History

Pinckney’s Treaty

Sometimes a bad treaty can pave the way for a good treaty. That seems to be what happened when Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain got an assist from news of Jay’s Treaty with England.

Before the French revolution changed everything, Spanish policy was to restrict American trade and settlement as best it could. But by 1794, Spanish forces had experienced defeats both in the Caribbean and in Europe. The Spanish prime minister, Manuel de Godoy, wanted to restore peace with France, which meant extricating Spain from its alliance with Great Britain, but this risked antagonizing the British, which would put Spanish colonies in the Americas at the mercy of the Royal Navy.

When Godoy learned that John Jay was in London to negotiate a treaty, he worried about an Anglo-American alliance. That had to be prevented if possible. He requested that the United States send someone to negotiate a treaty. President Washington selected Thomas Pinckney, former governor of South Carolina, who had been serving as United States minister to Great Britain since 1792.

There were three major issues to be addressed: the Florida boundary, the right of deposit in the city of New Orleans (that is, free use of the port by American settlers using the Mississippi) and – on the Spanish side – the question of an alliance.

Pinckney arrived in Spain in June of 1795, and made swift progress. Godoy offered the right to free navigation of the Mississippi, and acceptance of the 31st parallel as the Florida border, in return for an American alliance with Spain. Pinckney said, no alliance. Godoy came back with the same offer without the alliance, but with Spanish insistence on the right to require duties for goods passing through New Orleans. Pinckney threatened to leave. The next day, Godoy agreed to Pinckney’s demands. The final treaty also voided Spanish guarantees of military support to Indians in the disputed regions, which of course greatly weakening their ability to resist encroachment.

The Treaty of San Lorenzo, also known as the Treaty of Madrid, was signed in October, 1795, ratified by the Senate in March, 1796 and came into effect in August. Its official title is the Treaty of Friendship, Limits, and Navigation Between Spain and the United States. Whether it established a friendship is debatable, but it did give the United States a definite southern boundary to the south, and it did guarantee the right to navigate the Mississippi.

It is forgotten today, but Florida was not always in the hands of the Spanish. The end of the French and Indian War, in 1763, had caused major territorial shakeups. France had ceded what we know as the Louisiana Purchase territory to Spain, and Louisiana east of the Mississippi, except the city of New Orleans, to Great Britain. At the same time, Spain had ceded Spanish Florida to Great Britain. Thus, for 20 years, from 1763 to 1783, Britain ruled Florida, dividing it along the Apalachicola River for administrative convenience into West Florida, governed from Pensacola, and East Florida, governed from St. Augustine. During the Revolutionary War, Spain, as France’s ally, had captured Pensacola. In the Treaty of Paris that ended the war, the Floridas went from British to Spanish ownership.

But what good were they to Spain? Spain’s colonizing days were over. It sent a garrison for the new territory, but no settlers. As with Texas, as with the vast Louisiana territory, as with much of what became the American southwest, there were no settlers nor any plans for settlers. There were only lines on a map, and soldiers serving to garrison a useless territory. Useless, and potentially dangerous, because the boundary lines with the United States were in dispute. During the years of British possession, they had moved the boundary north, claiming a border at the latitude of present-day Vicksburg, and Spain claimed that the British border applied. The United States insisted on the old boundary at the 31^st parallel.

The treaty accepted the American claim, and Florida receded as an issue. (This wasn’t quite the end of boundary controversies, however. In October, 1800, in a secret treaty, Spain transferred Louisiana and part of West Florida back to France. When France sold Louisiana in 1803, a new dispute arose over which parts of West Florida Spain had ceded to France, and therefore which parts of West Florida belonged to whom. Ultimately this would be sorted out by Andrew Jackson.)

As to the Mississippi, again good sense prevailed over theoretical discussions of sovereignty. The fact of the matter was that there were already more than 100,000 Americans in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, and they needed access to New Orleans as a port of deposit. They didn’t need it to be American territory, necessarily, but they did need to know that they could ship their produce down the river and get it transshipped to foreign markets. A few years earlier, in 1784, the Spanish had closed New Orleans to American goods coming down the river. There was just no way the Americans were going to live with that uncertainty. The treaty guaranteed navigation rights to both countries for the entire length of the river.

