and Clark expedition, for example, was initially designed as a military reconnaisance of Louisiana in the event of war and was redefined as a ‘corps of discovery’ only after the Purchase placed the territory safely under American control. 54 Boyd, vol. 7, p. 403. 55 DeConde, Louisiana, p. 227. Jefferson had urged Congress to appropriate two million dollars as a bribe to Napoleon so that he would influence his Spanish ally to surrender West Florida. 56 Gaillard Hunt (ed.), The Writings of James Madison, 9 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1910), vol. 7, p. 74. 614 James Sofka concessions. Such territorial ambitions were completely congruent with European practices of the eighteenth century, and were based—as Jefferson and Madison readily admitted—on might rather than right.57 Their diplomatic agent in Europe, James Monroe, put the matter in stark terms when he observed to the Spanish Foreign Minister that Madrid must accede to American demands given that the United States ‘is a rising, and Spain, a declining, Power’.58 Similarly in the Mediterranean, Jefferson’s desire to form an ‘Antipiratical con- federacy’ to cruise against states preying on American merchantmen was inspired directly by Catherine’s precedent of 1780. With Congress unwilling to support a naval expansion program, Jefferson reasoned that under a League of Armed Neutrality in the Mediterranean the United States would only have to contribute one frigate rather than an entire naval squadron to assert its neutral rights.59 As in the case of the Russian proposal of 1780, Realpolitik undergirded the ornamental usage of fashionable liberal statements on the efficacy of collective security. Jefferson was frustrated at the ‘timidity’ demonstrated by Congress in refusing to endorse this proposal, and he ceaselessly urged the American government to use force to ‘cut [the pirates] to pieces piecemeal’. Frustrated by the increasing attacks on American shipping and the escalating cost of maritime insurance, Jefferson authorized a war against the North African states shortly after his inauguration in 1801.60 By 1805 he had achieved an objective unthinkable four years earlier: a Tunisian delegation travelled to Washington to negotiate directly with the President. While occasional attacks on American shipping continued until after the War of 1812, Jefferson’s Barbary War had demonstrated that America was willing to pay for its share of the Mediterranean market by force. Jefferson’s use of naval power in North Africa and his belligerent policy against Spain reflected his inherent assumptions regarding a two-tiered international order. In his view, the means of foreign policy must be carefully crafted to suit the capabilities of America’s adversaries in the system. Jefferson was keenly aware of the utility of force in international relations, but favoured it only in instances where war was likely to compel useful results at relatively low cost.61 His intent to use or seriously threaten force to gain territorial concessions or protect a commercial market against weaker rivals represented a shrewd awareness of the patterns and constraints of the prevailing international system. While the actual effects of these threats are frequently debated, the fact that Jefferson was even using such tactics casts serious doubt on a constructivist interpretation based on a unique American identity in defining its foreign policy goals. In the case of New Orleans, West Florida, and North Africa, Jefferson and his allies were clearly unmoved by pacifist inclinations, and the motives of their policies were indistinct from their allegedly ‘corrupt’ European parentage. To put it another

57 DeConde and Egan contend that the Administration was fully aware that the Treaty of 1783 surrendered the province to Spain as a separate entity from the rest of Louisiana. In his eagerness to gain West Florida for strategic and commercial reasons Jefferson, as DeConde notes, ignored legal niceties and sought to ‘stretch boundaries as though they were made of rubber’. Louisiana, p. 213. 58 DeConde, Louisiana, p. 215. 59 Boyd, vol. 10, pp. 560–6; vol. 18, pp. 349–416. 60 Boyd, vol. 7, pp. 511–12. See Sofka, ‘Jeffersonian Idea of National Security’ for a development of this conflict in the context of Jefferson’s broader view of American commercial policy. 61 On this point see Reginald Stuart, The Half-Way Pacifist: Thomas Jefferson’s View of War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). American neutral rights reappraised 615 way, the Floridas differed only in latitude from Silesia and Saxony: the underlying motives of territorial expansion and the protection of trade, the hallmarks of eighteenth century statecraft, were amply demonstrated in the New World. Jefferson’s blithe perversion of international law in the West Florida case, which even his admirers find disturbing, represents a consistent theme of early American diplomacy: the triumph of material interests over declared ideology or identity. In the cases of Spain and the Mediterranean Jefferson rarely perceived the need to even invoke the fig leaf of international law and spoke candidly about the assertion of American power. In the case of Great Power diplomacy, however, where the stakes were higher and American resources lower the need to invoke philosophical justification was comparably great.

