Negotiated and signed in 1794, Jay's Treaty attempted to resolve several diplomatic and commercial issues between the United States and Great Britain. As Britain and France warred with each other beginning in 1793, the United States found itself being drawn into the fray although it tried to remain neutral, maintaining trade with both belligerents. Britain secretly disrupted and seized over three hundred U.S. ships and a furious America demanded a diplomatic mission to that nation. In April 1794 Chief Justice John Jay was appointed envoy with instructions to seek indemnification for British seizures of American ships, fulfillment of all the unfulfilled elements—especially the evacuation of western posts—of the 1783 Peace of Paris treaty, and a more liberal interpretation of neutral rights. Some southerners wanted Jay to request compensation for slaves that had been carried off by the British during the Revolutionary War. Jay and the administration of President George Washington believed they were negotiating from a position of weakness and so could not press too hard on any of these points. Negotiations continued sporadically throughout the spring and summer of 1794 until a treaty was signed on 19 November 1794. The treaty's twenty-eight articles addressed most of the issues the mission was designed to accomplish. The second article secured British troop withdrawal from the western posts on or before 1 June 1796 as had been promised in the 1783 treaty. The treaty also established four commissions to investigate and resolve disputed issues, such as the debts owed to British merchants by American citizens and compensation for losses for U.S. ships seized by the British. Most problematic was article 12, which granted the United States access to the West Indian trade but only in vessels of seventy tons or less, an almost insulting condition that would severely restrict and limit trade. Jay believed that he had obtained the best terms possible at the time and subsequent historians, while noting the weaknesses, have largely agreed. The United States was unable to force compliance from the British and unwilling to risk a serious rupture between the two nations. The treaty failed to gain recognition of America's neutral rights in shipping or compensation for slaves carried off during the Revolution, and it did not address the matter of impressment or compensation for slaves. Still, comparing Jay's instructions to the final product, he did reasonably well. The treaty was sent to the Senate, which debated it in secret, rejected the controversial twelfth article, and on 24 June 1795 ratified the document by a 20 to 10 vote, exactly meeting the required two-thirds majority. Before the administration could publish the treaty, Republican anti-treaty newspapers had printed an extract of the leaked document and then the full text. Publication provoked furious, sometimes violent, protests by opponents who charged that the treaty was a sellout to Britain, willingly placed the United States in a subservient position to that nation, and further solidified American ties to a country many believed to be corrupt and dangerous. Despite the public protests, President Washington signed the treaty in late August 1795 and many of the protests died down. They were revived in the spring of 1796 when the House of Representatives took up the matter of funding the commissions created by the treaty. After several weeks of intense debate and against a backdrop of petitions cascading into the House—most of them now favoring approval of the treaty—the House acted in a series of close votes on 30 April 1796 to fund the treaty. As its negotiators had hoped, the treaty strengthened commercial relations between the United States and Britain and preserved peace between the two nations even as it intensified partisan politics in the former. However, it infuriated the French, who felt betrayed by the U.S. decision to side with Britain against its Revolutionary War ally. Consequently, it was the French who stepped up attacks on U.S. ships and violations of American neutrality in the late 1790s, heightening tensions between the erstwhile allies and culminating in the Quasi-War with France in 1798. See alsoTreaty of Paris .
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Jay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy. 2nd ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962. Combs, Jerald A. The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Horsman, Reginald. The Diplomacy of the New Republic, 1776–1815. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1985. Todd A. Estes
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