Now the border was settled, the two countries had a trade agreement, and the city of New Orleans was reopened to American goods. Those were important gains, and they came about because of the confluence of an able ambassador, a venal but gifted Spanish minister (Don Manuel de Godoy, the queen’s lover), and the implied threat of closer U.S.-British relations as reflected in Jay’s Treaty, which we will discuss soon. As one result of Pinckney’s diplomatic success, the Federalists ran him with John Adams in 1796, with unexpected results that we have already seen.

 

It wasn’t an “address” in the sense of being a speech. It was a letter that he wrote in 1792 with James Madison’s assistance, when he thought he would be able to retire. Four years later, he enlisted Alexander Hamilton’s literary skills, as well. Thus one of the most influential State documents ever penned profited by contributions from both authors of the Federalist Papers. But if some of the phrasing was theirs, the thoughts were his. The phrasing is in another’s age’s style of oratory, but his sincerity and common-sense wisdom shines through.

“The Address of General Washington To The People of The United States on his declining of the Presidency of the United States” runs more than 6,000 words. It was published in a Philadelphia newspaper in September, almost two months before the Electoral College would meet, then promptly reprinted everywhere, in other newspapers and as a pamphlet. In these days of inane sound-bites, it stands, as did Washington himself, as a giant surrounded by pygmies.

No one can adequately summarize it, nor is there any need to, in this age of computer searches. Even skimming it will give a better idea than reading someone else’s opinion. Here are a few of the points deserving to be remembered.

The value of the Union:

“The unity of Government … is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence …. But as it is easy to foresee, that … this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness ….”

The danger of factions, or political parties:

“One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings, which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those, who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.”

Care in political innovation:

“In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments, as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard, by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember, especially, that … a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable.”

How faction leads to dictatorship:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension … leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

On the need for religion and morality:

“Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports.…. A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.”

Knowledge and public opinion:

“Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

Taxes and spending:

“…it is essential that you should practically bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue; that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant ….”

Foreign policy:

“It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great Nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt, that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages, which might be lost by a steady adherence to it?”

The necessity for impartiality among nations:

“Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.”

Sharing the wisdom he had acquired in 20 years was the last service he could do for his country. He had provided leadership which, it was widely conceded, no one else could have provided. To his duty he had sacrificed his personal inclinations. No more. He was tired, and now he could go home.

 

Many features of presidential balloting that we take for granted came to us only as the result of trial and (sometimes painful) error. We have seen that the election of 1800 showed the necessity of amending the Constitution to take political parties into account. It astonishes us that the founding fathers, with all their extensive theoretical and practical knowledge of government, should fail to foresee the rise of political parties. But think what else they had to learn the hard way. Take, as a good example, the election of 1796.

It was the first election without Washington, who was finishing his eight years of servitude and looking forward with longing to retiring to Virginia. Toward the end of the year he had published his final advice to the nation, which we will look at in the next section. But who could replace the father of his country?

The obvious candidates had been friends for 20 years, and for all that time they had been serving their country well. The rotund New Englander and the tall red-headed Virginian had many points of political difference, and each was at the head of a pack of snapping partisans who took every opportunity to try to establish or widen a breach between the two. In this first contested presidential election, the hounds didn’t quite succeed, but there were many straws in the wind, for those with clear prevision, or for us looking backward.

The election wasn’t held all on one day. That wouldn’t happen for decades. In 1796, voting among the 16 states stretched for more than a month, from Nov. 3 to Dec. 7. And the voting wasn’t what we’re used to, either. The Constitution said that presidential Electors should be chosen by the state legislatures, but it didn’t say how. Different states chose different methods. Some chose them by statewide election; other states were divided into districts, with voters choosing one per district; in others, the state legislature appointed them. Their world was much more local and independent than ours. To us, it seems an incredible hodge-podge.

