One of the first challenges for the new team was to figure out how to deal with the lawless North African, or “Barbary,” states—Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis—which plundered foreign vessels in the Mediterranean and enslaved their crews. Many European powers had grown resigned to paying “tribute”—a polite word for ransom money—to win the release of their crews. As American crews succumbed to these pirates and were threatened with forced conversion to Islam, Washington was offended by the need to pay bribes, especially after Algiers seized eleven American merchant ships and a hundred prisoners. Reluctantly, he authorized the payment of money to Algiers and even tried to negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce with the city-state, but he thought the time had come to back up American diplomacy with military might. In March 1794 Congress approved a proposal, backed by Washington and Knox, to build six frigates “adequate for the protection of the commerce of the U.S. against Algerian corsairs.”16 This action officially inaugurated the U.S. Navy, although it would take four more years before a separate Navy Department was born. While the six frigates represented a landmark in Washington’s plan to foster a professional military, he never neglected diplomacy and wrested treaties from both Morocco and Algiers.

Another foreign policy crisis arose from the swelling casualties spawned by the French Revolution and the concomitant European turmoil. Supported by his cabinet, Washington made a private overture to the king of Prussia, asking him to release Lafayette as a gesture of friendship toward America. Although Washington failed to win his freedom, the king eased the shockingly bad conditions of Lafayette’s confinement and allowed him books, fresh air, and more appetizing food. The respite, alas, was brief. Lafayette was soon transferred to the Austrian authorities, who shut him up in a filthy, fly-infested cell in Olmütz, where he lay in chains and ragged clothing. After Lafayette’s wife was arrested in France, Gouverneur Morris interceded on her behalf, leading Robespierre to spare her from the guillotine, but her mother, sister, and grandmother wound up as victims of the Terror.

In April 1793 the French government had established the Committee of Public Safety, giving it sweeping powers to arrest people for treason and try them under its jurisdiction; by September a Reign of Terror ensued that would claim as many as forty thousand lives.17 As an eyewitness to the bloodletting, Gouverneur Morris provided Washington with a running commentary on the atrocities. “The Queen was executed the day before yesterday,” he wrote of Marie-Antoinette that October. “Insulted during her trial and reviled in her last moments”—she had been taken through the streets of Paris in an open cart to the guillotine—“she behav’d with dignity throughout.”18 The perceptive Morris saw that the violence was no incidental by-product of the revolution but fundamental to its spirit. As he put it in lapidary prose, “In the groves [of the revolution], at every end of every vista, you see nothing but gallows.”19 An essential difference between the American and French revolutions was that the American version allowed a search for many truths, while French zealots tried to impose a single sacred truth that allowed no deviation.

By July 1794 the revolutionary tribunal in Paris accelerated the tempo of its trials and issued nine hundred death sentences per month.20 Many victims of the Terror had been stalwart friends of the American Revolution. Pulled from his quarters in the middle of the night, Thomas Paine had been tossed into prison and stayed there for months. From Paris, James Monroe, who replaced Gouverneur Morris as American minister, informed Madison that Paine was loudly blaming Washington for his predicament: “He thinks the president winked at his imprisonment and wished he might die in gaol, and bears his resentment for it; also he is preparing an attack upon him of the most virulent kind.”21 Whatever displeasure Washington might have felt toward Paine, there is no evidence that he wanted him either abused or incarcerated.

Many Frenchmen who had admired or even participated in the American Revolution were casualties of its bloody Gallic sequel. After testifying in favor of Marie-Antoinette, the former Count d’Estaing was beheaded. The erstwhile Count de Rochambeau, locked up in the Conciergerie in Paris, was condemned to the guillotine and survived only because Robespierre fell from power as he was about to be decapitated. The massacre of French aristocrats widened the rift between Federalists, who feared that France would export anarchy, and Republicans, who cheered the radical spirit of events in Paris, whatever their unfortunate excesses.

At the same time that France was testing American patience, England, at war with France, was straining Anglo-American relations as never before. Starting in June 1793, the British government directed the Royal Navy to intercept neutral ships bearing foodstuffs destined for French ports and seize their cargo; five months later the policy was briefly expanded into a total blockade of the French West Indies. In short order, British warships stopped and seized 250 American ships, confiscating their wares. At the same time, to boost manpower in the depleted Royal Navy, captains grabbed British deserters aboard American ships—a practice known as “impressment”—accidentally tangling in their nets many innocent Americans. These high-handed maneuvers summoned up old memories of British arrogance and precipitated a political firestorm. Even Federalists waxed indignant that England was pursuing a counterproductive policy that would feed sympathy for France, foster a vengeful mood toward England, and threaten the neutrality proclamation.

Having authorized a new navy, Federalist leaders in Congress worked to marshal support for a 25,000-man army to deal with any foreign threats that materialized. They made plans to fortify harbors and, to combat the old bugaboo of a standing army, mobilize militiamen on short notice. For Republicans, such measures raised the specter of an oppressive military establishment that might be directed against homegrown dissidents. Those who deemed George Washington an uncritical admirer of Great Britain would have been surprised by the venomous letters he wrote that spring. In one, he mocked those “who affect to believe that Great Britain has no hostile intention towards this country” and insisted that its political conduct “has worn a very hostile appearance latterly.”22 He was convinced that Britain was inciting Indian nations against America and angling to alter the U.S.-Canadian border in Britain’s favor.

The impression grew among Federalists that it would be wise to dispatch a special envoy to London to avert war, maintain trade, seek reparations for plundered ships, and settle outstanding disputes, including many lingering from the end of the war, such as Britain’s failure to evacuate forts in the northwest. Among other things, Washington wanted to forestall any trade sanctions against England in the Congress. When Hamilton’s name surfaced as the Federalists’ first choice for the new envoy, Washington seriously considered it until Republicans protested that Hamilton, a patent Anglophile, would lack all credibility at home. Washington was swayed by this objection, especially after Hamilton removed himself from consideration and pushed forward Chief Justice Jay as an ideal substitute. To Republican eyes, the Anglophile Jay was hardly free of sin; indeed, Madison whispered in Washington’s ear that Jay was a secret monarchist. But Washington proceeded with the appointment. The choice of Jay, less controversial than Hamilton, still caused an enormous uproar among government critics, and Madison affirmed that it was “the most powerful blow ever suffered by the popularity of the president.”23 For Washington, negotiation with England seemed the only alternative to outright war, and he stuck courageously by his decision to display Jay.