The ﬁrst tier: Britain and the Embargo, 1806–8

The British problem, as Bukovansky correctly notes, proved to be the most intractable aspect of early American diplomacy. The American claim, articulated since 1783, that Britain was restricting American access to markets became more acute during the Napoleonic Wars. Jefferson, however, refused to accede to British trade policy in the manner of Hamilton in 1795, and insisted on extremely narrow definitions of contraband cargoes and restricted ports. In 1806, for example, Jefferson refused to send a treaty negotiated by Monroe to the Senate for ratifica- tion, as in his view it yielded to British demands that the United States endorse its view of belligerent rights.62 Dismissing the text as another Jay Treaty, Jefferson decided to hold out for better terms. However, Napoleon’s promulgation of the Berlin and Milan Decrees after November 1806 increased the economic pressure on Britain and reduced London’s room to compromise on its exclusionary practices in the western hemisphere. The British demanded that the United States refrain from luring Royal Navy deserters into the American merchant marine and providing them with doctored papers. This, naturally, was a legitimate legal stand for them to take, and American unwillingness to seriously negotiate on these terms led the British to stop American vessels and seize suspected deserters. In most cases those ‘impressed’ were authentic British subjects travelling on forged papers, but the practice stirred deep American resentment.63 Given these stated positions, Jefferson initially offered a compromise: Britain would end impressment and offer the United States broad neutral rights in exchange for a serious American attempt to disallow the common practice of hiring deserters. Before authorizing this, Jefferson in April 1807 ordered Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin to study the incidence of desertion and re-hiring in the American merchant marine. Gallatin reported the astounding figure that over one-half of the American merchant crews were in fact British deserters. He informed Jefferson that ‘our ton- nage employed in foreign trade has increased since 1803 at the rate of about 70,000 tons a year, equal to an increase of 8,400 sailors for two years, and I would estimate

62 See Donald Hickey, ‘The Monroe-Pinkney Treaty of 1806: A Reappraisal’, William and Mary Quarterly, 44 (1987), pp. 65–88; Perkins, Prologue to War, ch. 4. 63 Perkins, Prologue to War, ch. 3. 616 James Sofka that the British sailors have supplied from one-half to two-thirds of that increase’. Upon reviewing these figures, Jefferson abruptly reversed course and dropped the idea of an Anglo-American understanding on these terms. He noted to Madison that ‘Mr. Gallatin’s estimate of the number of foreign seamen in our employ renders it prudent, I think, to suspend all propositions regarding our non-employment of them’.64 In short, Jefferson wanted the British to surrender the practice of impressment and restrict its definition of belligerent rights yet was flatly unwilling to offer anything in return, even though American practices partially contributed to the problem. While prone to trumpeting international law when it suited him, Jefferson was unwilling to apply it to an American merchant marine growing exponentially in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This reluctance to come to a negotiated settlement and Jefferson’s refusal to ratify the Monroe-Pinkney treaty were overshadowed by the British attack on the American frigate Chesapeake in June 1807, which created a popular chorus for war with Britain. ‘Never, since the battle of Lexington have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present’, Jefferson observed that summer, ‘and even that did not produce such unanimity’.65 Having foreclosed a negotiated settlement as insufficient, how did Jefferson hope to compel Britain to respect American demands? Jefferson looked at the international system in 1807 with genuine alarm. He had no means of knowing whether the Chesapeake attack was an isolated incident carried out by an overzealous British officer or the first in a series of premeditated assaults on American military and/or civilian shipping. By early December, he received news from London that the British government was intending to issue a strict set of commercial regulations in response to Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan Decrees proclaiming the ‘Continental System’. Preliminary reports of these Orders- in-Council indicated that they would have dramatic implications for American and other neutral traffic.66 Jefferson feared a repetition of the events of 1793, when the British government quickly adopted draconian regulations and enforced them retroactively with no warning to neutral carriers, with the result being the seizure of hundreds of American vessels in the Caribbean and North Atlantic. Jefferson was eager to avoid this scenario, and the news he received from Europe in late 1807 confirmed his worst suspicions. Jefferson wanted to protect American resources on the high seas, and refused to cede the British the surprise and its attendent advantages they had enjoyed against the United States in 1793 or France in 1756.67 As a consequence, the Embargo was decided upon as an expedient means of preparing for a possible war by giving American vessels time to reach safe ports before hostilities began. ‘We should procrastinate 3 or 4 months’, Jefferson noted, ‘were it only to give time to our merchants to get in their vessels, property, & seamen, which are the identical materials with which the war is to be carried on’.

