Entangling Alliances with None

American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson

Lawrence S. Kaplan

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1987
• ISBN:
  9781612777702
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Written over a thirty-year period, the essays included in this volume develop one central theme: the completion of American isolationism in the formative years of the nation. Isolationism, in Kaplan's view, is not to be taken as economic or cultural independence but as abstention from political or military obligations to Europe, from alliances or from purposeful entanglement in the European balance of power.This study focuses on the assertion that Thomas Jefferson was central to the making of American foreign policy from the Revolution to 1803. But Kaplan's view is not always supportive of Jefferson. In fact, Kaplan believes the collection has a "Hamiltonian flavor, " although he does not necessarily consider himself a Hamiltonian either.

PART ONE:

JEFFERSONIAN BACKGROUND

1

THOMAS
JEFFERSON:

THE IDEALIST AS REALIST

No statesman of the revolutionary and early national periods made a more substantial contribution to the development of American foreign policy than Thomas Jefferson. From his magnificent synthesis of eighteenth-century political theory in the Declaration of Independence to his death fifty years later, Jefferson’s idealism, tempered by pragmatic regard for practical realities, played a key role in defining a distinctively American position toward the external world. No one, it might be said, ever blended the moralistic yearnings of the young republic for a new international order with the practical pursuit of national self-interest more effectively than he.

Examination of Jefferson’s amazingly varied career and multiple talents highlights the Renaissance quality of his mind and work. For another man any one of his accomplishments would have assured the homage of posterity. Over a span of eighty-three years Jefferson pursued an astonishing range of activities: he was largely responsible for founding the University of Virginia; he was an architectural innovator who helped bring classical forms to the New World; he was an agronomist experimenting with transplantations of rice and silk to the South; he was a theologian who attempted to harmonize Christianity with the temper of the Enlightenment. Above all, he was a scholar in the art of government whose ideas spread through the nation as Jeffersonian democracy. The prestige conferred by authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the power of the presidency ensured dissemination of his ideas in a manner rarely available to political theorists. If his virtuosity did not encompass an appreciation for the intricacies of finance, that shortcoming stemmed less from a lack of understanding the techniques of moneymaking than from a taste that placed spending above getting. Against the bankruptcy of his Monticello estate must be weighed the credit of a life-style that warmed guests in the beautiful mansion with their host’s hospitality as much as with fine French wines.

This westerner belonged to an aristocratic family, the Randolphs of Virginia. His father had improved his status by a wealthy marriage. As a member of the governing elite of the colony, Jefferson early experienced British and European influences flowing across the ocean to Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia. While there may have been few artists or scientists at the College of William and Mary in the colonial capital, there were sufficient men and books to initiate the youthful Jefferson into the life of the eighteenth-century liberal mind. He enjoyed the best of both the Old and the New worlds, sharing the excitement of European ideas that ranged from Arthur Young’s tracts on scientific farming to the disputed poems of Ossian. Books and papers from European centers found their way to Jefferson’s library and to the drawing rooms of Williamsburg and Philadelphia. He was very much a member of the international fraternity of literati that pumped liberal ideas into the courts of Europe and the coffeehouses of America—ideas that ultimately pushed both along the road to revolution. Jefferson’s intimacy with scholarly men such as Professor William Small of William and Mary and George Wythe, his law teacher at Williamsburg, and with such sophisticated men of the world as Francis Fauquier, lieutenant governor of Virginia during his student days, were experiences he repeated in Philadelphia and Paris in later years. True, the above names almost exhausted the roster of interesting people in colonial Virginia, but the point is that his circle of acquaintances included some of the broadest intellectual interests there; his six years at the village capital provided him with an extraordinary range of ideas.

At the same time, perhaps more than any contemporary, Jefferson captured the best elements in the transatlantic civilization of the colonies. As an American living close to the frontier he appreciated the richness of his environment and recognized the advantages of a land with few people and abundant resources. The agrarian society he so valued bred equality among its members, fostered self-reliance, and opened opportunities for individual growth that the Old World could never provide; his experiences encompassed facets that Europeans could not share unless they came to America. Jefferson understood what the challenge and opportunity of empty land meant in the life of a man; he could see in a practical way government expressing the will of the body politic. He lived in a society free of most of the oppressive traditions of the Old World. His father had surveyed the lands that became the first political units the son encountered. He understood the strengths and weaknesses of Rousseau’s natural man; he knew that the theory of Rousseau and Locke was reality for an American.

