Beyond the Water’s Edge
How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy
FROM BITTER DIVISION TO GOOD FEELINGS
In the beginning, political divisions lined the face the American republic presented to the rest of the world. Divisions were a natural consequence of forming a nation from thirteen separate colonies that different people with vastly different purposes had founded. Even when severing their tie to Britain, those colonies, in the Declaration of Independence in which they stated their case before the opinions of mankind, pronounced themselves to be “free and independent states”—plural.
Party politics already flowed through the veins of American colonists for reasons beyond the economic and religious differences among the colonies. The concept of competition between two parties was a legacy of English political history dating back to King John facing off against the barons at the time of Magna Carta, continuing through the seventeenth century contest between Cavaliers and Roundheads, and, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, between Tories and Whigs. Both Whigs and Tories sought to use allies in the American colonies, where the party competition in England had echoes.1
The earliest factionalism in America did not necessarily take the form of named political parties but nevertheless existed in ways that affected America’s foreign relations. James Madison was, along with his friend Thomas Jefferson, a founder of one of the two political parties that arose in the 1790s and formed half of what is often regarded as the first party system of the United States. Madison himself, however, considered it not
the first such system but the third. In an essay in 1792, he described the first system as pitting pro-independence forces against pro-British loyalists, with the second one consisting of supporters and opponents of the Constitution drafted in 1787.2 Factionalism during the new nation’s earliest years went even beyond what Madison described and had roots in commercial competition and assorted personal and family animosities. The emergence of that third—by Madison’s reckoning—party system was immersed in attitudes toward the two foreign powers that the young republic had to deal with far more than any others: Britain and France. Indeed, attitudes toward relations with these two powers were a large part of what defined the party allegiance of Americans. The opportunities for party politics to infect foreign relations were thus substantial. This represented one more challenge, along with many others, in the task of forging a unified nation.
FOREIGN INTERFERENCE AS A PRICE FOR FOREIGN SUPPORT
The roots of American diplomacy are to be found in the mid-eighteenth century in the person of agents in London who represented the interests of American colonies. Those interests were primarily commercial, but the agents functioned in large part as diplomats. Often reflecting conflicts among the colonies over matters such as boundaries and land grants, the agents competed at least as much as they cooperated. Personal ambition and a quest for commissions that agents earned on any budgetary support for their colonies added to the competition.3 Beginning in the mid-1760s, as British measures such as the Stamp Act of 1765 fostered a sense of shared grievance among the colonies, the agents began consulting with each other, but the consultations were infrequent before the final couple of years prior to independence.4
Besides the handicap of internal divisions, this early representation of America to the outside world provided the first example of such representation being tainted by non-American—which in this case meant British—interests. Some of the colonial agents were born and bred in America but others were Englishmen—often members of parliament or
lawyers—for whom the work as an agent was a part-time job.5 As frictions between the American colonies and the mother country intensified in the decade leading up to the American revolution, the conflict of interest became more apparent.
One of the half-dozen agents who were in place when the Revolution began in 1775 was Edmund Burke, a member of parliament who today is remembered chiefly as a theorist who wrote about the French Revolution. Burke favored conciliation with the colonies regarding taxes but did not back independence or a transfer of sovereignty to the Americans.6 Another of the colonial agents at that time was Paul Wentworth, who represented New Hampshire (where he had spent some time, although he had been born in the British Caribbean) but whose loyalties were with Britain. Wentworth began spying for the British secret service as early as 1772, continued his espionage (against the American mission in Paris) during the Revolutionary War, and later was elected to the British parliament.7
At various moments in U.S. history when the nation’s foreign relations were plagued by division, an outstanding leader has stepped up to overcome such breaches. At this time such a leader was Benjamin Franklin. The great polymath from Philadelphia had championed unity among Britain’s American colonies as early as 1754, when the threat to be met was coming from the eponymous enemies in what was known in America as the French and Indian War. Franklin published in his Pennsylvania Gazette what became one of the first American political images to go viral and was later repurposed when the nation faced other enemies: a cartoon depicting a snake separated into segments representing the different colonies, with the caption “Join, or Die.”8 Three years later, Franklin went to England as agent of the Pennsylvania assembly to address issues of taxation. He returned to England in the next decade with a broader mandate and for a longer stay, remaining until the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775. By that time, he had come to represent not only Pennsylvania but also Georgia, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.9 Also by then, Franklin and the one other native-born American still working as a colonial agent, Arthur Lee of Virginia, realized that with the intensification of differences between Britain and the American colonies, and with nearly half the colonies lacking an agent, they would have to start playing a broader role. They began sending copies of their correspondence to each of the colonies.10 Franklin, tacitly assuming authority to speak on behalf of all
the colonies, secretly negotiated with members of the British government to avoid war.11
Back in the colonies, factionalism complicated external relations. When the First Continental Congress convened in 1774, the main division was between patriots and loyalists, which correlated to a large degree with identifications as Whigs and Tories that had been inherited from the English. After the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired the following year at Lexington and Concord, patriots gained control of colonial governments and were able to exclude loyalists from the Second Continental Congress, which convened later in 1775.12 Divisions among the patriots then centered on the question of whether and when to declare independence. A moderate faction favored waiting until the position of France became clearer. A more confident militant faction countered that France was certain to give assistance to the Americans once they declared independence and that the greater hazard was that without such a declaration, Britain would reach accommodation with France and Spain by offering them compensation in North America.13
