Before moving along to the
overarching conclusion of this present series – implications and legacy of the
Jay Treaty, things of that nature – it would seem prudent to once more revisit
the previously explored pragmatism evinced by the text of
The Defence. The reasons for this are twofold, one fairly
straightforward and the other fairly subtle. On one hand, I would feel as
though I were behaving unjustly if only Hamilton’s contribution to that
selfsame series of essays were explored herein. Former Congressman, signer of
the Constitution, and Federalist Senator from New York Rufus King (1755-1827)
contributed ten of thirty eight entries, and it would seem a wasted opportunity
to forego a reading of at least one of them. And on the other hand, I do
believe there was another side to the pragmatism that so keenly came to
characterize the Federalist faction than that which was noted in Hamilton’s No.
III. Whereas that particular entry arguably demonstrated a tendency on the part
of the Federalists to strive for a fair and dispassionate an understanding of
their nation’s strengths and weaknesses, others appear to turn that sense of
realism outward in an attempt to assess the true nature of the American
republic’s place in the world. As No. XXV of The Defence speaks to both of these concerns – authored, as it was,
by King, and concerned, as it was, with the nature of the Anglo-American
commercial relationship – a relatively brief overview of the same would seem
very much in order.
First, however, let us lavish
a word or two on the man himself.
A native of what was then
Scarborough, Massachusetts – what is now Scarborough, Maine – Rufus King was
born into moderate wealth in 1755 to farmer, merchant, and lumberman Richard
King. Owing to the jealousy aroused by the elder King’s financial success, the
family home was twice attacked and partially destroyed during riots spurred by
the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the social tensions unleashed as a
result. In spite of these setbacks, however, and the socio-political upheaval
they portended, the younger King nevertheless enjoyed an education and early
career quite typical of the lesser elite of the Revolutionary Era. A graduate
of the preparatory Dummer Academy and of Harvard College, King read the law
under Massachusetts lawyer Theophilus Parsons (1750-1813) beginning in 1777,
volunteered for militia duty in 1778, was admitted to the bar in 1780, and was
elected to the lower house of the state legislature in 1783. He served in that
same body until 1785, overlapping with his term as a delegate to the
Continental Congress between 1784 and 1787. The last year of his service in
Congress also saw him dispatched by the Massachusetts General Court to
Philadelphia as one of that state’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention.
During the months that followed in Pennsylvania, King managed to distinguish
himself as a talented orator and also underwent an ideological transformation from
cautious supporter of the Articles of Confederation to ardent nationalist in
favor of a centralised federal government. And while his ensuing attempts to
convince his countrymen in Massachusetts that the proposed constitution stood
to benefit their lives and livelihoods ultimately met with success, his
endeavor to be chosen as one of the Bay State’s first Senators did not. Thus,
at the urging of friend and ally Alexander Hamilton, King migrated to New York
City, secured election to that state’s legislature in 1789, and swiftly
achieved his sought-after appointment to the United States Senate. Re-election
followed in 1795, and in that same year he partnered with Hamilton to write and
edit a series of essays in favor of – and in answer to the various critiques
that had been leveled against – the recently ratified treaty between Great
Britain and the United States. King’s contributions encompassed numbers XXIII
through XXX, XXXIV and XXXV of that thirty-eight part volume.
A few key points might
perhaps be surmised from this brief biographical sketch. While the two may have
no connection whatsoever, it would seem worth noting that King bore early
witness to the injustice of mob rule – during his family’s encounter with
jealous neighbors amid the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 – and later became a member
of the faction of American political life that valued order and stability over what
its members characterized as “excessive” democracy. Without attempting to
engage in something like historical psychoanalysis, the notion that his
personal politics were in some part derived from first-hand exposure to an
extreme expression of the stated position of the rival Republican faction is
nevertheless an intriguing one. It is also worth noting – in relation to the
backlash incurred by his family’s socio-economic status – that Rufus King
nonetheless lived a fairly comfortable existence. The schools he attended were
some of the best in British America, his training as a lawyer was interrupted
by a voluntary stint as a militia officer – during which he served as an aide
to General John Sullivan – and his political career experienced only a single,
brief interruption between 1783 and 1795. In consequence, he was an unlikely
sort of person to experience much sympathy for – or for that matter possess
much understanding of – the hardscrabble homesteaders then eking out a living
in Western Pennsylvania or Tennessee, the workingmen and “mechanics” of New
York City or Boston, or the economically marginalized yeoman farmers of
Virginia, North Carolina, or Maryland. He was a New England man, of moderate
wealth and a good education. He knew the law, had made it his trade, and sought
out politics as most young lawyers did. And when the politics of his home state
appeared to turn against him – by refusing him the honor of a Senate seat – he
picked up his life and tried again in New York. That this final turn succeeded
– or indeed that King believed it a viable next step – perhaps speaks to
something in his character; a stoic, sensible frame of mind that tended to
seize what opportunities were available rather than dwell on what could not be.
