Tools of Foreign Influence: Albert Gallatin, Geneva, and Federalist Nativism before the Alien and Sedition Acts

The intersection of Albert Gallatin’s career and Geneva’s careening revolutionary course shows the significance of Gallatin’s origins as he rose as a Democratic-Republican leader and it expands our understanding of the sources of Federalist nativism in the intersection of concerns about immigrants and foreign plots. Federalists had attacked Gallatin’s citizenship in expelling him from the senate in 1794, and his Genevanness became more important to Federalists that year in the face of the Western Insurrection and a Jacobin-inspired revolutionary tribunal in Geneva. Knowledge of Geneva—shaped by the English immigrant editor William Cobbett and the Geneva exiles in London François d’Ivernois and David Chauvet—deepened Federalists’ suspicion of Gallatin’s conduct in anti-excise meetings that mirrored the subversion of Geneva’s government by Jacobin clubs; in ostensibly Genevan subservience to France in pushing the House to scuttle the Jay Treaty; in opposing expenditures to defend the country from France, just as Genevans of dubious allegiances had invited the Directory’s agents in advance of French annexation. Geneva’s experiences dramatized Federalist fears of France; Gallatin the Genevan embodied Federalist fears of foreign influence in the United States. Those dual nativist concerns contributed motivations for, and enhanced the defense of, the Alien and Sedition Acts.