be a revenue district with Fort Stoddert as the port of entry. But the mischief had been done and no constructive interpretation of the act by the President could efface the impression first made upon the mind of Yrujo. Congress had meant to appropriate West Florida and the President had suffered the bill to become law.
* The italics are President Jefferson’s.
Nor was Pinckney’s conduct at Madrid likely to make Monroe’s mission easier. Two years before, in 1802, he had negotiated a convention by which Spain agreed to pay indemnity for depredations committed by her cruisers in the late war between France and the United States. This convention had been ratified somewhat tardily by the Senate and now waited on the pleasure of the Spanish Government. Pinckney was instructed to press for the ratification by Spain, which was taken for granted; but he was explicitly warned to leave the matter of the Florida claims to Monroe. When he presented the demands of his Government to Cevallos, the Foreign Minister, he was met in turn with a demand for explanations. What, pray, did his Government mean by this act? To Pinckney’s astonishment, he was confronted with a copy of the Mobile Act, which Yrujo had forwarded. The South Carolinian replied, in a tone that was not calculated to soothe ruffled feelings, that he had already been advised that West Florida was included in the Louisiana purchase and had so reported to Cevallos. He urged that the two subjects be kept separate and begged His Excellency to have confidence in the honor and justice of the United States. Delays followed until Cevallos finally, declared sharply that the treaty would be ratified only on several conditions, one of which was that the Mobile Act should be revoked. Pinckney then threw discretion to the winds and announced that he would ask for his passports; but his bluster did not change Spanish policy, and he dared not carry out his threat.
It was under these circumstances that Monroe arrived in Madrid on his difficult mission. He was charged with the delicate task of persuading a Government whose pride had been touched to the quick to ratify the claims convention, to agree to a commission to adjudicate other claims which it had refused to recognize, to yield West Florida as a part of the Louisiana purchase, and to accept two million dollars for the rest of Florida east of the Perdido River. In preparing these extraordinary instructions, the Secretary of State labored under the hallucination that Spain, on the verge of war with England, would pay handsomely for the friendship of the United States, quite forgetting that the real master of Spain was at Paris.
The story of Monroe’s five weary months in Spain may be briefly told. He was in the unstrategic position of one who asks for everything and can concede nothing. Only one consideration could probably have forced the Spanish Government to yield, and that was fear. Spain had now declared war upon England and might reasonably be supposed to prefer a solid accommodation with the United States, as Madison intimated, rather than add to the number of her foes. But Cevallos exhibited no signs of fear; on the contrary he professed an amiable willingness to discuss every point at great length. Every effort on the part of the American to reach a conclusion was adroitly eluded. It was a game in which the Spaniard had no equal. At last, when indubitable assurances came to Monroe from Paris that Napoleon would not suffer Spain to make the slightest concession either in the matter of spoliation claims or any other claims, and that, in the event of a break between the United States and Spain, he would surely take the part of Spain, Monroe abandoned the game and asked for his passports. Late in May he returned to Paris, where he joined with General Armstrong, who had succeeded Livingston, in urging upon the Administration the advisability of seizing Texas, leaving West Florida alone for the present.
Months of vacillation followed the failure of Monroe’s mission. The President could not shake off his obsession, and yet he lacked the resolution to employ force to take either Texas, which he did not want but was entitled to, or West Florida which he ardently desired but whose title was in dispute. It was not until November of the following year (1805) that the Administration determined on a definite policy. In a meeting of the Cabinet “I proposed,” Jefferson recorded in a memorandum, “we should address ourselves to France, informing her it was a last effort at amicable settlement with Spain and offer to her, or through her,” a sum not to exceed five million dollars for the Floridas. The chief obstacle in the way of this programme was the uncertain mood of Congress, for a vote of credit was necessary and Congress might not take kindly to Napoleon as intermediary. Jefferson then set to work to draft a message which would “alarm the fears of Spain by a vigorous language, in order to induce her to join us in appealing to the interference of the Emperor.”
The message sent to Congress alluded briefly to the negotiations with Spain and pointed out the unsatisfactory relations which still obtained. Spain had shown herself unwilling to adjust claims or the boundaries of Louisiana; her depredations on American commerce had been renewed; arbitrary duties and vexatious searches continued to obstruct American shipping on the Mobile; inroads had been made on American territory; Spanish officers and soldiers had seized the property of American citizens. It was hoped that Spain would view these injuries in their proper light; if not, then the United States “must join in the unprofitable contest of trying which party can do the other the most harm. Some of these injuries may perhaps admit a peaceable remedy. Where that is competent, it is always the most desirable. But some of them are of a nature to be met by force only, and all of them may lead to it.”
Coming from the pen of a President who had declared that peace was his passion, these belligerent words caused some bewilderment but, on the whole, very considerable satisfaction in Republican circles, where the possibility of rupture had been freely discussed. The people of the Southwest took the President at his word and looked forward with enthusiasm to a war which would surely overthrow Spanish rule in the Floridas and yield the coveted lands along the Gulf of Mexico. The country awaited with eagerness those further details which the President had promised to set forth in another message. These were felt to be historic moments full of dramatic possibilities.
Three days later, behind closed doors, Congress listened to the special message which was to put the nation to the supreme test. Alas for those who had expected a trumpet call to battle. Never was a state paper better calculated to wither martial spirit. In dull fashion it recounted the events of Monroe’s unlucky mission and announced the advance of Spanish forces in the Southwest, which, however, the President had not repelled, conceiving that “Congress alone is constitutionally invested with the power of changing our condition from peace to war.” He had “barely instructed” our forces “to patrol the borders actually delivered to us.” It soon dawned upon the dullest intelligence that the President had not the slightest intention to recommend a declaration of war. On the contrary, he was at pains to point out the path to peace. There was reason to believe that France was now disposed to lend her aid in effecting a settlement with Spain, and “not a moment should be lost in availing ourselves of it.” “Formal war is not necessary, it is not probable it will follow; but the protection of our citizens, the spirit and honor of our country, require that force should be interposed to a certain degree. It will probably contribute to advance the object of peace.”
After the warlike tone of the first message, this sounded like a retreat. It outraged the feelings of the war party. It was, to their minds, an anticlimax, a pusillanimous surrender. None was angrier than John Randolph of Virginia, hitherto the leader of the forces of the Administration in the House. He did not hesitate to express his disgust with “this double set of opinions and principles”; and his anger mounted when he learned that as Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means he was expected to propose and carry through an appropriation of two million dollars for the purchase of Florida. Further interviews with the President and the Secretary of State did not mollify him, for, according to his version of these conversations, he was informed that France would not permit Spain to adjust her differences with the United States, which had, therefore, the alternative of paying France handsomely or of facing a war with both France and Spain. Then Randolph broke loose from all restraint and swore by all his gods that he would not assume responsibility for “delivering the public purse to the first cut-throat that demanded it.”
Randolph’s opposition to the Florida programme was more than an unpleasant episode in Jefferson’s administration; it proved to be the beginning of a revolt which was fatal to the President’s diplomacy, for Randolph passed rapidly from passive to active opposition and fought the two-million dollar bill to the bitter end. When the House finally outvoted him and his faction, soon to be known as the “Quids,” and the Senate had concurred, precious weeks had been lost. Yet Madison must bear some share of blame for the delay since, for some reason, never adequately explained, he did not send instructions to Armstrong until four weeks after the action of Congress. It was then too late to bait the master of Europe. Just what had happened Armstrong could not ascertain; but when Napoleon set out in October, 1806, on that fateful campaign which crushed Prussia at Jena and Auerstadt, the chance of acquiring Florida had passed.
CHAPTER VI. AN AMERICAN CATILINE
With the transfer of Louisiana, the United States entered upon its first experience in governing an alien civilized people. At first view there is something incongruous in the attempt of the young Republic, founded upon the consent of the governed, to rule over a people whose land had been annexed without their consent and whose preferences in the matter of government had never been consulted. The incongruity appears the more striking when it is recalled that the author of the Declaration of Independence was now charged with the duty of appointing all officers, civil and military, in the new territory. King George III had never ruled more autocratically over any of his North American colonies than President Jefferson over Louisiana through Governor William Claiborne and General James Wilkinson.
The leaders among the Creoles and better class of Americans counted on a speedy escape from this autocratic government, which was confessedly temporary. The terms of the treaty, indeed, encouraged the hope that Louisiana would be admitted at once as a State. The inhabitants of the ceded territory were to be “incorporated into the Union.” But Congress gave a different interpretation to these words and dashed all hopes by the act of 1804, which, while it conceded a legislative council, made its members and all officers appointive, and divided the province. A delegation of Creoles went to Washington to protest against this inconsiderate treatment. They bore a petition which contained many stiletto-like thrusts at the President. What about those elemental rights of representation and election which had figured in the glorious contest for freedom? “Do political axioms on the Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the Mississippi?” To such arguments Congress could not remain wholly indifferent. The outcome was a third act (March 2, 1805) which established the usual form of territorial government, an elective legislature, a delegate in Congress, and a Governor appointed by the President. To a people who had counted on statehood these concessions were small pinchbeck. Their irritation was not allayed, and it continued to focus upon Governor Claiborne, the distrusted agent of a government which they neither liked nor respected.
Strange currents and counter-currents ran through the life of this distant province. Casa Calvo and Morales, the former Spanish officials, continued to reside in the city, like spiders at the center of a web of Spanish intrigue; and the threads of their web extended to West Florida, where Governor Folch watched every movement of Americans up and down the Mississippi, and to Texas, where Salcedo, Captain-General of the Internal Provinces of Mexico, waited for overt aggressions from land-hungry American frontiersmen. All these Spanish agents knew that Monroe had left Madrid empty-handed yet still asserting claims that were ill-disguised threats; but none of them knew whether the impending blow would fall upon West Florida or Texas. Then, too, right under their eyes was the Mexican Association, formed for the avowed purpose of collecting information about Mexico which would be useful if the United States should become involved in war with Spain. In the city, also, were adventurous individuals ready for any daring move upon Mexico, where, according to credible reports, a revolution was imminent. The conquest of Mexico was the day-dream of many an adventurer. In his memoir advising Bonaparte to take and hold Louisiana as an impenetrable barrier to Mexico, Pontalba had said with strong conviction: “It is the surest means of destroying forever the bold schemes with which several individuals in the United States never cease filling the newspapers, by designating Louisiana as the highroad to the conquest of Mexico.”
Into this web of intrigue walked the late Vice-President of the United States, leisurely journeying through the Southwest in the summer of 1805.