64 JPLC, Reel 61; Ford, vol. 10, p. 389. 65 Malone, Correspondence, p. 94. 66 Perkins, Prologue to War, pp. 148–9. The Orders were adopted in November, and were in effect by the time Jefferson received advance copies of them in early December. This was a decisive factor contributing to Jefferson’s embargo strategy. 67 Mannix, ‘Gallatin and Jefferson’; Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1979). At the onset of the Seven Years’ War Britain delayed its ofﬁcial declaration of war in order to seize French shipping by surprise through backdating the notice of hostilities. American neutral rights reappraised 617

More critically, such an interval would give the British time to offer reparations for the Chesapeake incident as well as a commitment to respect American neutral rights. Moreover, the United States would gain time to make military preparations and fortify coastal defences.68 The provisions of the Embargo Act of December 22, 1807 were severe: indeed, far more so than Jefferson’s 1793 proposal. Trade between the United States and Europe, except for emergency articles and postal service, was suspended, and permission of a state governor would be required before any American vessel could leave its port. Jefferson clearly intended the measure to be the opening salvo in an Anglo-American war. ‘For a certain length of time I think the embargo is a less evil than war’, he observed in the spring of 1808, ‘but after a time it will not be so’. The Embargo bought time for America to protect its shipping from the Orders-in- Council, and to arm, equip, and prepare for the coming confrontation with England. By the time that war came, Jefferson hoped, ‘our debt may be paid, our revenues clear, & our strength increased’.69 While this reasoning appeared sound in theory, it did not follow so logically in practice. The popular demand for war in the summer of 1807 was unquestionably Jefferson’s greatest weapon against Britain. By restraining this pressure and addressing the crisis in a detached and dispassionate manner, Jefferson deprived himself of the political support necessary to wage an effective campaign. The President’s strategy of ‘refrigerating the demand for war and then bringing it again to a boil’, as Perkins notes, backﬁred on him. After the editorials and speeches on the justice and necessity of war cooled with the weather in the autumn, Jefferson lost the momentum necessary to remain in control of events. He could easily have obtained a declaration of war from an outraged Congress in the summer, but once passions subsided—due ironically to his own success in managing the crisis following the Chesapeake attack—he could never again count on nearly unanimous public support for war. In short, if he wanted war, the period July–September 1807 was the most advantageous time to seek it.70 The source of Jefferson’s failure was the transformation of the policy from a ‘precautionary’ to ‘coercive’ measure.71 Jefferson hoped that by continuing the Embargo he could manipulate the Atlantic balance of power and force England to accede to American maritime demands by in effect doing in the western hemisphere what Napoleon was doing in Europe: depriving Britain of markets for goods and raw materials. As a consequence the economic and political dimensions of the transatlantic balance of power coalesced in the Embargo. By witholding American trade, Jefferson hoped that London would recognize America’s importance in the global economy and would accord the new Republic greater, if not Great Power, status in relation to maritime policy in an effort to reopen commerce with the

68 JPLC, Reel 62. He noted to Page on July 17 that he desired ‘reparation for the past & security for the future, that is to say, the end of impressments. If motives of either justice or interest should produce this from Great Britain, it will save a war; but if they are refused, we shall have gained time for getting in our ships & property & at least 20,000 seamen now aﬂoat on the ocean, and who may man 250 privateers … The meantime may also be importantly employed in preparations to enable us to give quick and deep blows’. Ford, vol. 10, pp. 47–50. 69 JPLC, Reel 66; 65. 70 Perkins, Prologue to War, pp. 148–9. 71 See Spivak, p. x for this argument. 618 James Sofka