And – what strikes us as even crazier — in these pre-12th-amendment days, there was no way to designate who was running for president and who for vice-president, so each of the two new parties had to run more than one candidate for president, hoping to win the top slot with their preferred candidate and bag the vice-presidency with their second-favored candidate. But this was tricky. If electors all voted for the party’s two candidates, you’d wind up with a tie, as indeed happened one election farther down the line. So the idea was that all the party’s electors would cast their vote for the man who was supposed to win, and a couple of them (but only a couple of them) would throw away their second vote on someone who couldn’t win, so that hopefully the result would be a one-two sweep in the right order. Politicians then being as trustworthy as politicians now, nobody quite knew if anybody (let alone everybody) would live up to his promises.

The Democratic-Republicans put up the same ticket they would win with in 1800, Jefferson and Burr, along with minor candidates Samuel Adams (Governor of Massachusetts), George Clinton (ex-Governor of New York), and John Henry (U.S. Senator from Maryland).

The Federalists named John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina. Also running but with no chance of winning, were not one but two justices of the Supreme Court, Oliver Ellsworth (Chief Justice) and James Iredell. Also John Jay (Governor of New York); Samuel Johnston (a former U.S. Senator), and Charles Pinckney, U.S. minister to France and the brother of Thomas Pinckney.

If one emotion fueled the campaign, it was fear. What became the Federalist Party feared French-sympathizing Republicans as the enemy within the gates, to be trusted neither with domestic tranquility nor with preserving independence from the French. The Republicans, in turn, said that the Federalists wished to re-establish monarchy and aristocracy, and were not to be trusted to maintain the county’s interests against the British Empire they held in so much awe.

On election day, Adams received 54% of the vote, and Jefferson 46%, a clear decision. The vote divided pretty neatly geographically, with Adams carrying every state north of the Potomac River except Pennsylvania, and none below the river.

But the electoral count was muddled, as a result of Hamilton’s machinations.

Hamilton evidently suspected that Adams might be hard to manage. He convinced the eight South Carolina electors whose first choice was Jefferson to cast their second votes for Pinckney, hoping that Pinckney’s total would surpass those of Adams. But when word of the scheme got out, many Adams electors withheld their second vote from Pinckney, hoping to foil Hamilton’s scheme.

They sure did. The final electoral count was 71 for Adams, 68 for Jefferson, 59 for Pinckney, and 30 for Burr, with the remaining 48 electoral votes spread among the nine minor candidates. Thus Jefferson, rather than Pinckney, would go on to be vice-president under Adams. (That Hamilton, he was some shrewd politician, wasn’t he?)

It wasn’t yet as bad as 1800, when after another four years of fear and counter-fear the country seemed on the verge of civil war, but it was bad enough. And — what can be hard for us to remember at the end of so many decades — each of these early elections seemed the more perilous because there had been so few of them. It was all new. Could it be maintained? The people remembered Ben Franklin’s words on the day the delegates had voted to submit the Constitution to the voters. A woman stopped him on the street and said, “And what kind of government have you given us, Doctor Franklin?” “A republic, madam,” he said, “if you can keep it.”

In 1796, they were a long way from knowing if they could keep it.

The fear of slave revolt was ever present in the minds of everyone living in slave-owning territory. Rich or poor, whites living among large numbers of blacks apparently never rested easy. Read through the pro-slavery speeches and literature of the times, and you see one recurrent theme – abolition would mean servile rebellion, race war, and perhaps extermination of the white race throughout the South. Freedom for black men and women must, inevitably, produce another Haiti.

But, come 1865, what did we see? What actually did happen when abolition came to the South? Not only did Northern whites sympathize with the black slaves, they made abolition the law of the land. Not only were the slaves freed; the federal government armed them, and gave them the protection of the uniform and the flag! Not only were the slaves released from their condition of servitude, but their former masters were – for the moment — laid low, politically powerless, economically broken. And what happened? Extermination? Race war? All the nightmare horrors that troubled the sleep of the South through so many decades?

Of course not. We, living so far in their future, know that none of this happened. As it turned out, what slaves wanted was not revenge, but – freedom. Having acquired their freedom, by their own sacrifices and the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of white soldiers, they then set about figuring out how to live their new lives. But nobody knew it was going to turn out that way. For six decades, white Southerners lived in the shadow of a nightmare.