The Second Continental Congress took a first step toward what it hoped would be orderly congressional direction of foreign policy even before independence, when it established in November 1775 a Committee of Secret Correspondence (to be renamed in 1777 the Committee for Foreign Affairs), with the function of maintaining contact with friends in the outside world and seeking foreign assistance. In March 1776, Congress commissioned its first official overseas representative when it sent Silas Deane, a merchant and congressional delegate from Connecticut, to France on a secret mission to obtain military supplies and seek financial aid.14
The disagreements over the timing of independence were a necessary discussion of strategy and tactics based on a shared interest in doing what was best for all the American colonies. The Deane mission, however, stirred up a more destructive kind of factionalism based on personal rivalries and resentments. A sociogram of the personal ties and antagonisms infecting America’s diplomacy over the next few years would be complicated, but much of the mess centered on rival camps identified with Deane and with Arthur Lee, who was still overseas as the last of the colonial agents and now could be considered the first U.S. diplomat representing the infant American nation. Accusations of
financial impropriety that Lee would later make against Deane would result in the latter’s recall to defend himself against the charges before Congress.
Supporters of Deane were generally more pro-French and had more limited territorial ambitions. The Lee camp was less trusting of France and had a more expansive view of what land should belong to the new United States. Family ties and coalitions among the propertied American elites figured into these differences. The Lees of Virginia and the Adamses of Massachusetts effectively formed an alliance based in part on a shared distrust of France. The Jays, Livingstons, and Morrises were among prominent families that were on the other side of this divide.15
Rivalries at home were reflected in American diplomacy abroad, which at this point meant diplomacy with France. In late 1776, Congress sent Franklin to Paris to be, along with Lee and Deane, part of a joint diplomatic delegation to France. John Adams was added to the mission the following year. The relationships within this delegation could have provided material for a soap opera. In addition to the animosity between Deane and Lee, Franklin—who was popular with the French—was the object of jealousy among the other members of the delegation. Adams thought Franklin was too deferential to France and did not work hard enough. Lee thought Franklin was a thief and used allies back home to try to undermine him in Congress, while Adams was irked by Lee’s cynicism and paranoia. Some of the rivalry between Lee (and his family) and Franklin had roots in trans-Appalachian land speculation schemes to which each had been connected.16
The American cause was rescued from intramural backbiting by Franklin’s ability to nurture support among the French for the American revolution and especially by events on the battlefield. After the British defeat at Saratoga in October 1777, the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, feared that Britain would make a separate peace with the Americans while continuing the war against France. That fear—which Franklin encouraged—led to Vergennes signing two accords with the Americans in February 1778, one a treaty of amity and commerce and the other a military alliance. The treaties involved not only a de facto French recognition of American independence but also a mutual commitment to continue waging the war until Britain recognized that independence as well.
Getting in bed with France, however, meant exposing American factionalism to manipulation by the French. Although lacking party labels, Congress already contained identifiable voting blocs.17 As Congress in 1779 began considering possible peace terms, deep divisions became apparent that were in large part regional. New England delegates, for example, insisted on fishing rights around Newfoundland, while delegates from the south and west were more concerned about the western boundary of the new nation and about navigation on the Mississippi River. The first French minister to America, Conrad-Alexandre Gérard, was able to play off such divisions in pushing for a moderate negotiating position that would minimize complications for France’s own diplomacy.18
The French manipulation also included telling the Americans, in ways that went far beyond normal diplomatic agrément, who should represent them overseas. Vergennes had a particular dislike for Adams, whom he perceived accurately as always having reservations about an alliance with France and suspected, notwithstanding the newly signed treaties, of not giving up the idea of a separate accommodation with Britain.19 Adams returned home from Paris in early 1779, but later that year the Continental Congress appointed him as envoy responsible for negotiating a peace with Britain. Back in France later in the year to perform that mission, he exacerbated French suspicions about his loyalty to the alliance when he suggested that the British be informed of his arrival.20 Adams also was often out of sync with Franklin, who by that time had been named the sole U.S. minister to France. Vergennes exploited that division, telling Adams at one point that he would no longer communicate with him and sending Adams’s correspondence to Franklin with the message, “The King expects that you will lay the whole before Congress.”21
Franklin did so, and the French were able to exploit divisions within the Continental Congress, including between supporters and adversaries of Adams. Vergennes instructed Gérard’s successor to use his influence to get Adams removed from the job of negotiating a peace. That influence was considerable, based on bribery as well as more conventional lobbying techniques. The French envoy was given the privilege of speaking to a congressional committee, to whom he unabashedly said that America should appoint an envoy who would “receive his directions from the Comte de Vergennes.”22
After much debate, Congress mostly folded under the French pressure. Although it did not remove Adams, it reduced his role to being just one of five peace commissioners. Franklin would be one of the others and would be expected— as Vergennes wished—to have the dominant role. Congress also instructed the peace commissioners to act only with France’s “knowledge and concurrence.” Thus went one of the first big lobbying victories by a foreign government in a divided American Congress.