United States. Sincere respect for American neutral rights, meaning an end to impressment and searches of American vessels, was his minimum demand; increased access to closed British markets in the western hemisphere were his preferred terms. From his perspective the British would have little choice but to accede to this ultimatum. This gambit was a logical extension of his 1793 Report on Commerce, but it proved too rigid and mechanistic a formula to be of much use in the political climate of 1807. Jefferson’s commercial restrictions hurt American exporters as much, if not more, than British importers, who retained Canada as a supplier of timber for the Royal Navy. Moreover, the Spanish Revolution of early 1808 led to the opening of Latin American ports, and the British quickly capitalized on this development. The slow erosion of American economic strength through idle ports and lost customs revenues convinced Jefferson that he could not maintain his policy of commercial abstinence forever. Ironically the British recognized these limitations on American policy long before Jefferson did: in London’s reading of American politics, dis- content in the Northeast would eventually force Jefferson to reverse himself or risk a political crisis.72 Consequently, as a measure designed to coerce England to accede to American maritime demands, the Embargo was a complete failure. Indeed, it was never intended to serve this purpose. Even before the measure was adopted by Congress, Gallatin had argued to the President that ‘as to the hope that it may … induce England to treat us better, I think it entirely groundless’, and he maintained that the United States should go to war before the Embargo had a deleterious effect on American commerical revenues. The tremendous rise in prices resulting from the act would simply encourage smuggling.73 A coercive embargo would have to be of long duration in order to be effective, yet even Jefferson doubted that the public could ‘endure’ it for very long. ‘People will ﬁght’, Gallatin cynically noted in July 1807, ‘but they will not give up their money for nothing’.74 Why, then, did Jefferson’s commercial retaliation strategy fail? Jefferson misread the power relationship between Britain, France, and the United States in 1808. In 1793 the economic and military balance of France and England was roughly equal. As a result American intervention or neutrality in the conﬂict could have been potentially decisive at that time, as Jefferson, Genet, and Pitt realized. But by 1808 Napoleon, having recently secured the Russian armistice at Tilsit, was supreme on the Continent. The capitulation of Russia meant that one of the last European markets for English goods and supplier of its raw materials was now within Napoleon’s ‘Continental System’. The British Government, therefore, believed that it could not afford to compromize its maritime policy in 1807–8, as it saw the resources and markets of the western hemisphere as the source of its salvation in its ongoing war against Napoleon’s France. As a result Jefferson’s desire for greater access to closed British markets and his assertion of America’s right to trade with whomever it wished clashed with London’s commitment to enforce the ‘Rule of 1756’ as well as to retain as many of its sailors as possible. The Embargo was the result of this irresistible

72 Spivak, p. 125. 73 JPLC, Reel 65; Spivak, p. 200. 74 Spivak, pp. 116–8; 83. American neutral rights reappraised 619 force of Jefferson’s demands meeting the immovable object in the shape of British commercial restrictions. Consequently Jefferson’s Embargo policy was designed to play for time and impress the British with the gravity with which he viewed the maritime issue. He had brought the nation to the verge of war and then halted. The next move, Jefferson indicated, was up to London. Given an even balance of power in Europe this strata- gem may have worked, or at least have produced a willingness in London to negotiate American demands. Unfortunately Jefferson’s arithmetically precise policy of commercial retaliation was inappropriate for and anachronistic in the era of total war dawning in Europe: the stakes for Britain in 1808 were simply too high. Jefferson underrated the significance of Napoleon’s Continental System and the Peace of Tilsit to the British Government. This was the fatal miscalculation that doomed the Embargo strategy, and which underscored the fragility of his conception of the international system. Jefferson’s diplomacy in 1807–8 depended for its success on accurate and careful computation of contingent factors. Its workings were too mechanistic and unsentimental to be of use in the age of the Napoleonic wars, as Jefferson did not have the time that would be necessary to make a substantial impact on British trade, especially in time of war. The failure of the Embargo as a policy is distinct, however, from its conceptual origins and should not obscure Jefferson’s design for America in the international system. Jefferson’s controversial failure to follow up on his original plan has long created the misperception that he was capitulating to pacifist instincts, and this is a dangerous misinterpretation. The genesis of the Embargo in planning and execution was rooted in seventeenth and eighteenth century mercantilism and naked power politics, and was intended to compel England to offer the United States concessions by strangling its already fragile economy. Nothing can be further from the truth than to argue that the Embargo was the ‘plan of an idealist’ or, as Louis Sears argued, ‘a test on a magnificent scale of a theory of international law long maturing in the President’s mind intended to curb the international anarchy which accompanied the rise of modern states’.75 It was conceived as an astute means of using the time- honoured European weapon of economic coercion—one deployed by Napoleon himself—against Britain so that the United States would not have to compromise on the lucrative hiring of deserters while still demanding strict neutral rights. In terms of its attention to the structural dynamics of the international system, and its rejection of a normative approach to politics, the Embargo policy was more familiar to Colbert and Josiah Tucker than Paine and Freneau.

