The Federalist Administrations. 12 years in the presidency: 8 for George Washington, 4 for John Adams. Alexander Hamilton doing most of the heavy lifting as Secretary of the Treasury. A new capital city.
An internal rebellion, a couple of treaties (one very unpopular, one unremarked on), a famous farewell address, a transfer of power by election, and then the wheels fell off. HOW the wheels fell off, and how one of the responses may have led to the Civil War, will be the main subject of my remarks in this diary, although there will be at least a nod to the events that preceded it.
Since George Washington had chaired the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and since Article II of the Constitution, which describes the Executive Branch of government, was written with Washington in mind (here's part one of Section 2, if you have any doubts),
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
it's not surprising that he was elected the first President once the Constitution had been ratified by the requisite number of states.
A lot of what we think we know about Washington isn't exactly true:
(Parson Weems' Fable, Grant Wood, 1939, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas)
The itinerant bookseller Mason Locke Weems (known as Parson) wrote educational and uplifting biographies of some of the Founding Fathers (notably Washington and Benjamin Franklin) and "embellished" them with useful stories about them that he made up.
It's actually possible to discuss the Washington presidency without discussing Washington until the very end, so here's the famous posthumous portrait by Gilbert Stuart:
(George Washington, Gilbert Stuart, 1810, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
First, the capital city. Not only no King, but no London either. The first time the South won a sectional dispute (the North wanted to keep the capital in New York until a site could be found in southeastern Pennsylvania). I could go on about this, but the best explanation I've ever found is the chapter about it in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism.
When we discuss the Washington Administration, we're mostly discussing Alexander Hamilton, his Secretary of the Treasury. We'll cover him in more detail in the next installment of the series. We're also discussing the American response to the OTHER thing that happened in 1789. You know, on quatorze juillet:
(Liberty Leading the People,Eugène Delacroix, 1830. Musee du Louvre, Paris)
When Louis XVI decided to support the American Revolution, he set up a conflict between Britain and France regarding the Western Hemisphere that really didn't end until the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The French Revolution may very well be what created the first political party system in the United States. While diplomatically the new nation was neutral, the Federalists found the revolutionaries perverse and not at all like our founding fathers. Jefferson and his party, on the other hand, looked at it as the culmination of the ideals of the American Revolution, and Jefferson himself saw his own hand in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (Jefferson clung to the belief that everything would turn out all right in France).
And this brings us to John Adams. The initial Constitutional provisions for the election of a president (1) instructed the states to select electors in whatever way they saw fit, and, when the electoral votes were counted, (2) the man with the most votes would be President, and (3) the man with the second-most votes would be vice president. That resulted in an electoral map that looks like this:
Exactly. No popular vote because all the electors were appointed by the various state legislatures. Adams as President, Thomas Jefferson as Vice President. Try to imagine this administration with Vice President McCain breaking ties in the Senate. No impetus to change that yet.
(John Adams, John Trumbull, 1793, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
Adams saw the presidency as his reward for 30 years of public service, not a party matter, but his entire presidency was absorbed with a crisis in foreign relations. The Republicans had been unable to scuttle Jay’s Treaty, which committed the United States to a close trading and economic relationship with Britain in return for Britain withdrawing from their western forts. This was good for trade because the British West Indies became dependent on the United States for flour, salted meat, dried fish and lumber.
Not surprisingly, the French looked at the Jay Treaty as a declaration of hostility but they felt that American public generally sympathetic to French cause and that the Federalist administration out of step with voters. Once Adams was elected, French pirates began to attack American shipping wherever they found it. Adams sent a three man negotiating team – Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, Elbridge Gerry – to seek a settlement with France. They were rebuffed by Talleyrand, but then three ministers sent by Talleyrand asking for a bribe in order to consider the Americans' demands. In April 1798, the dispatches of American mission were published, support for Federalists and immediate declaration of war increased. This is known as the XYZ affair in which the new world provincials were once again offended by the corruptions of wicked even if post-revolutionary Europe, and Adams gained a great deal of popular support as a result.
What resulted was a “quasi-war” with France, which challenged Adams. The most successful undertaking of Adams’s government was the creation of a Navy, virtually from scratch, in response to the presence of French cruisers in American coastal water. Unfortunately, the Adams administration prepared for war by passing and enacting four bills that have come to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Some historians have come to see these acts as having provided a unique opportunity for conservatives to float antidemocratic ideas in an attempt to undermine the democratic discourse that had been provoked by the French Revolution without being branded as traitorous monarchists.
