The Patriot Post® · Adams, the Diplomat, as a Foreign Policy President

While George Washington had made his two terms as president the model for all future presidencies, his successor, John Adams, while intellectually brilliant and committed to the republic, suffered by comparison.

His temperament was fiery and his rhetoric often offended even his own supporters. Where Washington was quietly deliberative, Adams was not. And so assured that his policies and vision were the only correct path to the future, his one-term presidency was frequently controversial. Having pushed through legislation increasing residency for citizenship — contrary to constitutional requirements — and attacking the concept of free speech and a free press, Adams then struggled with foreign policy.

In all fairness, it was a difficult time for the new nation, but Adams’s policies did little to make the time more peaceful.

It was that pesky French Revolution that unnerved President Adams.

He had always found the British and the Dutch with their forms of government — a constitutional monarchy and a confederation based on relatively independent provinces — more acceptable. The French Revolution had done nothing to increase his trust in the volatility of the French. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been executed, and the Reign of Terror had extended to thousands of French aristocrats but also to political proponents who differed with Robespierre, Danton and Marat’s ideas of revolution. (The three would eventually fight among themselves, and…)

The Christian faith was outlawed and replaced with a Temple of Reason. Adams found the Revolution’s attempts to “level” society to one “citizenship” unrealistic; Adams would have argued that talents were distributed and that all people were not equal when it came to leadership skills, etc. While he believed in liberty, equality, and perhaps even fraternity, he did not agree with the French Revolution’s goals or practices.

But the French Revolution impacted foreign affairs in a way that few, except perhaps Adams and the British Parliament, might have predicted.

War had erupted in Europe in 1792 as Napoleon’s armies had marched across the continent, subduing bordering countries and planting the seeds of revolution among the oldest monarchies. An alliance had formed — Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria — to repulse those ideas and their threat to political, economic, and social stability. Within a year, Washington had declared the young republic’s neutrality, advancing the idea that the United States would continue to trade with both the British and the French.

Unacceptable.

Since Britain was the U.S.‘s major trade partner, the British government intervened to prevent U.S. trade with France, assuming that if forced to “choose,” the U.S. would “choose wisely.” When Washington did not reverse our policy of neutrality, the Royal Navy began stopping American ships, seizing cargoes and impressing American sailors who were alleged to have “left” British service. Almost immediately, cries for war rang out from Boston to Savannah.

President Washington, understanding that the United States was not prepared to fight the British again, choose instead to work for a diplomatic solution. He sent his friend and legal scholar, John Jay, to London, where Jay successfully negotiated Jay’s Treaty (nice title, right?), decreasing tensions with Britain.

Ah, but troubles increased when the French interpreted the new treaty as an alliance between Great Britain and the U.S., and France began seizing American ships bound for British ports in both the Caribbean and on the British Isles. Into this diplomatic upheaval walked John Adams, coupled with his vice president who admittedly preferred the French and supported their revolution even though it had become a bit messy and tiresome.

Adams, acknowledging President Washington’s precedent for diplomatic solutions, tried that route, too. Three commissioners were sent to Paris to negotiate a peaceful resolve to the international crisis only to have French Prime Minister Talleyrand question their “status” and then demand a hefty bribe for himself and a $10 million loan for the struggling French government. The U.S. response was swift and not what Talleyrand had anticipated.

President Adams, refusing the “request” associated with the XYZ Affair, instead asked Congress for appropriations that would expand the U.S. Navy, provide defensive posts along the eastern seaboard, fund a standing “provisional” army, and allow the president to call up thousands of state militiamen to active duty. Buried among that legislation was the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, but Congress complied and created the Department of the Navy, organized an operational landing component — the Marines — and negated all previous trade treaties with France.

Adams had wagered that the appearance of a strong offensive would result in a strong defense that would not be called into action — and he was correct.

By the second year of his administration, Adams received word that France would entertain an American envoy if one was sent. Adams’s pugnacious position had worked, and the new commissioners were graciously received. After several weeks of talks, the Treaty of Montefontaine was signed. The United States and France dissolved their Revolutionary War alliance and the current tensions were lessened and then disappeared.

Adams had kept the United States from war, but, while he viewed it as his greatest diplomatic accomplishment in a career that had begun during the Revolution, it was not enough to earn him a second term. His former friend and current vice presidential “thorn in his flesh” defeated Adams in that bid for reelection.

In a deference to the workings of the republic and the rule of law, John Adams quietly returned home to Massachusetts. He would spend the remaining years of his life with his family and writing about politics and the role of the government. It would be almost two decades before he and Jefferson would lay aside their quarrel and reconcile, writing each other frequently, debating political ideas, and reminiscing about their early friendship amidst the revolutionary fires.