Top Highlights

• refused to negotiate a new trade treaty. Washington’s Cabinet also refused Genêt’s request for advance payments on U.S. debts to the French government
• However, Jefferson, as leader of the anti-federalist Democratic-Republican Party, sympathized with the French revolutionaries. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, leader of the Federalist Party, favored maintaining existing alliances—and treaties—with Great Britain.
• Convinced that supporting either Great Britain or France in a war would place the still comparatively weak United States in imminent danger of invasion by foreign armies, Washington issued a proclamation of neutrality on April 22, 1793.
• As far as the French government was concerned, America could help them as either an active military ally or as a neutral supplier of arms and materials.
• Obtain advance payments on debts owed to France by the United States; Negotiate a commercial agreement between the United States and France; and Implement provisions of the 1778 Franco-American treaty allowing France to attack British merchant ships using French ships stationed in American ports.

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