The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783-1829

Introduction

In the four decades after the United States secured its independence from the British empire, American statesmen closely observed and carefully responded to the gradual dissolution of the Spanish empire, even as they steered their nation through an era of internal and external crises. During these decades, they differed repeatedly and intensely about the proper response to the changes taking place in the Western Hemisphere, just as they divided over other foreign and domestic developments. Their frequent conflicts over specific measures, however, obscured a fundamental consensus over the larger problems that these changes raised for the United States. Elements of both the conflict and the consensus appeared in a pair of assessments of the situation facing the United States in 1816, when revolutionary movements in Spain’s New World colonies had initiated the final phase in the collapse of its empire. Return J. Meigs, the federal agent with the Cherokees, neatly summarized the situation. If the Spanish American revolutions succeed prosperously, he argued, we shall have good neighbours. But, if Spain ruled, he warned, we shall have bad neighbours[—]it cannot be otherwise.¹ Former president Thomas Jefferson viewed the matter very differently. He worried about the future, even though he trusted that the revolutionaries would win their independence. The United States would face grave dangers, he believed, if the Spanish Americans formed themselves into one confederacy, as in single mass they would be a very formidable neighbor. He hoped, instead, that they would establish three new governments, leaving the United States to act as the balancing power.²

During the decade or so after the War of 1812, the thinking of the most important American policymakers—James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay—about the dissolution of the Spanish empire fell somewhere between the hopes of Meigs and the fears of Jefferson. Still, all could agree not only that the developments in Spanish America were important to the United States, but also that they were important precisely because they would determine the character of its neighbors. Between 1783 and 1829, policymakers viewed the collapse of the Spanish empire—and the associated prospects for American expansion, Spanish American independence, and European intervention—in terms of a distinct understanding of the importance of good neighbours to the new American union.

The story of the American response to the dissolution of the Spanish empire includes a number of events that have been studied at great length by historians of American foreign policy and the early national period. The Louisiana Purchase, the West Florida Annexation, the Transcontinental Treaty, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Panama Congress have provided subjects for countless articles and monographs. Still, our understanding of these events remains incomplete. Neither the concerns of early American policymakers nor the divisions between them have been examined from a perspective that is sufficiently broad to capture the full range of forces that guided them. Studies that test the decisions of the first two generations of American policymakers against modern standards of realism, scrutinize them for evidence of political ambition, or search them for the roots of later imperialism have provided only partial insights into the thinking that shaped them at the time. The vast transformations in the hopes and fears of American policymakers and in the power and authority of the U.S. government over the past two centuries have erected obstacles to our properly understanding the past. It was, in large part, the success of these policymakers in the great struggle of their political lives—establishing and preserving an independent, republican union in North America—that created the conditions that have made it hard for modern historians, as well as for their immediate successors, to appreciate the difficulty of their undertaking.³

Three distinct but interrelated factors interacted in the policymaking process during the early national period. First, a complex web of political, economic, and social assumptions about and aspirations for the American people shaped each policymaker’s sense of the concerns and interests of the nation. Committed to popular government and individual enterprise, as well as national independence, policymakers sought measures that would protect and promote these ends. At the same time, they reacted to sudden developments in Europe or the New World and gradual shifts in the international system that presented threats and opportunities. In the early national period, such changes occurred at a dizzying pace in the areas of greatest importance to the United States. Finally, policymakers acted based on careful calculations of the nation’s ability to assert its will abroad. Their assessments of the nation’s strength always involved evaluations of the health of the federal union and the authority of the general government, as well as the size of its military forces.

Despite a widespread agreement about the factors that should inform policy decisions, policymakers regularly disagreed about how to define and to weight these factors. They found many different ways to reconcile their hopes for a society based on political self-determination and economic self-interest with their fears that such a society contained the seeds of its own destruction. As a result, they offered contrasting plans about how best to order the relations among the people, the state, and the economy to promote the goals of the Revolution and to prevent the self-destruction of the society. Policymakers also differed in their perceptions of developments abroad based upon their ideas about the operation of the international system, the behavior of states, and the strength of relevant nations. In an era of revolution, expansion, and warfare, moreover, even these underlying ideas changed over time. Finally, policymakers often differed about how to balance power and authority within the new nation in order to achieve the greatest strength with respect to other nations. They disagreed about the fundamental question of whether the government’s authority over the people—its ability to persuade them to act as it wished—was directly or inversely related to its power over them—its ability to compel them to act as it wished. And, even when policymakers agreed about questions of political economy, evaluations of international developments, or assessments of national capabilities, they could still propose contrasting, even contradictory, policies if they assigned these factors different weights in making their decisions.⁴

