Imagine a United States caught between the machinations of three hostile foreign powers and their proxies, too militarily weak and politically disunited to fight any one of them directly, much less all three together. Image a two-party system with one side theoretically favoring greater overseas projection of force and free trade, with the other more reticent and isolationist. Then the music changes; now the erstwhile militarists are accusing the putative doves of warmongering and threatening at least passive resistance to national defense policy. Partisan rhetoric habitually conflates political opposition with disloyal sedition. In states where they are unpopular, duly ratified treaties and related acts of Congress inspire open talk of nullification and whispers of secession. A sitting president spends lavishly from public funds to acquire foreign documents from a private broker solely in hopes of catching political rivals in disloyal acts. Congressmen and their press mouthpieces hysterically denounce even a sitting US president as the secret puppet of a hostile foreign state (an “asset,” in contemporary parlance). If this all sounds painfully familiar, Tyson Reeder’s neatly crafted Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America—an account of how Atlantic geopolitics shaped the early American republic’s “first party system”—will feel poignant and timely.

Reeder worked for six years as an editor of the Madison Papers. As the title of his new book suggests, James Madison is the central figure. But the work is nothing like a biography, nor does Reeder fall into the trap of uncritically adoring a great man whose papers he has long inhabited. His narrative is a brisk, lively, and even-paced survey of the major events in American diplomacy and political life from ratification of the Constitution to the War of 1812. The dramatis personae is as broad as any essential political history of the Early Republic. His character sketches are necessarily concise but nonetheless lively. From the well-known (such as the Jeffersonians’ bête noire, Alexander Hamilton) to the more obscure (such as the con artist Paul-Émile Soubrian, who impersonated a French count to broker the sale of worthless British intelligence reports to the United States at public cost for Madison’s political ends), Reeder crafts a narrative vivid in human detail despite its sweeping scope.

One unifying thread in Reeder’s account is Madison’s two-decade quest to leverage American agricultural exports against Britain’s unfavorable trade policy, depredations at sea, and incitement of hostile natives on the western frontier. Reeder’s historiographical contribution on Madison is his even-handed portrayal of the fourth president as simultaneously a great statesman and an unselfconsciously hypocritical partisan. He writes that Madison’s novel theory, first posited in The Federalist #10, that factions could counterbalance one another’s ill effects and permit stable representative government in an extended republic, elevated Publius’s essays “to a timeless piece of political theory.” Modern readers long accustomed to American security easily miss the underlying reason for Publius’s dread of faction: the influence of hostile foreign powers. As Reeder summarizes, Madison and his coauthors repeatedly warned that “weak governments invited ‘internal dissension,’ which inevitably bred ‘fresh calamities from abroad.’” Madison promoted the new constitution as an “ambitious vision” to endow a “politically diverse nation a strong central government that would protect liberty without succumbing to foreign scheming.”

In his subsequent career, however, Madison tended no less than his political rivals to treat opposing factions as seditious vipers in America’s republican paradise. In 1807, for example, he and President Thomas Jefferson prosecuted former vice-president Aaron Burr for treason, accusing him of planning a separatist insurrection in the West with the aid of Spain. They railed at Chief Justice John Marshall’s dismissal of the government’s case on a narrow reading of the Constitution’s treason clause. Jefferson called Burr “the rallying point of all the disaffected and worthless of the US,” (meaning Federalists), and “the pivot on which all the intrigues and conspiracies [of] foreign governments… are to turn.” Madison had written in The Federalist #43 that “artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions … [have] wreaked their alternate malignity on each other.” While he would “have disputed that the administration had conjured ‘artificial’ [charges] against Burr,” Reeder notes, “he could hardly have denied that his party used the trial to heap hatred on Federalists.”

The other contributions of Serpent in Eden stem from its three central and related themes: the distance between Revolution-era theory and subsequent reality on the question of factions; the difficulties of adjusting existing diplomatic norms to the American experiment in popular sovereignty; and American geopolitical weakness.

As noted, American Revolution-era political theory cast factions as existential threats to free republics. Thus, what historians term “the first party system” formed along conceptual and rhetorical lines carried over from the ratification debate. Supporters of Washington’s administration called themselves Federalists, implying that opposition to policy necessarily flowed from underlying hostility to the Constitution. In turn, those opponents called themselves Republicans, casting Hamilton’s faction as a pseudo-aristocratic sect acting against the people’s interest at the behest of financiers and, ultimately, the British. As Reeder repeatedly emphasizes, writers on both sides consistently “assumed that [they] preached truth while [their] opponents played politics.” Just as Publius had warned, this trend wrought lamentable consequences in diplomatic affairs. In 1794, for example, a British warship intercepted dispatches that vaguely and inconclusively suggested collusion between US Secretary of State Edmond Randolph and the French government in opposition to John Jay’s recently negotiated and as-yet-unratified commercial treaty with Britain. The short-lived mission of “Citizen” Charles Genet had shown that “Americans reviled foreign ministers who [visibly] meddled in their internal politics.” Therefore, Britain’s minister George “Hammond devised a slower but more effective strategy: Slip the document to Federalists and let partisans destroy each other.” Reeder documents numerous similar episodes, each underscoring the implicit lesson that national security requires bipartisan consensus and is endangered when domestic political rivals are more vilified than foreign enemies.

