The Constitutional Argument Hidden Inside Washington's Neutrality Proclamation: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Crisis of 1793

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About the Author:

Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV is a lawyer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Groningen. He is the author of Gods, Judges, and Presidents: Trifunctional Archetypes in American Law and Government (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) and The Dialectical Path of Law (2021). His research examines constitutional structure, comparative public law, taxation, and the intellectual history of legal institutions.

You can find the author's book, Gods, Judges, and Presidents, at the publisher page.

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A Proclamation That Did More Than Keep the Peace

On April 22, 1793, George Washington issued a document that looked, at first glance, like a straightforward act of foreign policy. France was at war with Britain and several other European powers. The United States, only a decade removed from the conflict that had secured its independence, was in no position to volunteer for another European war. Washington announced that the country would pursue conduct “friendly and impartial” toward the belligerents and warned Americans not to take actions that would compromise that position.^[1]

The policy was understandable. The constitutional authority behind it was less obvious.

The United States had signed treaties with France in 1778, when French support was vital to the American Revolution. The alliance contained mutual guarantees, including provisions tied to a future rupture between France and Britain. By 1793, however, the French monarchy with which those agreements had been made was gone. Revolutionary France had declared war on Britain, and Americans now had to decide both what their old commitments required and who, under the new Constitution, had authority to decide it.^[2]

Washington's Cabinet did not treat the matter casually. On April 18, the President put a remarkable list of questions before his advisers. Should a proclamation issue? Should it actually use the word “neutrality”? Should the new French minister be received? Were the earlier treaties still binding? Could they be suspended because France's government had changed? Would recognising them be inconsistent with neutrality? The questions moved back and forth between diplomacy, treaty law, constitutional power, and political prudence.^[3]

The Cabinet agreed on the need for a public statement, but even the vocabulary was contested. Jefferson objected to an explicit declaration of “neutrality,” and the proclamation that Edmund Randolph drafted avoided the word while announcing a policy that was neutral in substance. That small drafting choice captures the delicacy of the moment. A word could imply a conclusion about treaty obligations before the government had finished deciding what those obligations were. The administration was not merely choosing a policy. It was trying to avoid letting its description of the policy settle constitutional and diplomatic questions by accident.^[4]

This was what constitutional government looked like before its categories had hardened into civic shorthand. “Legislative,” “executive,” and “judicial” were written into the constitutional structure, but the words did not arrive with instructions for every future crisis. Someone still had to decide what kind of act a neutrality proclamation was.

That problem would soon produce one of the sharpest constitutional exchanges of the early republic.

Pacificus and the Case for Executive Power

Alexander Hamilton entered the controversy under the pseudonym Pacificus. His first essay appeared on June 29, 1793. Hamilton's argument began from the wording of Article II. The Constitution vested “the executive Power” in the President, while assigning particular foreign-affairs powers elsewhere or sharing them with the Senate. For Hamilton, those express exceptions mattered. Congress alone could declare war, and the Senate participated in treaty making, but the remaining field of executive authority did not disappear merely because the Constitution had identified limits.^[5]

His reasoning was practical as well as textual. A nation exists in a state of peace until the constitutionally competent authority changes that status. Congress could make the decisive choice for war. Until then, Hamilton argued, the President had both the capacity and the duty to preserve the existing peace, execute treaties, apply the law of nations, and speak for the United States in its intercourse with foreign governments.^[6]

Pacificus also depended on a particular way of reading exceptions. Hamilton reasoned that because the Constitution specifically gave Congress the power to declare war and required Senate participation in treaties, those provisions qualified a broader executive grant rather than defining the entire field of presidential foreign-affairs authority. The architecture of the document therefore mattered as much as any isolated clause. A narrow reading of the exceptions produced a wider presidency; a broad reading of the exceptions produced a narrower one.^[7]

This was not quite the simple theory of an unchecked foreign-affairs presidency that later readers sometimes project backward onto Hamilton. He expressly accepted that the legislature alone could place the nation in a state of war. The interesting move came one step earlier. Hamilton treated the general grant of executive power as meaningful in itself. If a function belonged to executive government by its nature and the Constitution had not taken it away, the President could claim it.