During the early national period, much of the common ground in the thinking of leading policymakers arose from their broadly shared ideas about the American union and its place in the world. Recent work on the political thought of this era has expanded our understanding of the assumptions and concerns of early Americans, but this new understanding has not brought a revision in our view of early policymaking. The evolution of American thinking about republicanism, liberalism, and federalism during the first half century of independence has received considerable attention over the last two decades. But the links between these competing or, at least, coexisting modes of thought are only imperfectly known. Their respective roles in either structuring the general patterns through which policymakers viewed developments or determining the specific measures with which they responded to events, moreover, remain almost unexplored.⁵ In fact, the first two generations of American policymakers conceived of their new nation and the world around it in a distinctive way that took shape during the 1780s, changed form during the next four decades, and lost sway during the 1820s. They believed that the goals of the Revolution were threatened by the problem of neighborhood and could be preserved only through the solution of union. Federal means, in their thinking, would accomplish republican and liberal ends.

Early American statesmen, like many of their contemporaries outside of the national government, viewed the new nation with a combination of hope and fear. The fluidity encouraged by its republican and liberal ideals promised a radical advance in personal political and economic freedoms, even as it threatened a sudden decline into anarchy or despotism. Similarly, its revolutionary origins and republican principles earned it the hostility of European monarchs, even as its unique location offered it eventual opportunities for expansion at their expense. Over the course of the 1780s, most statesmen and many citizens placed the union of the American states at the center of this mix of hopes and fears. The legacy of the Revolution shaped their thinking. Its goals determined their goals. Its successes imbued them with confidence. Its failures burdened them with fears. As they looked for new ways to preserve the national independence, republican government, commercial prosperity, and territorial empire for which they had fought, they returned to the means that had produced victory in the recent war. Only by perpetuating the increasingly tenuous union among the states, they decided, could they secure the ends of the Revolution. Even before the formal end of the war with Great Britain, Madison reduced the American situation to the simple question of whether prosperity & tranquility, or confusion and disunion [were] to be the fruits of the Revolution.⁶

Over the course of the 1780s, a growing number of American statesmen traced the mounting challenges to the goals of the Revolution to the imperfection of the union established by the Articles of Confederation and to the problem of neighborhood. The eventual founders of the new Constitution—and, thus, of the more perfect union that its preamble stated was its object—considered an American state system composed of multiple independent governments inherently destructive of these goals. If the imperfect union of the confederation foundered, as seemed increasingly likely, either thirteen separate nations or three or four partial confederacies would float from the wreckage. All of the variations in climate, geography, and population between the components of the resulting state system would necessarily create different interests. As fully sovereign nations, moreover, each government would bear the undiluted responsibility and possess the unrestricted means for promoting these interests and for preserving its own existence.

In the thinking of the Founders, multiple sovereign nations, whether individual states or partial confederacies, in a single neighborhood could not coexist peacefully. Collisions over laws, trade, and borders would ultimately develop. The ease of using force against adjacent nations would make a recourse to military solutions natural and common. Within each state, as a result, the dictates of self-promotion and self-preservation would quickly become the most powerful director[s] of national conduct.⁷ The sovereign states of North America, the Founders calculated, would eventually replicate the system of military, political, and commercial competition and conflict that had always bedeviled Europe. The Founders also rejected the argument that republics, even commercial republics, would not war upon each other. Regardless of their political or economic systems, men were men. By their nature, Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist Papers, men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious. At the same time, the Founders insisted that history demonstrated that even commercial republics would use military force to promote their interests. As Hamilton reminded his readers, to look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighbourhood [was] to disregard the uniform course of human events.⁸

To eliminate the problem of neighborhood and to secure the goals of the Revolution, the Founders looked to the solution of a union encompassing all of the American states. Within the union, each of the states would surrender some of its responsibilities and rights as a sovereignty to the federal government. Union would not erase the different interests of the individual states, but it would limit their means for promoting those interests. Political and legal processes would replace military and commercial warfare as the ways to resolve disputes. With all of the sovereign states of North America joined into a single union, they would no longer need to view each other as hostile neighbors. Under the American system of semisovereign states within a federal union, unlike under the European system of fully sovereign nations within a balance of power, the goals of the Revolution could be preserved.⁹

