At this point occurred one of the most remarkable reversals of public feeling in American history. French attacks on American shipping, begun out of irritation at the Jay Treaty and in order to influence the election, continued after Adams took office. Hoping to stop them, Adams appointed three commissioners (Charles Pinckney, United States minister to France, and elder brother of Thomas;9 John Marshall, a Virginia Federalist lawyer; and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who was not closely identified with either party) to try to negotiate a settlement. They were instructed to seek a moderate settlement, to “terminate our differences. . . without referring to the merits.”
Their mission was a fiasco. Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, sent an agent later spoken of as X to demand “something for the pocket,” a “gratification,”—read a bribe—as the price of making a deal. Later two other Tallyrand agents, Y and Z, made the same demand. The Americans refused, more because they suspected Talleyrand’s good faith than because of any particular distaste for bribery. “No, no, not a sixpence,” Pinckney later told X. The talks broke up, and in April 1798 President Adams released the commissioners’ reports.
They caused a sensation. Americans’ sense of national honor, perhaps overly tender because the country was so young and insecure, was outraged. Pinckney’s laconic refusal to pay a bribe was translated into the grandiose phrase “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” and broadcast throughout the land. John Adams, never a man with mass appeal, suddenly found himself a national hero. Federalist hotheads burned for a fight. Congress unilaterally abrogated the French Alliance, created a Navy Department, and appropriated enough money to build forty-odd warships and triple the size of the army. Washington came out of retirement to lead the forces, with Hamilton, now a general, as second in command. On the seas American privateers began to attack French shipping.
Adams did not much like the French and he could be extremely stubborn. A declaration of war would have been immensely popular. But perhaps the famously prickly president did not want to be popular. Instead of calling for war, he contented himself with approving the buildup of the armed forces.
The Republicans, however, committed to friendship with France, did not appreciate Adams’s moderation.
Although angered by the XYZ Affair, they tried, one Federalist complained, “to clog the wheels of government” by opposing the military appropriations. John Daly Burk of the New York Time Piece called Adams a “mock Monarch” surrounded by a “court composed of tories and speculators,” which of course was a flat lie.
Many Federalists expected the Republicans to side with France if war broke out. Hysterical and near panic, they easily persuaded themselves that the danger of subversion was acute. The French Revolution and the resulting war were churning European society to the depths, stirring the hopes of liberals and striking fear in the hearts of conservatives. Refugees of both persuasions were flocking to the United States. Suddenly the presence of these foreigners seemed threatening to “native” Americans.
World History
