On This Day: Pres. Washington backs Britain amid cries of senility, impeachment - Nov. 19, 1794
(edited from Wikipedia)
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The Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America, commonly known as the Jay Treaty, was a 1794 treaty between the United States and Great Britain that averted war, resolved issues remaining since the Treaty of Paris of 1783 (which ended the American Revolutionary War), and facilitated ten years of peaceful trade between the United States and Britain in the midst of the French Revolutionary Wars, which began in 1792.
The Treaty was designed by Alexander Hamilton and supported by President George Washington. It angered France and bitterly divided Americans. It inflamed the new growth of two opposing parties in every state, the pro-Treaty Federalists and the anti-Treaty Jeffersonian Republicans.
The treaty was "surprisingly generous" in allowing Americans to trade with Great Britain on a most-favored-nation basis. In return, the United States gave most favored nation trading status to Britain.
Approval and dissent
Washington submitted the treaty to the United States Senate for its consent in June 1795; a two-thirds vote was needed. The treaty was unpopular at first and gave the Jeffersonians a platform to rally new supporters.
Thomas Jefferson was harshly critical of the treaty. The Jeffersonians were opposed to Britain, preferring support for France in the wars raging in Europe, and they argued that the treaty with France from 1778 was still in effect. They considered Britain as the center of aristocracy and the chief threat to the United States' republican values. They denounced Hamilton, Jay, and Washington as monarchists who betrayed American values. Town hall meetings in Philadelphia turned from debate to disorder in the summer of 1795 as rocks were thrown, British officials harassed, and a copy of the treaty burnt at the door of one of America's wealthiest merchants and U.S. Senator, William Bingham.
Washington supported the Jay Treaty because he did not want American ships to be constantly attacked and captured by the powerful British navy, and he decided to take his chances with a hostile French navy that would mostly be bottled up in Europe by the British blockade.
By backing the treaty, he sacrificed the unanimous respect and goodwill that the whole country had given across his service as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, president of the Constitutional Convention, and President of the United States to that point. He was brutally criticized in Democratic-Republican areas of the country like his home state of Virginia. Numerous protestors would picket Mount Vernon and show their anger towards him. Newspapers and cartoons showed Washington being sent to the guillotine. A common protest rally cry was, "A speedy death to General Washington." Some protestors even wanted Washington to be impeached. It was only after Washington's death in 1799 when the whole country reunited and wholeheartedly respected him again.
[Mental illness and treason]
The treaty led to the permanent rupture of decades of close friendship and camaraderie between President Washington and the anti-Jay Treaty Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Jefferson wrote a scathing private letter that secretly called Washington senile and an “apostate” who subverted American liberty to “the harlot England”. He also secretly financed and ordered newspapers to personally attack Washington with accusations of mental illness and treason.
Madison, even though he wrote the Constitution, claimed as a partisan Democratic-Republican member of the House of Representatives that the House also has an equal role in the treaty-making process. Washington had to personally find the secret minutes of the 1787 Constitutional Convention where Madison himself said treaties are conducted by only the Senate and President, and he had to argue against Madison with Madison's own words from the Constitutional Convention. Madison forced Washington to invoke executive privilege over this issue.
Washington never saw or spoke to Jefferson and Madison ever again after the ratification of the Jay Treaty. Martha Washington said that the election of Jefferson as president in 1800 was the second worst day of her life after the death of her husband, and she believed the shocking words and actions by them towards Washington hastened his death only 2 years after leaving office.
[Provisions]
The Treaty was negotiated by John Jay and gained several of the primary American goals. This included the withdrawal of British Army units from forts in the Northwest Territory that it had refused to relinquish under the Paris Peace Treaty. The British were retaliating for the United States reneging on Articles 4 and 6 of the 1783 treaty; American state courts impeded the collection of debts owed British creditors and upheld the continued confiscation of Loyalist estates in spite of an explicit understanding that the prosecutions would be immediately discontinued.