BACKGROUND TO A SUCCESSFUL PEACE
The American peace commission of five was, for reasons of ill health and delayed travel, effectively reduced to three: Adams, Franklin, and John Jay. The challenges the commissioners faced from factionalism back home and the heavy hand of their French hosts, not to mention lingering personal resentments involving the commissioners themselves, were considerable. Jay complained about how closely their mission had been tied to France, telling Congress that this restriction “occasions sensations I never before experienced and induces me to wish that my name had been omitted.”23 And yet, their mission was a brilliant success. Congress swiftly and gratefully ratified the treaty they negotiated. The reasons for that success, and for the larger American success of birthing a new nation out of thirteen diverse colonies, point to more general ways in which the perverse influences of faction on foreign relations have been overcome.
The slowness of travel and communications across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, with several weeks usually separating the sending and receiving of a diplomatic dispatch, was a handicap in much of what American diplomats in that era endeavored to do, but for the peace commissioners it was a blessing. It separated them from the politics in Congress and from what otherwise probably would have been a disjointed attempt to micromanage the negotiations from the other side of the ocean. As for Congress requiring them to operate with French knowledge and concurrence, the commissioners agreed among themselves that they did not need to heed that instruction in detail, and they in effect ignored it. When the French complained, Franklin turned on the charm to mollify them. The
peace negotiation was thus, on the American side, the work of a small group of statesmen who exercised their best judgment about what was obtainable from Britain and what would be in the best interests of the newly created republic.
The revolution itself was a factor encouraging unity over factionalism. It was a shared endeavor filled with sacrifice and risk. For the peace commissioners and other Founding Fathers, that risk was personal. As British subjects they were committing what in Britain’s view was treason. Living together through a difficult, dangerous, and historic experience is a bond that can overcome divisions that at other times and in other circumstances might define political life.
The risk and sacrifice were illustrated by the experience of Henry Laurens, a South Carolinian who had succeeded John Hancock as president of the Second Continental Congress. Laurens was one of the five peace commissioners Congress designated, but when sailing to Europe on a previously assigned mission he was intercepted by a British warship, charged with treason, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. About the time he was released (in exchange for Lord Cornwallis, the loser at Yorktown) and belatedly joined his American colleagues in Paris after the peace negotiations were largely complete, his eldest son was killed in one of the last skirmishes of the Revolutionary War.
The Founding Fathers had to forge a new identity for the infant nation, and that necessity helped to lower the relative priority of other affinities and allegiances. The original colonists had rejected the Old World for various religious and political reasons, and the geographic separation from Europe further encouraged the sense of separateness of, and commonality among, Americans. The ethnic diversity reflecting origins in different parts of the Old World was blurred by the concept of a melting pot, which already was present at the time of the revolution. That concept was articulated, for example, by John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who was born into French nobility and served in French colonial forces before settling in New York as a farmer. He published a tract near the end of the Revolutionary War in which he described Americans as “a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen.”24
The revolutionary leaders sought foreign support as a matter of necessity—hence the alliance with France—but such a tie was an artifact
of who was fighting whom in the European wars of the time; it did not reflect an affinity based on ethnic or other subnational identities. The dominant ethnic ties were with Britain, which was then the enemy. In this respect the American revolution was different from many anti-colonial struggles in a later century, in which ethnic and racial differences marked divisions between rebels and the colonial power and would carry over into domestic strife and even civil war after independence.
Quality of leadership was unquestionably a large part of how Americans of the revolutionary era held things together despite the divisions that could have torn them apart. Americans contemplating their nation’s history should thank their luck in having had at this critical time leaders of the caliber of those who have been anointed with the title of Founding Father, a happy circumstance for which there is no simple explanation.
