Four primary documents on the vote that nearly destroyed the Washington administration. Washington's letter to the Senate at Founders Online. The vote in the Senate Executive Journal. The leak to the Aurora. The reaction across the country.
By 1793 the United States had a list of grievances against Britain that had been accumulating since the end of the Revolutionary War. Britain had not evacuated the Northwest posts as promised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. British warships were seizing American merchant vessels trading with France and impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy. The British were supplying and encouraging Native American resistance to American expansion in the Northwest Territory.
The United States was in no position to fight another war with Britain. The army was small. The navy barely existed. The national debt was still being managed. Washington decided to negotiate. He sent Chief Justice John Jay to London in April 1794 to reach an agreement.
Jay negotiated through the summer of 1794. The treaty he signed in November 1794 secured British evacuation of the Northwest posts by June 1796. It established procedures for arbitrating American damage claims against British seizures of merchant ships. It granted limited American trading rights in the British West Indies. It resolved some pre-war debt disputes.
What Jay did not get: any agreement on impressment, the primary grievance of ordinary Americans. Any recognition that neutral ships had the right to trade freely in wartime. Any compensation for enslaved people the British had removed during the war. Jay himself knew the treaty was limited. He wrote to Washington that it was the best he could obtain. Washington kept the treaty secret from the public and from the House of Representatives while he submitted it to the Senate.
I have no reason to believe that this treaty will be perfectly satisfactory to your Excellency, nor do I know that I could have made a better one.
Washington submitted the treaty to the Senate on June 8, 1795, with a message requesting confidential deliberation. The Senate debated the treaty in secret session. The Annals of Congress provide a Tier 2 reconstruction of the debate from newspaper accounts compiled decades later. On June 24, 1795, the Senate voted to ratify the treaty.
Resolved, as the sense of the Senate, that they do consent to and advise the President of the United States to ratify the Treaty of Amity Commerce and Navigation recently negotiated between the United States and Great Britain... two thirds of the Senators present concurring.
The Senate had voted under a resolution of secrecy. Within days of the vote, a senator provided a copy of the treaty to Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora and a leading Jeffersonian Republican newspaper. Bache published the full text on June 29, 1795.
The public reaction was immediate and fierce. Jay's effigy was burned in cities across the country. In New York, when Alexander Hamilton attempted to speak in defense of the treaty at a public meeting, the crowd pelted him with stones. He was driven from the platform. Jay later said he could have found his way across the country by the light of his burning effigies. Washington signed the treaty on August 14, 1795. The reaction to the Jay Treaty hardened the partisan division between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans that would define American politics for the next decade.