The parties agreed that disputes over wartime debts and the American–Canadian boundary were to be sent to arbitration—one of the first major uses of arbitration in modern diplomatic history. This set a precedent used by other nations. The Americans were granted limited rights to trade with British colonies in the Caribbean in exchange for some limits on the American export of cotton.
[Signing and ratification]
The Jay Treaty was signed on November 19, 1794, and submitted to the United States Senate for its advice and consent the following June. It was ratified by the Senate on June 24, 1795, by a two-thirds majority vote of 20–10 (exactly the minimum number necessary for concurrence). It was also ratified by the British government, and took effect February 29, 1796, the day when ratifications were officially exchanged.
Issues
The outbreak of war between France and Great Britain (and other countries) in 1793 ended the long peace that had enabled the new nation to flourish in terms of trade and finance. The United States now emerged as an important neutral country with a large shipping trade. From the British perspective, improving relations with the United States was a high priority lest it move into the French orbit. British negotiators ignored elements that wanted harsher terms in order to get a suitable treaty.
From the American viewpoint, the most pressing foreign policy issues were normalizing the trade relations with Britain, the United States' leading trading partner, and resolving issues left over from the Treaty of Paris. As one observer explained, the British government was "well disposed to America. ... They have made their arrangements upon a plan that comprehends the neutrality of the United States, and are anxious that it should be preserved."
Without warning American officials, the British government used the Royal Navy to capture nearly 300 neutral American merchant ships carrying goods from the French West Indies. Americans were outraged and Republicans in Jefferson's coalition demanded a declaration of war, but James Madison instead called for an embargo on trade with Britain. British officials told First Nations near the Canada–U.S. border that the border no longer existed and sold weapons to them. Congress voted on a trade embargo against Britain in March 1794. It was approved in the House of Representatives but defeated in the Senate when Vice President John Adams cast a tie-breaking vote against it.
At the national level American politics was divided between the factions of Jefferson and Madison, which favored the French, and the Federalists led by Hamilton, who saw Britain as a natural ally and thus sought to normalize relations with Britain, especially in the area of trade. President George Washington sided with Hamilton. Hamilton devised a framework for negotiations, and Washington sent Chief Justice of the United States John Jay to London to negotiate a comprehensive treaty.
Both sides achieved many objectives. Several issues were sent to arbitration, which (after years of discussion) were resolved amicably mostly in favor of the U.S. Britain paid $11,650,000 for damages to American shipping and received £600,000 for unpaid pre-1775 debts. While international arbitration was not entirely unknown, the Jay Treaty gave it a strong impetus and is generally taken as the start of modern international arbitration.
The British agreed to vacate its forts in United States territory—six in the Great Lakes region and two at the north end of Lake Champlain—by June 1796; which was done.
Evaluations
Historian Marshall Smelser argues that the treaty effectively postponed war with Britain, or at least postponed it until the United States was strong enough to handle it.
Bradford Perkins argued in 1955 that the treaty was the first to establish a special relationship between Britain and the United States, with a second installment under Lord Salisbury. In his view, the treaty worked for ten years to secure peace between Britain and America: "The decade may be characterized as the period of 'The First Rapprochement'." As Perkins concludes,
For about ten years there was peace on the frontier, joint recognition of the value of commercial intercourse, and even, by comparison with both preceding and succeeding epochs, a muting of strife over ship seizures and impressment. Two controversies with France ... pushed the English-speaking powers even more closely together.
George Herring's 2008 history of US foreign policy says that, in 1794, "the United States and Britain edged toward war" and concludes, "The Jay Treaty brought the United States important concessions and served its interests well." Joseph Ellis finds the terms of the treaty "one-sided in Britain's favor", but asserts with a consensus of historians that it was
a shrewd bargain for the United States. It bet, in effect, on England rather than France as the hegemonic European power of the future, which proved prophetic. It recognized the massive dependence of the American economy on trade with England. In a sense it was a precocious preview of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), for it linked American security and economic development to the British fleet, which provided a protective shield of incalculable value throughout the nineteenth century. Mostly, it postponed war with England until America was economically and politically more capable of fighting one.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Treaty
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