Underlying all this at the time of the revolution, and continuing for some years afterward, was a strong sense of the hazards of partisanship. This sense was partly a reaction to what was perceived to have been bad in the British political experience. Americans of that day generally believed that parties were evil associations of self-aggrandizing men, and that national policies were best determined not through political competition but rather through unity and consensus.25 Anti-partisanship would manifest itself partly in rhetoric and tactics—in labeling opponents in any dispute as more partisan than one’s own side. Anti-partisanship was seen as good politics, in the sense that blatant partisanship would turn off more voters than it would attract. But in this era there also was a genuine belief among American leaders, as a matter of political philosophy and not just political tactics, that for partisan competition to dominate policymaking was an ill the new republic could not afford.
A MORE PERFECT UNION
The machinery of government in the infant American nation did little to insulate foreign policy from factionalism. The Continental Congress established in 1781 the office of secretary of foreign affairs (a position Jay would occupy for most of the decade), but Congress and its committees remained heavily involved in foreign relations.26 Under the Articles of
Confederation, the individual states could play in foreign relations as well. Article IX gave Congress the right to determine peace and war and enter treaties and alliances, but the states retained considerable powers over trade and tariffs. Article VI said that states could send and receive ambassadors and make war if they got Congress’s permission, and they did not even need permission to make war if there were a threat of “imminent” invasion by “some nation of Indians.”
The writers of the Constitution of 1787 paid significant attention to foreign relations. Specific issues included the relative roles of the president and the Senate, the supermajority required for ratification of treaties, and whether the House of Representatives should be given a role in the approval of treaties and diplomatic appointments. But the thrust of the constitutionwriters’ work was in the direction of placing more power in the hands of those who would represent the whole nation rather than parts of it. In response to a view that the Senate should have the lead in making treaties, Madison observed “that the Senate represented the states alone, and that for this as well as other obvious reasons it was proper that the president should be an agent in treaties.”27 The convention’s finished product, especially in Article I, Section 10, corrected deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation by prohibiting states from entering foreign alliances and restricting what they could do regarding foreign trade and tariffs.
Madison and other champions of a stronger central authority were concerned not only with the allocation of powers between states and the federal government but also with overcoming the influence of other subnational interests. A backdrop to their efforts was the increasing domestic factionalism amid economic stresses of the 1780s, which could even take a violent form as demonstrated by Shays’ Rebellion, an armed anti-tax revolt in western Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787.28 But foreign relations were always at the front of their concerns about national unity or disunity. As Madison put it in Federalist No. 42, “If we are to be one nation in any respect, it clearly ought to be in respect to other nations.”29
Pride of place in the Federalist Papers speaks to this point. After an introductory essay by Alexander Hamilton, the next four papers, all by Jay, were about foreign relations. As those papers’ collective title— “Concerning dangers from foreign force and influence”—suggests, they focused on the malevolent interplay between domestic factions and interference by foreign states. The danger of domestic division leading to
foreign interference would arise partly, noted Jay, because foreign nations, “acting under the impulse of opposite interests and unfriendly passions,” would often favor different sides in the internal American dispute. The impetus for damaging transnational alliances between American factions and foreign powers also would come from the factions. Jay wrote of “confederacies” that might consist of states where certain factional interests were concentrated. “Considering our distance from Europe,” he argued, “it would be more natural for these confederacies to apprehend danger from one another than from distant nations, and therefore that each of them should be more desirous to guard against the others by the aid of foreign alliances, than to guard against foreign dangers by alliances between themselves.”30 Jay was prescient not only about the self-declared confederacy that would wage a civil war several decades later but also about how, in the twenty-first century, some parts of the American nation would see other parts of the same nation as greater threats than foreign powers, and to welcome interference by foreign powers in an effort to quash their domestic opponents.
Affinities between domestic partisans and foreign powers were about to arise much sooner, while Jay’s own generation was still around, although that generation would eventually surmount the dangers involved. Gouverneur Morris, who was one of Pennsylvania’s delegates at the constitutional convention, had the hazards of foreign influence and dual loyalties in mind when he argued that a long residency period should be a requirement for serving in the Senate. Morris said—notwithstanding the diluting effects of the American melting pot—“admit a Frenchman into your Senate, and he will study to increase the commerce of France; an Englishman, he will feel an equal bias in favor of that of England.”31 Events in Europe along with a surge in American partisanship would soon bring worries about undue French or British influence to the fore.
OLD WORLD UPHEAVAL AND NEW WORLD PARTIES
The nature of the first American party system under the Constitution is incomprehensible without focusing on foreign relations and sentiments
— FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, AUTHOR OF LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
PETER BEINART, AUTHOR OF THE CRISIS OF ZIONISM
— ELLEN LAIPSON, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY STUDIES, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
SUZANNE E. SPAULDING, DIRECTOR, DEFENDING DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS PROJECT, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
— JORDAN TAMA, AUTHOR OF TERRORISM AND NATIONAL SECURITY REFORM: HOW COMMISSIONS CAN DRIVE CHANGE DURING CRISES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu