CHAPTER SIXTY

Mad Dog

EVEN WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT, George Washington insisted that, in sending John Jay to England, he had selected the person best qualified to ensure peace. Because of long delays in transatlantic communications, Washington had no precise notion of the deal Jay was hammering out in London and warned his emissary that “many hot heads and impetuous spirits” wished him to speed up his work.¹ While not wanting to rush Jay, he reminded him, quoting his beloved Shakespeare, that “there is a ‘tide in human affairs’ that ought always to be watched” and that he should proceed with all possible haste.² By February 1795 reports made the rounds in Philadelphia that Jay had concluded a treaty and would shortly arrive on American shores.

On March 3, with Congress set to adjourn, Washington notified legislators that he would convene a special session on June 8 to debate the treaty, which would surely arrive in the interim. As it happened, four days later the document sat on his desk. Washington must have quietly gagged as he pored over its provisions, which seemed heavily slanted toward Great Britain. The treaty failed to stem the odious British practice of seizing American sailors on the high seas. Shockingly, it granted British imports most-favored-nation status, even though England did not reciprocate for American imports. Once the treaty was revealed, it would seem to many as if Jay had groveled before his British counterparts in a demeaning throwback to colonial times. The treaty would strike southerners as further damning proof that Washington was a traitor to his heritage, for Jay had failed to win compensation for American slaves carted off at the end of the war. For all that, the treaty had several redeeming features. England finally consented to evacuate the forts on the Great Lakes; it opened the British West Indies to small American ships; and it agreed to compensate American merchants whose freight had been confiscated. And these concessions paled in comparison to the treaty’s overriding achievement: it arrested the fatal drift toward war with England. On balance, despite misgivings, Washington thought the flawed treaty the best one feasible at the moment.

Fully aware of its explosive contents, Washington elected to shroud the treaty in “impenetrable secrecy,” as Madison termed it, until Congress reconvened in June. By the time the Senate debated it, Jay had returned from England, having been elected in absentia governor of New York. (He would shortly resign as chief justice.) It was not an auspicious homecoming for Jay. The Senate had agreed to debate the treaty in secret, but Republicans gasped in horror as they perused its contents. Its fate seemed uncertain until the Federalists granted the Republicans a critical concession: they would oppose the notorious Article XII, which limited American trade in the British West Indies to ships under seventy tons. Strengthened by this compromise, the treaty effectively passed the Senate in late June by a 20-to-10 vote, the bare minimum needed under the Constitution’s two-thirds rule. The next step would be for Washington to sign the treaty, which caused him an agony of indecision.

In early July, word came that the British had issued bellicose new orders to seize ships laden with food bound for France. Having crafted delicate compromises to steer the treaty through the Senate, Washington was appalled at British insensitivity and protested to resident minister George Hammond. Washington felt sufficiently jittery about signing the treaty that he privately asked Hamilton, now returned to legal practice in Manhattan, to aid him with a high-level crib sheet. Evidently Washington and Hamilton had not been in touch, since Washington admitted that he did not know how Hamilton had been occupied of late. “My wishes,” Washington explained, “are to have the favorable and unfavorable side of each article stated and compared together, that I may see the bearing and tendency of them and, ultimately, on which side the balance is to be found.”³ That Washington turned to Hamilton for guidance reflects his lack of confidence in his newly installed cabinet and his continuing reliance on Hamilton as his economic tutor. When Hamilton was treasury secretary, Washington had had to keep him at arm’s length, juggling him against Jefferson, but he had no such inhibitions with Hamilton out of office. Despite reservations about the Jay Treaty, Hamilton provided Washington with a generally laudatory fifty-three-page analysis, urging him to sign the highly imperfect document. Amazed at the breadth of this sparkling dissection, Washington in his reply sounded sheepish about having inadvertently taken up so much of Hamilton’s time.

Before he put his signature on the treaty, Washington was preparing to publish it when the Aurora printed a précis on June 29 that left the public so aghast that Madison said the treaty “flew with an electric velocity to every part of the union.”⁴ On July 1 the paper issued the complete text, and an official version ran in the Federalist Gazette of the United States. The uproar was overwhelming, tagging Jay as the chief monster in the Republicans’ bestiary. In the treaty, Republicans saw a blatant partiality for England and equally barefaced hostility toward France. Critics gave way to full-blown paranoid fantasies that Jay, in the pay of British gold, had suborned other politicians to introduce a monarchical cabal. Some protests bordered on the obscene, especially a bawdy poem in the Republican press about Jay’s servility to the British king: “May it please your highness, I John Jay / Have traveled all this mighty way, / To inquire if you, good Lord, will please, / to suffer me while on my knees, / to show all others I surpass / In love, by kissing of your———.” ⁵ By the July Fourth celebrations, Jay had been burned in effigy in so many towns that he declared he could have traversed the entire country by the glare of his own flaming figure.

The targets of the protest went far beyond Jay. At a rally in New York, when Hamilton rose to defend the treaty, protesters hurled stones at him, while in Philadelphia a menacing mob descended on George Hammond’s residence, smashed the windows, and “burned the treaty with huzzahs and acclamations.”⁶ Treaty opponents had no compunctions about besieging the presidential mansion, and John Adams remembered it “surrounded by an innumerable multitude from day to day, buzzing, demanding war against England, cursing Washington, and crying success to the French patriots and virtuous Republicans.”⁷ From across the country, inflammatory resolutions against the treaty piled up on Washington’s desk, many of them too obnoxious to warrant replies. “No answer given. The address too rude to merit one,” Washington scrawled atop a New Jersey petition, while he chided another from Virginia thus: “Tenor indecent. No answer returned.” On still another from Kentucky, he scribbled: “The ignorance and indecency of these proceedings forbade an answer.”⁸ Though tepid in his enthusiasm for the treaty, Washington was not prepared to go to war with England and thought the treaty would prevent a harmful deterioration in Anglo-American trade.

In mid-July Washington left sultry Philadelphia for a breathing spell at Mount Vernon, enduring a debilitating six-day journey in “hot and disagreeable” weather.⁹ If he hoped to escape the brouhaha over the Jay Treaty, he was disabused when Secretary of State Randolph reported on the spreading commotion and some preposterous accusations against Washington. One newspaper writer had charged that the president “insidiously aims to dissolve all connections between the United States and France and to substitute a monarchic for a republican ally.”¹⁰ Washington felt powerless to stop this sometimes-ludicrous barrage of falsehoods. Owing to “party disputes,” he complained to Pickering, the “truth is so enveloped in mist and false representations that it is extremely difficult to know through what channel to seek it.”¹¹ Washington was especially pleased when his ex-treasury secretary launched a lengthy series of essays under the signature of “Camillus,” providing a detailed defense of the Jay Treaty. Washington gave way to gloomy musings about republican government, viewing his Republican opponents as full of passionate intensity—“always working, like bees, to distill their poison”—while government supporters were either cowed or spineless, trusting too much to the good sense of the people.¹²