The Founders trusted in a single union to secure American independence against the inroads of European powers, whether in the form of foreign invasion or undue influence. A union would serve in the future, as it had during the Revolution, to combine the resources, manpower, and energies of the individual states for the preservation of all. A growing population and expanding settlements, the Founders realized, made attacks from overseas less likely with every year. The greater danger to national independence derived, instead, from the possibility that the union would dissolve, initiating a scramble for power between neighboring sovereignties. The Founders believed that, if the union divided into either thirteen separate states or three or four partial confederacies, alliances would be soug[h]t first by the weaker and then by the stronger party. The different states might retain a nominal independence, but would have to surrender their real independence in order to gain the European allies that they would need to protect their trade and territory against their North American neighbors. In the end, Madison predicted, the American states would be made subservi[ent] to the wars and politics of Europe.¹⁰

At the same time, union seemed essential to the Founders for preserving republican government within the states. Unless a single union included all of the states, separate sovereignties would interact in some form of a balance-of-power system. Even though European intellectuals described this system as a force for peace and progress, the Founders recognized that it had, in fact, failed either to preserve the peace in Europe or to protect small states from their larger neighbors. In their thinking, the perpetuation of republican governments required that each of the states remain confident of its security. Otherwise, the separate states or confederacies would need to protect themselves using any means available, even those inimical to republican government. They would have to centralize power, raise standing armies, erect extensive fortifications, and, to pay for these steps, impose heavy taxes and forced levies. Republican government would collapse under the weight of each sovereignty’s necessary measures of self-preservation. According to Madison, breaking or dissolving [the] Union would lead unavoidably to appeal[s] to [the] Sword, Standg. armies, and perpetual Debts.¹¹ If the American states replicated the European nations in their international relations, the Founders warned, they would soon replicate them in their internal politics. If we should be disunited, Hamilton reasoned, we should be in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe—our liberties would be a prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other.¹²

The Founders also viewed a single union as a critical step toward commercial prosperity. Recognizing the abundance of their resources, the industry of their people, and the advantages of their location, Americans expected a fairly high level and broad extent of prosperity as a result of international trade. At the same time, influenced by the Enlightenment, they linked commerce to the spread of learning and promotion of peace, on one level, and to the acceptance of personal autonomy and encouragement of rational decision making, on another. During the 1780s, however, the shortcomings of the confederation government left American merchants closed out of extensive markets in the British empire and the Mediterranean Sea. If the existing union collapsed, the sovereign states or confederacies could be trusted to erect even more extensive obstacles to commerce. In order to protect their own farmers, merchants, and artisans, they would enact tariffs, fees, and regulations. But a more perfect union would open new routes to prosperity at home and abroad. By creating an extended area for trade without restrictions or tariffs, a union would promote profitable exchanges between farmers, artisans, manufacturers, and merchants from different states. By permitting the states to act as a single nation with respect to other powers, it would provide the leverage necessary to pry open foreign markets and to encourage Ships & Seamen and manufactures.¹³ In the view of the Founders, a single union would increase the prospects for an expansion of individual opportunity and collective prosperity.

Finally, the Founders recognized the importance of union for the goal of territorial expansion. Throughout the 1780s, their expansionism generally focused upon the vast territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. While the Treaty of Paris had confirmed this region to the United States, the new nation encompassed the trans-Appalachian West only in a formal sense. Native American tribes and confederacies occupied and controlled most of the land. The steady stream of settlers that flowed into the West during and after the war intended to displace the native inhabitants. But there was no guarantee that these settlers would maintain their ties to the United States as citizens of either existing states or new states within the confederation. If the union of the eastern states disintegrated, the connection with the West would almost certainly dissolve as well. Properly managed, western expansion would afford an economic bounty for the union as a whole and for the farmers, manufacturers, importers, and speculators of the eastern states. Cash sales of western lands would provide the government with an independent source of income, enabling it to meet its costs, to restore American credit, and to begin to repay the war debt. Speculative companies would retail western lands to farmers, who would buy needed European or American manufactured goods from eastern merchants and traders. Improperly managed, however, the western settlers would break with the American union and either set up a separate confederacy or turn to the nearby British or Spanish empires. In either case, the United States would not only lose the value of the West and the prospect of any further expansion, but also gain a potentially hostile neighbor.¹⁴