Conclusion

What conclusions can be drawn from a general investigation of American neutral rights policy after 1783? First, that there was widespread agreement among both Federalists and Republicans that the United States needed to secure and preserve its independence, export its products overseas, gain revenue from import duties, and ﬁnally to safeguard the main organs of the nation’s trade: the Mississippi, the North

75 Sears, Jefferson and the Embargo, p. 32. 620 James Sofka

Atlantic, the Carribean, and the Mediterranean. All three were mutually reinforcing and all led to the conclusion that commerce was a vital ingredient of the national security of the new Republic, and that neutrality was the best means of allowing commerce to grow. Here American leaders quite naturally copied from European examples and experience. Trade led to the meteoric rise of the United Provinces, France, and Britain to world power status in the seventeenth century; why could it not have a similar salutary effect on the United States? The essential security equation was deceptively straightforward: neutrality increased the reach of American commerce, commerce increased wealth, and wealth increased national power. This reading of foreign policy, far from being a novel experiment in constructivist identity-to-interest logic or emblematic of a liberal or republican ideology, was actually quite pedestrian in Europe by 1720. Leaders in both parties naturally differed as to the best means of achieving these objectives, and the vigorous debates and partisan cleavages of the 1790s were largely inspired by foreign policy disputes. Hamilton, taking a parsiminous view of American finances, asserted the classical structural realist position that weak states must compromise to the dictates of strong ones if they refuse to follow an isolationist policy. His attempts to seek an entente with Britain in 1790, 1793, and 1795 were directed towards achieving this goal. Similarly, many Republican leaders who rallied around Genet in 1793 took the same logic but chose France as the likely ally and protector of the United States. Both camps believed that the United States needed to choose between one of the powers dominating the bipolar order and obtain its protection. Jefferson regarded this policy as unsophisticated. Fearing that the United States would become a vassal of one or the other of the European states, Jefferson saw in neutrality an expedient means of manipulating the tripolar distribution of Atlantic commercial power to America’s advantage. His arguments in defence of neutrality in 1793, and again throughout his Presidency, were based on the strategic idea that the United States provided economic advantages too vital for the Europeans to lose. This led him to oppose a war with the major European powers, as the United States could not compel the terms it desired by force. Threats, subtle intimidations, and intentional vagueness about American intentions were a far less costly means to achieve political goals, and neutrality served this end brilliantly. In his masterly biography of Bismarck, Otto Pflanze notes that the essence of the German Chancellor’s genius in foreign policy was ‘his capacity to see manifold inter- connections between political phenomena, not only their actual but also their potential links, that is, their mutual vulnerability to common manipulation’.76 This approach to international relations was essential similar in Jefferson’s case, and in the West particularly he was extraordinarily successful employing this formula to his advantage. In the second ‘tier’ of the international system, Jefferson was willing to resort to force against states pursuing inimical commercial policies but which did not directly threaten the existence of the United States. He saw no reason to offer tribute to the North Africans, or to pay dearly for West Florida, when a limited war was more cost-effective for the benefits gained. In short, Jeffersonian strategic thought—like

76 Otto Pﬂanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), vol. 3, p. 97. American neutral rights reappraised 621