Aaron Burr is one of the enigmas of American politics. Something of the mystery and romance that shroud the evil-doings of certain Italian despots of the age of the Renaissance envelops him. Despite the researches of historians, the tangled web of Burr’s conspiracy has never been unraveled. It remains the most fascinating though, perhaps, the least important episode in Jefferson’s administration. Yet Burr himself repays study, for his activities touch many sides of contemporary society and illuminate many dark corners in American politics.
According to the principles of eugenics, Burr was well-born, and by all the laws of this pseudo-science should have left an honorable name behind him. His father was a Presbyterian clergyman, sound in the faith, who presided over the infancy of the College of New Jersey; his maternal grandfather was that massive divine, Jonathan Edwards. After graduating at Princeton, Burr began to study law but threw aside his law books on hearing the news of Lexington. He served with distinction under Arnold before Quebec, under Washington in the battle of Long Island, and later at Monmouth, and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1779. Before the close of the Revolution he had begun the practice of law in New York, and had married the widow of a British army officer; entering politics, he became in turn a member of the State Assembly, Attorney-General, and United States Senator. But a mere enumeration of such details does not tell the story of Burr’s life and character. Interwoven with the strands of his public career is a bewildering succession of intrigues and adventures in which women have a conspicuous part, for Burr was a fascinating man and disarmed distrust by avoiding any false assumption of virtue. His marriage, however, proved happy. He adored his wife and fairly worshiped his strikingly beautiful daughter Theodosia.
Burr throve in the atmosphere of intrigue. New York politics afforded his proper milieu. How he ingratiated himself with politicians of high and low degree; how he unlocked the doors to political preferment; how he became one of the first bosses of the city of New York; how he combined public service with private interest; how he organized the voters–no documents disclose. Only now and then the enveloping fog lifts, as, for example, during the memorable election of 1800, when the ignorant voters of the seventh ward, duly drilled and marshaled, carried the city for the Republicans, and not even Colonel Hamilton, riding on his white horse from precinct to precinct, could stay the rout. That election carried New York for Jefferson and made Burr the logical candidate of the party for Vice-President.
These political strokes betoken a brilliant if not always a steady and reliable mind. Burr, it must be said, was not trusted even by his political associates. It is significant that Washington, a keen judge of men, refused to appoint Burr as Minister to France to succeed Morris because he was not convinced of his integrity. And Jefferson shared these misgivings, though the exigencies of politics made him dissemble his feelings. It is significant, also, that Burr was always surrounded by men of more than doubtful intentions–place-hunters and self-seeking politicians, who had the gambler’s instinct.
As Vice-President, Burr could not hope to exert much influence upon the Administration, since the office in itself conferred little power and did not even, according to custom, make him a member of the Cabinet; but as Republican boss of New York who had done more than any one man to secure the election of the ticket in 1800, he might reasonably expect Jefferson and his Virginia associates to treat him with consideration in the distribution of patronage. To his intense chagrin, he was ignored; not only ignored but discredited, for Jefferson deliberately allied himself with the Clintons and the Livingstons, the rival factions in New York which were bent upon driving Burr from the party. This treatment filled Burr’s heart with malice; but he nursed his wounds in secret and bided his time.
Realizing that he was politically bankrupt, Burr made a hazard of new fortunes in 1804 by offering himself as candidate for Governor of New York, an office then held by George Clinton. Early in the year he had a remarkable interview with Jefferson in which he observed that it was for the interest of the party for him to retire, but that his retirement under existing circumstances would be thought discreditable. He asked “some mark of favor from me,” Jefferson wrote in his journal, “which would declare to the world that he retired with my confidence”–an executive appointment, in short. This was tantamount to an offer of peace or war. Jefferson declined to gratify him, and Burr then began an intrigue with the Federalist leaders of New England.
The rise of a Republican party of challenging strength in New England cast Federalist leaders into the deepest gloom. Already troubled by the annexation of Louisiana, which seemed to them to imperil the ascendancy of New England in the Union, they now saw their own ascendancy in New England imperiled. Under the depression of impending disaster, men like Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts and Roger Griswold of Connecticut broached to their New England friends the possibility of a withdrawal from the Union and the formation of a Northern Confederacy. As the confederacy shaped itself in Pickering’s imagination, it would of necessity include New York; and the chaotic conditions in New York politics at this time invited intrigue. When, therefore, a group of Burr’s friends in the Legislature named him as their candidate for Governor, Pickering and Griswold seized the moment to approach him with their treasonable plans. They gave him to understand that as Governor of New York he would naturally hold a strategic position and could, if he would, take the lead in the secession of the Northern States. Federalist support could be given to him in the approaching election. They would be glad to know his views. But the shifty Burr would not commit himself further than to promise a satisfactory administration. Though the Federalist intriguers would have been glad of more explicit assurances they counted on his vengeful temper and hatred of the Virginia domination at Washington to make him a pliable tool. They were willing to commit the party openly to Burr and trust to events to bind him to their cause.
Against this mad intrigue one clear-headed individual resolutely set himself–not wholly from disinterested motives. Alexander Hamilton had good reason to know Burr. He declared in private conversation, and the remark speedily became public property, that he looked upon Burr as a dangerous man who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government. He pleaded with New York Federalists not to commit the fatal blunder of endorsing Burr in caucus, and he finally won his point; but he could not prevent his partisans from supporting Burr at the polls.
The defeat of Burr dashed the hopes of the Federalists of New England; the bubble of a Northern Confederacy vanished. It dashed also Burr’s personal ambitions: he could no longer hope for political rehabilitation in New York. And the man who a second time had crossed his path and thwarted his purposes was his old rival, Alexander Hamilton. It is said that Burr was not naturally vindictive: perhaps no man is naturally vindictive. Certain it is that bitter disappointment had now made Burr what Hamilton had called him–“a dangerous man.” He took the common course of men of honor at this time; he demanded prompt and unqualified acknowledgment or denial of the expression. Well aware of what lay behind this demand, Hamilton replied deliberately with half-conciliatory words, but he ended with the usual words of those prepared to accept a challenge, “I can only regret the circumstance, and must abide the consequences.” A challenge followed. We are told that Hamilton accepted to save his political leadership and influence–strange illusion in one so gifted! Yet public opinion had not yet condemned dueling, and men must be judged against the background of their times.
On a summer morning (July 11, 1804) Burr and Hamilton crossed the Hudson to Weehawken and there faced each other for the last time. Hamilton withheld his fire; Burr aimed with murderous intent, and Hamilton fell mortally wounded. The shot from Burr’s pistol long reverberated. It woke public conscience to the horror and uselessness of dueling, and left Burr an outlaw from respectable society, stunned by the recoil, and under indictment for murder. Only in the South and West did men treat the incident lightly as an affair of honor.
The political career of Burr was now closed. When he again met the Senate face to face, he had been dropped by his own party in favor of George Clinton, to whom he surrendered the Vice-Presidency on March 5, 1805. His farewell address is described as one of the most affecting ever spoken in the Senate. Describing the scene to his daughter, Burr said that tears flowed abundantly, but Burr must have described what he wished to see. American politicians are not Homeric heroes, who weep on slight provocation; and any inclination to pity Burr must have been inhibited by the knowledge that he had made himself the rallying-point of every dubious intrigue at the capital.
The list of Burr’s intimates included Jonathan Dayton, whose term as Senator had just ended, and who, like Burr, sought means of promoting his fortunes, John Smith, Senator from Ohio, the notorious Swartwouts of New York who were attached to Burr as gangsters to their chief, and General James Wilkinson, governor of the northern territory carved out of Louisiana and commander of the western army with headquarters at St. Louis.
Wilkinson had a long record of duplicity, which was suspected but never proved by his contemporaries. There was hardly a dubious episode from the Revolution to this date with which he had not been connected. He was implicated in the Conway cabal against Washington; he was active in the separatist movement in Kentucky during the Confederation; he entered into an irregular commercial agreement with the Spanish authorities at New Orleans; he was suspected–and rightly, as documents recently unearthed in Spain prove–of having taken an oath of allegiance to Spain and of being in the pay of Spain; he was also suspected–and justly–of using his influence to bring about a separation of the Western States from the Union; yet in 1791 he was given a lieutenant-colonel’s commission in the regular army and served under St. Clair in the Northwest, and again as a brigadier-general under Wayne. Even here the atmosphere of intrigue enveloped him, and he was accused of inciting discontent among the Kentucky troops and of trying to supplant Wayne. When commissioners were trying to run the Southern boundary in accordance with the treaty of 1795 with Spain, Wilkinson–still a pensioner of Spain, as documents prove–attempted to delay the survey. In the light of these revelations, Wilkinson appears as an unscrupulous adventurer whose thirst for lucre made him willing to betray either master–the Spaniard who pensioned him or the American who gave him his command.
In the spring of 1805 Burr made a leisurely journey across the mountains, by way of Pittsburgh, to New Orleans, where he had friends and personal followers. The secretary of the territory was one of his henchmen; a justice of the superior court was his stepson; the Creole petitionists who had come to Washington to secure self-government had been cordially received by Burr and had a lively sense of gratitude. On his way down the Ohio, Burr landed at Blennerhassett’s Island, where an eccentric Irishman of that name owned an estate. Harman Blennerhassett was to rue the day that he entertained this fascinating guest. At Cincinnati he was the guest of Senator Smith, and there he also met Dayton. At Nashville he visited General Andrew Jackson, who was thrilled with the prospect of war with Spain; at Fort Massac he spent four days in close conference with General Wilkinson; and at New Orleans he consorted with Daniel Clark, a rich merchant and the most uncompromising opponent of Governor Claiborne, and with members of the Mexican Association and every would-be adventurer and filibuster. In November, Burr was again in Washington. What was the purpose of this journey and what did it accomplish?
It is far easier to tell what Burr did after this mysterious western expedition than what he planned to do. There is danger of reading too great consistency into his designs. At one moment, if we may believe Anthony Merry, the British Minister, who lent an ear to Burr’s proposals, he was plotting a revolution which should separate the Western States from the Union. To accomplish this design he needed British funds and a British naval force. Jonathan Dayton revealed to Yrujo much the same plot–which he thought was worth thirty or forty thousand dollars to the Spanish Government. To such urgent necessity for funds were the conspirators driven. But Dayton added further details to the story which may have been intended only to intimidate Yrujo. The revolution effected by British aid, said Dayton gravely, an expedition would be undertaken against Mexico. Subsequently Dayton unfolded a still more remarkable tale. Burr had been disappointed in the expectation of British aid, and he was now bent upon “an almost insane plan,” which was nothing less than the seizure of the Government at Washington. With the government funds thus obtained, and with the necessary frigates, the conspirators would sail for New Orleans and proclaim the independence of Louisiana and the Western States.
The kernel of truth in these accounts is not easily separated from the chaff. The supposition that Burr seriously contemplated a separation of the Western States from the Union may be dismissed from consideration. The loyalty of the Mississippi Valley at this time is beyond question; and Burr was too keen an observer not to recognize the temper of the people with whom he sojourned. But there is reason to believe that he and his confederates may have planned an enterprise against Mexico, for such a project was quite to the taste of Westerners who hated Spain as ardently as they loved the Union. Circumstances favored a filibustering expedition. The President’s bellicose message of December had prepared the people of the Mississippi Valley for war; the Spanish plotters had been expelled from Louisiana; Spanish forces had crossed the Sabine; American troops had been sent to repel them if need be; the South American revolutionist Miranda had sailed, with vessels fitted out in New York, to start a revolt against Spanish rule in Caracas; every revolutionist in New Orleans was on the qui vive. What better time could there be to launch a filibustering expedition against Mexico? If it succeeded and a republic were established, the American Government might be expected to recognize a fait accompli.
The success of Burr’s plans, whatever they may have been, depended on his procuring funds; and it was doubtless the hope of extracting aid from Blennerhassett that drew him to the island in midsummer of 1806. Burr was accompanied by his daughter Theodosia and her husband, Joseph Alston, a wealthy South Carolina planter, who was either the dupe or the accomplice of Burr. Together they persuaded the credulous Irishman to purchase a tract of land on the Washita River in the heart of Louisiana, which would ultimately net him a profit of a million dollars when Louisiana became an independent state with Burr as ruler and England as protector. They even assured Blennerhassett that he should go as minister to England. He was so dazzled at the prospect that he not only made the initial payment for the lands, but advanced all his property for Burr’s use on receiving a guaranty from Alston. Having landed his fish, Burr set off down the river to visit General Jackson at Nashville and to procure boats and supplies for his expedition.
Meanwhile, Theodosia–the brilliant, fascinating Theodosia–and her husband played the game at Blennerhassett’s Island. Blennerhassett’s head was completely turned. He babbled most indiscreetly about the approaching coup d’etat. Colonel Burr would be king of Mexico, he told his gardener, and Mrs. Alston would be queen when Colonel Burr died. Who could resist the charms of this young princess? Blennerhassett and his wife were impatient to exchange their little isle for marble halls in far away Mexico.
But all was not going well with the future Emperor of Mexico. Ugly rumors were afloat. The active preparations at Blennerhassett’s Island, the building of boats at various points along the river, the enlistment of recruits, coupled with hints of secession, disturbed such loyal citizens as the District-Attorney at Frankfort, Kentucky. He took it upon himself to warn the President, and then, in open court, charged Burr with violating the laws of the United States by setting on foot a military expedition against Mexico and with inciting citizens to rebellion in the Western States. But at the meeting of the grand jury Burr appeared surrounded by his friends and with young Henry Clay for counsel. The grand jury refused to indict him and he left the court in triumph. Some weeks later the District-Attorney renewed his motion; but again Burr was discharged by the grand jury, amid popular applause. Enthusiastic admirers in Frankfort even gave a ball in his honor.
Notwithstanding these warnings of conspiracy, President Jefferson exhibited a singular indifference and composure. To all alarmists he made the same reply. The people of the West were loyal and could be trusted. It was not until disquieting and ambiguous messages from Wilkinson reached Washington-disquieting because ambiguous–that the President was persuaded to act. On the 27th of November, he issued a proclamation warning all good citizens that sundry persons were conspiring against Spain and enjoining all Federal officers to apprehend those engaged in the unlawful enterprise. The appearance of this proclamation at Nashville should have led to Burr’s arrest, for he was still detained there; but mysterious influences seemed to paralyze the arm of the Government. On the 22d of December, Burr set off, with two boats which Jackson had built and some supplies, down the Cumberland. At the mouth of the river, he joined forces with Blennerhassett, who had left his island in haste just as the Ohio militia was about to descend upon him. The combined strength of the flotilla was nine bateaux carrying less than sixty men. There was still time to intercept the expedition at Fort Massac, but again delays that have never been explained prevented the President’s proclamation from arriving in time; and Burr’s little fleet floated peacefully by down stream.
The scene now shifts to the lower Mississippi, and the heavy villain of the melodrama appears on the stage in the uniform of a United States military officer–General James Wilkinson. He had been under orders since May 6, 1806, to repair to the Territory of Orleans with as little delay as possible and to repel any invasion east of the River Sabine; but it was now September and he had only just reached Natchitoches, where the American volunteers and militiamen from Louisiana and Mississippi were concentrating. Much water had flowed under the bridge since Aaron Burr visited New Orleans.
After President Jefferson’s bellicose message of the previous December, war with Spain seemed inevitable. And when Spanish troops crossed the Sabine in July and took up their post only seventeen miles from Natchitoches, Western Americans awaited only the word to begin hostilities. The Orleans Gazette declared that the time to repel Spanish aggression had come. The enemy must be driven beyond the Sabine. “The route from Natchitoches to Mexico is clear, plain, and open.” The occasion was at hand “for conferring on our oppressed Spanish brethren in Mexico those inestimable blessings of freedom which we ourselves enjoy.” “Gallant Louisianians! Now is the time to distinguish yourselves . . . . Should the generous efforts of our Government to establish a free, independent Republican Empire in Mexico be successful, how fortunate, how enviable would be the situation in New Orleans!” The editor who sounded this clarion call was a coadjutor of Burr. On the flood tide of a popular war against Spain, they proposed to float their own expedition. Much depended on General Wilkinson; but he had already written privately of subverting the Spanish Government in Mexico, and carrying “our conquests to California and the Isthmus of Darien.”
With much swagger and braggadocio, Wilkinson advanced to the center of the stage. He would drive the Spaniards over the Sabine, though they outnumbered him three to one. “I believe, my friend,” he wrote, “I shall be obliged to fight and to flog them.” Magnificent stage thunder. But to Wilkinson’s chagrin the Spaniards withdrew of their own accord. Not a Spaniard remained to contest his advance to the border. Yet, oddly enough, he remained idle in camp. Why?
Some two weeks later, an emissary appeared at Natchitoches with a letter from Burr dated the 29th of July, in cipher. What this letter may have originally contained will probably never be known, for only Wilkinson’s version survives, and that underwent frequent revision.* It is quite as remarkable for its omissions as for anything that it contains. In it there is no mention of a western uprising nor of a revolution in New Orleans; but only the intimation that an attack is to be made upon Spanish possessions, presumably Mexico, with possibly Baton Rouge as the immediate objective. Whether or no this letter changed Wilkinson’s plan, we can only conjecture. Certain it is, however, that about this time Wilkinson determined to denounce Burr and his associates and to play a double game, posing on the one hand as the savior of his country and on the other as a secret friend to Spain. After some hesitation he wrote to President Jefferson warning him in general terms of an expedition preparing against Vera Cruz but omitting all mention of Burr. Subsequently he wrote a confidential letter about this “deep, dark, and widespread conspiracy” which enmeshed all classes and conditions in New Orleans and might bring seven thousand men from the Ohio. The contents of Burr’s mysterious letter were to be communicated orally to the President by the messenger who bore this precious warning. It was on the strength of these communications that the President issued his proclamation of the 27th of November.
* What is usually accepted as the correct version is printed by McCaleb in his “Aaron Burr Conspiracy,” pp. 74 and 75, and by Henry Adams in his “History of the United States,” vol. III, pp. 253-4.
While Wilkinson was inditing these misleading missives to the President, he was preparing the way for his entry at New Orleans. To the perplexed and alarmed Governor he wrote: “You are surrounded by dangers of which you dream not, and the destruction of the American Government is seriously menaced. The storm will probably burst in New Orleans, where I shall meet it, and triumph or perish!” Just five days later he wrote a letter to the Viceroy of Mexico which proves him beyond doubt the most contemptible rascal who ever wore an American uniform. “A storm, a revolutionary tempest, an infernal plot threatens the destruction of the empire,” he wrote; the first object of attack would be New Orleans, then Vera Cruz, then Mexico City; scenes of violence and pillage would follow; let His Excellency be on his guard. To ward off these calamities, “I will hurl myself like a Leonidas into the breach.” But let His Excellency remember what risks the writer of this letter incurs, “by offering without orders this communication to a foreign power,” and let him reimburse the bearer of this letter to the amount of 121,000 pesos which will be spent to shatter the plans of these bandits from the Ohio.
The arrival of Wilkinson in New Orleans was awaited by friends and foes, with bated breath. The conspirators had as yet no intimation of his intentions: Governor Claiborne was torn by suspicion of this would-be savior, for at the very time he was reading Wilkinson’s gasconade he received a cryptic letter from Andrew Jackson which ran, “keep a watchful eye on our General and beware of an attack as well from your own country as Spain!” If Claiborne could not trust “our General,” whom could he trust!
The stage was now set for the last act in the drama. Wilkinson arrived in the city, deliberately set Claiborne aside, and established a species of martial law, not without opposition. To justify his course Wilkinson swore to an affidavit based on Burr’s letter of the 29th of July and proceeded with. his arbitrary arrests. One by one Burr’s confederates were taken into custody. The city was kept in a state of alarm; Burr’s armed thousands were said to be on the way; the negroes were to be incited to revolt. Only the actual appearance of Burr’s expedition or some extraordinary happening could maintain this high pitch of popular excitement and save Wilkinson from becoming the ridiculous victim of his own folly.
On the 10th of January (1807), after an uneventful voyage down the Mississippi, Burr’s flotilla reached the mouth of Bayou Pierre, some thirty miles above Natchez. Here at length was the huge armada which was to shatter the Union–nine boats and sixty men! Tension began to give way. People began to recover their sense of humor. Wilkinson was never in greater danger in his life, for he was about to appear ridiculous. It was at Bayou Pierre that Burr going ashore learned that Wilkinson had betrayed him. His first instinct was to flee, for if he should proceed to New Orleans he would fall into Wilkinson’s hands and doubtless be court-martialed and shot; but if he tarried, he would be arrested and sent to Washington. Indecision and despair seized him; and while Blennerhassett and other devoted followers waited for their emperor to declare his intention, he found himself facing the acting-governor of the Mississippi Territory with a warrant for his arrest. To the chagrin of his fellow conspirators, Burr surrendered tamely, even pusillanimously.