First, the Naturalization Act of 1798 (June 18, 1798). At this point in our history, the major concern about immigrants was how to make them citizens, as no attempt would be made to limit immigration until after the Civil War. The first naturalization act was passed in 1790. It stated that
any alien, being a free white person
who had resided in the United States for
two years could be admitted as a citizen of any state where he had lived for
one year if he proved his good character and took an oath or affirmation prescribed by law to uphold the Constitution. This was revised in 1795 to make the residence requirement
five years, to require the petitioner to declare his intention to seek American citizenship three years before application and to renounce all allegiance and fidelity to “any foreign prince, potentate, State or sovereignty whatever” (this is still in the oath), provide proof of good character, and proof of attachment to the principles of the Constitution.
The major change made in 1798 was to lengthen the residence requirement to fourteen years. This was explicitly to deprive the Jeffersonian Republicans of any immigrant votes. This passed each house but the margin of one vote. Voter suppression, late-18th century style.
Second, An Act Concerning Aliens(June 25, 1798): This said that the President might expel any foreign-born non-naturalized citizen considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” without affording him a hearing, and it was applicable during both peacetime and wartime. The original idea was to get rid of as many aliens as possible through isolation and wholesale deportation using a vast system of registration, surveillance and individual permits. It would have wiped out the entire tourist trade had one existed. The excesses were struck out largely on Federalist initiative as Alexander Hamilton, seeing the earliest version of the bill, thought his friends must be running wild. It cleared the House by a margin of 6 votes. It was never invoked and it expired June 1800 without ever having been used
Third, An Act Respecting Alien Enemies (July 6, 1798): This gave president the authority to designate as alien enemies any citizens or subjects of a hostile nation whose presence he regarded as dangerous only in the event of war or invasion. The Republicans suggested that the bill was unconstitutional of bill, fearing that a similar bill could be passed that argued that dissenting citizens could be considered dangerous to the peace of the country. The procedures of the act, which involved federal and state courts as well as enforcement officers, were defined by law rather than being left to President’s discretion. Adams never used this, since open war with France never took place, but it remains on the books today. I'm taking liberties here, but the underlying premise of the bill has allowed civil rights abuses like this:
That's the image on the slide I use to describe the Alien Enemies Act.
Fourth, and finally, An Act in Addition to the Act, Entitled "An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States," more commonly known as the Sedition Act (July 14, 1798): This was designed as an omnibus bill that would have throttled any opposition to the federal government, and the initial version based on the idea that there was such a thing as treason in peacetime. The House passed a bill like this, but the provision was struck from the bill by the Senate, as was a provision that prohibited any expression that justified the existence of the French government.
The Sedition Act provided for fines and imprisonment for
any person [who]shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government,
ostensibly as a temporary defense measure necessary for protecting the nation from disloyal citizens. The final bill represented a liberalization of the common law of seditious libel, insofar as malicious intent had to be proved and evidence of the truth of allegedly libelous utterances could be admitted as a defense.
The Act was allowed to expire March 3, 1801, the day before the Adams administration was to end, and this one they used. Twenty-five persons were arrested, including prominent Republican editors, and ten of them were convicted; these form the basis of our current codes regarding libel and slander.
The Alien and Sedition Acts provoked the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, drafted in secret by Jefferson, and Madison, and formally introduced by John Breckinridge in Kentucky, and John Taylor in Virginia. The Resolutions provided an argument for the responsibility of the states to interpose for arresting the progress of evil, by declaring the Alien and Sedition Acts
unconstitutional; and that the necessary and proper measures will be taken by each, for co-operating with this state, in maintaining the Authorities, Rights, and Liberties, referred to the States respectively, or to the people.
These did much to unify the Republican Party, and note the use of the language of the Tenth Amendment. They also demonstrated that it was possible to unite as a band of patriots in resistance to encroaching tyranny as an opposition party. The spirit of the Resolutions led to the establishment of many effective and explicitly partisan newspapers by Jeffersonian printers and editors during 1799 and 1800.
They also contributed a great deal to the nineteenth century discussion of state sovereignty and states rights by introducing the term nullification AND to define the election of 1800 as a referendum on the future of nation. We will explore the irregularity of the election, and the development of the 12th Amendment to fix these irregularities, next week.
