A History of the American People

dispatch, deliberately fed to Washington by his Secretary of State's enemies, appeared to reveal
him soliciting French bribes in return for bending American policy in the direction of Paris.
Washington fell into the trap, treated Randolph with great deviousness and duplicity-he could be
very two-faced when he chose-and suddenly pounced and accused him of treason: By the eternal God ... the damndest liar on the face of the earth!' Randolph had no alternative but to go, instantly, though it shortly became clear-and historians have since confirmed-that he was guiltless of anything except a little boasting to the French that he was the man in the administration who called the tunes. Washington realized too late he had made a mistake and inflicted an injustice on an old colleague, and the whole episode sickened him of politics. As his second term drew to an end, there was no doubting the finality of his determination to retire for good. Although Washington's administration demonstrated, especially towards its close, that the rise of party was irresistible, that bipartisan politics, however desirable, simply did not work and that, in the utopian republic, it wouldnever be glad confident morning again,' it was on the whole a
remarkable success. Not only did it restore the nation's credit, repay its debts, construct a
workable financial system, and install a central bank, it also steered the country through a
number of tricky problems. In 1789 the nation for the first time was alerted to possible
responsibilities in the Pacific northwest when an Anglo-Spanish dispute over fur-trading rights
on Vancouver Island ended in the Nootka Sound Convention (1790). Washington, while keeping
the country neutral, laid down the policies which were to become America's norm in this part of
the world and eventually to lead to a peaceful partition of the northwest, between the United
States and British Canada, which eliminated Spain (and Russia) completely.
Washington also pursued a cautiously neutral policy during the first phase of the great war
which pitted the crowns of Europe against Revolutionary France from 1793. He took the
opportunity to send Chief Justice Jay to London to tie up the loose ends left by the Treaty of
Paris a decade before. Jay's Treaty (1794) was treated by Washington's critics-including
Jefferson-as an absurd victory for British diplomacy. It was nothing of the sort. It provided for
British evacuation of the northwest posts, which had allowed Canadian traders to control the fur-
routes and prevented full settlement of the Ohio Valley; it opened a limited West Indies trade for
American vessels; it gave America a `most favored nation' status in British trade; and, in general,
it gave a boost both to America's own exports and commercial trading and to British exports into
the United States, thus swelling Hamilton's revenues from import duties. It was one of those
commercial treaties which enormously benefited both signatories while hurting neither, and the
opposition outcry in Congress-mainly inspired by pro-French sentiment-makes little sense to the
historian today. On the basis of Jay's Treaty, Washington sent his minister in England, Thomas
Pinckney (1750-1828), to Madrid to negotiate a comparable arrangement with Spain. Pinckney's
treaty secured major concessions-Spain's acknowledgment of America's boundary claims east of
the Mississippi and in East and West Florida and, equally important, America's right of access to
and transit through New Orleans, the strategic port at the mouth of the Mississippi. By these two
treaties, in fact, all the last remaining obstacles to full-scale American westward expansion into
the Ohio and Mississippi valleys were removed.
At the same time, the last years of the 1780s and the Washington administration saw an
enormous increase in the maritime commerce of the United States. American ships penetrated
the West Indies on a large scale, first trading with the Dutch and French Islands, then after Jay-
Pinckney with the Spanish and above all the British colonies. In 1785 the Empress of China, the
first American trader to penetrate the Far East, returned from Canton to New York, followed two