The end of the drama was near at hand. Burr was brought before a grand jury, and though he once more escaped indictment, he was put under bonds, quite illegally he thought, to appear when summoned. On the 1st of February he abandoned his followers to the tender mercies of the law and fled in disguise into the wilderness. A month later he was arrested near the Spanish border above Mobile by Lieutenant Gaines, in command at Fort Stoddert, and taken to Richmond. The trial that followed did not prove Burr’s guilt, but it did prove Thomas Jefferson’s credulity and cast grave doubts on James Wilkinson’s loyalty.* Burr was acquitted of the charge of treason in court, but he remained under popular indictment, and his memory has never been wholly cleared of the suspicion of treason.
* An account of the trial of Burr will be found in “John Marshall and the Constitution” by Edward S. Corwin, in “The Chronicles of America”.
CHAPTER VII. AN ABUSE OF HOSPITALITY
While Captain Bainbridge was eating his heart out in the Pasha’s prison at Tripoli, his thoughts reverting constantly to his lost frigate, he reminded Commodore Preble, with whom he was allowed to correspond, that “the greater part of our crew consists of English subjects not naturalized in America.” This incidental remark comes with all the force of a revelation to those who have fondly imagined that the sturdy jack-tars who manned the first frigates were genuine American sea-dogs. Still more disconcerting is the information contained in a letter from the Secretary of the Treasury to President Jefferson, some years later, to the effect that after 1803 American tonnage increased at the rate of seventy thousand a year, but that of the four thousand seamen required to man this growing mercantile marine, fully one-half were British subjects, presumably deserters. How are these uncomfortable facts to be explained? Let a third piece of information be added. In a report of Admiral Nelson, dated 1803, in which he broaches a plan for manning the British navy, it is soberly stated that forty-two thousand British seamen deserted “in the late war.” Whenever a large convoy assembled at Portsmouth, added the Admiral, not less than a thousand seamen usually deserted from the navy.
The slightest acquaintance with the British navy when Nelson was winning immortal glory by his victory at Trafalgar must convince the most sceptical that his seamen for the most part were little better than galley slaves. Life on board these frigates was well-nigh unbearable. The average life of a seaman, Nelson reckoned, was forty-five years. In this age before processes of refrigeration had been invented, food could not be kept edible on long voyages, even in merchantmen. Still worse was the fare on men-of-war. The health of a crew was left to Providence. Little or no forethought was exercised to prevent disease; the commonest matters of personal hygiene were neglected; and when disease came the remedies applied were scarcely to be preferred to the disease. Discipline, always brutal, was symbolized by the cat-o’-nine-tails. Small wonder that the navy was avoided like the plague by every man and seaman.
Yet a navy had to be maintained: it was the cornerstone of the Empire. And in all the history of that Empire the need of a navy was never stronger than in these opening years of the nineteenth century. The practice of impressing able men for the royal navy was as old as the reign of Elizabeth. The press gang was an odious institution of long standing–a terror not only to rogue and vagabond but to every able-bodied seafaring man and waterman on rivers, who was not exempted by some special act. It ransacked the prisons, and carried to the navy not only its victims but the germs of fever which infested public places of detention. But the press gang harvested its greatest crop of seamen on the seas. Merchantmen were stopped at sea, robbed of their able sailors, and left to limp short-handed into port. A British East Indiaman homeward bound in 1802 was stripped of so many of her crew in the Bay of Biscay that she was unable to offer resistance to a French privateer and fell a rich victim into the hands of the enemy. The necessity of the royal navy knew no law and often defeated its own purpose.
Death or desertion offered the only way of escape to the victim of the press gang. And the commander of a British frigate dreaded making port almost as much as an epidemic of typhus. The deserter always found American merchantmen ready to harbor him. Fair wages, relatively comfortable quarters, and decent treatment made him quite ready to take any measures to forswear his allegiance to Britannia. Naturalization papers were easily procured by a few months’ residence in any State of the Union; and in default of legitimate papers, certificates of citizenship could be bought for a song in any American seaport, where shysters drove a thrifty traffic in bogus documents. Provided the English navy took the precaution to have the description in his certificate tally with his personal appearance, and did not let his tongue betray him, he was reasonably safe from capture.
Facing the palpable fact that British seamen were deserting just when they were most needed and were making American merchantmen and frigates their asylum, the British naval commanders, with no very nice regard for legal distinctions, extended their search for deserters to the decks of American vessels, whether in British waters or on the high seas. If in time of war, they reasoned, they could stop a neutral ship on the high seas, search her for contraband of war, and condemn ship and cargo in a prize court if carrying contraband, why might they not by the same token search a vessel for British deserters and impress them into service again? Two considerations seem to justify this reasoning: the trickiness of the smart Yankees who forged citizenship papers, and the indelible character of British allegiance. Once an Englishman always an Englishman, by Jove! Your hound of a sea-dog might try to talk through his nose like a Yankee, you know, and he might shove a dirty bit of paper at you, but he couldn’t shake off his British citizenship if he wanted to! This was good English law, and if it wasn’t recognized by other nations so much the worse for them. As one of these redoubtable British captains put it, years later: “‘Might makes right’ is the guiding, practical maxim among nations and ever will be, so long as powder and shot exist, with money to back them, and energy to wield them.” Of course, there were hair-splitting fellows, plenty of them, in England and the States, who told you that it was one thing to seize a vessel carrying contraband and have her condemned by judicial process in a court of admiralty, and quite another thing to carry British subjects off the decks of a merchantman flying a neutral flag; but if you knew the blasted rascals were deserters what difference did it make? Besides, what would become of the British navy, if you listened to all the fine-spun arguments of landsmen? And if these stalwart blue-water Britishers could have read what Thomas Jefferson was writing at this very time, they would have classed him with the armchair critics who had no proper conception of a sailor’s duty. “I hold the right of expatriation,” wrote the President, “to be inherent in every man by the laws of nature, and incapable of being rightfully taken away from him even by the united will of every other person in the nation.”
In the year 1805, while President Jefferson was still the victim of his overmastering passion, and disposed to cultivate the good will of England, if thereby he might obtain the Floridas, unforeseen commercial complications arose which not only blocked the way to a better understanding in Spanish affairs but strained diplomatic relations to the breaking point. News reached Atlantic seaports that American merchantmen, which had hitherto engaged with impunity in the carrying trade between Europe and the West Indies, had been seized and condemned in British admiralty courts. Every American shipmaster and owner at once lifted up his voice in indignant protest; and all the latent hostility to their old enemy revived. Here were new orders-in-council, said they: the leopard cannot change his spots. England is still England–the implacable enemy of neutral shipping. “Never will neutrals be perfectly safe till free goods make free ships or till England loses two or three great naval battles,” declared the Salem Register.
The recent seizures were not made by orders-in-council, however, but in accordance with a decision recently handed down by the court of appeals in the case of the ship Essex. Following a practice which had become common in recent years, the Essex had sailed with a cargo from Barcelona to Salem and thence to Havana. On the high seas she had been captured, and then taken to a British port, where ship and cargo were condemned because the voyage from Spain to her colony had been virtually continuous, and by the so-called Rule of 1756, direct trade between a European state and its colony was forbidden to neutrals in time of war when such trade had not been permitted in time of peace. Hitherto, the British courts had inclined to the view that when goods had been landed in a neutral country and duties paid, the voyage had been broken. Tacitly a trade that was virtually direct had been countenanced, because the payment of duties seemed evidence enough that the cargo became a part of the stock of the neutral country and, if reshipped, was then a bona fide neutral cargo. Suddenly English merchants and shippers woke to the fact that they were often victims of deception. Cargoes would be landed in the United States, duties ostensibly paid, and the goods ostensibly imported, only to be reshipped in the same bottoms, with the connivance of port officials, either without paying any real duties or with drawbacks. In the case of the Essex the court of appeals cut directly athwart these practices by going behind the prima facie payment and inquiring into the intent of the voyage. The mere touching at a port without actually importing the cargo into the common stock of the country did not alter the nature of the voyage. The crucial point was the intent, which the court was now and hereafter determined to ascertain by examination of facts. The court reached the indubitable conclusion that the cargo of the Essex had never been intended for American markets. The open-minded historian must admit that this was a fair application of the Rule of 1756, but he may still challenge the validity of the rule, as all neutral countries did, and the wisdom of the monopolistic impulse which moved the commercial classes and the courts of England to this decision.*
* Professor William E. Lingelbach in a notable article on “England and Neutral Trade” in “The Military Historian and Economist” (April, 1917) has pointed out the error committed by almost every historian from Henry Adams down, that the Essex decision reversed previous rulings of the court and was not in accord with British law.
Had the impressment of seamen and the spoliation of neutral commerce occurred only on the high seas, public resentment would have mounted to a high pitch in the United States; but when British cruisers ran into American waters to capture or burn French vessels, and when British men-of-war blockaded ports, detaining and searching–and at times capturing–American vessels, indignation rose to fever heat. The blockade of New York Harbor by two British frigates, the Cambrian and the Leander, exasperated merchants beyond measure. On board the Leander was a young midshipman, Basil Hall, who in after years described the activities of this execrated frigate.
“Every morning at daybreak, we set about arresting the progress of all the vessels we saw, firing of guns to the right and left to make every ship that was running in heave to, or wait until we had leisure to send a boat on board ‘to see,¹ in our lingo, ‘what she was made of.’ I have frequently known a dozen, and sometimes a couple of dozen, ships lying a league or two off the port, losing their fair wind, their tide, and worse than all their market, for many hours, sometimes the whole day, before our search was completed.”*
* “Fragments of Voyages and Travels,” quoted by Henry Adams, in “History of the United States”, vol. III, p. 92.
One day in April, 1806, the Leander, trying to halt a merchantman that she meant to search, fired a shot which killed the helmsman of a passing sloop. The boat sailed on to New York with the mangled body; and the captain, brother of the murdered man, lashed the populace into a rage by his mad words. Supplies for the frigates were intercepted, personal violence was threatened to any British officers caught on shore, the captain of the Leander was indicted for murder, and the funeral of the murdered sailor was turned into a public demonstration. Yet nothing came of this incident, beyond a proclamation by the President closing the ports of the United States to the offending frigates and ordering the arrest of the captain of the Leander wherever found. After all, the death of a common seaman did not fire the hearts of farmers peacefully tilling their fields far beyond hearing of the Leander’s guns.
A year full of troublesome happenings passed; scores of American vessels were condemned in British admiralty courts, and American seamen were impressed with increasing frequency, until in the early summer of 1807 these manifold grievances culminated in an outrage that shook even Jefferson out of his composure and evoked a passionate outcry for war from all parts of the country.