That way of reasoning made classification enormously important. If treaty interpretation, diplomatic recognition, and the maintenance of peace were naturally executive activities, Article II did considerable work. If they were not, the same text looked much narrower.

Hamilton had defended presidential energy before. In Federalist No. 70, he argued that unity gave the executive qualities such as decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch. Those were not decorative virtues. They explained why a single magistrate was better suited than a large assembly to tasks that required coherent and timely action.^[8] The Neutrality Proclamation presented exactly the kind of situation in which speed, responsibility, and a single national voice seemed valuable.

But Hamilton's argument also created an obvious difficulty. The more constitutional meaning one derives from the “nature” of executive power, the more important it becomes to explain where that nature comes from.

Madison Asks What Kind of Power War Really Is

James Madison answered as Helvidius beginning in August. He did not merely argue that Hamilton had drawn the line in the wrong place. He challenged Hamilton's method of drawing it.

Madison's first move was to ask what an executive actually does. In its most basic form, he argued, executive power carries existing law into effect. A declaration of war is different. It creates a new legal condition. Peace ends, wartime rules become relevant, and the relationships between the United States and another country change in a way that cannot be described simply as executing a law already on the books.^[9]

For Madison, that made the war decision fundamentally deliberative. The power to begin war might involve military consequences, but those consequences did not make the initial decision executive. Indeed, the fact that the President would direct the armed forces after war began was a reason not to let the same official decide unilaterally whether war should begin.

This was a subtle argument because Madison did not deny that foreign affairs required an executive role. Presidents could communicate with other governments, conduct negotiations, receive ministers, and carry decisions into effect. His concern was the constitutional leap from “the President is the proper actor in diplomacy” to “foreign-affairs powers are presumptively presidential unless specifically excepted.”

Madison thought that leap smuggled an older constitutional world into the American one.

British constitutional practice had associated war and diplomacy with royal prerogative. Writers who described those activities as executive often had monarchy before their eyes. Madison warned that Americans could inherit the classification without noticing the political assumptions packed inside it. A function was not naturally executive simply because kings had performed it.^[10]

The point was almost archaeological. Constitutional words carry sediment from earlier systems. “Executive” can sound neutral while quietly preserving an answer developed for a hereditary monarch. If a republic is serious about dividing power differently, it sometimes has to reopen the category itself.

Hamilton Against Hamilton

Madison then made the controversy stranger.

In his Helvidius essay, he quoted an earlier defence of the Constitution that had argued the treaty power did not fit neatly within either the legislative or executive category. Treaties had the force of law, the earlier essay explained, but they were agreements between sovereigns rather than ordinary statutes. The President was well suited to negotiation, while the Senate's participation supplied an additional safeguard.

The source Madison was invoking was Federalist No. 75, written by Hamilton.^[11]

Five years earlier, Hamilton had warned against treating treaty making as naturally executive merely because political writers often put it there. In 1793, Hamilton's Pacificus argument relied more heavily on the general character of executive power in foreign affairs. Madison did not need to accuse him of simple contradiction. The juxtaposition was more interesting than that. It showed how quickly constitutional categories could change meaning when an actual crisis replaced a ratification debate.

During ratification, Hamilton's task had been to reassure readers that the President did not inherit the foreign-affairs prerogatives of a king. In 1793, his task was to defend a President who had to act while Europe was at war and Congress had not supplied a detailed statutory code for the situation. Different institutional problems pulled on different parts of the same constitutional vocabulary.

That is one reason the Pacificus-Helvidius exchange remains so useful. It catches constitutional meaning in motion.

The Constitution's text had not changed between 1788 and 1793. The external world had. So had the incentives of the interpreters. A theory of divided government that looked clear in the abstract had to survive contact with treaties, diplomats, privateers, commercial pressure, public opinion, and the possibility of war.

The Foreign Minister Who Made the Question Impossible to Ignore

The dispute did not unfold in a seminar room. Edmond Charles Genêt, the new French minister, arrived in the United States in April 1793 with instructions that placed immediate pressure on American neutrality. He encouraged privateering against British commerce and sought to use American ports in ways the Washington administration regarded as incompatible with a neutral posture. His activities turned questions about treaty obligations and presidential authority into problems of daily administration.^[12]

The Genêt affair made these abstractions tangible. French privateers were being fitted out or commissioned from American ports, British complaints were accumulating, and American citizens were drawn into hostilities that the federal government was trying to avoid. The prosecution of Gideon Henfield, an American who served aboard a French privateer, ended in acquittal and underscored how incomplete the statutory framework still was. The executive could announce a policy and invoke the law of nations, but enforcing neutrality against individuals raised another question: where was the enacted law that made the conduct criminal?^[13]

This practical setting matters. It is tempting to read early constitutional disputes as though the participants first formed theories and then applied them. Often the order ran the other way. Events forced officials to act, and action exposed assumptions that had not yet been fully articulated.

Washington's Cabinet had to decide whether French actions in American ports were lawful. Federal officials had to decide whether prosecutions were possible. Diplomats had to answer protests. Congress would eventually pass the Neutrality Act of 1794, giving statutory form to parts of the policy that the executive had initially developed under pressure.^[14]

The sequence is revealing. Executive action came first, constitutional argument followed, and legislation later supplied a more explicit rule. That does not prove that Hamilton was right or Madison was right. It shows why a constitutional order cannot be understood from judicial cases alone.

In the early republic, constitutional meaning was being built by presidents, cabinet officers, legislators, diplomats, newspaper writers, and voters as well as judges. David Currie later made this point powerfully in his study of the first Congresses and executive branch: much of the Constitution's early practical meaning was worked out outside the Supreme Court.^[15] The neutrality crisis is a vivid example because the institutional roles themselves were among the things being worked out.

The Older History Inside a New Republic

Madison's criticism of inherited categories points toward a much longer history of divided political authority.

The American separation of powers did not descend from one ancient model. Nor is every three-part political scheme a rough draft of the Constitution. Plato's divisions in the Republic, Polybius's mixed Roman constitution, Montesquieu's analysis of political liberty, and later comparative theories such as Georges Dumézil's account of differentiated social functions arose from very different intellectual and institutional settings.^[16]

Their value is not that they reveal a hidden chain leading to Philadelphia. It is that they show how often political thinkers have had to distinguish among forms of rule.

Polybius, for example, divided Roman political authority among consuls, Senate, and people, but his system was a mixed constitution rather than a modern separation of legislative, executive, and judicial functions. Plato's ordered city and soul were hierarchical moral arguments, not blueprints for coordinate branches. Montesquieu is much closer to the American constitutional tradition, but even his account emerged from a particular reading of English government and a larger theory of liberty.^[17]

The mistake is to treat resemblance as ancestry. The more useful comparison asks a functional question. Why do political communities repeatedly become dissatisfied with the idea that all public power is one undifferentiated thing?

That question is central to my book, Gods, Judges, and Presidents. The book uses older philosophical, historical, psychological, and comparative frameworks to examine the modern American division of authority without claiming that those frameworks secretly caused it. The neutrality controversy offers a concrete example of why this kind of comparison can matter. Hamilton and Madison could not resolve their dispute merely by pointing to the word “executive.” They had to say what executive action was for, what habits belonged to it, and what dangers followed when one category swallowed another.^[18]

The long history becomes useful at exactly that point. It reminds us that institutional names are conclusions as much as they are descriptions.

What 1793 Can Teach an Applied Historian

The easiest modern lesson from the neutrality debate would be partisan. One could enlist Hamilton whenever a strong presidency is desired and Madison whenever legislative control is preferred. That would waste the history.

The better lesson is methodological.

First, constitutional disputes often turn on classification before they turn on doctrine. A contested action may be described as execution, lawmaking, adjudication, diplomacy, emergency response, or something else. The label can determine which institution appears to have the stronger claim. Before accepting the label, it is worth asking what assumptions produced it.

Second, institutional virtues are not universal virtues. Speed is often desirable in execution. It can be dangerous in lawmaking. Deliberation is often desirable in legislation. It can become paralysis in an emergency response. Independence is crucial to judging, but an executive completely insulated from political accountability would present its own problem. The constitutional design distributes not only powers but different tolerances for delay, secrecy, publicity, responsibility, and disagreement.