At the time of the French Revolution in 1789, French Hispaniola (called Saint-Domingue) was the richest and most profitable French possession, wealthy from growing sugar. Sugar depended on extensive manual labor, and that labor came from African slaves. But the white planters who sat at the top of the social structure knew they were also sitting at the top of a volcano. According to 1789 figures, the last reliable statistics available, 450,000 enslaved blacks outnumbered whites and free people of color combined (32,000 and 28,000, respectively) by a margin of ten to one. Chronically terrified, the establishment was not shy about using violence to maintain control.

But then came the French Revolution, and in May 1791, the new French government granted citizenship to wealthy free people of color in the colony. The plantation owners refused to comply. The slaves began to hear the grands blancs talking of declaring independence from France, and of course they realized that independence would mean that the plantation owners would be free to operate as they pleased. On the night of 21 August 1791, the slaves rose in revolt, and in ten days took control of the entire Northern Province. Within weeks, the slaves, now numbering 100,000, had killed 4,000 whites and burned or destroyed hundreds of plantations. By 1792, the rebels controlled a third of the island.

Beginning in 1791, white refugees from slave insurrections fled to Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Charleston, bringing their stories with them. American slaveholders commiserated with the exiled French planters, and drew their own comparisons, especially when, in 1807, Haiti expelled or murdered remaining French whites. The government banned slave owners from bringing Haitian slaves with them, for fear that domestic slaves, hearing of the successful slave revolt in Haiti, would themselves revolt. Anti-slavery advocates favored the insurgent slaves.

Hearing of the revolt, the Legislative Assembly in France promptly granted civil and political rights to free men of color in the colonies – and dispatched 6,000 French soldiers. But then, another complication. In 1793, France declared war on Great Britain. By August 1793, there were only 3,500 French soldiers on the island.

In February, 1794, France abolished slavery and granted all black men civil and political rights, but it was far too late. Under the military leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Haiti defeated Napoleon. That is, an army led by Bonaparte’s brother-in-law General Charles Leclerc was decimated by yellow fever and destroyed by the insurgents.

(It is probable that we obtained the Louisiana territory from Napoleon only because Leclerc’s army in Haiti was lost. With that army gone, and Leclerc himself dead, there was no way to occupy New Orleans, or threaten the United States, or maintain either colony against England when war resumed. So, Napoleon sold Louisiana rather than have the British take it away from him.)

Although L’Ouverture was tricked into captivity and death in France, the French cause on the island was finished. Haiti, as the island nation was now to be called, gained formal independence in 1804. Haiti’s war began as a slave revolt and became intertwined with a war of empires. The situation in Haiti in no way resembled that in any part of the United States. Nonetheless, the specter of a successful slave revolt was powerful.

This slave-revolt-turned-revolution rebellion was never successfully emulated, but, in seeming to confirm the reality of a persistent nightmare, it had had consequences far larger than the compass of that unhappy island. Increasingly southerners bases their politics and their social institutions on fear. But America, it eventually turned out, was not Haiti. All those decades of nightmare had been just that, nightmare. Life after slavery was going to be hard, for North and South, black and white alike, though hard for each in different ways. But it was a continuation of something begun by the Declaration of Independence, not the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It took place in a country inspired and shaped by Washington and Jefferson, not Robespierre and Napoleon, and that made all the difference.

 

For 20 years, while England and France fought to the death, small neutral countries did their best to stay out of the way, lest they be crushed by accident or design. The United States, chief among those smaller countries, received some protection by its position on the far side of the broad Atlantic (think what our position would have been if we had been located in Europe somewhere), but our Achilles heel was our merchant navy. Both the naval powers seized neutral ships that traded with their enemies, and we couldn’t very well cease to trade. (A dozen years later, after the French had been driven from the seas by Trafalgar and British attacks had become intolerable, Jefferson finally did try that tactic, as we have seen, but with indifferent success.)

President Washington, steering a careful course, had placated England to some extent with Jay’s Treaty, as we shall see. But anything that pleased England could only anger France (and vice versa), and so Jay’s Treaty brought us, in the first year of the Adams presidency, to the very brink of war with France, and in fact a little over the brink.

