MS (DLC: Washington Papers); in TJ’s hand, being copied from Hamilton’s Dft, and signed by Hamilton, Knox, and TJ; with marginal note by TJ (see note 2 below); endorsed by Tobias Lear. PrC (DLC); lacks signatures of Hamilton and Knox. Dft (DLC: Hamilton Papers); variant text in Hamilton’s hand with addition by Knox and note by TJ (see notes 2 and 8 below), signed by TJ only; includes additional paragraphs (see note 10 below). Tr (DLC); variant text in the hand of Bartholomew Dandridge, Jr.; conjoined to Tr of Dissenting Opinion on the Little Sarah, 8 July 1793. Entry in SJPL: “Ons of heads of deptmts. on Little Sarah.” Included in the “Anas.” Enclosed in Hamilton to TJ, 10 July 1793, and TJ to George Washington, [11 July 1793].

The case of the Little Sarah, a British merchant ship captured by the French frigate Embuscade and taken as a prize to Philadelphia, brought to a head the growing tensions between Edmond Charles Genet and the Washington administration and led the President and the Cabinet to seek his recall by the French government. At stake in this dispute was Genet’s open defiance of the federal government’s clearly enunciated ban on the arming of belligerent privateers in American ports. Convinced from the first that France’s treaty of commerce with the United States gave it the right to fit out privateers in American ports, in this case Genet also defied the ban because he planned to dispatch the Little Sarah (renamed the Petite Démocrate) and the Embuscade to New Orleans in order to provide naval support for an expeditionary force that he hoped to raise in Kentucky and Louisiana as part of a Girondin plan to liberate Louisiana from Spanish rule (TJ to Jean Baptiste Ternant, 15 May 1793; TJ to Genet, 5 June 1793; Genet to TJ, 22 June 1793; note to TJ to Isaac Shelby, 28 June 1793; Turner, CFM description begins Frederick Jackson Turner, “Correspondence of French Ministers, 1791–1797,” American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1903, II description ends , 223).

The Little Sarah affair first came to the Washington administration’s attention on 22 June 1793, when Governor Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania transmitted to the President a report by Master Warden Nathaniel Falconer suggesting that the Little Sarah was being fitted out as a French privateer in the nation’s capital. Washington submitted this report to the Cabinet on the same day, in consequence of which Secretary of War Henry Knox requested Mifflin to inform the President promptly of changes made to the ship since its arrival. Two days later Mifflin sent Washington another report by Falconer mentioning a number of minor alterations made to the Little Sarah thus far and indicating that the ship’s armament had actually been reduced since its arrival because of the transfer of two of its four iron cannon to the Citoyen Genet. These documents did not reach Washington before he left Philadelphia on 24 June 1793 for a visit to Mount Vernon, and the Cabinet neither forwarded them to him nor returned a reply to Mifflin. Uncertain now whether the case of the Little Sarah was covered by Knox’s 24 May 1793 circular to the state governors ordering them to prevent belligerent privateers from fitting out in American ports, Mifflin took no further action (Falconer to Mifflin, 22, 24 June 1793, PHarH: Executive Correspondence; Mifflin to Washington, 22 June, 8 July 1793, same; Pa. Archs. description begins Samuel Hazard and others, eds., Pennsylvania Archives. Selected and Arranged from Original Documents in the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Philadelphia and Harrisburg, 1852–1935, 119 vols. description ends , 9th ser., i, 598, 599; Washington, Journal description begins Dorothy Twohig, ed., The Journal of the Proceedings of the President, 1793–1797, Charlottesville, 1981 description ends , 187).

