Part II collects writings from Washington’s second presidential term (1793–1797). During this period Washington had to grapple with delicate problems of foreign policy – especially the question how the young and comparatively weak America should stand in relation to the warring great powers, Britain and France. This challenging term presented domestic perplexities as well, most especially the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, which Washington believed to be a serious threat to the new government’s authority. Moreover, throughout Washington’s entire presidency we find many ceremonial communications in which he strove to educate his fellow citizens in the basic principles of republican government and in the habits and virtues necessary for it to survive and thrive.

The radical changes of the early First French Republic inspired British reformers to form their own unprecedentedly inclusive club network, the London Corresponding Society. Openly trying to recruit workingmen, unlike elite preceding Parliamentary Reform networks, the society pushed for universal suffrage and a rapid opening of British politics. The organization’s potential sparked a much more successful counter-mobilization, however, from the Society for the Preservation of Liberty and Property from Republicans and Levellers, which gloried in the unreformed British system and sought to repress reform agitation. After the Declaration of War with France in 1793, most dissent was driven underground.

The hopes of the French Revolution were most keenly felt by their Catholic coreligionists in Ireland. Using revolutionary universalism to surmount long-standing religious differences, the United Irishmen were founded in 1791 to create a new political network for substantive reforms. The network faced suppression after the 1793 Declaration of War, however, and reorganized into militant underground militia cells. Seeking aid from the French government for a militant uprising, the United Irish ultimately rose with disastrous results in 1798.

This chapter opens the first part of the book that presents the background of the First World War. It deals with the emergence of the concept of “enemy alien” in the debate among international lawyers. Starting with the Law of Nations published by Emer de Vattel in 1758, it analyzes and discusses what the foundational texts of international law in the century-and-a-half preceding the First World War said on the rights of foreigners in peacetime and on the conduct toward these same foreigners when they became enemies in wartime. It then compares legal doctrines and practices analyzing the behavior of belligerents towards enemy aliens in a string of interstate wars that occurred between the end of the eighteenth century and 1865, namely the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792–1793, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The chapter follows the changes in the attitude toward enemy aliens that mass conscription and the post-French Revolution concept of citizenship and nationality triggered.