While a number of British war vessels were lying in Hampton Roads watching for certain French frigates which had taken refuge up Chesapeake Bay, they lost a number of seamen by desertion under peculiarly annoying circumstances. In one instance a whole boat’s crew made off under cover of night to Norfolk and there publicly defied their commander. Three deserters from the British frigate Melampus had enlisted on the American frigate Chesapeake, which had just been fitted out for service in the Mediterranean; but on inquiry these three were proven to be native Americans who had been impressed into British service. Unfortunately inquiry did disclose one British deserter who had enlisted on the Chesapeake, a loud-mouthed tar by the name of Jenkin Ratford. These irritating facts stirred Admiral Berkeley at Halifax to highhanded measures. Without waiting for instructions, he issued an order to all commanders in the North Atlantic Squadron to search the Chesapeake for deserters, if she should be encountered on the high seas. This order of the 1st of June should be shown to the captain of the Chesapeake as sufficient authority for searching her.
On June 22, 1807, the Chesapeake passed unsuspecting between the capes on her way to the Mediterranean. She was a stanch frigate carrying forty guns and a crew of 375 men and boys; but she was at this time in a distressing state of unreadiness, owing to the dilatoriness and incompetence of the naval authorities at Washington. The gundeck was littered with lumber and odds and ends of rigging; the guns, though loaded, were not all fitted to their carriages; and the crew was untrained. As the guns had to be fired by slow matches or by loggerheads heated red-hot, and the ammunition was stored in the magazine, the frigate was totally unprepared for action. Commodore Barron, who commanded the Chesapeake, counted on putting her into fighting trim on the long voyage across the Atlantic.
Just ahead of the Chesapeake as she passed out to sea, was the Leopard, a British frigate of fifty-two guns, which was apparently on the lookout for suspicious merchantmen. It was not until both vessels were eight miles or more southeast of Cape Henry that the movements of the Leopard began to attract attention. At about half-past three in the afternoon she came within hailing distance and hove to, announcing that she had dispatches for the commander. The Chesapeake also hove to and answered the hail, a risky move considering that she was unprepared for action and that the Leopard lay to the windward. But why should the commander of the American frigate have entertained suspicions?
A boat put out from the Leopard, bearing a petty officer, who delivered a note enclosing Admiral Berkeley’s order and expressing the hope that “every circumstance . . . may be adjusted in a manner that the harmony subsisting between the two countries may remain undisturbed.” Commodore Barron replied that he knew of no British deserters on his vessel and declined in courteous terms to permit his crew to be mustered by any other officers but their own. The messenger departed, and then, for the first time entertaining serious misgivings, Commodore Barron ordered his decks cleared for action. But before the crew could bestir themselves, the Leopard drew near, her men at quarters. The British commander shouted a warning, but Barron, now thoroughly alarmed, replied, “I don’t hear what you say.” The warning was repeated, but again Barron to gain time shouted that he could not hear. The Leopard then fired two shots across the bow of the Chesapeake, and almost immediately without parleying further–she was now within two hundred feet of her victim–poured a broadside into the American vessel.
Confusion reigned on the Chesapeake. The crew for the most part showed courage, but they were helpless, for they could not fire a gun for want of slow matches or loggerheads. They crowded about the magazine clamoring in vain for a chance to defend the vessel; they yelled with rage at their predicament. Only one gun was discharged and that was by means of a live coal brought up from the galley after the Chesapeake had received a third broadside and Commodore Barron had ordered the flag to be hauled down to spare further slaughter. Three of his crew had already been killed and eighteen wounded, himself among the number. The whole action lasted only fifteen minutes.
Boarding crews now approached and several British officers climbed to the deck of the Chesapeake and mustered her crew. Among the ship’s company they found the alleged deserters and, hiding in the coal-hole, the notorious Jenkin Ratford. These four men they took with them, and the Leopard, having fulfilled her instructions, now suffered the Chesapeake to limp back to Hampton Roads. “For the first time in their history,” writes Henry Adams,* “the people of the United States learned, in June, 1807, the feeling of a true national emotion. Hitherto every public passion had been more or less partial and one-sided; . . . but the outrage committed on the Chesapeake stung through hidebound prejudices, and made democrat and aristocrat writhe alike.”
* History of the United States, vol. IV, p. 27.
Had President Jefferson chosen to go to war at this moment, he would have had a united people behind him, and he was well aware that he possessed the power of choice. “The affair of the Chesapeake put war into my hand,” he wrote some years later. “I had only to open it and let havoc loose.” But Thomas Jefferson was not a martial character. The State Governors, to be sure, were requested to have their militia in readiness, and the Governor of Virginia was desired to call such companies into service as were needed for the defense of Norfolk. The President referred in indignant terms to the abuse of the laws of hospitalitv and the “outrage” committed by the British commander; but his proclamation only ordered all British armed vessels out of American waters and forbade all intercourse with them if they remained. The tone of the proclamation was so moderate as to seem pusillanimous. John Randolph called it an apology. Thomas Jefferson did not mean to have war. With that extraordinary confidence in his own powers, which in smaller men would be called smug conceit, he believed that he could secure disavowal and honorable reparation for the wrong committed; but he chose a frail intermediary when he committed this delicate mission to James Monroe.
CHAPTER VIII. THE PACIFISTS OF 1807
It is one of the strange paradoxes of our time that the author of the Declaration of Independence, to whose principle of self-determination the world seems again to be turning, should now be regarded as a self-confessed pacifist, with all the derogatory implications that lurk in that epithet. The circumstances which made him a revolutionist in 1776 and a passionate advocate of peace in 1807 deserve some consideration. The charge made by contemporaries of Jefferson that his aversion to war sprang from personal cowardice may be dismissed at once, as it was by him, with contempt. Nor was his hatred of war merely an instinctive abhorrence of bloodshed. He had not hesitated to wage naval war on the Barbary Corsairs. It is true that he was temperamentally averse to the use of force under ordinary circumstances. He did not belong to that type of full-blooded men who find self-expression in adventurous activity. Mere physical effort without conscious purpose never appealed to him. He was at the opposite pole of life from a man like Aaron Burr. He never, so far as history records, had an affair of honor; he never fought a duel; he never performed active military service; he never took human life. Yet he was not a non-resistant. “My hope of preserving peace for our country,” he wrote on one occasion, “is not founded in the Quaker principle of nonresistance under every wrong.”
The true sources of Jefferson’s pacifism must be sought in his rationalistic philosophy, which accorded the widest scope to the principle of self-direction and self determination, whether on the part of the individual or of groups of individuals. To impose one’s will upon another was to enslave, according to his notion; to coerce by war was to enslave a community; and to enslave a community was to provoke revolution. Jefferson’s thought gravitated inevitably to the center of his rational universe–to the principle of enlightened self-interest. Men and women are not to be permanently moved by force but by appeals to their interests. He completed his thought as follows in the letter already quoted: “But [my hope of preserving peace is founded] in the belief that a just and friendly conduct on our part will procure justice and friendship from others. In the existing contest, each of the combatants will find an interest in our friendship.”
It was a chaotic world in which this philosopher-statesman was called upon to act–a world in which international law and neutral rights had been well-nigh submerged in twelve years of almost continuous war. Yet with amazing self-assurance President Jefferson believed that he held in his hand a master-key which would unlock all doors that had been shut to the commerce of neutrals. He called this master-key “peaceable coercion,” and he explained its magic potency in this wise:
“Our commerce is so valuable to them [the European belligerents] that they will be glad to purchase it when the only price we ask is to do us justice. I believe that we have in our hands the means of peaceable coercion; and that the moment they see our government so united as that they can make use of it, they will for their own interest be disposed to do us justice.”
The idea of using commercial restrictions as a weapon to secure recognition of rights was of course not original with Jefferson, but it was now to be given a trial without parallel in the history of the nation. Non-importation agreements had proved efficacious in the struggle of the colonies with the mother country; it seemed not unreasonable to suppose that a well-sustained refusal to traffic in English goods would meet the emergency of 1807, when the ruling of British admiralty courts threatened to cut off the lucrative commerce between Europe and the West Indies. With this theory in view, the President and his Secretary of State advocated the NonImportation Bill of April 18, 1806, which forbade the entry of certain specified goods of British manufacture. The opposition found a leader in Randolph, who now broke once and for all with the Administration. “Never in the course of my life,” he exclaimed, “have I witnessed such a scene of indignity and inefficiency as this measure holds forth to the world. What is it? A milk-and-water bill! A dose of chicken-broth to be taken nine months hence! . . . It is too contemptible to be the object of consideration, or to excite the feelings of the pettiest state in Europe.” The Administration carried the bill through Congress, but Randolph had the satisfaction of seeing his characterisation of the measure amply justified by the course of events.
With the Non-Importation Act as a weapon, the President was confident that Monroe, who had once more returned to his post in London, could force a settlement of all outstanding differences with Great Britain. To his annoyance, and to Monroe’s chagrin, however, he was obliged to send a special envoy to act with Monroe. Factious opposition in the Senate forced the President to placate the Federalists by appointing William Pinkney of Maryland. The American commissioners were instructed to insist upon three concessions in the treaty which they were to negotiate: restoration of trade with enemies’ colonies, indemnity for captures made since the Essex decision, and express repudiation of the right of impressment. In return for these concessions, they might hold out the possible repeal of the Non-Importation Act! Only confirmed optimists could believe that the mistress of the seas, flushed with the victory of Trafalgar, would consent to yield these points for so slight a compensation. The mission was, indeed, doomed from the outset, and nothing more need be said of it than that in the end, to secure any treaty at all, Monroe and Pinkney broke their instructions and set aside the three ultimata. What they obtained in return seemed so insignificant and doubtful, and what they paid for even these slender compensations seemed so exorbitant, that the President would not even submit the treaty to the Senate. The first application of the theory of peaceable coercion thus ended in humiliating failure. Jefferson thought it best “to let the negotiation take a friendly nap”; but Madison, who felt that his political future depended on a diplomatic triumph over England, drafted new instructions for the two commissioners, hoping that the treaty might yet be put into acceptable form. It was while these new instructions were crossing the ocean that the Chesapeake struck her colors.
