Neutrality Laws.
333
NEUTRALITY LAWS. AS INTERPRETED BY JOHN MARSHALL, ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO. By Sallie E. Marshall Hardy.
IT will be remembered that when war broke out between France and England, during Washington's administration, the American people, having in mind the great services of the French to this country in our hour of need, so warmly sympathized with France that the President had great difficulty in preserving neutrality. Relying upon this wide-spread feeling the French minister to this country at that time, M. Genet, fitted out privateers openly in our ports to prey upon British commerce, and defied our government in every way until Washington demanded his recall. When John Adams became President affairs be tween France and this country, chiefly be cause of our desire to maintain a neutral position, had assumed such a serious aspect that three envoys extraordinary were sent by the American government to Paris to endeavor to settle our difficulties. The three envoys chosen were the eminent states man and soldier, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Elbridge Gerry, who was afterwards governor of Massachusetts and vice-president of the United States, and John Mar shall, then a lawyer of renown, and later the great chief justice. All of the papers were drafted by General Marshall. He kept a diary while in France, which contains copies of the papers trans mitted by the envoys to our State depart ment and their letters to Talleyrand, the French minister of foreign affairs. It is from this diary that I copy the following : — "The United States has a full conviction that her engagements by no means bind her to take part in the war, but leave her so far the mistress of her own conduct as to
be at perfect liberty to observe a system of real neutrality. Being bound by no duty to enter into the war, the government of the United States conceived itself bound by duties the most sacred to abstain from it. Contemplating man, even in a different so ciety, as the natural friend of man, a state of peace, though unstipulated by treaty, was considered as imposing obligations not to be wantonly violated. These obligations, created by the laws of nature, were in some instances strengthened by solemn existing engagements, of which good faith required a religious observance. "To a sense of moral right, other con siderations of the greatest magnitude were added, which forbid the government of the United States to plunge them unnecessarily into the miseries of the bloody conflict then commencing. The great nations of Europe either impelled by ambition, or by existing or supposed political interests peculiar to themselves, have consumed more than a third of the present century in war. What ever causes may have produced so afflicting an evil they can not be supposed to have been entirely extinguished, and humanity can scarcely indulge the hope that the temper or the condition of man is so altered as to exempt the next century from the ills of the past. Strong fortifications, powerful navies, immense armies, the accumulated wealth of ages and a full population make the nations of Europe able to support those wars in which they are induced to engage by motives exclusively their own. In all re spects different is the situation of the United States. Possessed of an extensive, unsettled territory, on which bountiful nature has