Membership in the exclusive group that controlled the colony set Jefferson apart from most of his fellows and conferred special advantages on him. Good fortune allowed him to live a life transcending that of the colonial yeoman, whose scarcity of cash and education limited his freedom to roam physically and intellectually; his appreciation of democracy had an aristocratic base in a deferential society. Granted that class distinctions were slighter than in Europe and lacked philosophical and practical support, Jefferson was, nonetheless, a “gentleman,” comfortably fixed in his milieu. He could practice the arts of government as proper and entirely natural functions of his place in society: vestryman in his church, magistrate in the local community, delegate to colonial and national legislatures. Of course, opportunity in the abstract beckoned all men—and it was more than just a pious abstraction in America as compared with other societies—but for men of Jefferson’s class there simply was a larger share of opportunity. Others were similarly endowed; his special distinction lay in his genius, in those qualities of mind and spirit that allowed him to range over the whole experience of mankind and distill its essence in lucid prose.

His public career spanned the period from the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763 to the end of his second presidential term in 1809, years in which he turned his talents to the creation and maintenance of independence from Great Britain. Jefferson was not concerned with reordering the internal society of America or with indulging private interests. His greatest satisfactions derived from such contributions to political philosophy as were found in the Declaration of Independence or in political practice, from his part in organizing the Northwest Territories, or from the educational theory he bequeathed to the University of Virginia. His primary work, however, was in public affairs, particularly the relations of America with Europe. It could not have been otherwise.

For him, as for all the Founding Fathers, the central event of life was the creation of a nation out of thirteen disparate British colonies. Every step in making the Revolution and in securing it afterwards involved foreign affairs. In such a context, conventional divisions between domestic and foreign affairs lost meaning. In the first generation of the Republic no national leader could escape awareness of the hostile outside world. Europe intruded in every way, inspiring fear of reconquest by the mother country, offering opportunity along sparsely settled borderlands, arousing uncertainties over the aliance with a great power. Unless the new nation settled for a subsistence economy its prosperity rested upon trade with the Old World; the European market held the American economy captive, and no political theory could alter that fact of economic life. There could be no escape from such concerns, any more than from the language Americans spoke, the customs they followed, or the ideas they circulated.

Anglo-American relations dominated American history in the early years of the Republic. Despite a successful military separation, the economic links of tradition proved more enduring than the political, even though many people, Jefferson included, wished it to be otherwise. If an alternative to a British connection existed, it was not to be achieved by retreating into autarchy but by shifting the economy toward France, the wartime ally; it was to France that those leaders suspicious or fearful of British designs turned during the administrations of George Washington and John Adams.

Anglophiles and Francophiles alike, however, held a different view of Spain, the third major European nation whose interests impinged on those of America. For most Americans, Spain presented an object of aggrandizement and exploitation, a weak state whose territories might be despoiled, or at least kept out of the control of other European powers. As Americans looked southward and westward at insecurely held Spanish territory they envisaged a future continental empire of liberty that would free them from the superpowers of the day.

The record clearly reveals the Jeffersonian involvement in foreign affairs. His service as delegate to both Continental Congresses, as wartime governor of Virginia, and as commissioner to France at the end of the war were all linked to French and British influences in American life. During the Confederation period he represented the United States in Paris, attempting to mobilize support for its continued independence. Upon return to America he became secretary of state, the first in the revitalized union, absorbed in assuring survival of the nation in a hostile world. The French Revolution and its subsequent wars dominated his years as vice-president and president. The magnificent acquisition of Louisiana, though not wholly his doing, deservedly is credited to him; and the disastrous embargo of 1807, though not wholly his mistake, if mistake it was, appropriately is identified with him. Success or failure, Jefferson the public man was of necessity a maker of diplomacy.

Jefferson’s enemies of every generation make much of what they consider his deficiencies in character. Most dwell on his inconsistency, pointing out that he shifted from one position to another at critical moments out of fear of consequences, instability of judgment, or passion for power. Thus, his movement from strict to loose construction of the Constitution, from agrarianism to support of manufacturing, from fear of executive power to abuse of it in office, from a love of France to distrust and finally to dependence upon that country under Napoleon have all been used by enemies who would dismiss him as weak, cowardly, opportunistic, or worse. His Francophilia has been interpreted as a personality quirk with dire consequences for the country.

Much of the familiar Federalist criticism of Jefferson withers in the face of close examination. A far better case may be made of excessive consistency, of an allegiance to a conception of society long after it had become obvious that the ideal could not be sustained, or of reliance upon economic weapons against Europe after those weapons were turned against him. Jefferson never questioned what he wanted for America; he envisioned a society of cultivated, independent men on terms of equality with one another, keeping government as close to the local level as possible, living on farms rather than in cities because the agrarian life best propagated the good life. Expansionism became part of the plan because an American empire would remove the corrupt and dangerous model of Europe, as it would if the pattern of international commerce could also be reorganized to incorporate the American alternative to mercantilism, free trade. He identified urban commercial society with class conflict, with oligarchic manipulation of politics, and with European financial control over America, most especially Great Britain’s economic interests in its former colonies. To combat such dangers, he believed that right reason applied to the right environment would create a society embodying the best blend of the Enlightenment with the frontier.

