In that new and better world that many Revolutionary leaders envisioned, war itself might be abolished. Just as liberal Americans in their Revolutionary state constitutions sought a new kind of domestic politics that would end tyranny, so too did many of them seek a new kind of international politics that would promote peace among nations. This emphasis alone gave the American Revolution worldwide significance.
Throughout the eighteenth century, liberal intellectuals had looked forward to a new enlightened world in which corrupt monarchical diplomacy, secret alliances, dynastic rivalries, and balances of power would be abolished. Since war was promoted by the dynastic ambitions, the bloated bureaucracies, and the standing armies of monarchies, then the elimination of monarchy would mean the elimination of war itself. A world of republican states would encourage a peace-loving diplomacy—one based on the natural concert of international commerce. If the people of the various nations were left alone to exchange goods freely among themselves—without the corrupting interference of selfish monarchical courts, irrational dynastic rivalries, and the secret double-dealing diplomacy of the past—then, it was hoped, international politics would become republicanized and pacified.
Suddenly in 1776, with the United States isolated and outside Europe’s mercantile empires, the Americans had both an opportunity and a need to put into practice these liberal ideas about international relations and the free exchange of goods. Thus commercial interest and Revolutionary idealism blended to form the basis for much American thinking about foreign affairs that lasted well into the twentieth century; to some extent this blending is still present in American thinking about the world.
“Our plan is commerce,” Thomas Paine told Americans in 1776, “and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” America had no need to form traditional military alliances. Trade between peoples alone would be enough. Indeed, for Paine and other liberals peaceful trade among the people of the various nations became the counterpart in the international sphere to the sociability of people in the domestic sphere. Just as enlightened thinkers like Paine and Jefferson foresaw a republican society held together solely by the natural affection of people, so too did they envision a world held together by the natural interests of peoples in commerce. In both the national and international spheres monarchy and its intrusive institutions and monopolistic ways were what prevented a natural harmony of people’s feelings and interests.
In 1776 members of the Continental Congress attempted to embody these liberal principles in a model treaty that would be applied to France and eventually to other nations. This model treaty, drafted mainly by John Adams in July 1776, promised the greatest possible commercial freedom and equality between nations. Were the principles of the model treaty “once really established and honestly observed,” John Adams later recalled, “it would put an end forever to all maritime war, and render all military navies useless.” In duties and trade restrictions foreigners were to be treated as one’s own nationals were treated. Even in wartime trade was to be kept flowing. Neutral nations were to have the right to trade with and carry the goods of the belligerent nations—the right expressed in the phrase “free ships make free goods.” The list of contraband articles—that is, articles subject to seizure by belligerents, including those articles owned by neutral nations—were to be limited and would not include, for example, provisions and naval stores. In addition, blockades of belligerent ports had to be backed up by naval power and not simply declared on paper.
Ultimately the Americans did not get much of what they wanted in the treaties they signed with France in 1778. Although the commercial treaty they made with France did contain the principles of free trade, they also had to agree to a traditional political and military alliance. Despite this concession to realpolitik, however, the Americans’ enlightened dream of a new world order based on commerce was not lost. In 1784 the United States authorized a diplomatic commission composed of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin to negotiate commercial treaties with sixteen European states based on the liberal principles of a revised 1784 model treaty. The hope was to have America lead the way to an “object so valuable to mankind as the total emancipation of commerce and the bringing together all nations for a free intercommunication of happiness.”
The major European nations, however, refused to open themselves freely to American trade; and only two states—Prussia and Sweden, peripheral powers with little overseas trade—agreed to sign liberal treaties with the United States. Yet despite the indifference of most European states, many Americans, and especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, remained confident of the power of commerce to influence international politics. This confidence in the power of American commerce and these liberal principles of free trade continued to influence many Americans’ thinking about the world into the early decades of the nineteenth century. It explains the idealistic efforts of the Jeffersonian Republicans to resort to nonimportation measures and eventually in 1807 to a wholesale embargo of American overseas trade as a grand experiment in what Jefferson called “peaceful coercion.” Indeed, even today the common resort to economic sanctions in place of military force is a legacy of these enlightened principles.