A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Washington was in his first year as president when the French Revolution erupted. By the end of Washington’s first term, Louis XVI had gone to the guillotine. When France declared war on England in early 1793, Washington declared “impartial neutrality,” a wildly unpopular decision. He now came face-to-face with a difficulty that has bedeviled many of his successors: a passionate attachment to foreign causes. The neutrality decree sundered the cabinet. Jefferson’s partisans, denounced as “Gallic jackals,” mocked the Federalists as “British boot-lickers.”9 Alexander Hamilton, who accused Jefferson of a “womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain,” was himself accused of leaking Jefferson’s strategies to the British.10 In part because of Hamilton’s interference in his department, Jefferson resigned as secretary of state and was replaced by Edmund Randolph, who was dismissed when the British leaked letters to support a charge he had solicited bribes from the French for acts of treason during the Whiskey Rebellion.