Washington [451]
In September 1791 the overtures made by Hamilton, with Washington’s approval, resulted in a major breakthrough in Anglo-American relations, as George III named George Hammond as the first British minister to America. When Hammond and his secretary, Edward Thornton, arrived that autumn, they immediately sensed the amicable disposition of the treasury secretary and the implacable hostility of the secretary of state. Writing home, Thornton evoked Jefferson’s “strong hatred” of the British and his “decided and rancorous malevolence to the British name.”7 Not surprisingly, Hammond and Thornton gravitated to the pro-British circle clustered around Hamilton.
America’s fervent attachment to France arose from gratitude for its indispensable help during the Revolutionary War, and no country saluted its revolution with more fraternal warmth. In a variety of ways, the French Revolution had been spawned by its American predecessor, which had bred dreams of liberty among French aristocrats who fought in the war, then tried to enshrine its principles at home. The most visible standard-bearer of these hopes was the Marquis de Lafayette, who told Washington from Paris that the “ideas of liberty have been, since the American Revolution, spreading very fast.”8 As Jefferson stated proudly, the French had been “awakened by our revolution . . . Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.”9 As early as 1780 Washington had predicted that France, to pay for its American adventure, would face a huge deficit and resort to ruinous taxes that “the people of France are not in a condition to endure for any duration.”10 Those taxes and other hardships had provoked immense discontent, leading King Louis XVI to convene a special advisory assembly called the Estates-General in May 1789, which mingled commoners with the clergy and nobility.
Always a perceptive student of politics, George Washington, from the first stir-rings of the French Revolution, was astonishingly prophetic about its course. He regarded Louis XVI as a good-hearted but fallible king who would make a clumsy, self-destructive effort to foil revolutionary impulses. “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth,” Washington remarked to Madison in 1788. “The checks [the king] endeavors to give it . . . will, more than probably, kindle a flame which may not easily be extinguished, tho[ugh] for a while it may be smothered by the armies at his command.”11 With his sure instincts, Washington intuited that the French Revolution might veer off into fanaticism and warned Lafayette “against running into extremes and prejudicing your cause.”12 On the other hand, he also thought that if the king managed change properly, a constitutional monarchy might ensue. Paradoxically, Jefferson, an eyewitness to the revolution’s outbreak, seemed blind to its violent potential. In August 1788 he blithely reported to James Monroe from France, “I think it probable this country will, within two or three years, be in the enjoyment of a tolerably free constitution and that without its having cost them a drop of blood.”13 Perhaps because of his association with enlightened Parisian intellectuals, Jefferson missed the bloodthirsty spirit of the French Revolution, its lust for gore and its gratuitous butchering of innocent victims.
The early days of the French Revolution, so giddily triumphant, produced general rejoicing among Americans. In the spring and summer of 1789 they applauded the creation of the National Assembly and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and