Reeder’s second major theme is the complexity of applying the diplomatic norms of imperial monarchies to America’s experiment in popular sovereignty. Americans’ initial difficulty in distinguishing between political opposition to specific measures and seditious enmity toward the wider constitutional order posed special problems for diplomacy. Immediately upon his arrival in the United States, “Citizen” Genet invoked the 1778 Franco-American treaty of alliance as he commissioned US citizens to launch privateering ventures against British shipping from American ports. As he traveled north from Charleston, he spoke to sympathetic crowds of the two sister republics’ transatlantic struggle against monarchy. This was too much for Washington, who interpreted the 1778 treaty more narrowly and stunned Genet with a declaration of US neutrality before requesting his recall to Paris. This would have been uncontroversial in Europe, where “monarchs were the sovereign.” There, “if a minister incited the people … against their monarch, [he] would be subverting the government.” But “Americans acknowledged multiple, overlapping sovereigns including the president, Congress, state legislatures, and, ultimately, the people.” Why, then, Genet reasoned, could foreign ministers not “bypass elected officials and appeal to the people” directly?

The Jacobin firebrand was only the first foreign agent to find trouble in “the grey area where the people’s sovereignty ends and the government’s begins.” Later, the Jefferson administration expelled Spanish minister Carlos Martínez de Yrujo for his pseudonymous essays criticizing the American claim to West Florida. “Public opinion,” Yrujo declared in one essay, “is the true sovereign of a democracy.” His rhetoric and actions, Reeder writes, “caught Madison in a war with his own ideology.” Having fiercely opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Republicans

assumed executive office ready to restore the rights they believed Federalists had tried to deny Americans. Now Yrujo exposed the worrisome possibility that foreign powers could turn those rights … into tools of subversion. He struck a persistent fear: the US government must either suppress freedom or succumb to foreign incursion.

Americans sympathetic to the ordeal of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may wonder if this dilemma has ever been resolved.

The final theme of Reeder’s narrative is the United States’s comparative geopolitical weakness. Throughout the early national era, Britain and Spain armed hostile native tribes against the United States—often within territory they had acknowledged by treaty as belonging to the US. Britain and France forcibly seized American goods at sea and in port, often citing tenuous interpretations of international law. Spain and France traded Louisiana back and forth, several times closing New Orleans to outbound American trade over ineffectual protests from US officials. Royal Navy officers boarded US-flagged merchant vessels (and on one occasion a US Navy frigate) to remove crew members they viewed as British runaways but whom Americans claimed as naturalized citizens. Throughout the early national period, suspicion that the disloyalty of domestic rivals rendered American independence illusory pervaded political discourse. In the spring of 1808, for example, Federalists denounced Jefferson as a tool of France for maintaining an embargo that crippled New England’s commerce to strike at Britain. Jefferson refused Federalist calls to publish US minister to France John Armstrong’s official dispatches. Former Secretary of State Timothy Pickering asked in a public letter, “Are we to be profoundly ignorant of the declarations and avowed designs of the French Emperor, although these may strike at our liberty and independence?” Jefferson, he implied, was Napoleon’s catspaw. Four years later, as a presidential election approached and Shawnee chief Tecumseh’s pan-Indian resistance movement engulfed the western frontier, Madison received innumerable letters from supporters “linking British contrivance, Native American violence, and the infidelity of [Federalists],” a deadly triumvirate of enemies “conspiring to murder their liberty.”

Reeder’s book is an excellent summary of a complex and important period that is too much overlooked by historians of American diplomacy. Experts in the subfield may find his summaries of each successive episode too sparing, but precisely for that reason it offers interested casual readers a satisfactorily thorough introduction to the period. The book’s most obvious flaw is the occasional insertions of unnecessary and distracting detail, seemingly in obeisance to the academy’s regnant ideology. Recounting James Monroe’s introductory conversation with Napoleon, for example, Reeder summarizes the French emperor’s questions about President Jefferson and the US minister’s responses: “How old was he? About sixty. Was he married? Widowed. Did he have children? Yes, three daughters (it was actually three daughters and a son, but Monroe didn’t count—and probably didn’t know about—the boy and girl born to Jefferson and Sally Hemmings).” Inclusion of such extraneous detail smacks of virtue signaling, but these digressions are comparatively few and mercifully concise. It may now be impossible to publish any work with a prestigious academic press without such statements, however irrelevant—indeed, they may be the work of a pious editorial redactor. Thankfully, they detract little from Reeder’s compelling account of early national United States’s geopolitical vulnerability and fractious political discord.

This infant republic, beset with enemies and riven by internal discord would emerge in due course to vital manhood, able to assert and defend its rights. A later generation perceived the hand of “Manifest Destiny.” Political theologians may agree but historians cannot. Neither the American republic’s independence and unity, nor its later creation and preservation of a liberal world order are the irresistible work of divine force. The liberty and greatness of that republic which a later American statesman called “the last, best hope of Earth” are the conscious work of innumerable men and women painstakingly committed to them. The liberal order which that republic has made depends on a bipartisan consensus that the world should be so, and rests ultimately upon popular consent.