The Jay Treaty, Part I: Context

            Now, as is my custom from time to time, I’d like to try something a little different.

            I’ve lately had cause to think a little about some of the issues that had served to define particular political eras in the history of the United States of America. Slavery – to seize upon what is undoubtedly the most obvious and far-reaching example – was the core social, ideological, and economic concern for an entire generation of Americans. Between the 1830s and the 1860s, no other single issue consumed as much energy or occupied as much attention in the national consciousness. In consequence, the shape of the United States as we know it was moulded through attempting to confront exactly what role the so-called “peculiar institution” was to play in the nation’s future or alternately by taking pains to avoid any such reckoning. And while no other single question of policy ever exerted quite the same gravitational pull, there have been a number of other such pressure points across the history of the American republic that effectively served as moments of national self-reflection, crisis, and renewal. The end of the 19^th century and the beginning of what became known as the Progressive Era, for instance, was most certainly one of those key moments. Forced to confront the apparent contradictions between the American national credo – “all men are created equal” – and the increasingly inequitable effects of laissez-faire capitalism, prominent reformers transformed and realigned the political culture of the United States in a way that better reflected the technological and social changes wrought by the Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath. The era of the Vietnam War (1964-1973) reflects another such crisis point, during which the nation engaged in an often chaotic process of introspection and assumptions about the role of government and civil society were challenged and redefined.

Moments like these litter the timeline of American history, and studying them can yield tremendous insight into the way that Americans have understood the meaning of their nationality as well as provide valuable context for a great many of the assumptions ingrained into American culture. America at its worst, one might therefore cynically remark, has historically also been America at its most American. Bearing all of this in mind, and nurturing a personal interest in exploring one of these defining moments alongside my faithful readers, I have determined to take the next several weeks to examine just such a crisis point that falls quite neatly within the era of American history that I long ago staked out as my own to master. Thus, I introduce to you the Jay Treaty, the First Party System, and one of the first great era-defining public debates of the post-constitutional United States.     

            What, I inexplicably hear you ask, is the Jay Treaty? In short, it was a bilateral international agreement negotiated and ratified by the United States of America and the Kingdom of Great Britain in the middle years of the 1790s. Formally titled the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty; and the United States of America, by Their President, with the advice and consent of Their Senate, its purpose was to settle a number of grievances between the relevant parties that had either persisted since the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1783 or arisen since then. It was drafted and signed in London on November 19^th, 1794 by John Jay (1745-1829), on a break from his duties as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and William Grenville (1759-1834), 1^st Baron Grenville and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Without going into more detail than that – there will be time for that later – it will for the moment suffice to add that said treaty, upon the arrival of the completed text in the United States of America in the summer of 1795, touched off nothing short of a firestorm of controversy and partisan tension. Heralded by some as a pragmatic compromise between economic necessity and ideological conviction, it was simultaneously decried by others as symbolic of a rank capitulation to monarchist Britain and an abhorrent betrayal of republican principle. Its foes pledged themselves to defeat its ratification by the United States Senate, and even its supporters frequently expressed dissatisfaction and disdain for certain of its provisions.

Leaked to the public in July, 1795 – President Washington had earlier decreed that the text be distributed only to officers of the federal government – their response was no less extreme. An avalanche of pamphlets for and against flooded the country, raucous public demonstrations erupted in towns and cities, and the inexorable crystallization of a two-party political alignment – which had been simmering since the ratification of the Constitution six years prior – was finally and fully realized. And yet, in spite of everything that was said against it, the aspersions cast upon its author, the President of the United States, and its supporters in the press, and the far from inconsiderable efforts of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in particular to see it well and truly defeated, the Jay Treaty did ultimately become law. The Senate ratified it, twenty votes to ten, on June 24^th, 1795, and Washington signed it into law that August. Its provisions requiring funding were thereafter backed by the House of Representatives, and it finally took effect on February 29, 1796. Those of you still following along might at this point fairly have cause to wonder how this was possible – how it was, in spite of the controversy and chaos that it spawned, that the Jay Treaty managed to become the law of the land. This line of thought is most certainly worth pursuing. Understanding how the Jay Treaty came to pass and the passions that it aroused may yet reveal a great deal about the United States of America as it existed in the end of the 18^th century, the domestic and foreign policy priorities of its citizens and statesman, and the vision(s) that they collectively nurtured of its future.

To that end, what follows will be an exploration of  the text of the Jay Treaty, the various ways that it served either to benefit or to harm certain aspects of economy, security, and national reputation of the United States of America, the contemporary responses of its supporters and critics, and the political significance of its eventual ratification. Before delving into any of that, however, there must first commence a discussion of the conditions on the ground that made the negotiation of a treaty necessary to begin with and which conditioned how the resulting draft document was finally received.  

While it is usually customary at this point to offer some insight into the background of the author of whichever document is under examination, the following paragraphs will, for reasons shortly to be explained, forego any such assessment. First, the life, career, and inclinations of John Jay have been discussed at length already in this series; to repeat them here would therefore appear largely unnecessary. Second, there is little of interest to say about William Grenville – at least not as of 1794/95. He was still fairly new to the political scene, having first entered the House of Common in 1782, and in short order had become a close ally of his first cousin, Prime Minister William Pitt (1759-1806). He was well-educated, had served in the government since 1784, and acted as Home Secretary (1789-1791) prior to being assigned to the Foreign Affairs portfolio. By all indications he was a typical government minister of his era, and promoted the agenda of his party and his nation to a high degree of competency. The third reason for saying little more about Grenville or Jay than that has to do with the nature of the document itself – an international treaty touching upon a number of high-level and potentially sensitive subjects – which more or less demanded that its authors adhere to the linguistic and structural norms of contemporary diplomacy. There was, in short, little latitude for either man to express or insert any aspect of their individual political or philosophical proclivities. Knowing full well that the language they ultimately arrived at would need to be scrutinized and approved before it could come into force, Jay and Grenville therefore doubtless understood that a distinctly measured, non-partisan tone was the most likely to meet with mutual acceptance.   

           

Having thus acknowledged that Jay and Grenville will not be the stars of this particular show, it thus remains to devote the majority of the discussion that follows to an explanation of the specific political and economic conditions that gave rise to the Jay Treaty. And boy howdy – as the saying goes – is there a hell of a lot to talk about.  

Although the immediate aftermath of the ratification of the Treaty of Paris (1783) witnessed a general return to peaceful and mutually profitable relations between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the newly-independent United States of America, a number of key issues were – as aforementioned – either left unaddressed by the terms thereof or arose in the interim to sow animosity between the parties involved. Examples of the former generally touched upon matters of territory or property and spoke to the effects of lingering animosity, pride, and arrogance on both sides of the Atlantic. Article Two of the Treaty of Paris, for example, while intended to settle the territorial boundaries between the nascent United States and Britain’s remaining possessions in North America, proved particularly difficult to implement. The actual text of the article in question was somewhat vaguely worded – describing a line running from the westernmost point of Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi River as the international border – and left uncertain exactly where American sovereignty ended and Britain’s began. The result was an area in the far west of the American republic’s declared territory that potentially overlapped with British claims in the Province of Quebec. As neither party was particularly willing to concede to the other – Britain, still smarting over the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, wished to maintain a check on American expansion in the Great Lakes region, while the United States was eager to press it claims to the same territory and the resources it contained – disputes over resources, settlement, and the application of domestic law were more or less inevitable.

            The most visible manifestation of this overlapping sovereignty took the form of a series of forts on the western frontier of what the Treaty of Paris had fairly clearly acknowledged to be American territory. Most of these permanent garrisons – including but not limited to Fort Detroit and Fort Mackinac in what became the Northwest Territory, and Fort Niagara and Fort Ontario in New York State – had been built by the British during the Seven Years War (1754-1763), had remained in British hands throughout the late Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and had been officially ceded to American control by the terms of the peace in 1783. Article 7 of the accordant treaty specifically stated that George III (1738-1820), on behalf of his government, agreed to remove, “All his armies, garrisons, and fleets from the said United States, and from every post, place, and harbor within the same [.]” In spite of this written assurance, however, British military personnel retained control of these selfsame fortifications, and the hinterlands surrounding them, well into the 1790s. Not only that, but British military authorities also ordered the construction of a further garrison, Forth Miami, in the Maumee River valley in 1794 –  in territory that fell well within the American claim and long after the Treaty of Paris had been signed and ratified.

Britain’s rationale, for continuing to occupy these existing garrisons, and for constructing a new one, was essentially twofold. First, it gave British authorities the ability to apply pressure to the United States government as a means of compelling the latter to fulfil what Britain claimed were its own largely unheeded obligations under the Treaty of Paris – namely, the restoration or restitution of Loyalist property and the repayment of debts owed to British subjects. Second, it allowed Britain to maintain commercial and political relations with the Native inhabitants of the Great Lakes region. Actively servicing these bonds – established over the course of the 17^th and 18^th centuries through trade, military cooperation, and diplomatic exchange – provided Britain with access to trade goods, information, and the ability to generally frustrate or slow the expansion of American settlement into what are now the states of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. The indigenous peoples of these disputed territories – the Wyandot, the Shawnee, the Lenape, and the Miami, among others – meanwhile took ample advantage of Britain’s evident intention to stymie the growth of its former colonial subject by seeking to bend their European ally’s North American strategy towards the promotion and preservation of their own particular interests. On the ground, this relationship and its outcomes took the form of terror-inspiring Native raids on American settlements, occasional British military aide during engagements with the United States armed forces – such as their ultimately futile participation in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in August, 1794 – and the overall umbrella of protection offered by the continued physical presence of British soldiers, traders, and administrators in ostensibly American territory.

            A further inadequacy of the Treaty of Paris – from the American perspective, at least – also lay in its failure to provide financial restitution for thousands of slaves who fled their American masters and received freedom and transportation from British authorities during the late Revolutionary War. These runaways had responded to the efforts of British officials like Virginia’s Royal Governor John Murray, 4^th Earl of Dunmore (1730-1809), to stymie the American war effort by bleeding away the labor supply of the rebellious provinces. A number of these former slaves subsequently served in specially-formed regiments of the British army in combat and non-combat roles alike. In return for their service, and for abandoning their masters, upwards of six thousand newly-freed men, women, and children were transported from what had been formally recognized as the United States of America to British territories in Nova Scotia, Florida, the Caribbean, and even Britain proper. While this truthfully represented a small percentage of the overall slave population of the former Thirteen Colonies, the Revolutionary governments of the various Southern states in particular – whose economic wellbeing depended on access to slave labor – fully expected that the terms of the peace between the nascent American republic and Great Britain would include a clause that mandated the return or restitution of what they considered to be seized Patriot property. That the Treaty of Paris entirely failed to achieve this goal while at the same time requesting American compensation for seized Loyalist property and estates struck a portion of the political classes in the United States as manifestly unjust, and consequently remained a sticking point within the diplomatic realm of the Anglo-American relationship.