Shaping a New Republic

When George Washington took the oath of office in New York on April 30, 1789, the Constitution was a plan on paper. There was no cabinet, no federal court, no tax system, and no way of dealing with the Native nations, Spanish officials and British soldiers who still held much of the land the United States claimed. Over the next twelve years, the Washington and Adams administrations built those institutions, and the arguments over how to build them split the country's leaders into the first national political parties.

Putting the Constitution into practice

The Constitution left much to be decided, so nearly everything the first officeholders did became a precedent, a model later leaders followed.

• Departments and the cabinet. In 1789 Congress created the Departments of State (Thomas Jefferson), Treasury (Alexander Hamilton) and War (Henry Knox), and an attorney general (Edmund Randolph). The Constitution says only that the president may ask department heads for written opinions; Washington began meeting with them as a group, and the cabinet became a permanent institution without ever being written into law.
• Federal courts. The Judiciary Act of 1789 set up a six-justice Supreme Court, with John Jay as chief justice, plus district and circuit courts, and gave the Supreme Court power to review state court decisions involving federal law.
• Rights. The First Congress proposed the amendments that became the Bill of Rights (Topic 3.8).
• Presidential conduct. The plain title "Mr. President" won out over grander proposals such as "His Highness." Washington enforced federal law with force when western Pennsylvanians rose against the whiskey tax in 1794, and stepped down after two terms, a limit no president broke until Franklin Roosevelt won a third term in 1940.
• Peaceful transfer. In 1797, John Adams succeeded Washington. In 1801, Adams handed power to his political opponent, Jefferson (Topic 4.2).

Hamilton, Jefferson and the first parties

The deepest disagreements began with money. In his Report on Public Credit (January 1790), Hamilton proposed that the national government pay its roughly $54 million debt in full, at face value, and also assume (take over and pay) about $25 million in war debts owed by the states, a policy called assumption. Paying in full would establish the country's credit, so it could borrow again in a crisis, and tying wealthy creditors to the national government would give them a stake in its success. Madison objected that many original holders, such as soldiers paid in IOUs, had sold their certificates for a fraction of their value to speculators who would now profit. Southern states, which had paid down much of their own debt, also objected to paying for states such as Massachusetts that had not. The deadlock broke in the Compromise of 1790: southern votes for assumption in exchange for a permanent national capital on the Potomac River.

Hamilton next proposed a Bank of the United States, chartered for 20 years with $10 million in capital, one-fifth owned by the government. It would hold federal money, lend to the government, and issue a stable paper currency. The Constitution does not mention a bank, so the argument turned on how to read it. Jefferson took a strict construction: under the necessary and proper clause, Congress could do only what was truly necessary to carry out its listed powers, and a bank was merely convenient. Hamilton argued a loose construction: the clause allowed any reasonable means to a constitutional end, such as collecting taxes and borrowing, unless the Constitution forbade it. Washington signed the bank bill in February 1791. Hamilton's Report on Manufactures (December 1791) proposed tariffs and subsidies to build American industry; Congress passed little of it, though moderate tariffs became the government's main income.

The bank fight showed two visions of the republic.

Neither man meant to found a party; most leaders still thought organized parties were dangerous factions. But by 1792 each side had its own newspaper (John Fenno's Gazette of the United States for Hamilton, Philip Freneau's National Gazette for Jefferson), and Jefferson left the cabinet at the end of 1793. Foreign policy turned this split into two organized parties.

The French Revolution divides the country

When France declared war on Britain in February 1793, the United States faced a hard choice. The 1778 Treaty of Alliance tied it to France, but Britain was the country's main trading partner, and duties on imports, most of them British goods, supplied nearly all federal revenue, the money that paid the interest on Hamilton's funded debt. Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality in April 1793, a precedent that the president can set foreign policy. The new French minister, Edmond Genet, toured the country cheered by crowds and commissioned American ships as privateers (privately owned armed ships licensed by a government to capture an enemy's merchant ships) to attack British vessels, defying the proclamation, until Washington demanded his recall. Pro-French Democratic-Republican Societies formed in dozens of towns to criticize the administration, and after the Whiskey Rebellion Washington blamed "self-created societies" for stirring it up.

Neutrality did not protect American shipping. In 1793 and 1794 Britain seized hundreds of American ships trading with the French West Indies and impressed (forcibly drafted) American sailors into the Royal Navy. To avoid war, Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to London. Jay's Treaty (1794) got Britain to withdraw from its forts in the Northwest by 1796 and to send American claims for seized ships to a commission. It said nothing about impressment or neutral rights, and its opening of the British West Indies to small American ships came with such tight limits that the Senate struck that article out. Democratic-Republicans burned Jay in effigy, and the Senate ratified the treaty in 1795 by exactly the two-thirds needed, 20 to 10. The fight over Jay's Treaty, more than any other issue, created organized parties that ran candidates against each other in the election of 1796, which Adams won by three electoral votes, with Jefferson becoming vice president.

France treated Jay's Treaty as an alliance with its enemy and began seizing American ships. When Adams sent diplomats to Paris in 1797, three agents of Foreign Minister Talleyrand, identified in the published dispatches as X, Y and Z, demanded a bribe of about $250,000 and a large loan before talks could begin. The XYZ Affair made Federalists briefly popular, and from 1798 to 1800 the two countries fought an undeclared naval war, the Quasi-War, while Congress created the Navy Department.