He never abandoned his vision of the good society. Apparent deviations were responses to external pressures or were expedients, temporary tactical retreats. He shared with other Founding Fathers a belief that alliances with European powers were unnecessary and potentially dangerous to American independence. His musings about a relationship with Europe “precisely on the footing of China,” while fanciful, were genuine; and he knew that in an imperfect world less desirable choices sometimes had to be made to attain more desirable ends. Thus, an alliance with France might be made if Britain threatened the nation’s independence; the danger of a connection with Europe had to be balanced against the greater damage that defeat or accommodation with Britain might bring. When France took over the Mississippi outlet at New Orleans, Jefferson contemplated a marriage of convenience to the British fleet and nation. Similarly, he recognized that an embargo on trade would require cultivation of manufactures and urban growth in violation of his preference for an agrarian America; when he saw the alternative as acceptance of British domination, he took the risk. No one celebrated the virtues of limited government more eloquently than Jefferson, but he realized that they had to be subordinated to the need for a national government strong enough to enforce the embargo, just as in earlier years the state governments of the Confederation, though in his view better custodians of freedom than a more centralized union, had to give way to the Constitution when the Republic’s survival was at stake. In 1803 Jefferson’s firm commitment to strict construction of the Constitution conveniently expanded to avoid loss of a vast empire in the West.

Jefferson’s statecraft invited criticisms. His means occasionally distorted his ends and diminished the stature of the man who tolerated the distortions. Indeed, he paid for his concessions by witnessing before he died some of the unfortunate consequences he had always feared would follow from the promotion of an industrial society, and his reliance on economic coercion exacerbated international tensions while it created new domestic ones. If he did not also pay for France’s exploitation of his too ardent sympathy, it was only because he refused to confess to any errors of judgment in a pro-French policy.

Part of the explanation of Jefferson’s flexibility lies in his early recognition of the importance of the external world in American affairs and in his firm belief in the permanent hostility of Great Britain. Preservation of the new nation from the baneful effects of those realities required statecraft; if Jefferson sometimes overrated the efficacy of diplomacy, he seldom underestimated the danger of involvement in transatlantic affairs. Ultimately, of course, Americans sought a solution in withdrawal from the European arena into their own empire, into a peculiarly American isolationism wherein obligations to Europe did not exist. In one way or another nearly every American statesman worked to free the nation from dependence upon Europe.

When Jefferson was secretary of state in the 1790s, his countrymen differed violently about the direction of foreign affairs, especially about the American response to the French Revolution and its subsequent wars. The powerful commercial interests of New England and the seaboard towns looked to Great Britain as a necessary business partner, at least until a viable domestic economy could be created. Many of its leaders equated a pro-British policy with freedom from French ideology and French imperialism. Jefferson and his followers never accepted such views. They believed, at least until after the War of 1812, that Britain intended to reduce America to a position of permanent inferiority in an economic relationship more suffocating than the political connection had been before independence. Like their opponents the Federalists, Jeffersonians responded emotionally to events in France, but they read their import differently. They believed that if the French republic collapsed in its war with monarchical Britain, monarchy if not British rule would return to America.

Jefferson’s anti-British animus had deep roots. It grew in part from wartime experiences and received repeated reinforcement during his career. At times his fears approached obsession, but he directed these sentiments more to particular institutions and proponents of policy than to Englishmen per se or to the benign aspects of British culture. However flawed, the British political system surpassed any in Europe; and even when in France desperately seeking help during the Confederation period, Jefferson could in good conscience recommend to French friends that they follow the British political model. If Frenchmen kept in view the example of their cross-channel neighbor, he told Lafayette, they might advance “step by step towards a good constitution.” His feelings for English friends remained as warm as his feelings for Frenchmen. He admired the liberal English reformers whose Anglo-Saxon traditions in law and language he claimed for America—indeed, he who had paraphrased Locke’s political philosophy could hardly do otherwise.

In some respects this common heritage exacerbated problems between Britain and America, for the mother country lacked the excuse of ignorance for its abuse of freedom and its threats to liberty. Because Britain had extended its heritage to the New World, British behavior became intolerable when it selfishly and abruptly deprived colonists of their right to tax and govern themselves through their own representative bodies. By such actions the ministers of the Crown behaved unconstitutional...