James Monroe is one of the most unlucky diplomats in American history. From those early days when he had received the fraternal embraces of the Jacobins in Paris and had been recalled by President Washington, to the ill-fated Spanish mission, circumstances seem to have conspired against him. The honor of negotiating the purchase of Louisiana should have been his alone, but he arrived just a day too late and was obliged to divide the glory with Livingston. On this mission to England he was not permitted to conduct negotiations alone but was associated with William Pinkney, a Federalist. No wonder he suspected Madison, or at least Madison’s friends, of wishing to discredit him. And now another impossible task was laid upon him. He was instructed to demand not only disavowal. and reparation for the attack on the Chesapeake and the restoration of the American seamen, but also as “an indispensable part of the satisfaction” “an entire abolition of impressments.” If the Secretary of State had deliberately contrived to deliver Monroe into the hands of George Canning, he could not have been more successful, for Monroe had already protested against the Chesapeake outrage as an act of aggression which should be promptly disavowed without reference to the larger question of impressment. He was now obliged to eat his own words and inject into the discussion, as Canning put it, the irrelevant matters which they had agreed to separate from the present controversy. Canning was quick to see his opportunity. Mr. Monroe must be aware, said he, that on several recent occasions His Majesty had firmly declined to waive “the ancient and prescriptive usages of Great Britain, founded on the soundest principles of natural law,” simply because they might come in contact with the interests or the feelings of the American people. If Mr. Monroe’s instructions left him powerless to adjust this regrettable incident of the Leopard and the Chesapeake, without raising the other question of the right of search and impressment, then His Majesty could only send a special envoy to the United States to terminate the controversy in a manner satisfactory to both countries. “But,” added Canning with sarcasm which was not lost on Monroe, “in order to avoid the inconvenience which has arisen from the mixed nature of your instructions, that minister will not be empowered to entertain . . . any proposition respecting the search of merchant vessels.”
One more humiliating experience was reserved for Monroe before his diplomatic career closed. Following Madison’s new set of instructions, he and Pinkney attempted to reopen negotiations for the revision of the discredited treaty of the preceding year. But Canning had reasons of his own for wishing to be rid of a treaty which had been drawn by the late Whig Ministry. He informed the American commissioners arrogantly that “the proposal of the President of the United States for proceeding to negotiate anew upon the basis of a treaty already solemnly concluded and signed, is a proposal wholly inadmissible.” His Majesty could therefore only acquiesce in the refusal of the President to ratify the treaty. One week later, James Monroe departed from London, never again to set foot on British soil, leaving Pinkney to assume the duties of Minister at the Court of St. James. For the second time Monroe returned to his own country discredited by the President who had appointed him. In both instances he felt himself the victim of injustice. In spite of his friendship for Jefferson, he was embittered against the Administration and in this mood lent himself all too readily to the schemes of John Randolph, who had already picked him as the one candidate who could beat Madison in the next presidential election.
>From the point of view of George Canning and the Tory squirearchy
whose mouthpiece he was, the Chesapeake affair was but an incident–an unhappy incident, to be sure, but still only an incident–in the world-wide struggle with Napoleon. What was at stake was nothing less than the commercial supremacy of Great Britain. The astounding growth of Napoleon’s empire was a standing menace to British trade. The overthrow of Prussia in the fall of 1806 left the Corsican in control of Central Europe and in a position to deal his long premeditated blow. A fortnight after the battle of Jena, he entered Berlin and there issued the famous decree which was his answer to the British blockade of the French channel ports. Since England does not recognize the system of international law universally observed by all civilized nations–so the preamble read–but by a monstrous abuse of the right of blockade has determined to destroy neutral trade and to raise her commerce and industry upon the ruins of that of the continent, and since “whoever deals on the continent in English goods thereby favors and renders himself an accomplice of her designs,” therefore the British Isles are declared to be in a state of blockade. Henceforth all English goods were to be lawful prize in any territory held by the troops of France or her allies; and all vessels which had come from English ports or from English colonies were to be confiscated, together with their cargoes. This challenge was too much for the moral equilibrium of the squires, the shipowners, and the merchants who dominated Parliament. It dulled their sense of justice and made them impatient under the pinpricks which came from the United States. “A few short months of war,” declared the Morning Post truculently, “would convince these desperate [American] politicians of the folly of measuring the strength of a rising, but still infant and puny, nation with the colossal power of the British Empire.” “Right,” said the Times, another organ of the Tory Government, “is power sanctioned by usage.” Concession to Americans at this crisis was not to be entertained for a moment, for after all, said the Times, they “possess all the vices of their Indian neighbors without their virtues.”
In this temper the British Government was prepared to ignore the United States and deal Napoleon blow for blow. An order-in-council of January 7, 1807, asserted the right of retaliation and declared that “no vessel shall be permitted to trade from one port to another, both which ports shall belong to, or be in possession of France or her allies.” The peculiar hardship of this order for American shipowners is revealed by the papers of Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, whose shrewdness and enterprise were making him one of the merchant princes of his time. One of his ships, the Liberty, of some 250 tons, was sent to Lisbon with a cargo of 2052 barrels and 220 half-barrels of flour which cost the owner $10.68 a barrel. Her captain, on entering port, learned that flour commanded a better price at Cadiz. To Cadiz, accordingly, he set sail and sold his cargo for $22.50 a barrel, winning for the owner a goodly profit of $25,000, less commission. It was such trading ventures as this that the British order-in-council doomed.
What American shipmasters had now to fear from both belligerents was made startlingly clear by the fate of the ship Horizon, which had sailed from Charleston, South Carolina, with a cargo for Zanzibar. On the way she touched at various South American ports and disposed of most of her cargo. Then changing her destination, and taking on a cargo for the English market, she set sail for London. On the way she was forced to put in at Lisbon to refit. As she left to resume her voyage she was seized by an English frigate and brought in as a fair prize, since –according to the Rule of 1756–she had been apprehended in an illegal traffic between an enemy country and its colony. The British prize court condemned the cargo but released the ship. The unlucky Horizon then loaded with an English cargo and sailed again to Lisbon, but misfortune overtook her and she was wrecked off the French coast. Her cargo was salvaged, however, and what was not of English origin was restored to her owners by decree of a French prize court; the rest of her cargo was confiscated under the terms of the Berlin decree. When the American Minister protested at this decision, he was told that “since America suffers her ships to be searched, she adopts the principle that the flag does not cover the goods. Since she recognizes the absurd blockades laid by England, consents to having her vessels incessantly stopped, sent to England, and so turned aside from their course, why should the Americans not suffer the blockade laid by France? Certainly France recognizes that these measures are unjust, illegal, and subversive of national sovereignty; but it is the duty of nations to resort to force, and to declare themselves against things which dishonor them and disgrace their independence.”* But an invitation to enter the European maelstrom and battle for neutral rights made no impression upon the mild-tempered President.
* Henry Adams, History of the United States, IV, p. 110.
It is as clear as day that the British Government was now determined, under pretense of retaliating upon France, to promote British trade with the continent by every means and at the expense of neutrals. Another order-in-council, November 17, 1807, closed to neutrals all European ports under French control, “as if the same were actually blockaded,” but permitted vessels which first entered a British port and obtained a British license to sail to any continental port. It was an order which, as Henry Adams has said, could have but one purpose–to make American commerce English. This was precisely the contemporary opinion of the historian’s grandfather, who declared that the “orders-in-council, if submitted to, would have degraded us to the condition of colonists.”
Only one more blow was needed, it would seem, to complete the ruin of American commerce. It fell a month later, when Napoleon, having overrun the Spanish peninsula and occupied Portugal, issued his Milan decree of December 17, 1807. Henceforth any vessel which submitted to search by English cruisers, or paid any tonnage duty or tax to the English Government, or sailed to or from any English port, would be captured and condemned as lawful prize. Such was to be the maritime code of France “until England should return to the principles of international law which are also those of justice and honor.”
Never was a commercial nation less prepared to defend itself against depredations than the United States of America in this year 1807. For this unpreparedness many must bear the blame, but President Jefferson has become the scapegoat. This Virginia farmer and landsman was not only ignorant and distrustful of all the implements of war, but utterly unfamiliar with the ways of the sea and with the first principles of sea-power. The Tripolitan War seems to have inspired him with a single fixed idea–that for defensive purposes gunboats were superior to frigates and less costly. He set forth this idea in a special message to Congress (February 10, 1807), claiming to have the support of “professional men,” among whom he mentioned Generals Wilkinson and Gates! He proposed the construction of two hundred of these gunboats, which would be distributed among the various exposed harbors, where in time of peace they would be hauled up on shore under sheds, for protection against sun and storm. As emergency arose these floating batteries were to be manned by the seamen and militia of the port. What appealed particularly to the President in this programme was the immunity it offered from “an excitement to engage in offensive maritime war.” Gallatin would have modified even this plan for economy’s sake. He would have constructed only one-half of the proposed fleet since the large seaports could probably build thirty gunboats in as many days, if an emergency arose. In extenuation of Gallatin’s shortsightedness, it should be remembered that he was a native of Switzerland, whose navy has never ploughed many seas. It is less easy to excuse the rest of the President’s advisers and the Congress which was beguiled into accepting this naive project. Nor did the Chesapeake outrage teach either Congress or the Administration a salutary lesson. On the contrary, when in October the news of the bombardment of Copenhagen had shattered the nerves of statesmen in all neutral countries, and while the differences with England were still unsettled, Jefferson and his colleagues decided to hold four of the best frigates in port and use them “as receptacles for enlisting seamen to fill the gunboats occasionally.” Whom the gods would punish they first make mad!
The 17th of December was a memorable day in the annals of this Administration. Favorable tradewinds had brought into American ports a number of packets with news from Europe. The Revenge had arrived in New York with Armstrong’s dispatches announcing Napoleon’s purpose to enforce the Berlin decree; the Edward had reached Boston with British newspapers forecasting the order-in-council of the 11th of November. This news burst like a bomb in Washington where the genial President was observing with scientific detachment the operation of his policy of commercial coercion. The Non-Importation Act had just gone into effect. Jefferson immediately called his Cabinet together. All were of one mind. The impending order-in-council, it was agreed, left but one alternative. Commerce must be totally suspended until the full scope of these new aggressions could be ascertained. The President took a loose sheet of paper and drafted hastily a message to Congress, recommending an embargo in anticipation of the offensive British order. But the prudent Madison urged that it was better not to refer explicitly to the order and proposed a substitute which simply recommended “an immediate inhibition of the departure of our vessels from the ports of the United States,” on the ground that shipping was likely to be exposed to greater dangers. Only Gallatin demurred: he would have preferred an embargo for a limited time. “I prefer war to a permanent embargo,” he wrote next day. “Government prohibitions,” he added significantly, “do always more mischief than had been calculated.” But Gallatin was overruled and the message, in Madison’s form, was sent to Congress on the following day. The Senate immediately passed the desired bill through three readings in a single day; the House confirmed this action after only two days of debate; and on the 22d of December, the President signed the Embargo Act.
