Washington [450]
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Running into Extremes
EARLY IN HIS ADMINISTRATION, George Washington had figured out that for foreign policy advice he would have to rely on his cabinet rather than the Senate, but the cabinet members were no less split in the foreign policy realm than they were on pressing domestic issues. The most divisive topic was whether the United States should lean toward France or Great Britain. Even after waging war against Britain for more than eight years, Washington took a coldly realistic view of the strategic need for cordial relations with London. The federal government depended upon customs duties as its principal revenue source and could scarcely afford to antagonize its major trading partner. After the war, as American trade with England swiftly rebounded, Washington had observed, “Our trade in all points of view is as essential to G[reat] B[ritain] as hers is to us.”1 In the postwar period, American merchants had bristled at the exclusion of their ships from the British West Indies. Scarcely a raging Anglophile, Washington had a long list of other grievances against the English—their refusal to make restitution for runaway slaves, their unwillingness to evacuate western posts, their reluctance to send a minister to the United States—but he never allowed those complaints to stymie his earnest efforts to improve relations with the Crown.
In the autumn of 1789 Washington decided to post the witty Gouverneur Morris to England as an unofficial envoy to iron out problems between the two governments. Jefferson feared that America would import Britain’s monarchical ways along with its products and strongly favored warmer relations with France, whose revolution he monitored with enthusiasm. Where Hamilton and Jay supported Morris’s appointment, Jefferson staunchly opposed it, viewing Morris as a “high-flying monarchy man” and overly friendly to England.2 He later faulted the fun-loving Morris for prejudicing Washington’s mind against the French Revolution.
Because Jefferson did not take office until March 1790, Hamilton was able to poach on territory usually reserved for the secretary of state and attempted to strengthen ties with Great Britain, with whom the United States still lacked formal diplomatic relations. In October 1789 he conducted a secret meeting with a British diplomat, Major George Beckwith, assuring him, “I have always preferred a connection with you to that of any other country. We think in English and have a similarity of prejudices and predilections.”3 Washington likewise believed that the common laws, language, and customs of America and England made them natural allies, and he fully concurred with Hamilton’s desire to negotiate a commercial treaty between the two countries. By the summer of 1790 Morris’s talks in London began to bear fruit. After a meeting with Beckwith, Hamilton relayed to Washington the startling news that Sir Guy Carleton, now the governor general of Canada, “had reason to believe that the Cabinet of Great Britain entertained a disposition not only towards a friendly intercourse but towards an alliance with the United States.”4 Jefferson scoffed at such views emanating from an unofficial emissary.
Accepting the need for creative diplomacy, Washington sought to profit from the back channel established by Hamilton with Beckwith. That summer the specter of war between England and Spain arose after their military confrontation at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island in western Canada.