Federalists used the crisis against their opponents. The Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) raised the residency requirement for citizenship from five to fourteen years (most immigrants voted Democratic-Republican), let the president deport foreigners he judged dangerous, and made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious" writing against the government. Some 25 people, mostly Democratic-Republican editors, were charged; Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon was jailed and won reelection from his cell. Jefferson and Madison answered with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (1798), written in secret, which argued that the Constitution was a compact among the states and that states could judge when Congress exceeded its powers; Kentucky's 1799 resolution used the word "nullification." No other state agreed, but the argument would return in the nullification crisis of 1832. Adams, against Hamilton's wishes, sent new envoys to France, and the Convention of 1800 ended both the Quasi-War and the 1778 alliance.

Here was the 1790s' central conflict over liberty and order: Federalists believed criticism in wartime threatened the government itself, while Democratic-Republicans believed punishing it destroyed the free press the First Amendment protected.

The West: Britain, Spain and Native nations

Settlers poured over the Appalachians after the war. Kentucky became a state in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796. Their problems were foreign ones. British troops still held forts around the Great Lakes and supplied Native nations resisting American expansion. Spain controlled New Orleans and closed the Mississippi to Americans, and its agents tempted westerners to break from the Union. The Washington administration handled both through diplomacy. Jay's Treaty got the British out of the forts. Pinckney's Treaty (the Treaty of San Lorenzo, 1795) got Spain to grant free navigation of the Mississippi, the right of deposit (to store goods at New Orleans for export without paying duties), and a southern boundary at the 31st parallel. The Senate ratified it unanimously; westerners got everything they wanted.

Relations with American Indians rested on an ambiguous legal footing. The Constitution lists the "Indian Tribes" next to foreign nations as partners in commerce, and the federal government made treaties with them, as it did with foreign states. Yet the United States claimed sovereignty over their land under the Treaty of Paris, which Native nations had not signed. The Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790 said that only the federal government could buy Indian land, by treaty. But states such as Georgia and New York made their own deals, and settlers squatted on land no treaty had touched. Secretary of War Knox hoped to buy land peacefully and "civilize" Native peoples into farmers, while the government kept pushing them to sell.

North of the Ohio, a Western Confederacy of Shawnee, Miami, Delaware and other nations, led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, defeated an American army under Josiah Harmar in 1790 and destroyed Arthur St. Clair's army in November 1791, killing more than 600 soldiers, the worst defeat a U.S. army ever suffered against Native forces. General Anthony Wayne rebuilt the army and won the Battle of Fallen Timbers in August 1794; the British at nearby Fort Miamis closed their gates to the retreating warriors. In the Treaty of Greenville (1795), the confederacy gave up most of present-day Ohio for goods and yearly payments. Each treaty treated Native nations as sovereigns able to sell land, and each was made under military pressure, so their status, independent nations or dependents of the United States, stayed unsettled until the Cherokee cases of the 1830s.

Spanish California

While Americans pushed west, Spain pushed north along the Pacific. Worried that Russian fur traders moving down from Alaska and British ships would claim the coast, Spain sent soldiers under Gaspar de Portolá and Franciscan missionaries under Junípero Serra to San Diego in 1769. Over the next half century they built 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma, along with presidios (forts) and towns such as San José (1777) and Los Angeles (1781).

The missions ran on Native labor. Once baptized, Native people were not allowed to leave, and they farmed, herded and built under the friars' control, with whipping as punishment and soldiers to capture those who fled. Disease and harsh conditions caused deaths to outnumber births in the missions, and Native peoples resisted: the Kumeyaay burned the San Diego mission in 1775, and in 1785 a woman named Toypurina helped plan a revolt at San Gabriel.

For the settlers, the frontier offered social mobility. Most soldiers and settlers were of mixed Spanish, Indigenous and African ancestry, which placed them low in New Spain's sistema de castas, a colonial ranking of people by ancestry with Spaniards at the top and people of Indigenous and African descent below them. In California they could gain land, become respected gente de razón ("people of reason," a label for Hispanicized colonists), and see their caste labels change on official records. The result was cultural blending: Catholic and Native religious practices merged, Spanish livestock and crops changed Native life, and new mixed communities formed.

Washington's Farewell Address

In September 1796, Washington announced that he would not seek a third term in a letter printed in newspapers, drafted with help from Hamilton. Written amid the Jay Treaty fight and French efforts to sway the coming election, it urged Americans to value the Union above section or party. Washington warned against parties built on "geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western," and against "the spirit of party" in general, which he feared could lead to the "permanent despotism" of a faction's leader. On foreign policy, he advised trade with all nations but as few political ties as possible, and to "steer clear of permanent alliances," though he accepted temporary alliances in emergencies.

The address served as a guide to American foreign policy for more than a century, and later leaders cited it when they avoided European alliances. But it was not neutral. By 1796 Washington stood with the Federalists, and Democratic-Republicans read his attack on party, and his warning against foreign attachments, as aimed at them and their sympathy for France.

Worked examples

Where students lose points

On the exam

The skill for this topic is sourcing: identifying a document's historical situation, audience, purpose and point of view. Typical sources are the Farewell Address, the Neutrality Proclamation, letters about Genet or Jay's Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and treaties with Native nations. In essays about the early republic, the 1790s give strong evidence for prompts on federal power, the origins of parties, and how foreign wars shaped domestic politics.