In March 1797, just after assuming office, President Adams learned that France had seized American merchant ships in the Caribbean, and that Paris had refused to accept Charles Pinckney as minister. Federalists took a hard line on France, as always, and, as always, Republicans expressed solidarity with the ideals of the French revolutionaries. In late May Adams told Congress that he had decided to send a special commission to France, to try to adjust relations, consisting of Pinckney, John Marshall and independent Elbridge Gerry. Adams also called for expansion of the Navy to protect our interests. (By June, 1797, French ships had seized 316 American merchant ships, and cruised the Atlantic seaboard virtually unopposed, because the last American warship had been sold in 1785, leaving only revenue cutters.) Once the commissioners were approved, Adams instructed them to negotiate similar terms to those that had been granted to Britain in the Jay Treaty.

But dealing with the English and dealing with the French were two very different things. The English never varied: The king (or, during the king’s periods of insanity, his son as regent) worked with the small number of aristocrats who maintained control of parliament. Whigs or Tories, what you had to deal with was predictable and understandable. Not so the French after the Revolution. In the years since the Revolution in 1789, the form of government had changed repeatedly, and with every change of regime, the rules, the attitudes, and the expectations changed.

In 1797, France’s executive was not one man, but a five-man Directory. Two years later, it would be Napoleon as consul, then a few years on, Napoleon as Emperor of the French. Running through all these regimes, a crooked man pursuing a crooked path, was Foreign Minister Talleyrand, the man foreigners had to deal with before they could deal with the ostensible authorities. Unhappy the envoys from a relatively straightforward republic trying to come to honorable agreement by straightforward means.

Case in point: As soon as the three American envoys arrived in Paris, three of Talleyrand’s secret agents (named X Y and Z in the official report that was later issued), issued a series of demands, including a large official loan to the French government and a £50,000 unofficial bribe to Talleyrand. This, before formal negotiations could begin. This was accustomed practice by then, and the Americans knew it, but they didn’t like it, and they said so. Then, when a peace treaty ended the War of the First Coalition, and France was temporarily at peace with most of Europe (though not England), the agents returned. Now they were threatening war. Pinckney responded in words that became famous: “No, no, not a sixpence!”

The commissioners met with Talleyrand informally in March, and he agreed to forget about a loan, but he would talk only with Gerry. Marshall and Pinckney left in April, but Talleyrand told Gerry that if he left France the Directory would declare war. So he said he would remain, but only until someone could replace him. He refused to engage in further substantive negotiations. His exchanges with Talleyrand laid groundwork for the eventual end to diplomatic and military hostilities, but the Federalists suspected him of disloyalty, and did their best to make him a scapegoat.

In March 1798, Adams received the first dispatches from the commissioners. He told Congress of their apparent failure, but held the dispatches themselves secret, fearing a Congressional and popular backlash. But Federalist hawks demanded the release of the commissioners’ dispatches, and when he turned them over in March, the public learned of XYZ, and the Federalists howled for war.

And the Republicans? They had joined in the demand to have the dispatches published, because they had thought that Adams had exaggerated the situation. Now they learned better, and it put them on the defensive.

The Federalist-dominated Congress authorized the president to acquire, arm, and man as many as 12 vessels of up to 22 guns each. It was the rebirth of the American Navy, which turned out to be just as well, a few years later. In July, Congress annulled the 20-year-old alliance with France, and authorized attacks on French warships. But Adams refused to let them stampede him into asking for a declaration of war.

The consequences kept on showing up. Because the affair discredited the French, it could be made to discredit the Democratic Republicans, who were pro-French. Hence, the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In France, publication of the dispatches led the Directory to try to get the truth out of Talleyrand, which was more than mortal man could do, but did put him on the defensive, and led him to confess to Gerry that the men had been his agents, and that, regardless what he had just testified to the Directory, he was interested in reconciliation between the two countries. Gerry told Adams, and Adams bore it in mind. When Talleyrand made diplomatic overtures to U.S. minister William Vans Murray in The Hague, Adams sent negotiators to France who eventually negotiated an end to hostilities. And so what is sometimes called the Quasi-War did not become a real war, which might have left the Alien and Sedition Laws in effect, might have prevented Jefferson’s revolution, therefore might have prevented the Louisiana Purchase…. It might have changed everything incalculably, as wars are in the habit of doing.

