Volume II Part 34 (1/2)
From the same source Pinckney is warned: ”You must not appear to suspect what you may really know; ... you must ... save him [Gerry] and, in doing so, prevent the Division that would grow out of a Schism in your Commission.” Gerry will be all right, thinks King, ”unless Pride shall be put in opposition to Duty, or Jealousy shall mislead a mind neither ingenuous nor well organized, but habitually suspicious, and, when a.s.sailed by personal vanity, inflexible.”[669]
Pinckney informs King of the situation in Paris on December 27, declaring ”that we ought to request our Pa.s.sports and no longer exhibit to the World the unprecedented Spectacle of three Envoys Extraordinary from a free and independent nation, in vain soliciting to be heard.”[670]
Marshall now insists that the American case be formally stated to the French Government. Gerry at last agrees.[671] Marshall, of course, prepares this vastly important state paper. For two weeks he works over the first half of this historic doc.u.ment. ”At my request Genl. Pinckney & Mr. Gerry met in my room & I read to them the first part of a letter to the Minister of Exterior Relations which consisted of a justification of the American Government,”[672] he relates in his Journal.
Over the last half of the American case, Marshall spends seven days.
”The Second part of the letter to the Minister of Exterior Relations, comprehending the claims of the United States upon France, being also prepared, I read it to Genl Pinckney & Mr. Gerry.” Both sections of Marshall's letter to Talleyrand were submitted to his colleagues for suggestions.[673]
It was hard work to get Gerry to examine and sign the memorial. ”I had so repeatedly pressed Mr. Gerry,” notes Marshall, ”on the subject of our letter prepared for the Minister of Exterior Relations & manifested such solicitude for its being so completed as to enable us to send it, that I had obviously offended. Today I have urged that subject and for the last time.”[674] Two days later Marshall chronicles that ”Mr. Gerry finished the examination of our letter to the Minister of Exterior Relations.”[675] A week later the letter, translated and signed, is delivered to Talleyrand.[676]
Upon this memorial were based future and successful American negotiations,[677] and the statement by Marshall remains to this day one of the ablest state papers ever produced by American diplomacy.
Marshall reminds Talleyrand of the frequent and open expressions of America's regard for France, given ”with all the ardor and sincerity of youth.” These, he says, were considered in America ”as evidencing a mutual friends.h.i.+p, to be as durable as the republics themselves.”
Unhappily the scene changed, says Marshall, and ”America looks around in vain for the ally or the friend.” He pictures the contrast in the language and conduct of the French Government with what had pa.s.sed before, and says that the French charge of American partiality toward Great Britain is unfounded.
Marshall then reviews the international situation and makes it so plain that America could not take part in the European wars, that even Talleyrand was never able to answer the argument. ”When that war [began]
which has been waged with such unparalleled fury,” he writes, ”which in its vast vicissitudes of fortune has alternately threatened the very existence of the conflicting parties, but which, in its progress, has surrounded France with splendor, and added still more to her glory than to her territory,” America found herself at peace with all the belligerent Powers; she was connected with some of them by treaties of amity and commerce, and with France by a treaty of alliance.
But these treaties, Marshall points out, did not require America to take part in this war. ”Being bound by no duty to enter into the war, the Government of the United States conceived itself bound by duties, the most sacred, to abstain from it.” Upon the ground that man, even in different degrees of social development, is still the natural friend of man, ”the state of peace, though unstipulated by treaty,” was the only course America could take. ”The laws of nature” enjoined this, Marshall announces; and in some cases ”solemn and existing engagements ...
require a religious observance” of it.[678]
Such was the moral ground upon which Marshall built his argument, and he strengthened it by practical considerations. ”The great nations of Europe,” he writes, ”either impelled by ambition or by existing or supposed political interests, peculiar to themselves, have consumed more than a third of the present century in wars.” The causes that produced this state of things ”cannot be supposed to have been entirely extinguished, and humanity can scarcely indulge the hope that the temper or condition of man is so altered as to exempt the next century from the ills of the past. Strong fortifications, powerful navies, immense armies, the acc.u.mulated wealth of ages, and a full population, enable the nations of Europe to support those wars.”[679]
Problems of this character, Marshall explains, must be solved by European countries, not by the United States. For, ”encircled by no dangerous Powers, they [the Americans] neither fear, nor are jealous of their neighbors,” says Marshall, ”and are not, on that account, obliged to arm for their own safety.” He declares that America, separated from Europe ”by a vast and friendly ocean,” has ”no motive for a voluntary war,” but ”the most powerful reasons to avoid it.”[680]
America's great and undefended commerce, made necessary by her then economic conditions, would be, Marshall contends, the ”immediate and certain victim” of engaging in European wars; and he then demonstrates the disastrous results to America of departing from her policy of Neutrality.