This period of American inaction came to an end on 5 July when Alexander Hamilton met with TJ and Knox and notified them that preparations for fitting out the Little Sarah as a privateer were already well advanced. In response to a new request by Knox for further information that grew out of this meeting, Mifflin submitted to the Secretary of War on the following day a report by Falconer on the arming of the Little Sarah and asked for an opinion from the federal government on “the propriety of detaining her” (for the report, see enclosure to Mifflin to TJ, 7 July 1793). Before the Cabinet could respond, however, the crisis worsened on the evening of 6 July when Alexander J. Dallas, the strongly Republican secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, received word that the Little Sarah would sail from port the next morning. Informed of this news by Dallas, Mifflin resolved to call out a detachment of militia to prevent the ship from leaving Philadelphia. In an effort to avert hostilities, Mifflin agreed to a suggestion by Dallas that the secretary first meet with Genet in order to persuade him to keep the Little Sarah in port until the President had an opportunity to decide whether arming the vessel violated American neutrality. But Dallas’s dramatic meeting with Genet about an hour before midnight on the 6th only aggravated the situation. In addition to defending his right to fit out the Little Sarah as a privateer and criticizing the federal government for being hostile to the French Republic, Genet refused to delay the ship’s sailing until Washington returned to Philadelphia, promised to repel force with force if Mifflin employed the militia, and threatened to appeal from the President to the American people in order to vindicate his actions. In the face of Genet’s defiance, Mifflin called into service a unit of militia without specifying their mission and sought guidance from TJ and Knox on what the federal government wanted him to do about the Little Sarah. At this point TJ prevented a possibly violent confrontation by meeting with Genet on 7 July and extracting from him a highly equivocal statement about the readiness of the Little Sarah that the Secretary of State chose to regard as an assurance that the ship would not sail until after the President had returned to Philadelphia and examined the case. As a result, Mifflin the same day disbanded the militiamen who had gathered in response to his call (Notes of Cabinet Meeting and Conversations with Edmond Charles Genet, 5 July 1793; Memorandum of a Conversation with Edmond Charles Genet, 10 July 1793; Mifflin to Washington, 8 July 1793, PHarH: Executive Correspondence; Pa. Archs. description begins Samuel Hazard and others, eds., Pennsylvania Archives. Selected and Arranged from Original Documents in the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Philadelphia and Harrisburg, 1852–1935, 119 vols. description ends , 9th ser., i, 614; Dallas to the Public, 7 Dec. 1793, General Advertiser, 10 Dec. 1793).

It was against this background that the three Cabinet members then in Philadelphia met this day and expressed the discordant views on the Little Sarah case recorded in the document printed above. But, even as Mifflin began preparations immediately after this meeting to carry out the deterrent strategy advocated by Hamilton and Knox, Genet himself rendered moot the divergence of opinion in the Cabinet by having the Little Sarah moved to Chester, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia and below the proposed fortifications on Mud Island. The ship was still there on 11 July when Washington arrived in Philadelphia and ordered the Cabinet to confer with him the next day about Genet’s latest challenge to American neutrality (Genet to TJ, 9 July 1793; Washington to TJ, 11 July 1793; Pa. Archs. description begins Samuel Hazard and others, eds., Pennsylvania Archives. Selected and Arranged from Original Documents in the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Philadelphia and Harrisburg, 1852–1935, 119 vols. description ends , 9th ser., i, 617–22; Washington, Journal description begins Dorothy Twohig, ed., The Journal of the Proceedings of the President, 1793–1797, Charlottesville, 1981 description ends , 191).

The summoning of the Cabinet to reconsider the Little Sarah affair gave TJ a final opportunity to mitigate the severity of Genet’s defiance. In advance of the Cabinet meeting of 12 July 1793, TJ obtained an assurance from Genet that the Little Sarah would not go to sea until the President had reached a decision on the case (TJ to Washington, [11 July 1793]). At the meeting itself the Cabinet decided to request Genet to keep the Little Sarah and some other French prizes from sailing until the executive had obtained counsel from the justices of the Supreme Court on a number of questions relating to American neutrality. Among other things, these questions involved the permissibility of arming French privateers with French cannon and manning them with French nationals, two of the circumstances Genet had adduced to justify his actions with respect to the Little Sarah. At the same time Hamilton and Knox also urged that the United States ask France to recall Genet, but as TJ disagreed and Washington expressed no view the Cabinet came to no decison on this matter (Cabinet Opinion on Consulting the Supreme Court, 12 July 1793; TJ to Edmond Charles Genet and George Hammond, 12 July 1793; Notes on Neutrality Questions, 13 July 1793).

Genet himself dashed whatever hope TJ may have had of lessening the French minister’s offense in the eyes of the President and the Cabinet. About two days after TJ communicated to him the substance of the Cabinet’s deliberations, Genet dispatched the Little Sarah to prey on enemy shipping in the Atlantic in violation of his pledge to TJ that the ship would remain in place until the President had decided the case. Genet thus abandoned his original plan to send the Little Sarah to New Orleans because he now hoped to enlist the more formidable support of a French fleet recently arrived off the American coast from Saint-Domingue for his projected invasion of Louisiana (Turner, CFM description begins Frederick Jackson Turner, “Correspondence of French Ministers, 1791–1797,” American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1903, II description ends , 223; Woodfin, “Citizen Genet,” 614–15). But in taking this action Genet tipped the balance of opinion among the President and his closest advisors in favor of seeking the increasingly obstreperous French minister’s recall (see Editorial Note on the recall of Edmond Charles Genet, at 16 Aug. 1793).