JAY'S TREATY

JAY'S TREATY (1794). Both the United States and Great Britain failed to live up to the terms of the 1783 peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. American violations reflected the weakness of its central government; state governments passed laws blocking the repayment of prewar debts to British creditors and Americans continued to discriminate against American loyalists. British violations resulted from a more deliberate policy—failing to evacuate Northwest forts and posts, especially to please its Indian allies and to assuage its fur traders.

Mounting American dissatisfaction came up against the Federalist-Republican split in government. To such Federalists as Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, friendship with Britain was too important to risk over these issues; Hamilton needed trade with Britain, America's key trading partner, to finance his plans. To Republicans, such as Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who were committed to France, the only recourse was a firm insistence on Britain's honoring of its treaty obligations.

Britain had issues as well. By this point a war had begun between France and Britain, and it would not end for nearly two decades. As the world's premier naval power, Britain rejected America's view that it should, as a neutral state, be able to trade freely with all interested parties. Britain seized hundreds of American neutral ships, and Sir Guy Carleton, Baron Dorchester, the governor-general of Canada, made a bellicose speech to western Indians implying that they would soon be able to recover their lands in the Great Lakes region from the United States.

In this environment, President George Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay, a staunch Federalist and a strong Anglophile, to London as minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinaire on a special mission. As the historian Samuel Flagg Bemis has noted, Jay could have made more of the American cause. He acquiesced in British maritime measures for the duration of the war with France in return for the creation of a mixed commission to adjudicate American spoliation claims for damages made "under color" of British Orders in Council. On 19 November 1794, Jay and the British foreign minister Lord Grenville signed a Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation. Britain agreed to evacuate frontier posts by 1 June 1796 (which it mostly did); the United States guaranteed payment of British private prewar debts. Another term of the treaty stated that mixed boundary commissions were to establish the boundaries in the northwest and northeast. The boundary commission for the northwest never met, and the commission for the northeast set the boundary at the Saint Croix River. Jay did not obtain any satisfaction on issues of impressment, neutral (shipping) rights, ending so-called paper or unenforced blockades, and no indemnification for slaves that departing British soldiers took from the United States in 1783.

Washington got the treaty through the Senate and the House only with great difficulty and at some cost. The temporary acquiescence in British maritime measures was the price the Federalists paid for redemption of American territorial integrity in the Northwest, and peace with Britain. Britain wanted a treaty to keep its best foreign customer and to keep the United States neutral during the continuing conflict with France. There certainly were protests in the United States, and Jay was burned in effigy while Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was stoned while publicly defending the treaty. France regarded the treaty as a violation of its commercial treaty with the United States and, as Alexander DeConde has written, engaged in a kind of undeclared naval war with America between 1798 and 1800.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Jay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962.

Combs, Jerald A. The Jay Treaty: Political Background of the Founding Fathers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

DeConde, Alexander. Entangling Alliance: Politics and Diplomacy under George Washington. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Reuter, Frank T. Trials and Triumphs: George Washington's Foreien Policy. Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University Press, 1983.

Charles M.Dobbs

Jay's Treaty (1795).After the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the British refused to turn over the Great Lakes forts on the American side of the new border with Canada. This was only fair, they argued, because the Americans were refusing to honor their promises to compensate the Loyalists for their wartime losses and to enforce payment of prewar debts American citizens owed to British subjects. The British also refused to reopen their West Indian colonies to American ships and to compensate Americans for escaped slaves they had carried off at the end of the war.

The resulting tensions escalated dramatically when, after revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain in 1793, the British began to seize neutral American ships carrying goods to France. As Britain and the United States approached the brink of war in 1794, the embryonic Jeffersonian Republican party in Congress wanted to force the British to settle on American terms by cutting off Anglo‐American trade. Instead, President George Washington commissioned the Federalist John Jay to negotiate a settlement.

The terms of the resulting treaty became known in March 1795. In return for giving up America's right to retaliate commercially against Britain for ten years, the British relinquished the Great Lakes posts and agreed to turn over to neutral arbitration the issues of Loyalist compensation, prewar debts, Canadian border disputes, and the most egregious of British ship seizures. The British also agreed to open the West Indies to certain American ships, but the concession was so meager and contingent that the Senate rejected this part of the treaty. To the dismay of both northern shippers and southern slaveholders, Jay secured neither a guarantee of American neutral rights nor compensation for escaped slaves.

The Senate ratified the treaty in June 1795, and the House of Representatives voted the funds to implement it in 1796. But the acrimonious congressional and public debates over whether peace with the powerful British was worth the cost of the treaty helped to convert the Federalists and Republicans from limited congressional factions into full‐scale party organizations among the public at large. The treaty also alienated France and helped bring on the 1798 Quasi‐War with that country.
See also Early Republic, Era of the; Federalist Party; Jefferson, Thomas; Political Parties; Quasi‐War with France.

Bibliography

Samuel Flagg Bemis , Jay's Treaty, rev. ed., 1962.
Jerald A. Combs , The Jay Treaty, 1970.
Daniel G. Lang , Foreign Policy in the Early Republic, 1985.

Jerald A. Combs

Jay's Treaty a treaty between the United States and Great Britain to regulate commerce and navigation. It corrected problems arising from violations of the Treaty of Paris of 1793.