 

We know so little about our destiny. Because Eli Whitney’s stepmother opposed his wish to attend college, he spent years working as a farm laborer and school teacher to save enough money, and was 27 years old before graduating from Yale College (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1792. He wanted to study law, but he didn’t have enough money. Perhaps he thought his life was frustrating his desires. Instead, it was using him to transform the world.

He took a ship for South Carolina, intending to take up a job as private tutor, and aboard ship met the widow and family of Nathanael Greene, who we will encounter as a Revolutionary War general. He was invited to visit the Greene plantation in Georgia, then being managed by Mrs. Greene’s future husband Phineas Miller, also a New Englander, also a Yale graduate.

While visiting the plantation, he observed the bottleneck in the process of producing cotton: separating fibers (called lint) from seeds. Hundreds of man-hours were required to clean a useful amount of lint. He was a New England Yankee – that is, an inventor by nature. Could he figure out a way to improve the process?

In pretty short order he had invented the “cotton engine,” which inevitably got shortened to “cotton gin.” (Whitney later said he got the idea for the mechanism by watching a cat trying to pull a chicken through a fence.) Basically, a drum stuck with hooks pulled the cotton fibers through a fine mesh that the seeds would not fit through, while brushes continuously removed the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. The thing could clean 50 pounds of lint per day.

Simple, but revolutionary. Too simple for Whitney’s good, actually. The machine was too easily imitated. Besides, he and Miller, as partners, weren’t thinking of manufacturing the gin. They thought they would clean their neighbors’ cotton – in exchange for 40% of the product! On paper, this probably looked pretty smart: The farmers would still be better off, because the gin would let them produce so much more cotton than otherwise, and they wouldn’t have to put out any cash for the service – and Whitney and Miller would have all that cotton to sell.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. Whitney patented the machine, but Whitney and Miller never could build enough gins to meet demand, and others began making and selling them. Patent-infringement lawsuits succeeded in eating up all the profits, and their cotton gin company went out of business in 1797. The cotton gin made Whitney famous, not rich.

But he sure did set consequences in motion. Before he invented the cotton gin, slave labor was mostly used to grow rice, tobacco, indigo, and cotton. There wasn’t much profit in any of it, and probably if the slaves had been white rather than black – and therefore had presented no problems of post-slavery social readjustment – they would have been freed as early as the Revolution. Certainly at the time the founding fathers were devising the Constitution, they assumed that slavery was a dying institution.

Then along came the cotton gin, and suddenly slavery was firmly fastened not only on the states where it had long existed, but all the way to the Mississippi and beyond.

Why? For the reason that people always exploit other people: It was profitable. It was more than profitable, it was terrifically profitable, it was the way to amass fortunes. Cotton exports went from less than 500,000 pounds in 1793 to 93 million pounds in 1810. Far from slavery dying out, the need for slaves to grow cotton led to the importation of 80,000 Africans before Congress banned the slave trade in 1808.

And this can’t be blamed just on southerners. New England factories and Northern shipping lines were founded on slavery just as firmly, and only slightly more indirectly, as any cotton plantation in Dixie. Southern cotton fed New England textile mills. Southern cotton provided more than half the value of all American exports between 1820 and 1860. Southern cotton, by 1860, provided as much as 80% of the supply of cotton to Great Britain’s voracious textile industry, and two-thirds of the supply for the entire world. Is it any wonder that Southern statesmen came to overrate their importance in the economy of the nation and the world, thinking that “Cotton is King”?

Eli Whitney was a Yankee inventor, finding a new way to overcome an old problem He wasn’t thinking to transform the textile industry, and the South, and he wasn’t thinking to invent one of the main indirect causes of the Civil War, and he certainly didn’t anticipate solving the problem and then reaping no benefit from his invention. But that’s what happened. First to last, it’s a story of unanticipated consequences.

The Alien and Sedition Acts and the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, taken together, show bad policy engendering a cure worse than the disease. The immediate effect was nil, or next to nil. The longer term consequences included civil war. That isn’t what anyone had in mind in 1798, but men like Washington could see it coming. What’s odd is that men like Jefferson did not.

President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts  into law in 1798, and so he got the blame for them, but – as with most of the mistaken policies pursued during his term of office – they originated with the high Federalists in Congress and in the Cabinet he inherited from Washington (and mistakenly kept). As usual with bad policy measures, they stemmed from fear.

