ad no ready instructions on the subject, he led him into a proposal
that Ternant should take the thing up as a volunteer with me, that we
should arrange conditions, and let them go for confirmation or refusal.
Hamilton communicated this to the President, who came into it, and
proposed it to me. I disapproved of it, observing, that such a volunteer
project would be binding on us, and not them; that it would enable them
to find out how far we would go, and avail themselves of it. However,
the President thought it worth trying, and I acquiesced. I prepared a
plan of treaty for exchanging the privileges of native subjects, and
fixing all duties for ever as they now stood. Hamilton did not like this
way of fixing the duties, because, he said, many articles here would
bear to be raised, and therefore, he would prepare a tariff. He did so,
raising duties for the French, from twenty-five to fifty per cent. So
they were to give us the privileges of native subjects, and we, as a
compensation, were to make them pay higher duties. Hamilton, having made
his arrangements with Hammond to pretend that though he had no powers to
conclude a treaty of commerce, yet his general commission authorized him
to enter into the discussion of one, then proposed to the President at
one of our meetings, that the business should be taken up with Hammond
in the same informal way. I now discovered the trap which he had laid,
by first getting the President into the step with Ternant. I opposed
the thing warmly. Hamilton observed, if we did it with Ternant we should
also with Hammond. The President thought this reasonable. I desired him
to recollect, I had been against it with Ternant, and only acquiesced
under his opinion. So the matter went off as to both. His scheme
evidently was, to get us engaged first with Ternant, merely that he
might have a pretext to engage us on the same ground with Hammond,
taking care, at the same time, by an extravagant tariff, to render
it impossible we should come to any conclusion with Ternant: probably
meaning, at the same time, to propose terms so favorable to Great
Britain, as would attach us to that country by treaty. On one of those
occasions he asserted, that our commerce with Great Britain and her
colonies was put on a much more favorable footing than with France and
her colonies. I therefore prepared the tabular comparative view of the
footing-of our commerce with those nations, which see among my papers.
See also m