Meanwhile Genet was left in a position in which he had a perfect right to claim all privileges conferred on France by the treaty.  The result was a curious chapter of diplomatic correspondence.  Genet took an attitude of indignant remonstrance at the duplicity of the American position.  Did not the United States have a treaty with France?  By what authority then did the Administration interfere with him in the enjoyment of his rights as the representative of France, and interfere with American citizens in their dealings with him?  He shrewdly refrained from any attempt to defend the capture of the Grange by L’Ambuscade in Delaware Bay.  “The learned conclusions of the Attorney-General of the United States, and the declarations of the American Government, have been on this subject the rule of my conduct.  I have caused the prize to be given up.”  But he stood firm on rights secured by the treaty.  “As long as the States, assembled in Congress, shall not have determined that this solemn engagement should not be performed, no one has the right to shackle our operations, and to annul their effect, by hindering those of our marines who may be in the American ports, to take advantage of the commissions which the French Government has charged me to give to them, authorizing them to defend themselves, and fulfill, if they find an opportunity, all the duties of citizens against the enemies of the State.”

This was using an argument borrowed from Jefferson’s abundant stock of constitutional limitations.  Genet was, of course, advised of the dissensions in the Cabinet.  He was on such confidential terms with Jefferson that he talked freely about the projected raid on Louisiana.  Jefferson noted in his diary that “he communicated these things to me, not as Secretary of State, but as Mr. Jefferson.”  Jefferson told Genet that he “did not care what insurrections should be excited in Louisiana,” but that “enticing officers and soldiers from Kentucky to go against Spain was really putting a halter about their necks, for that they would assuredly be hung if they commenced hostilities against a nation at peace with the United States.”  So great is the force of legal pedantry that Jefferson was unable to agree that the President should proclaim neutrality in clear and positive terms; but that same pedantry was effectively employed in covering the legal flaws of Jefferson’s position in his notes to Genet.  He attenuated the treaty obligations by strict construction and also by reservations founded on the general principles of international law.  “By our treaties with several of the belligerent Powers,” he told Genet, “we have established a style of peace with them.  But without appealing to treaties, we are at peace with them all by the law of nature:  for, by nature’s law, man is at peace with man.”  Hence the propriety of forbidding acts within American jurisdiction that would cause disturbance of this peace, a point on which he quoted copiously from Vattel.  Genet manifested