"Many Who Wandered in Darkness": The Contest over American National Identity, 1795-1798

Abstract

"Many Who Wandered in Darkness":The Contest over American National Identity, 1795–1798 Matthew Rainbow Hale On May 1, 1798, a correspondent from Albany wrote to the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States regarding the impact of the XYZ Affair.1 "The circumstance," noted the author, "has thrown light in the paths of many who wandered in darkness with respect to the views of the French towards America—has united numbers of the wavering, to the standard of Government—and has wrought a favorable change in some who were in opposition to the measures of administration."2 Written less than a month after President John Adams first disclosed the content of American diplomatic negotiations with France, the Albany correspondent's remarks testified to the shift in American public opinion sparked by the release of the XYZ documents. Astonished by the insolent behavior of French diplomats—including repeated personal insults, threats to the United States, and demands for bribes and forced loans—Americans from every state rallied together to express their patriotic indignation. Setting aside their bitter partisan differences, at least temporarily, diverse groups of citizens pledged to support Adams's administration in its resistance to French belligerence. The Gazette writer's characterization of the spring of 1798 as a turning point in American history was thus largely accurate. From that date forward, Franco-American relations would never be the same because the "light" of the XYZ Affair was so bright and the "change" resulting from it so dramatic.3 [End Page 127] The Albany correspondent also underscored, albeit implicitly, the struggle to define American nationality and its place in a world of international revolutionary turmoil. For although they were couched within a narrowly anti French rebuke of misguided Francophiles, the Gazette writer's references to "some who were in opposition," "numbers who were wavering," and "many who wandered in darkness" pointed toward the difficulty all Americans experienced in their attempts to come to grips with the consequences of Jay's Treaty (1795). To begin with, the persistence of the pro- and anti-French controversy up till the XYZ Affair made clear that Jay's Treaty helped perpetuate the intense popular contest over American nationality that had erupted in early 1793. The Anglo-American pact of 1795 alleviated a severe crisis and prompted an official shift in American international relations, but it failed to undermine the essential characteristics of the previously dominant understandings of Americanness. At the same time, Jay's Treaty complicated the rigid pro- and anti-French polarity by prompting ambiguous and paradoxically similar alterations on each side of the political cultural divide. Those modifications served on one hand to reinforce the bitter conflict at the heart of efforts to delineate American nationality, while on the other seemed to presage the eventual displacement of that conflict. Indeed, perhaps the most significant legacy of the diplomatic accord of 1795 was that it contributed to the emergence of a distinctive Americanness separate from both the pro- and anti-French versions of the same. Jay's Treaty by no means established a firm foundation which a triumphant American national identity could instantaneously burst forth. Yet in helping to break down the previously dominant pro-and anti-French polarity, it marked the accelerated pace with which a distinctive Americanness took shape in the mid-1790s. Emphasis on the impact of Jay's Treaty brings into relief the unavoidable centrality of transatlantic currents in the career of early American nationality. Recent studies of the early republic have restored the contested and rather amorphous nature of popular political culture, but more work remains to be done on the external, rather than internal, sources of Americans' struggle to define their nationality.4 In particular, the impact of the French Revolutionary [End Page 128] Wars on American nationality has never been fully explored. While historians sometimes give the impression that American rhetoric regarding foreign events was simply symbolic of more important, domestic developments, the pervasiveness and intensity of the debates surrounding international affairs suggests that real, geopolitical forces decisively shaped the United States. In that sense, the French Revolutionary Wars not only gave Americans something to talk about in their quest for a national identity, they also...