A Sovereign People

INTRODUCTION

WHEN PRESIDENT GEORGE Washington delivered his first inaugural address on April 30, 1789, he confessed that as a man of "inferior endowments from nature" who was "unpractised in the duties of civil administration," he feared his inadequacy to handle the challenges that lay ahead for the new federal government. Washington, however, was not the only man who felt the weight of those challenges. Along with the president, there were men who believed that the survival of the Republic rested on the Constitution and its government—and that the success of both depended upon them. The anxiety they shared with the president can be seen in the debates in Congress, in cabinet meetings, in newspaper articles, and in their private correspondence.

Like Washington, these men called themselves Federalists, but in spirit they were nationalists. They had written the Constitution or supported its ratification from a firm conviction that a strong government representing all the people of the Republic was the surest path to economic growth and prosperity, to civil law and order, and to winning the respect and recognition from foreign nations necessary to insure America's continued independence. They had met with fierce opposition at the ratifying conventions by men equally certain that the best way to protect the liberties and rights won in the Revolution was to keep power in the hands of the state governments. But the Federalists had won that hard-fought battle. And now, in 1789, the first president and the first Congress were preparing for the battles to come.

The stakes were high. If the federal government failed, and these men were well aware that it might, it would be their failure; if it succeeded, they hoped to be credited with that success. In short, Federalists tended to see themselves as the exclusive guardians of the federal experiment, the Constitution's true representatives and agents—and its only legitimate interpreters. They viewed anyone who opposed them, anyone who criticized them publicly or attacked their policies, as an enemy of the Constitution, of the federal government, and of the Republic.

There was opposition—in newspapers, in congressional debates, in memorials and petitions sent to the presidents, in outbreaks of open resistance and in challenges to the sovereignty of the United States by foreign powers. The laws passed by Congress and the policies set by the president were ignored by foreign representatives and resisted by citizens. Their policies were undermined by state officials protective of their own authority. And the Federalists in office were relentlessly accused of secretly plotting to destroy the Republic and create a monarchy in America. Federalists believed that this opposition would undermine their efforts to win the loyalty of the ordinary citizens to the Constitution and its government. Without the peoples' support, the Constitution was only a piece of paper.

Looking back from the twenty-first century, it is often difficult to imagine that the acceptance of the Constitution was ever contested or that the authority of the federal government was so widely doubted. But a closer examination of the decade after the ratification of that piece of paper reveals that attachment to the federal government grew slowly. As it did, a new identity emerged. Vermonters and New Yorkers and Virginians came to see themselves less as citizens of their home states and more as citizens of a nation. The Federalist economic and fiscal policies alone cannot explain this shift. Although Alexander Hamilton's economic plan ensured that entrepreneurs and commercial interests would have a vested interest in the survival of the federal government, it did not win the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens. The Federalists needed help to lay the foundation for a strong and enduring central government. They found it in the least expected places: crises of government legitimacy and sovereignty.

Some of these crises originated within the new nation's borders; others started abroad. In each instance, the Federalists resolved the crisis, and the process brought more Americans into the national fold. The central story of the 1790s is how patriotism came to be associated with this support for the Constitution and its government. If the Revolution freed the states and the Constitution linked them as never before, it was the Federalists in the 1790s, responding to one grave crisis after another, who established a nation on firm ground.

A Sovereign People tracks four of the crises of this founding era. It explores the context in which they arose, the nature of the challenge to the government, and how the Federalists chose to resolve the crisis. Unlike many accounts of these crises, this book does not focus on their role in the emergence of an opposition party led by Jefferson and Madison; instead, it scrutinizes the part these crises, and their resolutions, played in the emergence of American nationalism.

The first crisis was a domestic challenge to the legitimacy of congressional legislation. Known as the Whiskey Rebellion of 1792–1794, this was an armed resistance by western Pennsylvania farmers and distillers to an excise tax on the production and sale of alcohol. Frontier communities like these had a long history of resentment, first against the British and colonial governments and later against the state governments that they believed favored the more established eastern enclaves. In the early 1790s, Pennsylvania backcountry men nurtured a long list of such complaints, this time aimed at the new federal government. Chief among them was the government's failure to secure navigation rights to the Spanish-held Mississippi River that would have allowed them to ship their grain harvest to market before it spoiled. To preserve the value of their crop on the long haul across land, they distilled much of it into liquor. In 1792, however, the financially struggling federal government imposed a tax on the production and sale of this alcohol. The resulting rebellion is a reminder that the ghost of the American Revolution—with its call to citizens to rise up against tyranny—still haunted the land. The whiskey rebels, like the New England Shays' rebels of 1786, believed that they had a right to arm themselves and resist unfair legislation. And, like the Sons of Liberty and other radicals of the 1770s, they used intimidation and violence against the tax collectors and the members of their communities who dared to support the excise tax. Government failure to answer the whiskey rebels' challenge would set a precedent that made a mockery of its authority. The government's dilemma was how to end the rebellion, establish its legislative authority, and avoid fueling the public's fears of an abuse of power under the new Constitution.