The immense and varied resources of the United States can only be used for self-defense, reasons the Virginia lawyer. ”Neither the genius of the nation, nor the state of its own finances admit of calling its citizens from the plough but to defend their own liberty and their own firesides.”
He then points out that, in addition to the moral wrong and material disaster of America's taking part in France's wars, such a course means the launching into the almost boundless ocean of European politics. It implies ”contracting habits of national conduct and forming close political connections which must have compromitted the future peace of the nation, and have involved it in all the future quarrels of Europe.”
Marshall then describes the ”long train of armies, debts, and taxes, checking the growth, diminis.h.i.+ng happiness, and perhaps endangering the liberty of the United States, which must have followed.” And all this for what? Not to fulfill America's treaties; ”not to promote her own views, her own objects, her own happiness, her own safety; but to move as a satellite around some other greater planet, whose laws she must of necessity obey.”[681]
”It was believed,” he declares, ”that France would derive more benefit from the Neutrality of America than from her becoming a party in the war.” Neutrality determined upon, he insists that ”increased motives of honor and of duty commanded its faithful observance.... A fraudulent neutrality is no neutrality at all.... A ... nation which would be admitted to its privileges, should also perform the duties it enjoins.”
If the American Government, occupying a neutral position, had granted ”favors unstipulated by treaty, to one of the belligerent Powers which it refused to another, it could no longer have claimed the immunities of a situation of which the obligations were forgotten; it would have become a party to the war as certainly as if war had been openly and formally declared, and it would have added to the madness of wantonly engaging in such a hazardous conflict, the dishonor of insincere and fraudulent conduct; it would have attained, circuitously, an object which it could not plainly avow or directly pursue, and would have tricked the people of the United States into a war which it would not venture openly to declare.”
Then follows this keen thrust which Talleyrand could not evade: ”It was a matter of real delight to the government and people of America,”
suavely writes Marshall, ”to be informed that France did not wish to interrupt the peace they [the American people] enjoyed.”
Marshall then makes a sudden and sharp attack memorable in the records of diplomatic dueling. He calls attention to the astounding conduct of the French Minister on American soil immediately after the American Government had proclaimed its Neutrality to the world and had notified American citizens of the duties which that Neutrality enjoined. In polite phrase he reminds Talleyrand of Genet's a.s.sumption of ”the functions of the government to which he was deputed, ... although he was not even acknowledged as a minister or had reached the authority which should inspect his credentials.”
But, notwithstanding this, says Marshall, ”the American Government resolved to see in him [Genet] only the representative of a republic to which it was sincerely attached” and ”gave him the same warm and cordial reception which he had experienced from its citizens without a single exception from Charleston to Philadelphia.”
Two paragraphs follow of fulsome praise of France, which would seem to have been written by Gerry, who insisted on revising the memorial.[682]
But in swift contrast Marshall again throws on the screen the indefensible performances of the French Minister in America and the tolerance with which the American Government treated them. ”In what manner would France have treated any foreign minister, who should have dared to so conduct himself toward this republic?... In what manner would the American Government have treated him [Genet] had he been the representative of any other nation than France?”
No informed man can doubt the answer to these questions, says Marshall.
”From the Minister of France alone could this extraordinary conduct be borne with temper.” But ”to have continued to bear it without perceiving its extreme impropriety would have been to have merited the contempt” of the world and of France herself. ”The Government of the United States did feel it,” declares Marshall, but did not attribute Genet's misconduct to the French Nation. On the contrary, the American Government ”distinguished strongly between the [French] Government and its Minister,” and complained ”in the language of a friend afflicted but not irritated.” Genet's recall ”was received with universal joy” in America, ”as a confirmation that his ... conduct was attributable only to himself”; and ”not even the publication of his private instructions could persuade the American Government to ascribe any part of it to this [French] republic.”[683]
Marshall further points out ”the exertions of the United States to pay up the arrearages” of their debt to France; America's ”disinterested and liberal advances to the sufferers of St. Domingo ... whose recommendation was that they were Frenchmen and unfortunate”; and other acts of good-will of the American Government toward the French Republic.