In August 1792, to Lafayette’s horror, the Jacobins incited a popular insurrection that included the storming of the Tuileries in Paris and the butchery of the Swiss Guards defending the palace. The king was abruptly dethroned. Refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the civil constitution, nearly 25,000 priests fled the country amid a horrifying wave of anticlerical violence. A month later Parisian mobs engineered the September Massacres, slaughtering more than fourteen hundred prisoners, many of them aristocrats or royalist priests. Ejected from his military command and charged with treason, Lafayette fled to Belgium. “What safety is there in a country where Robespierre is a sage, Danton is an honest man, and Marat a God?” he wondered.²¹ Arrested by Austrian forces, he spent the next five years languishing in ghastly Prussian and Austrian prisons. With cruel irony, he was charged with having clapped the French king in irons and kept him in captivity. While claiming the rights of an honorary American citizen, Lafayette was confined in a small, filthy, vermin-infested cell.

On September 21 France abolished the monarchy and declared itself a republic. Two weeks later Madame Lafayette informed Washington of her husband’s dreadful plight and thwarted plans to defect to America: “His wish was that I should go with all our family to join him in England, that we might go and establish ourselves together in America and there enjoy the consoling sight of virtue worthy of liberty.”²² She pleaded with Washington to dispatch an envoy who might reclaim her husband in the name of the United States. However distraught he was about Lafayette, Washington was entangled in a political predicament. He could not afford to antagonize the new French republic, and Lafayette’s name was now anathema among the French revolutionaries. Gouverneur Morris, named minister to France in early 1792, warned Washington against undertaking any rash actions on Lafayette’s behalf. “His enemies here are as virulent as ever,” he cautioned.²³ For the moment, the only permissible response was personal charity. Drawing on his own money, Gouverneur Morris extended 100,000 livres to Lafayette’s wife, while Washington deposited 2,300 guilders from his own funds into an Amsterdam account for her use. He assured Madame Lafayette that he wasn’t indifferent to her husband’s plight, “nor contenting myself with inactive wishes for his liberation. My affection to his nation and to himself are unabated.”²⁴

Developments in France only aggravated the growing discord in American politics. Regarding the French revolutionaries as kindred spirits, Republicans rejoiced at the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty, while Federalists, dreading popular anarchy, dwelled on the grisly massacres. The fate of France was more than an academic question after it promulgated its Edict of Fraternity, promising fraternal support to revolutionary states around the globe. Amid this revolutionary camaraderie, in August 1792 the French conferred honorary citizenship upon Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Thomas Paine. For Jeffersonians, it fulfilled their fondest dream of a worldwide democratic revolution, while Federalists found the universal dream disturbing. Alexander Hamilton protested, “Every nation has a right to carve out its own happiness in its own way.”²⁵ Among the imperial powers, the Edict of Fraternity generated widespread fear of subversion, sharpening tensions throughout Europe.

On January 21, 1793, the former King Louis XVI, who had helped win American independence, was decapitated before a crowd of twenty thousand people intoxicated with a lust for revenge. After stuffing the king’s head between his legs, the executioner flung his remains into a rude cart piled with corpses, while bystanders dipped souvenirs into the royal blood pooled under the guillotine. Vendors soon hawked patches of the king’s clothing and locks of bloodstained hair, in a spectacle of sadistic glee that shocked many people inside and outside France. On February 1 France declared war on Great Britain and Holland.

Thomas Jefferson seemed unfazed by the regicide and the large-scale massacres preceding it. After William Short wrote of horrifying beheadings in Paris, Jefferson saw little cause for alarm. “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause,” he conceded, then added cold-bloodedly, “but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now.”²⁶ Persuaded that tales of French atrocities were propaganda exploited by Federalists, Jefferson became an apologist for the burgeoning horrors of the Jacobins. “I begin to consider them the true revolutionary spirit of the whole nation,” he told Madison.²⁷ Madison also viewed the revolution through rose-colored spectacles. While Washington and Hamilton refused to acknowledge their election as honorary French citizens, Madison sent back a warmly fraternal response, extolling the “sublime truths and precious sentiments recorded in the revolution of France.”²⁸

Washington hoped to win respectability from foreign powers, but he also wanted to stay free of foreign entanglements so the young nation could prosper. He gave Gouverneur Morris a succinct formulation of his credo: “My primary objects . . . have been to preserve the country in peace, if I can, and to be prepared for war, if I cannot.”²⁹ In general, he favored economic rather than political involvement with the outside world. This neutrality policy was practical in that the United States was too small to exert significant leverage among the great powers and high-minded enough to shy away from European balance-of-power politics. Washington had no desire to exploit wrangling among foreign states, telling Morris that “this country is not guided by such narrow and mistaken policy as will lead it to wish the destruction of any nation under an idea that our importance will be increased in proportion as that of others is lessened.”³⁰ As war convulsed Europe, Washington, a former war hero, might have been tempted to become a warlike president, but he wisely abjured the use of force at this first serious threat.

In early April, while vacationing at Mount Vernon, Washington received a letter from Hamilton in Philadelphia, announcing that England and France were at war. In forwarding instructions to Jefferson, Washington left no doubt of his desire for unconditional American neutrality: “War having actually commenced between France and Great Britain, it behooves the government of this country to use every means in its power to prevent the citizens thereof from embroiling us with either of those powers by endeavoring to maintain a strict neutrality.”³¹ As he rushed back to the capital, he asked Jefferson to draw up a document spelling out the terms of neutrality. Washington was especially concerned that American ships might be recruited as privateers to prey on British vessels, luring the country into war.

After the abortive attempt by Giles to expel him from office, Hamilton was not eager to defer to Jefferson and turned to Chief Justice Jay for advice on drafting a neutrality proclamation. Even though Jefferson complained bitterly about Hamilton’s meddling in affairs of state, Washington did not always segregate foreign policy matters. Back in Philadelphia on April 18, he addressed thirteen questions on the crisis to all his department heads. The first two were the most urgent: Should the United States issue a declaration of neutrality, and should it receive a minister from the French republic? Ever alert to Hamilton’s unseen influence, Jefferson noted that while the handwriting was Washington’s, “the language was Hamilton’s and the doubts his alone.”³²