Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution, and: Napoleon's Troublesome Americans: Franco-American Relations, 1804-1815 (review)

Abstract

Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution. By Melanie Randolph Miller. (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005. Pp. 284. Cloth, $30.00.)Napoleon's Troublesome Americans: Franco-American Relations, 1804-1815. By Peter P. Hill. (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005. Pp. 289. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by Philipp ZiescheAs the most recent French-American quarrel subsides, the books under review offer wealth of material for revisiting the beginnings of the two nations' long-contentious relationship. Peter P. Hill's analysis of high-level diplomacy in the little-studied period between the Louisiana Purchase and the end of the Napoleonic Wars displays his profound knowledge of both American and French archival sources. Hill's former student Melanie Randolph Miller has mined Gouverneur Morris's remarkable diary and correspondence more thoroughly than anyone before to reconstruct his time in Paris from the first stirrings of the Revolution in 1789 to the height of the Terror in 1794. (She is now the editor of the new Gouverneur Morris Papers project.) Both books are deeply researched, persuasively argued, and clearly written; yet both miss the opportunity to place their respective subjects in the larger contexts of either the longer history of French-American relations or the age of transatlantic revolutions.Like her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2000, Miller's book straightforwardly declares her intention to rescue Morris from historical oblivion and reestablish his reputation as a great American statesman (xiv). Envoy to the Terror is particularly strong on Morris's tenure as American minister to from 1792 to 1794, when he patiently but determinedly struggled at great personal risk with French authorities for the release of imprisoned Americans and the restitution of seized property. Miller conclusively demonstrates that far from destroying the French-American alliance, as Alexander DeConde argued half century ago, Morris in fact prevented hostilities between the United States and France (240) by keeping open lines of communication during time when all other foreign representatives fled Paris.1However, Miller's book appears in historiographical context far different from the one in which she started her project. Over the past six years, no fewer than three adulatory biographies of Morris have appeared, including those by Richard Brookhiser, William Howard Adams (who acknowledged his extensive reliance on Miller's work), and James J. Kirschke, as well as biography for children.2 Miller provides richer account of Morris's efforts to influence the early French Revolution, his failed diplomatic mission to Britain, and his desperate attempts to preserve the constitutional monarchy in and help the royal family escape from Paris, than any of the other works. Yet the fact remains that Morris's reputation is no longer in dire need of rescuing, making Miller's tireless defense of him against both long-standing conventional wisdom (xiii) and detractors among Morris's contemporaries seem unnecessarily partisan. While Miller paints vivid portrait of Morris, those she calls his opponents or antagonists-from bigwigs Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine, to minor figures like William Short, William Stephens Smith, and Stephen Sayre-serve largely as foils for Morris's superior character, skills as diplomat, and prescience as observer of the French Revolution.This is particularly regrettable in the case of Paine, who like Morris has been the subject of several recent biographies. For all their ideological differences and personal animosity, the two men shared cosmopolitan mindset that increasingly placed both of them on the margins of both American and French nationalist politics. Their nonconformity to the conventional U.S.-centric narrative of the early republic explains their long scholarly neglect as well as the recent surge in interest. …