Obviously, the specific geopolitical conditions that faced the Founders during the 1780s structured their thinking about the problem of neighborhood and the solution of union. The unchecked sovereignty of neighboring nations posed a problem for them only because the means that had always been used by states to protect their existence and to promote their interests conflicted with the Founders’ commitment to national independence and republican government. Furthermore, the political structure of the New World, where thirteen American states shared the hemisphere only with European colonies, influenced their idea of neighborhood. The Founders readily accepted as an axiom in politics, that vicinity, or nearness of situation, constitutes nations natural enemies.¹⁵ They could view union as a solution to the problem of neighborhood precisely because during the 1780s there were no nations in the New World other than the thirteen American states. By definition, colonies lacked the prerogatives of sovereignty; they had neither interests of their own nor the self-directed power to protect them. With the American states joined into one union, the entirety of the New World would contain just one sovereignty and, thus, no neighborhood. It is not evident that the Founders fully understood that these unique political, geographical, and historical circumstances allowed the union of the states to solve the problem of neighborhood. But it is clear that they recognized that either the creation of a new nation outside of, but adjacent to, the union or the dissolution of the existing union into its component parts would unleash all of the dangers of a complex state system.

The federal union of the Constitution defined for Americans how they confronted both each other and the outside world. The Founders counted on the growing danger of disunion to rouse all the real friends to the Revolution to exert themselves in favor of such an organization of the Confederacy, as [would] perpetuate the Union, and redeem the honor of the Republican name.¹⁶ With hard bargaining at the Philadelphia convention and hard selling in the different states, the aptly named Federalists secured the construction and ratification of the more perfect union that they thought essential. If the Constitution lacked some of the supports that its architects had originally believed necessary, it nonetheless appeared to offer the only shelter against a dismemberment of the Union.¹⁷ The new union would preserve the peace between the sovereign states that appeared essential to the successful realization of the Founders’ political and economic goals. At the same time, it would afford the energy, manpower, resources, and leverage that appeared necessary to eliminate European interference and to encourage commercial prosperity and territorial expansion. With both domestic happiness and national security dependent upon union and both internal and external forces capable of undermining union, the lines between domestic and foreign policies remained blurred during the early national period. Policymakers recognized that measures to strengthen the union, even if taken in response to specific domestic or foreign conditions, would have repercussions that could not be easily divided into their internal and external aspects.

Throughout the early national period, American policymakers viewed the continued existence of a union that seemed essential for achieving the goals of the Revolution as problematic rather than natural. Too many forces threatened to blow it apart from within; too many pressures threatened to tear it apart from without. The centrifugal forces created by political liberty, economic enterprise, territorial expansion, and states’ rights strained against the fragile bonds that held together sections, states, and citizens. At the same time, developments outside the union, in both Europe and the New World, created further strains upon these weak ties. Once the union became the repository of American hopes for the success of the Revolution, disunion—as a consequence of either domestic or foreign pressures—seemed to pose the ultimate danger to the United States. Actively promoting and protecting union became the prime responsibility of federal policymakers. From the 1780s through the 1820s, the first two generations of policymakers worked to develop policies that would function in harmony to strengthen the bonds between the states, to contain the centrifugal forces within the union, and to lessen the threats from external pressures. Nonetheless, they bitterly disagreed about how best to defend against their common fears and to bring about their common goals.

This study traces the rise and fall of the logic of unionism among leading American policymakers between the mid-1780s and the mid-1820s. While it is informed, in part, by the concepts and concerns of diplomatic historians, it does not attempt to examine the diplomatic exchanges produced by the collapse of the Spanish empire from a bilateral or multilateral perspective. The actions of the Spanish and Spanish American governments receive fairly little attention in this account. At the same time, a number of domestic and foreign developments that were only remotely related to events in the Spanish empire, but were critically connected to changes in American unionism, receive extended analysis. But the focus on Spanish America in this work should not be misconstrued as merely an example, even a major example, of unionist thinking in action. During these decades, the gradual dissolution of the Spanish empire in the New World presented the central crisis for the unionist thinking of American policymakers. The erosion of Spanish power threatened to revive the problem of neighborhood in two radically different forms. It could bring about the types of external pressures that might destroy the existing American union and make fully sovereign neighbors out of the semisovereign states. Or it could result in the independence of one or more Spanish American nations and create new sovereign neighbors for the United States as a whole. The New World’s British, French, and Portuguese empires never presented precisely the same threats in American thinking.¹⁸ In their efforts to respond to these dangers, policymakers would expand, redefine, and, in the end, abandon the unionist logic of the Founders.

Chapter One: The Union and its Neighbors 1783–1815

In the decades between the end of the Revolutionary War and the end of the War of 1812, the first generation of policymakers in the independent United States struggled to apply and to adapt their unionist logic to rapidly changing conditions within the new nation and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Even before the Spanish empire in the New World began to unravel with the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 and the collapse of the Spanish monarchy in 1808, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, and others confronted the possibility that the western region of their own nation would reinvigorate the problem of neighborhood and destroy the solution of union. As they endeavored to preserve the union between East and West, in particular, and among all of the states, in general, these policymakers divided into opposing groups that eventually became the Federalists and the Republicans. The ideas about and approaches to the trans-Appalachian West and the American union that Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and other Republicans developed in these years shaped their responses to the retrocession of Louisiana between 1801 and 1803 and to the revolutions within the Spanish empire between 1808 and 1815. In each case, Republican policymakers worked actively to preserve the integrity of the federal union and to prevent the creation of a hostile neighborhood.

As policymakers responded to developments in the trans-Appalachian West, Louisiana, and Spanish America between 1783 and 1815, they discovered and displayed the full complexity in their understanding of the problem of neighborhood. In their thinking, any potentially dangerous neighbor would imperil the Revolution’s goals of national independence, republican government, commercial prosperity, and territorial expansion. The incredible fluidity of the New World combined with the incredible fragility of the American union to pose a dual threat. First, a new nation might emerge out of the ongoing turmoil in the West or Louisiana or Spanish America, forcing the United States, as a whole, to adjust its institutions and aspirations to the presence of one or more sovereign neighbors on its borders. Second, the pressures generated on the American union by changes in the West or Louisiana or Spanish America might tear apart the United States, making the existing states into neighbors of each other. Either outcome would unleash the forces that the Founders had concluded would destroy the Revolutionary experiment. Each of these dangers had to be actively combated, according to the unionist logic of the first generation of American policymakers.

A commitment to securing the goals of the Revolution against the problem of neighborhood, in both of its forms, guided leading policymakers as they responded to changing conditions throughout the New World between 1783 and 1815. This shared commitment did not dictate a common policy, however. The consensus among the Founders extended little further than the necessity of the more perfect union established by the Constitution. How to protect the union, in general, and how to preserve the ties between East and West, in particular, quickly arose as divisive questions to which different policymakers gave conflicting answers. After a series of heated battles over the trans-Appalachian West during the 1780s and 1790s, the Republican approach to the West and the union gained a clear ascendancy with Jefferson’s inauguration as president in 1801, just as policymakers were forced to react to the first stage in the gradual collapse of the Spanish empire in the New World. Over the next fourteen years, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe demonstrated their concern about the character of the American neighborhood and the health of the American union as they confronted two challenges—the retrocession of Louisiana to France and the revolutions in Spanish America.

They Will End by Separating from our Confederacy and Becoming It’s Enemies

Between 1783 and 1801, the instability of the West between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, which was a part of the United States according to the Treaty of Paris, gave policymakers something of a preview of the dangers that changes in the Spanish empire would later present. Their attempts to meet the challenges of the West coincided with and contributed to their efforts to think through the problem of neighborhood and the solution of union and to enact their unionist logic in a new Constitution. As they struggled with these issues, they divided into two parties with conflicting views about how to manage the West and how to maintain the union. Both the approaches and the divisions that took shape during these years would influence the response to changes in the Spanish empire after 1801. Even at the time, the basic similarity of the American West and the Spanish empire was clear to some policymakers. Writing from Paris in January 1786, Jefferson responded to ominous news that Kentucky might separat[e] not only from Virginia . . . but also from the confederacy with predictions of future expansion at Spain’s expense. Our confederacy, he boldly asserted, must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled. Even as he warned that it was not in the interest of that great continent to press too soon on the Spaniards, Jefferson noted that those countries [could not] be in better hands. He worried only that Spain was too feeble to hold them till our population [was] sufficiently advanced to gain it from them peice by peice.¹ If policymakers failed to handle the West properly, Jefferson’s dream of a great continent would be lost.

Between 1783 and 1787, the Founders arrived at their new understanding of the need for a more perfect union as they struggled with the unsettlement in the trans-Appalachian West. During the 1770s and 1780s, common citizens assigned a personal meaning to the Revolutionary goals that policymakers viewed in national terms. This dynamic was particularly powerful in the West. New settlers flocked to this region with a clear belief that independence, self-government, prosperity, and expansion were their own goals, as well as the nation’s. As they moved over the mountains and spread across the Ohio River valley, they demanded fresh lands, commercial access to the Gulf of Mexico, and local government. These demands strained the frail links between western settlers and the national and state governments that claimed to control the West. Eastern policymakers generally agreed about the nature of the problem, if not the solution. The western settlers would become a distinct people from us unless the eastern governments handled them wisely, Washington warned in late 1784. Instead of adding strength to the Union, they would develop into a formidable and dangerous neighbour.² With British, French, and Spanish policymakers aware of this prospect and alert to ways to encourage western secession, the dangers only multiplied. Allowing the creation of a hostile neighbor in the West would undermine basic American goals. It would preclude future commercial and territorial expansion, compel the eastern states to protect themselves in ways that seemed incompatible with national independence and republican government, and blast any expectations of American greatness.³

Preserving the union between East and West and promoting an orderly process of settlement quickly emerged as goals common to American policymakers. But common ends did not result in common means. Between 1783 and 1787, many of the men who would later lead the Republican party, including Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, argued that the western settlers would stay in the union only if the confederation and state governments actively worked to satisfy their extensive political, economic, and diplomatic interests. Based on his analysis of the American character in general, that of those people particularly, and the inergetic nature of our governments, Jefferson concluded that the western settlers would leave the union rather than remain in colonial subserviency to Congress or the parent states.⁴ But early self-government would meet only one of their concerns. Congress also had to prove itself willing and able to force concessions from the Indians who held the land and the Spanish who had closed the mouth of the Mississippi in 1784. In the thinking of many future Republicans, if the national government failed to secure these legitimate western demands or, even worse, deliberately sacrifice[d] their interests in favor of eastern interests, western settlers would see it better to govern themselves.⁵ Unless the government quickly demonstrated that union served the interests of westerners as well as easterners, Jefferson predicted, "they [would] end by separating from our confederacy and becoming it’s [sic] enemies."⁶

Many of the men who would later lead the Federalist party, including John Jay, Rufus King, and Arthur St. Clair, developed a very different approach to the trans-Appalachian West during the 1780s. In their thinking, policymakers could prevent disunion and promote order only by insuring that the power and authority of the government in the West grew at least as rapidly as the population and size of western settlements. Accordingly, they tried, at once, to increase the government’s presence in the West and to dampen the settlers’ enthusiasm for migration. They insisted that the governing ordinance for the Northwest Territory establish a gradual and incremental process toward statehood and divide the region into no more than five large states instead often small ones. They advocated a land policy that would not only insure orderly settlement, which the future Republicans supported as well, but also slow the transfer of the land to farming families by selling the public domain in large lots, at high prices, and for cash. Most importantly, they sought a diplomatic solution to their fears in the form of a treaty between Jay and Spanish minister Don Diego de Gardoqui. In 1786 and 1787, Jay and Gardoqui worked on a treaty closing the Mississippi to western trade for twenty-five or thirty years in exchange for commercial benefits for American merchants in the Spanish empire. Without the Mississippi outlet, Jay and his New England and New York supporters calculated, the West would lose much of its attractiveness, allowing the government to strengthen its hold over the region without facing a flood of new settlers.

The alarm at the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations showed how easily the mismanagement of western affairs could unleash the forces of disunion. Westerners voiced their outrage as soon as they heard of the intended treaty. Plans for breaking from the union and arriving at an accommodation with Spain circulated in the West for years, culminating between 1787 and 1789 with the Spanish Conspiracy in Kentucky. Monroe, one of the fiercest opponents of the negotiations in Congress, believed that this result was not an accident. The willingness to close the Mississippi to western trade tended so strongly toward disunion that he concluded that the original intention had been to [throw] the western people & territory without the govt. of the U.S. But Monroe also recognized that a division at the Appalachians might precipitate further divisions between the eastern states. The northerners who supported the treaty, he decided, might even have intended to [dismember] the govt. itself, for the purpose of a separate Confederacy.⁷ The explosion over the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations occurred, moreover, just as the Founders initiated their final effort to restructure the union. Of the many obstacles to this effort, the sectional divisions over the negotiations threatened to prove especially damaging. While the treaty itself never won the support of the required nine states, the news of it alone, Madison feared, would be fatal . . . to an augmentation of the federal authority, if not to the little now existing.⁸ Whether viewed from the North, the South, or the West, the conflict sparked by the treaty tended to confirm an irreconcilable diversity of interests in the states that made agreeing upon a new Constitution even more difficult.

By the time that the new federal government commenced its operations in early 1789, key policymakers could agree that the union was necessary to achieve the goals of the Revolution and that the Constitution was necessary to secure the union. But they quickly divided over the measures required to safeguard the Constitution and the union against rapidly changing conditions. The continuing emphasis upon union served to eliminate any real distinction between foreign and domestic policy for either Federalists or Republicans. Instead, both Hamilton, on one hand, and Jefferson and Madison, on the other, constructed an integrated array of policies intended to secure the union against both internal and external pressures. The Federalists worked to build a strong central government with close ties to Great Britain in order to suppress the sources of domestic division and to distance the union from foreign threats. As the Republicans attacked this program, they developed an alternative approach that limited the power of the federal government over the states and the people and shifted attention from Europe to the New World. Each group of policymakers increasingly saw the other’s program as dangerous to the Constitution and the union; in response, they intensified party conflict and sought popular support.⁹

While the lines between Federalists and Republicans only gradually became clear, the sources of their division could be traced to the first actions of the new government. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, Vice President John Adams, and others in the executive and legislative branches sought to instill the federal government with the energy needed to counteract the centrifugal forces that had disabled the confederation. In their view, only an effective central government could check or channel these forces. In 1792, Hamilton explained that his political creed included "two essential points[—]the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country and . . . the necessity of an efficient general government to maintain that Union. Establishing an energetic and effective government at the center of the union, the Federalists believed, required steps to restrain the activities of the states and the people and to augment the power and authority of the federal government. To Hamilton, it seemed necessary to subordinate the states to the nation. They could be both safe & useful, he believed, if they were all of the size of Connecticut, Maryland or New Jersey."¹⁰ The Federalists also endeavored to surround the new government in ceremony and ritual as a way to awe the people into deference. And they insisted on possessing the ability and displaying the will to coerce obedience through military force. In their view, the authority of the federal government depended upon its power; a weak government could neither win the people’s voluntary support nor compel their reluctant submission.

At the same time, Hamilton and the Federalists believed that the energy of the federal government and, thus, the well-being of the Constitution and the union depended upon the loyalties of wealthy and powerful men more than upon those of the mass of the people. Federalist efforts to centralize control over the financial system and the developing economy through the funding and assumption laws, the Bank of the United States, and federal bounties for manufacturers reflected this assessment. In each case, Hamilton sought to break the attachment of eastern capitalists to the states and to cement their loyalty to the federal government by making it the source of personal pecuniary advantages, principally in the form of regular interest payments on federal bonds. To raise the revenue needed to support these plans, he looked primarily to customs duties and secondarily to excise taxes, including one on distilled liquor. With customs receipts accounting for the bulk of federal revenues and duties on British imports accounting for the bulk of customs receipts, Hamilton naturally placed great value upon a flourishing trade and friendly relations with Great Britain. This trans-Atlantic focus, in the Federalist view, served as the foundation for the tenuous structure that held up the union. It brought in the customs receipts that funded the interest payments that satisfied the eastern capitalists that energized the federal government that stabilized the Constitution that, in the end, perpetuated the union.¹¹

The Republican critique of Federalist policies reflected a conviction that they would lead unavoidably, if unintentionally, to a dissolution of the union. Over the course of Washington’s first administration, Jefferson and Madison saw in the unfolding Federalist program a plan to reform the federal republic into a British-style constitutional monarchy. The enticement to paper speculation, the debasement of a corrupt squadron in Congress, and the establishment of a permanent debt appeared frighteningly reminiscent of the Walpolian system