Third, overlap does not eliminate distinction. Hamilton and Madison both lived inside a Constitution in which the President could veto legislation, the Senate could participate in treaties and appointments, and Congress could structure the federal judiciary. Neither took those connections to mean that the categories were meaningless. The question was how much mixture a republican system could tolerate without allowing one kind of authority to absorb another.^[19]

Finally, practice matters. Washington's administration had to make decisions before constitutional theory was settled. The resulting practices did not automatically become correct merely because they happened first, but they became part of the material later Americans had to interpret. Institutions acquire expectations through repeated action.

There is another caution here for applied history. The past is most useful when it complicates the analogy we hoped to make. The neutrality controversy does not hand us a rule that says “favour the President” or “favour Congress.” It shows that both expansive and restrictive theories can grow from recognisable constitutional principles, and that institutional setting changes which principle looks most urgent. A serious historical analogy should therefore identify not only what resembles the present but what does not: the statutory background, the available institutions, the nature of the emergency, and the political incentives of the actors.

This is perhaps the most durable point from 1793. Separation of powers is not maintained once, at a constitutional convention. It is maintained repeatedly when officials decide whether a new problem belongs to their office, whether they should defer, whether they should resist, and what kind of reasons they owe for doing either.

Washington wanted peace. Hamilton wanted enough executive authority to preserve it. Madison wanted to prevent a theory of executive power from quietly recreating prerogatives the Constitution had divided. All three concerns could be sincere at the same time.

The argument survived because there was no final answer hidden in the word “executive.”

More than two centuries later, the neutrality crisis still offers a useful way to think about constitutional structure. The question is not simply whether power has crossed a line on an organisational chart. It is whether the line marks a real difference in how public authority should be exercised.

That is why the quarrel between Pacificus and Helvidius belongs to more than the history of foreign relations. It is a record of a republic learning, under pressure, what its own branches were supposed to be.

Endnotes

1. George Washington, “Neutrality Proclamation, 22 April 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-12-02-0371.

2. Treaty of Alliance Between the United States and France, 6 February 1778, arts. 11–12, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fr1788-2.asp.

3. “Questions on Neutrality and the Alliance with France, 18 April 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-25-02-0529.

4. “Cabinet Opinion on Washington’s Questions on Neutrality and the Alliance with France, 6 May 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-25-02-0530; see also Washington, “Neutrality Proclamation, 22 April 1793.”

5. Alexander Hamilton, “Pacificus No. I, 29 June 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-15-02-0038.

6. Hamilton, “Pacificus No. I.”

7. Hamilton, “Pacificus No. I.”

8. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 70, in The Federalist Papers, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp.

9. James Madison, “Helvidius No. 1, 24 August 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-15-02-0056.

10. Madison, “Helvidius No. 1.”

11. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 75, in The Federalist Papers, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed75.asp.

12. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “The Citizen Genêt Affair, 1793–1794,” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/citizen-genet.

13. “Memorial from Edmond Charles Genet, 27 May 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-26-02-0119; see also “Thomas Jefferson’s Notes for George Washington’s Annual Message, 22 November 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-14-02-0264-0008.

14. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “The Citizen Genêt Affair, 1793–1794.” Congress enacted federal neutrality legislation on June 4, 1794.

15. David P. Currie, The Constitution in Congress: The Federalist Period, 1789–1801 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

16. Plato, Republic, bk. IV, esp. 441e–442b; Polybius, Histories, bk. VI, esp. 6.11–18; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, bk. XI, ch. 6; Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Zone Books, 1988); C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

17. Plato, Republic, bk. IV; Polybius, Histories, bk. VI, available through Perseus Digital Library, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plb.+6&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0234; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, bk. XI, ch. 6.

18. Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV, Gods, Judges, and Presidents: Trifunctional Archetypes in American Law and Government (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/gods-judges-and-presidents-9781666957761/.

19. James Madison, Federalist No. 47, and Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, Federalist No. 51, in The Federalist Papers, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed47.asp and https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp.