Jay's Treaty

Still more significant was the outcome of President Washington’s decision to send John Jay to England to seek a treaty settling the conflicts that vexed the relations of the two nations. The British genuinely wanted

To reach an accommodation with the United States— as one minister quipped, the Americans “are so much in debt to this country that we scarcely dare to quarrel with them.” Jay was received by both the king and queen and wined and dined by the foreign secretary, the prime minister, and other officials. The British also feared that the two new republics, France and the United States, would draw together in a battle against Europe’s monarchies. On the other hand, the British were riding the crest of a wave of important victories in the war in Europe and were not disposed to make concessions to the Americans simply to avoid trouble.

The treaty that Jay brought home did contain a number of concessions. The British agreed to evacuate the posts in the West. They also promised to compensate American shipowners for seizures in the West Indies and to open up their colonies in Asia to American ships. They conceded nothing, however, to American demands that the rights of neutrals on the high seas be respected; no one really expected them to do so in wartime. A provision opening the British West Indies to American commerce was so hedged with qualifications limiting the size of American vessels and the type of goods allowed that the United States refused to accept it.

Jay’s Treaty also committed the United States to paying pre-Revolutionary debts still owed British merchants, a slap in the face to many states whose courts had been impeding their collection. Yet nothing was said about the British paying for the slaves they had “abducted” during the fighting in the South.

Although Jay might have driven a harder bargain, this was a valuable treaty for the United States. But it was also a humiliating one. Most of what the United States gained already legally belonged to it, and the treaty sacrificed principles of importance to a nation dependent on foreign trade. When the terms became known, they raised a storm of popular protest. It seemed possible that President Washington would repudiate the treaty or that if he did not, the Senate would refuse to ratify it.