What was this measure which was passed by Congress almost without discussion? Ostensibly it was an act for the protection of American ships, merchandise, and seamen. It forbade the departure of all ships for foreign ports, except vessels under the immediate direction of the President and vessels in ballast or already loaded with goods. Foreign armed vessels were exempted also as a matter of course. Coasting ships were to give bonds double the value of vessel and cargo to reland their freight in some port of the United States. Historians have discovered a degree of duplicity in the alleged motives for this act. How, it is asked, could protection of ships and seamen be the motive when all of Jefferson’s private letters disclose his determination to put his theory of peaceable coercion to a practical test by this measure? The criticism is not altogether fair, for, as Jefferson would himself have replied, peaceable coercion was designed to force the withdrawal of orders-in-council and decrees that menaced the safety of ships and cargoes. The policy might entail some incidental hardships, to be sure, but the end in view was protection of American lives and property. Madison was not quite candid, nevertheless, when he assured the British Minister that the embargo was a precautionary measure only and not conceived with hostile intent.
Chimerical this policy seemed to many contemporaries; chimerical it has seemed to historians, and to us who have passed through the World War. Yet in the World War it was the possession of food stuffs and raw materials by the United States which gave her a dominating position in the councils of the Allies. Had her commerce in 1807 been as necessary to England and France as it was “at the very peak” of the World War, Thomas Jefferson might have proved that peaceable coercion is an effective alternative to war; but he overestimated the magnitude and importance of the carrying trade of the United States, and erred still more grievously in assuming that a public conscience existed which would prove superior to the temptation to evade the law. Jefferson dreaded war quite as much because of its concomitants as because of its inevitable brutality, quite as much because it tended to exalt government and to produce corruption as because it maimed bodies and sacrificed human lives. Yet he never took fully into account the possible accompaniments of his alternative to war. That the embargo would debauch public morals and make government arbitrary, he was to learn only by bitter experience and personal humiliation.
Just after the passage of this momentous act, Canning’s special envoy, George Rose, arrived in the United States. A British diplomat of the better sort, with much dignity of manner and suave courtesy, he was received with more than ordinary consideration by the Administration. He was commissioned, every one supposed, to offer reparation for the Chesapeake affair. Even after he had notified Madison that his instructions bade him insist, as an indispensable preliminary, on the recall of the President’s Chesapeake proclamation, he was treated with deference and assured that the President was prepared to comply, if he could do so without incurring the charge of inconsistency and disregard of national honor. Madison proposed to put a proclamation of recall in Rose’s hands, duly signed by the President and dated so as to correspond with the day on which all differences should be adjusted. Rose consented to this course and the proclamation was delivered into his hands. He then divulged little by little his further instructions, which were such as no self-respecting administration could listen to with composure. Canning demanded a formal disavowal of Commodore Barron’s conduct in encouraging deserters from His Majesty’s service and harboring them on board his ship. “You will state,” read Rose’s instructions, “that such disavowals, solemnly expressed, would afford to His Majesty a satisfactory pledge on the part of the American Government that the recurrence of similar causes will not on any occasion impose on His Majesty the necessity of authorizing those means of force to which Admiral Berkeley has resorted without authority, but which the continued repetition of such provocations as unfortunately led to the attack upon the Chesapeake might render necessary, as a just reprisal on the part of His Majesty.” No doubt Rose did his best to soften the tone of these instructions, but he could not fail to make them clear; and Madison, who had conducted these informal interviews, slowly awoke to the real nature of what he was asked to do. He closed further negotiations with the comment that the United States could not be expected “to make, as it were, an expiatory sacrifice to obtain redress, or beg for reparation.” The Administration determined to let the disavowal of Berkeley suffice for the present and to allow the matter of reparation to await further developments. The coercive policy on which the Administration had now launched would, it was confidently believed, bring His Majesty’s Government to terms.
The very suggestion of an embargo had an unexpected effect upon American shipmasters. To avoid being shut up in port, fleets of ships put out to sea half-manned, half-laden, and often without clearance papers. With freight rates soaring to unheard-of altitudes, ship-owners were willing to assume all the risks of the sea–British frigates included. So little did they appreciate the protection offered by a benevolent government that they assumed an attitude of hostility to authority and evaded the exactions of the law in every conceivable way. Under guise of engaging in the coasting trade, many a ship landed her cargo in a foreign port; a brisk traffic also sprang up across the Canadian border; and Amelia Island in St. Mary’s River, Florida, became a notorious mart for illicit commerce. Almost at once Congress was forced to pass supplementary acts, conferring upon collectors of ports powers of inspection and regulation which Gallatin unhesitatingly pronounced both odious and dangerous. The President affixed his signature ruefully to acts which increased the army, multiplied the number of gunboats under construction, and appropriated a million and a quarter dollars to the construction of coast defenses and the equipment of militia. “This embargo act,” he confessed, “is certainly the most embarrassing we ever had to execute. I did not expect a crop of so sudden and rank growth of fraud and open opposition by force could have grown up in the United States.”
The worst feature of the experiment was its ineffectiveness. The inhibition of commerce had so slight an effect upon England that when Pinkney approached Canning with the proposal of a quid pro quo– the United States to rescind the embargo, England to revoke her orders-in-council–he was told with biting sarcasm that “if it were possible to make any sacrifice for the repeal of the embargo without appearing to deprecate it as a measure of hostility, he would gladly have facilitated its removal AS A MEASURE OF INCONVENIENT RESTRICTION UPON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.” By licensing American vessels, indeed, which had either slipped out of port before the embargo or evaded the collectors, the British Government was even profiting by this measure of restriction. It was these vagrant vessels which gave Napoleon his excuse for the Bayonne decree of April 17, 1808, when with a stroke of the pen he ordered the seizure of all American ships in French ports and swept property to the value of ten million dollars into the imperial exchequer. Since these vessels were abroad in violation of the embargo, he argued, they could not be American craft but must be British ships in disguise. General Armstrong, writing from Paris, warned the Secretary of State not to expect that the embargo would do more than keep the United States at peace with the belligerents. As a coercive measure, its effect was nil. “Here it is not felt, and in England . . . it is forgotten.”
Before the end of the year the failure of the embargo was patent to every fair-minded observer. Men might differ ever so much as to the harm wrought by the embargo abroad; but all agreed that it was not bringing either France or England to terms, and that it was working real hardship at home. Federalists in New England, where nearly one-third of the ships in the carrying trade were owned, pointed to the schooners “rotting at their wharves,” to the empty shipyards and warehouses, to the idle sailors wandering in the streets of port towns, and asked passionately how long they must be sacrificed to the theories of this charlatan in the White House. Even Southern Republicans were asking uneasily when the President would realize that the embargo was ruining planters who could not market their cotton and tobacco. And Republicans whose pockets were not touched were soberly questioning whether a policy that reduced the annual value of exports from $108,000,000 to $22,000,000, and cut the national revenue in half, had not been tested long enough.
Indications multiplied that “the dictatorship of Mr. Jefferson” was drawing to a close. In 1808, after the election of Madison as his successor, he practically abdicated as leader of his party, partly out of an honest conviction that he ought not to commit the President-elect by any positive course of action, and partly no doubt out of a less praiseworthy desire not to admit the defeat of his cherished principle. His abdication left the party without resolute leadership at a critical moment. Madison and Gallatin tried to persuade their party associates to continue the embargo until June, and then, if concessions were not forthcoming, to declare war; but they were powerless to hold the Republican majority together on this programme. Setting aside the embargo and returning to the earlier policy of non-intercourse, Congress adopted a measure which excluded all English and French vessels and imports, but which authorized the President to renew trade with either country if it should mend its ways. On March 1, 1809, with much bitterness of spirit, Thomas Jefferson signed the bill which ended his great experiment. Martha Jefferson once said of her father that he never gave up a friend or an opinion. A few months before his death, he alluded to the embargo, with the pathetic insistence of old age, as “a measure, which, persevered in a little longer . . . would have effected its object completely.”
CHAPTER IX. THE LAST PHASE OF PEACEABLE COERCION
Three days after Jefferson gave his consent to the repeal of the embargo, the Presidency passed in succession to the second of the Virginia Dynasty. It was not an impressive figure that stood beside Jefferson and faced the great crowd gathered in the new Hall of Representatives at the Capitol. James Madison was a pale, extremely nervous, and obviously unhappy person on this occasion. For a masterful character this would have been the day of days; for Madison it was a fearful ordeal which sapped every ounce of energy. He trembled violently as he began to speak and his voice was almost inaudible. Those who could not hear him but who afterward read the Inaugural Address doubtless comforted themselves with the reflection that they had not missed much. The new President, indeed, had nothing new to say–no new policy to advocate. He could only repeat the old platitudes about preferring “amicable discussion and reasonable accommodation of differences to a decision of them by an appeal to arms.” Evidently, no strong assertion of national rights was to be expected from this plain, homespun President.
At the Inaugural Ball, however, people forgot their President in admiration of the President’s wife, Dolly Madison. “She looked a queen,” wrote Mrs. Margaret Bayard Smith. “She had on a pale buff-colored velvet, made plain, with a very long train, but not the least trimming, and beautiful pearl necklace, earrings, and bracelets. Her head dress was a turban of the same colored velvet and white satin (from Paris) with two superb plumes, the bird of paradise feathers. It would be ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for any one to behave with more perfect propriety than she did. Unassuming dignity, sweetness, grace. Mr. Madison, on the contrary,” continued this same warm-hearted observer, “seemed spiritless and exhausted. While he was standing by me, I said, ‘I wish with all my heart I had a little bit of seat to offer you.’ ‘I wish so too,’ said he, with a most woebegone face, and looking as if he could hardly stand. The managers came up to ask him to stay to supper, he assented, and turning to me, ‘but I would much rather be in bed,’ he said.” Quite different was Mr. Jefferson on this occasion. He seemed to be in high spirits and “his countenance beamed with a benevolent joy.” It seemed to this ardent admirer that “every demonstration of respect to Mr. M. gave Mr. J. more pleasure than if paid to himself.” No wonder that Mr. Jefferson was in good spirits. Was he not now free from all the anxieties and worries of politics? Already he was counting on retiring “to the elysium of domestic affections and the irresponsible direction” of his own affairs. A week later he set out for Monticello on horseback, never again to set foot in the city which had witnessed his triumph and his humiliation.
The election of Madison had disclosed wide rifts in his party. Monroe had lent himself to the designs of John Randolph and had entered the list of candidates for the Presidency; and Vice-President Clinton had also been put forward by other malcontents. It was this division in the ranks of the opposition which in the end had insured Madison’s election; but factional differences pursued Madison into the White House. Even in the choice of his official family he was forced to consider the preferences of politicians whom he despised, for when he would have appointed Gallatin Secretary of State, he found Giles of Virginia and Samuel Smith of Maryland bent upon defeating the nomination. The Smith faction was, indeed, too influential to be ignored; with a wry face Madison stooped to a bargain which left Gallatin at the head of the Treasury but which saddled his Administration with Robert Smith, who proved to be quite unequal to the exacting duties of the Department of State.