The French Revolution broke out at the commencement of Washington’s first term, and by his second term progressed to war between France and England. Washington worked hard to keep his small country out of a war that could only bring harm, but, in Adams’ term, as we shall see, France and the United States had drifted into a state of quasi-war.

But the Alien and Sedition Acts stemmed less from fear of the French than from fear of French sympathizers. The bills were the product of the first variant of what would later become “red scares”: American citizens, seduced by a foreign ideology, were no longer to be trusted! Indeed, they were to be feared! The government would have to do something!

What it did was to pass four laws attacking the presumed danger on two fronts. First, aliens. The time required for naturalization should be changed from five years to 14, because clearly five years was too little time to turn them into trustworthy citizens (i.e. the kind who wouldn’t vote for Jefferson’s party). And the president must be given the right to imprison or deport any aliens dangerous to the country’s “peace and safety”– and guess who would get to define whether a given alien was dangerous?

Second, Americans. The times were too dangerous for free speech: Anyone criticizing the government or its officers could be fined and imprisoned. In other words, censorship.

And this was not an idle threat. A few examples: A newspaper editor was arrested in 1798 under the Sedition Act for having accused Washington of incompetence and financial irregularities, and Adams of nepotism and monarchical ambition. (He died of yellow fever while awaiting trial.) An English immigrant and printer who reprinted a claim that the federal government had employed Tories was found guilty of seditious libel and sentenced to a two-month imprisonment and a $200 fine. A congressman was indicted for writing an essay accusing the administration of “ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice”. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in jail.

The acts were denounced by Democratic-Republicans, figured prominently in the elections of 1798 and 1800, and ultimately helped defeat Adams in his bid for re-election. But that’s not all they did. They led to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, authored secretly by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which eventually produced huge calamitous consequences.

In the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson advocated nullification, and even drafted a threat for Kentucky to secede. Jefferson warned that, “unless arrested at the threshold,” the Alien and Sedition Acts would “necessarily drive these states into revolution and blood.” The theoretical damage of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions was a recipe for disunion.

The resolutions argued that the states had the right and the duty to judge the constitutionality of federal measures, and to declare unconstitutional measures null and void. The Virginia Resolutions of 1798 say that the states have a right to “interpose” to prevent harm caused by unconstitutional laws. The Kentucky Resolution of 1799 advocated nullification. In both cases, the resolutions argued that the Constitution was a “compact” or agreement among the states, and therefore, the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically delegated to it, and if it did so, its acts could be declared unconstitutional by the states.

Thus, if the Compact theory were accepted, states could decide the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress. Could the mind of man have created a more perfect recipe for chaos?

The Compact theory said that the nation was formed through an agreement among the states, and that therefore the federal government is a creation of the states, and therefore states should be the final arbiters of the federal government’s authority to act in any given case. But the fact is, the government that was formed by a compact among the states was the government framed under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution was written precisely in order to overcome the inherent weaknesses of that kind of government.

The Constitution says “we the people of the United States,” not “we the people of the various states.” It formed a government directly responsible to the people, with divided powers and a distribution of powers between the general government and the several State governments. The states as such are not parties to the Constitution. The states ratified the new form of government; they did not create it.

And this is how it was seen at the time. The resolutions were submitted to the other states for approval, with these results: Seven states rejected them, three passed resolutions expressing disapproval, and four took no action. At least six states took the position that the constitutionality of acts of Congress is a question for the federal courts, not the state legislatures.

Washington told Patrick Henry that if “systematically and pertinaciously pursued”, the resolutions would “dissolve the union or produce coercion,” which, long after his death, is exactly what happened. As we have seen, in the years before the Civil War, the compact theory was used by southern states to argue that they had a right to nullify federal law, and in 1861, they used it to justify secession.

Hamilton, of course, had a solution – send the army into Virginia on some “obvious pretext” and “put Virginia to the Test of resistance.” Fortunately, Adams had far too much sense to listen to that hare-brained idea. But it would have been better if he had vetoed the equally hare-brained Alien and Sedition Acts, and avoided setting into motion so many dangerous ideas.