In 1794, a single diplomatic document pushed the young United States into chaos. Political cartoons showed George Washington at the guillotine, protesters picketed Mount Vernon, and congressman Frederick Muhlenberg was stabbed by his own brother-in-law days after casting a deciding vote. This episode explores the Jay Treaty and the intense human drama behind early American foreign policy.

With Britain seizing nearly 300 American merchant ships, occupying forts in the Great Lakes and arming Native confederacies, Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to London with almost no leverage. Jay secured British withdrawal from the forts, compensation for seized shipping and joint commissions that historians call the birth of modern international arbitration, but he won nothing on impressment. The result bought America a decade of peace and left a surprising legacy in modern Indigenous border rights.

• Why the 1783 Treaty of Paris left Britain and America in a tense standoff over forts, debts and seized ships
• How the Jay Treaty split Washington and Hamilton from Jefferson and Madison and ignited the first party system
• Washington’s refusal to hand over diplomatic papers and the precedent of executive privilege
• Fisher Ames’s 90-minute speech and the 49 to 49 tie broken by Frederick Muhlenberg
• How Article 3 still allows Canadian-born Native Americans to live and work in the U.S. without a visa