Of this ostensibly reasonable fellow’s
third contribution to his and ally Hamilton’s pro-Jay Treaty essay series, a
few brief points ought first to be laid down. Concerned almost exclusively with
confronting the objections raised against the provisions of that agreement
which pertained to commercial intercourse between the United States and the
various territories of the British Empire, No. XXV sought to explain – with
evident calm, and without resorting to the kinds of invective that Hamilton
seemed unable to resist – precisely why the state of affairs arrived at by Mr.
Jay had come to pass. In so doing, King seemed less concerned with enumerating
the various benefits that the United States stood to extract from its
newly-clarified trading relationship with Great Britain than with simply
attempting to explain to his fellow countrymen that hoping for very much more
than had been obtained by Jay was almost wholly unrealistic. No. XXV was thus
not overly approving of the Jay Treaty, or particularly keen to brush aside or
gloss over the areas in which it appeared to fall short. Jay had performed
admirably, King patiently asserted, by managing to secure as many concessions
as the final agreement contained. The resulting treaty was far from perfect –
indeed, certain of its articles were likely in need of renegotiation. But as
the product of diplomacy between perhaps the single greatest commercial power
in the 18th century world and a comparatively small and impoverished
nation whose origins lay in living memory, it was hardly the failure that so
many of its critics claimed. To see this clearly, King coolly and persistently
asserted, one need only endeavor to separate what was from what ought to have
been.
Taking the twelfth article of
the Jay Treaty – perhaps the most controversial of all – as his first subject
on this head, King proceeded to explain to his audience how the American envoy
managed to arrive at a set of provisions that seemed to fall so far from what
certain of his fellow countrymen felt that their nation deserved. Thus, to the
assertion that the United States ought to have secured access to British ports
in the West Indies on the same basis of Great Britain herself, King offered a
sobering rebuke. “That Great Britain,” he wrote,
Will
consent to place our Trade with her west India Colonies, upon an equally
advantageous footing with her own, is improbable. This would be doing what none
of the great colonizing Nations has done, or is likely to do.
Indeed, he continued, such a policy
would seem to defeat the very purpose of establishing and defending colonies to
begin with. The reason that imperial nations like Great Britain, or France, or
Spain spent such tidy sums guarding and expanding their possessions in the
Americas, or the East Indies, or Africa – over tremendous distances and despite
major logistical challenges – was so that the wealth they extracted from these
regions would flow exclusively into their respective coffers. For the Pitt
Ministry to abandon this framework, King accordingly warned,
Would be
equivalent to making her Islands in the west Indies, the common Property of
Great Britain & America for all commercial, & profitable, purposes; and
exclusively her own, in the Burthen of Support & Defence.
However much the merchants of Boston
or New York – or indeed the plantation farmers of Virginia or North Carolina –
might have desired unfettered market access to Jamaica, or the Bahamas, or
Barbados, to buy lucrative luxuries like sugar and coffee and sell much-needed
staples like rice and wheat, it simply wasn’t reasonable to expect Britain to
As Hamilton had earlier pointed out in No.
III of The Defence, this was an important realization. What could not be
achieved, he asserted, was not worth pursuing. Americans ought to have expected
their chosen envoy to be able to identify these insurmountable obstacles, and
to act accordingly in search of some alternative. Mr. Jay, he urged, had done
exactly that. Having ascertained, “By a preliminary discussion, the
impossibility of bringing the other party to concede the point” – in this case,
the professed right of the United States to freely access the British West
Indies – he next sought to determine what he could realistically obtain instead.
The result was Article XII of the Jay Treaty. And while the provisions thereof,
King explained, where perhaps more restrictive than was absolutely necessary –
thus requiring their renegotiation – they were not as worthy of outrage as
certain critics of the agreement vehemently proclaimed. Indeed, the very notion
that Britain was prepared to offer the United States access to the West Indies
on any terms at all was quite remarkable, and represented a far more
significant diplomatic achievement than Jay was generally credited with
achieving. These assertions King advanced methodically, patiently, and with a
degree of equanimity that belied the controversy that the topic at hand had
aroused among his countrymen.
