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in the Mediterranean and enslaved their crews. Many European powers had grown resigned to paying “tribute”—a polite word for ransom money—to win the release of their crews. As American crews succumbed to these pirates and were threatened with forced conversion to Islam, Washington was offended by the need to pay bribes, especially after Algiers seized eleven American merchant ships and a hundred prisoners. Reluctantly, he authorized the payment of money to Algiers and even tried to negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce with the city-state, but he thought the time had come to back up American diplomacy with military might. In March 1794 Congress approved a proposal, backed by Washington and Knox, to build six frigates “adequate for the protection of the commerce of the U.S. against Algerian corsairs.”16 This action officially inaugurated the U.S. Navy, although it would take four more years before a separate Navy Department was born. While the six frigates represented a landmark in Washington’s plan to foster a professional military, he never neglected diplomacy and wrested treaties from both Morocco and Algiers.

Another foreign policy crisis arose from the swelling casualties spawned by the French Revolution and the concomitant European turmoil. Supported by his cabinet, Washington made a private overture to the king of Prussia, asking him to release Lafayette as a gesture of friendship toward America. Although Washington failed to win his freedom, the king eased the shockingly bad conditions of Lafayette’s confinement and allowed him books, fresh air, and more appetizing food. The respite, alas, was brief. Lafayette was soon transferred to the Austrian authorities, who shut him up in a filthy, fly-infested cell in Olmütz, where he lay in chains and ragged clothing. After Lafayette’s wife was arrested in France, Gouverneur Morris interceded on her behalf, leading Robespierre to spare her from the guillotine, but her mother, sister, and grandmother wound up as victims of the Terror.

In April 1793 the French government had established the Committee of Public Safety, giving it sweeping powers to arrest people for treason and try them under its jurisdiction; by September a Reign of Terror ensued that would claim as many as forty thousand lives.17 As an eyewitness to the bloodletting, Gouverneur Morris provided Washington with a running commentary on the atrocities. “The Queen was executed the day before yesterday,” he wrote of Marie-Antoinette that October. “Insulted during her trial and reviled in her last moments”—she had been taken through the streets of Paris in an open cart to the guillotine—“she behav’d with dignity throughout.”18 The perceptive Morris saw that the violence was no incidental by-product of the revolution but fundamental to its spirit. As he put it in lapidary prose, “In the groves [of the revolution], at every end of every vista, you see nothing but gallows.”19 An essential difference between the American and French revolutions was that the American version allowed a search for many truths, while French zealots tried to impose a single sacred truth that allowed no deviation.

By July 1794 the revolutionary tribunal in Paris accelerated the tempo of its trials and issued nine hundred death sentences per month.20 Many victims of the Terror had been stalwart friends of the American Revolution. Pulled from his quarters in the middle of the night, Thomas Paine had been tossed into prison and stayed there for months. From Paris, James Monroe, who replaced Gouverneur Morris as American minister, informed Madison that Paine was loudly blaming Washington for his predicament: “He thinks the president winked at his imprisonment and wished he might die in gaol, and bears his resentment for it; also he is preparing an attack upon him of the most virulent kind.”21 Whatever displeasure Washington might have felt toward Paine, there is no evidence that he wanted him either abused or incarcerated.

Many Frenchmen who had admired or even participated in the American Revolution were casualties of its bloody Gallic sequel.