The second crisis is known as the Genet affair. French ambassador Edmond Charles Genet arrived in America in the spring of 1793, armed with instructions from his country's revolutionary government to enlist US help in its struggle to spread an "empire of liberty" to other European nations. As the two republics in the Western world, France expected willing aid from the United States, just as France had aided the Americans in achieving their independence. Genet demanded that President Washington accept the French interpretation of the crucial 1778 Franco-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce and Treaty of Alliance, an interpretation that would allow French warships and privateers to make full use of American ports and territorial waters in its naval battle with England. Genet also enlisted Americans to man French privateers and to join in the invasion of Spanish and British territories in North America. In his enthusiasm to achieve these goals, Genet ran roughshod over American sovereignty, ignoring the president's Proclamation of Neutrality in the European war and flouting the policies in place to ensure that neutrality. In effect, Genet's actions would have turned the United States into a satellite of France rather than an independent sovereign nation. The government needed to assert its control over foreign policy without alienating the many Americans who continued to be grateful to the French for their aid during the Revolution and who hoped to see the French Republic victorious.

The third crisis, the XYZ affair of 1798, posed a diplomatic challenge to American honor and to its ability to sustain the policy of neutrality as the war in Europe continued to rage. In 1794, Washington had acted to ease tensions and avoid war with Britain by negotiating what was known as the Jay Treaty. In 1798, his successor, John Adams, hoped to do the same with France. Relations between the two countries had deteriorated since the Genet affair; privateering against American merchant ships had increased, and, in 1797, France had refused the credentials of an American ambassador. Adams sent three envoys to Paris to reestablish a cordial relationship between the two republics. Before any formal negotiations could take place, however, the French minister's agents demanded a bribe for the minister and a large loan toward the French war effort. The bribe was seen as an insult to American honor; the loan was likely to draw the United States into a war with Britain. The challenge facing President Adams was whether the situation called for a declaration of war against France or a second attempt at the negotiation of a treaty.

The fourth crisis involved the interpretation of the Constitution and the powers it granted the federal government. It began when the Adams administration tried to take advantage of the popularity it enjoyed for the handling of the XYZ affair. Federalists decided to pass legislation that would silence the partisan press supporting the Republican opposition as well as laws that would slow the growth of that party by imposing tighter immigration and naturalization laws. These Alien and Sedition Acts prompted both Kentucky and Virginia to pass resolutions that denied the authority of the federal government to legislate against free speech or to interfere with the power of state governments to control immigration. Both states suggested that allegedly unconstitutional laws could be declared null and void. And both states challenged the idea that the Constitution had created a "consolidated" or national government rather than a union of sovereign states. The government's task was to defend not only the constitutionality of its legislation as necessary and proper but to persuade the public that the citizens of America, not the states, were the source of authority for the Constitution and the federal government.

The Federalists made many mistakes in dealing with these crises. Yet we can see the arc of a rising nationalism as they navigated their way through each of them. The public's commitment to the Constitution and the federal government began as little more than a desire to honor and to express its trust in the Revolutionary War hero, George Washington. It slowly evolved into a respect for the office rather than the man. It grew stronger as citizens began to acknowledge the value of a federal government that would speak to the outside world with one voice and a united purpose. It deepened when once again the French showed contempt for America and declared that the people could be separated from their government. And it solidified as Kentucky and Virginia insisted that they could reject particular laws but made their argument within the context of acceptance of—and loyalty to—the Constitution and a federal government. The disagreement was not over whether the Constitution ought to be accepted and admired, but over whose interpretation of that near-sacred document was correct.

Modern Americans often assume that nationalism was an obvious and even automatic response to the transition from colonies to an independent country after the Revolutionary War. But this assumption misses the reality that the core of nationalism—loyalty to a country and its government and a shared identity as its citizens—was the result of the hard work of governance. The governments of Washington and Adams did not find perfect solutions to the crises facing their country, but over the course of their administrations Americans came to acknowledge that the federal government was the best-equipped institution to deal with critical domestic and foreign problems.

THE DECISIONS MADE by men like Washington, Hamilton, and Adams, members of an executive branch committed to a strong, active central government, ensured the survival of the young Republic during its critical first decade. Today, however, many Americans doubt the wisdom of what these eighteenth-century leaders called an "energetic government." We have seen an ebbing of confidence in government's capacity to play a positive role in our society. Nationalism has become closely associated with a call for limited government, and patriotism often takes the form of jingoism and empty chauvinism. A closer look at the 1790s will remind us that nationalism and patriotism once carried more positive meanings—and give us reason to believe they can do so again.