Hamilton’s—focused on traditional equations of power, but departed from Hamilton’s in providing a more generous assessment of America’s present and potential contribution to the global economy. The real debate between the constructivist argument advanced by Bukovansky and the traditional realist interpretation presented here essentially concerns two questions: first, did the United States differ significantly from its European counter- parts in the methodology of defining its objectives and implementing them? Second, did the admittedly popular ideologies of ‘liberalism’ or ‘republicanism’ in any way translate into actual foreign policy practice? My answer to both of these questions is a resounding and unapologetic ‘No’. This analysis has demonstrated that the prevailing eighteenth century theory that wealth and power were inextricably linked continued on in the new Republic almost reflexively. The mercantilist ideology inherited by American leaders was embraced emphatically, and while philosophical gloss was often used to conceal questions of power, the belief that the United States needed to secure its trade routes to gain security was pervasive after 1783. Jefferson’s Report on Commerce, Madison’s Bill of 1791, and the logic of the Embargo of 1807 were classical mercantilist gambits. The manipulation of the potential British alliance of 1802, the subsequent blurring of legal niceties in West Florida, and Hamilton’s eager appeals for British friendship in the 1790s were all standard practice for eighteenth century regimes. Trade was too important to the welfare of the state to be conceived in normative terms: the material balance of power consistently outweighed philosophical attacks on ‘corruption’ or ‘old-world’ styles of diplomacy. It should not be forgotten that in the eighteenth century all governments, even the most autocratic of regimes such as Catherinian Russia, frequently cloaked diplomatic gambits in ‘enlightened’ terms. Frederick II had his Foreign Minister concoct a ficticious legal claim to Silesia in 1740 only to exult that ‘it was the work of an excellent charlatan!’ This, it should be remembered, came from the author of the Anti-Machiavel.77 Catherine’s Armed Neutrality, her subsequent claim to the Crimea, and her designs on Poland were all phrased in decorous and appropriately highminded language. British policymakers used the Admiralty court system to routinely skew maritime law in favour of the power of the Royal Navy. Jefferson and Hamilton both manipulated Grotius and Vattel in their ‘Opinions’ on the 1778 French Treaty in 1793 to suit their own political aims. The language of international law was often justificatory in both democratic and autocratic cultures, but its teachings were seldom prescriptive. In short, the causal link between ideas and behaviour, let alone norms and interests, remains in my view at best obscure, and probably non-existent. Bukovansky seems to imply that since the Americans did not choose isolation they must therefore be wedded to a uniquely ‘American’ vision of neutrality. Therefore the republican experiment after 1783 can be seen as a remarkable new normative turn of events in international relations. This view, however logical it might appear from a perspective resting solely on declared convictions, blurs the nuances and subtleties of early American diplomacy. The line between political rhetoric designed for partisan consumption and the actual conduct of foreign policy in the Cabinet rooms cannot be drawn too starkly. Jefferson had no qualms about running rough-

77 Dorn, p. 139. 622 James Sofka shod over many of his earlier political beliefs, especially regarding ‘strict con- struction’, while in office. Beginning with Franklin’s Parisian embassy in the 1770s, American diplomats demonstrated their ability to skilfully imbue their political designs in normative terms, often using the language of republican identity. But did these ideas influence behaviour? Can Jefferson’s perversion of international law in the Florida case or on impressment be interpreted as anything other than an expedient means of promoting American interests? Simply pointing to the vast pamphlet literature of the new Republic is insufficient for proving this case. Bukovansky correctly asserts that ‘the challenge for social scientists is to explain how ideas come to have such power’, but she accepts their prescriptive weight without question. Crane Brinton provided at least a partial answer to this problem, by asserting that new regimes frequently assert revolutionary principles while retaining essentially conservative policies.78 The United States was no different after 1783. Jefferson, for example, quoted liberal maxims with eloquence but practiced a diplomacy based largely upon power, especially commercial power. Hamilton was an unequalled champion of the American experiment but borrowed his strategic con- cepts from the time-honoured practice of European states allying with a more powerful actor. In brief, it is my contention that the neutral rights policy of the United States was largely traditional—that is, European—in formulation and execution, and that interests of state, rather than a pervasive ideology or identity, determined the course of foreign policy in the first twenty years of American independence.

78 Bukovansky, p. 238; Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952), ch. 9.