Speaking first to the flaws which he
felt that Article XII of the Jay Treaty possessed, King drew particular
attention to the tonnage restrictions imposed on American shipping and the
limitations placed upon precisely which goods native to Britain’s West Indian
colonies could be subsequently re-exported from the United States. As to the
former, the Jay Treaty stated explicitly that American vessels would be
permitted to carry to and from, “His Majesty’s Islands and Ports […] any Goods
or Merchandizes being of the Growth, Manufacture, or Produce [,]” of either the
United States or the island in question, provided that the American vessels in
question were not, “above the burthen of Seventy Tons [.]” This type of
condition, King admitted, was, “Less liberal than we might with reason expect,”
and he accordingly approve the judgement of the Senate to that effect. “The
exclusion of all vessels above the Burthen of Seventy Tons,” he continued,
Would
diminish the Benifits, and value, of this Trade; and tho we cannot calculate
upon obtaining, by future negotiation, a total removal of a Limitation on this
Subject, it is not altogether improbable that a Tonnage something larger may be
procured.
This evaluation was very much in
keeping with King’s earlier statements – if not also the general approach of
his fellow Federalists – as to the nature of Britain’s commercial empire and
its relationship with the United States.
A seventy ton ceiling on vessels
trading with the West Indies was indeed, for the period, quite low. By the late
1780s a British merchant vessel rated at slightly over two hundred tons was
considered fairly small, and many ship-owners in major merchant towns like
Bristol tended towards vessels with an average capacity of two hundred and
fifty tons or more. It was, therefore, quite reasonable for America merchants,
circa 1795, and their elected representatives to express some degree of
frustration at Britain’s evident attempt to limit the ability of the United
States to extract some measure of wealth from the former’s Caribbean
dependencies. That being said, King was also wise to caution his countrymen not
to expect a complete removal upon petition of any manner of tonnage regulation.
As he earlier pointed out, Britain stood to gain nothing by permitting American
vessels to trade with its West Indian ports on the same basis as British
vessels. Indeed, it rather stood to lose the commercial monopoly it had spent time,
blood, and treasure endeavoring to erect. The object of a commercial treaty
between the United States and Great Britain, therefore, should not have been
the total elimination of any British advantage. Rather, the object of American
negotiators – John Jay and his potential successors included – should have been
simply to secure an accommodation for American shipping within the British
imperial economy that obtained the best possible conditions for American
merchants while simultaneously failing to do harm to Britain’s accustomed
preeminence. Article XII failed to achieve this end, though its renegotiation
could only be expected to lessen certain restrictions rather than remove them
outright.
King said much the same of the
aforementioned limitations that the Jay Treaty placed upon which ostensibly
West Indian products could be re-exported from the United States of America.
Under the terms of the previously-cited Article XII, American vessels were
prohibited from carrying, “Any Melesses, Sugar, Coffee, Cocoa or Cotton […]
either from His Majesty’s Islands or from the United States, to any part of the
world, except the United States, reasonable Sea Stores excepted.” In theory,
King avowed, this was an entirely reasonable – or at least understandable
– condition. “The cause of this Restraint,” he declared, “ is found in that
commercial Jealousy, and Spirit of monopoly, which have so long reigned over
the Trade of the Colonies [.]” Britain was no different than most other
contemporary European powers in this respect, and it would have been irrational
for the merchant interests in the United States to demand that the former
simply look the other way while its monopoly was effectively shattered. Coffee,
molasses, and sugar were exceedingly valuable trade goods, and while Britain
was willing to part with some of what was produced in its West Indian
dependencies, it was hardly surprising that this accommodation was accompanied
by the caveat that American merchants be prohibited from undercutting British market
control. Indeed, King affirmed,
An entire
Freedom of Trade with the British west Indies, might at Times materially raise
the Price of west India productions on the British consumers, the supply of
whom is essentially a monopoly in the Hands of the British Planters [.]
Anyone willing to confront this
reality, he continued, would accordingly be forced to concede the improbability
of Great Britain ever agreeing to establish wholly free trade between its West
Indian possessions and any nation in the world.
That
being said, Britain had already been exceptionally generous with what it was
willing to allow American vessels to carry away from its West Indian colonies.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1778) between the United
States of America and the Kingdom of France, American merchants were forbidden
from removing sugar, cotton, coffee, and cocoa from French colonies in the
Caribbean, with rum and molasses the only permissible trade goods. The terms of
the Jay Treaty, by allowing American vessels to carry away all of the products
cited above, was comparatively quite liberal, though Britain had as much reason
to protect its West Indies monopoly in 1795 as had France in 1778. And while
this beneficence had only been extended to the United States because, “Great
Britain,” King explained, “Has seen it, to be compatible with her
Interests, to admit us to share more extensively in the Productions of her
Islands [,]” the fact of it was worth noting all the same. Britain had granted
privileges to the American republic that the former nation’s closest ally had
opted to reserve. It was an unexpected turn of events, and one whose significance
was not to be discounted. Generous or not, however, there remained aspects of
Britain’s proposed commercial protocol with the United States – as embodied by
the terms of Article XII of the Jay Treaty – that nevertheless struck King as
unacceptable.
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