The Administration began with what appeared to be a great diplomatic triumph. In April the President issued a proclamation announcing that the British orders-in-council would be withdrawn on the 10th of June, after which date commerce with Great Britain might be renewed. In the newspapers appeared, with this welcome proclamation, a note drafted by the British Minister Erskine expressing the confident hope that all differences between the two countries would be adjusted by a special envoy whom His Majesty had determined to send to the United States. The Republican press was jubilant. At last the sage of Monticello was vindicated. “It may be boldly alleged,” said the National Intelligencer, “that the revocation of the British orders is attributable to the embargo.”
Forgotten now were all the grievances against Great Britain. Every shipping port awoke to new life. Merchants hastened to consign the merchandise long stored in their warehouses; shipmasters sent out runners for crews; and ships were soon winging their way out into the open sea. For three months American vessels crossed the ocean unmolested, and then came the bitter, the incomprehensible news that Erskine’s arrangement had been repudiated and the over-zealous diplomat recalled. The one brief moment of triumph in Madison’s administration had passed.
Slowly and painfully the public learned the truth. Erskine had exceeded his instructions. Canning had not been averse to concessions, it is true, but he had named as an indispensable condition of any concession that the United States should bind itself to exclude French ships of war from its ports. Instead of holding to the letter of his instructions, Erskine had allowed himself to be governed by the spirit of concession and had ignored the essential prerequisite. Nothing remained but to renew the NonIntercourse Act against Great Britain. This the President did by proclamation on August 9, 1809, and the country settled back sullenly into commercial inactivity.
Another scarcely less futile chapter in diplomacy began with the arrival of Francis James Jackson as British Minister in September. Those who knew this Briton were justified in concluding that conciliation had no important place in the programme of the Foreign Office, for it was he who, two years before, had conducted those negotiations with Denmark which culminated in the bombardment and destruction of Copenhagen. “It is rather a prevailing notion here,” wrote Pinkney from London, “that this gentleman’s conduct will not and cannot be what we all wish.” And this impression was so fully shared by Madison that he would not hasten his departure from Montpelier but left Jackson to his own devices at the capital for a full month.
This interval of enforced inactivity had one unhappy consequence. Not finding employment for all his idle hours, Jackson set himself to read the correspondence of his predecessor, and from it he drew the conclusion that Erskine was a greater fool than he had thought possible, and that the American Government had been allowed to use language of which “every third word was a declaration of war.” The further he read the greater his ire, so that when the President arrived in Washington (October 1), Jackson was fully resolved to let the American Government know what was due to a British Minister who had had audiences “with most of the sovereigns of Europe.”
Though neither the President nor Gallatin, to whose mature judgment he constantly turned, believed that Jackson had any proposals to make, they were willing to let Robert Smith carry on informal conversations with him. It speedily appeared that so far from making overtures, Jackson was disposed to await proposals. The President then instructed the Secretary of State to announce that further discussions would be “in the written form” and henceforth himself took direct charge of negotiations. The exchange of letters which followed reveals Madison at his best. His rapier-like thrusts soon pierced even the thick hide of this conceited Englishman. The stupid Smith who signed these letters appeared to be no mean adversary after all.
In one of his rejoinders the British Minister yielded to a flash of temper and insinuated (as Canning in his instructions had done) that the American Government had known Erskine’s instructions and had encouraged him to set them aside–had connived in short at his wrongdoing. “Such insinuations,” replied Madison sharply, “are inadmissible in the intercourse of a foreign minister with a government that understands what it owes itself.” “You will find that in my correspondence with you,” wrote Jackson angrily, “I have carefully avoided drawing conclusions that did not necessarily follow from the premises advanced by me, and least of all should I think of uttering an insinuation where I was unable to substantiate a fact.” A fatal outburst of temper which delivered the writer into the hands of his adversary. “Sir,” wrote the President, still using the pen of his docile secretary, “finding that you have used a language which cannot be understood but as reiterating and even aggravating the same gross insinuation, it only remains, in order to preclude opportunities which are thus abused, to inform you that no further communications will be received from you.” Therewith terminated the American Mission of Francis James Jackson.
Following this diplomatic episode, Congress Wain sought a way of escape from the consequences of total nonintercourse. It finally enacted a bill known as Macon’s Bill No. 2, which in a sense reversed the former policy, since it left commerce everywhere free, and authorized the President, “in case either Great Britain or France shall, before the 3d day of March next, so revoke or modify her edicts as that they shall cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States,” to cut off trade with the nation which continued to offend. The act thus gave the President an immense discretionary power which might bring the country face to face with war. It was the last act in that extraordinary series of restrictive measures which began with the Non-Intercourse Act of 1806. The policy of peaceful coercion entered on its last phase.
And now, once again, the shadow of the Corsican fell across the seas. With the unerring shrewdness of an intellect never vexed by ethical considerations, Napoleon announced that he would meet the desires of the American Government. “I am authorized to declare to you, Sir,” wrote the Duc de Cadore, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Armstrong, “that the Decrees of Berlin and Milan are revoked, and that after November 1 they will cease to have effect–it being understood that in consequence of this declaration the English are to revoke their Orders-in-Council, and renounce the new principles of blockade which they have wished to establish; or that the United States, conformably to the Act you have just communicated [the Macon Act], cause their rights to be respected by the English.”
It might be supposed that President Madison, knowing with whom he had to deal, would have hesitated to accept Napoleon’s asseverations at their face value. He had, indeed, no assurances beyond Cadore’s letter that the French decrees had been repealed. But he could not let slip this opportunity to force Great Britain’s hand. It seemed to be a last chance to test the effectiveness of peaceable coercion. On November 2, 1810, he issued the momentous proclamation which eventually made Great Britain rather than France the object of attack. “It has been officially made known to this government,” said the President, “that the said edicts of France have been so revoked as that they ceased, on the first day of the present month, to violate the neutral commerce of the United States.” Thereupon the Secretary of the Treasury instructed collectors of customs that commercial intercourse with Great Britain would be suspended after the 2d of February of the following year.
The next three months were full of painful experiences for President Madison. He waited, and waited in vain, for authentic news of the formal repeal of the French decrees; and while he waited, he was distressed and amazed to learn that American vessels were still being confiscated in French ports. In the midst of these uncertainties occurred the biennial congressional elections, the outcome of which only deepened his perplexities. Nearly one-half of those who sat in the existing Congress failed of reelection, yet, by a vicious custom, the new House, which presumably reflected the popular mood in 1810, would not meet for thirteen months, while the old discredited Congress wearily dragged out its existence in a last session. Vigorous presidential leadership, it is true, might have saved the expiring Congress from the reproach of incapacity, but such leadership was not to be expected from James Madison.
So it was that the President’s message to this moribund Congress was simply a counsel of prudence and patience. It pointed out, to be sure, the uncertainties of the situation, but it did not summon Congress sternly to face the alternatives. It alluded mildly to the need of a continuance of our defensive and precautionary arrangements, and suggested further organization and training of the militia; it contemplated with satisfaction the improvement of the quantity and quality of the output of cannon and small arms; it set the seal of the President’s approval upon the new military academy; but nowhere did it sound a trumpet-call to real preparedness.
Even to these mild suggestions Congress responded indifferently. It slightly increased the naval appropriations, but it actually reduced the appropriations for the army; and it adjourned without acting on the bill authorizing the President to enroll fifty thousand volunteers. Personal animosity and prejudice combined to defeat the proposals of the Secretary of the Treasury. A bill to recharter the national bank, which Gallatin regarded as an indispensable fiscal agent, was defeated; and a bill providing for a general increase of duties on imports to meet the deficit was laid aside. Congress would authorize a loan of five million dollars but no new taxes. Only one bill was enacted which could be said to sustain the President’s policy–that reviving certain parts of the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809 against Great Britain. With this last helpless gasp the Eleventh Congress expired.
The defeat of measures which the Administration had made its own amounted to a vote of no confidence. Under similar circumstances an English Ministry would have either resigned or tested the sentiment of the country by a general election; but the American Executive possesses no such means of appealing immediately and directly to the electorate. President and Congress must live out their allotted terms of office, even though their antagonism paralyzes the operation of government. What, then, could be done to restore confidence in the Administration of President Madison and to establish a modus vivendi between Executive and Legislative?
It seemed to the Secretary of Treasury, smarting under the defeat of his bank bill, that he had become a burden to the Administration, an obstacle in the way of cordial cooperation between the branches of the Federal Government. The factions which had defeated his appointment to the Department of State seemed bent upon discrediting him and his policies. “I clearly perceive,” he wrote to the President, “that my continuing a member of the present Administration is no longer of any public utility, invigorates the opposition against yourself, and must necessarily be attended with an increased loss of reputation by myself. Under those impressions, not without reluctance, and after perhaps hesitating too long in the hopes of a favorable change, I beg leave to tender you my resignation.”
This timely letter probably saved the Administration. Not for an instant could the President consider sacrificing the man who for ten years had been the mainstay of Republican power. Madison acted with unwonted promptitude. He refused to accept Gallatin’s resignation, and determined to break once and for all with the faction which had hounded Gallatin from the day of his appointment and which had foisted upon the President an unwelcome Secretary of State. Not Gallatin but Robert Smith should go. Still more surprising was Madison’s quick decision to name Monroe as Smith’s successor, if he could be prevailed upon to accept. Both Virginians understood the deeper personal and political significance of this appointment. Madison sought an alliance with a faction which had challenged his administrative policy; Monroe inferred that no opposition would be interposed to his eventual elevation to the Presidency when Madison should retire. What neither for the moment understood was the effect which the appointment would have upon the foreign policy of the Administration. Monroe hesitated, for he and his friends had been open critics of the President’s pro-French policy. Was the new Secretary of State to be bound by this policy, or was the President prepared to reverse his course and effect a reconciliation with England?
These very natural misgivings the President brushed aside by assuring Monroe’s friends that he was very hopeful of settling all differences with both France and England. Certainly he had in no wise committed himself to a course which would prevent a renewal of negotiations with England; he had always desired “a cordial accommodation.” Thus reassured, Monroe accepted the invitation, never once doubting that he would reverse the policy of the Administration, achieve a diplomatic triumph, and so appear as the logical successor to President Madison.
Had the new Secretary of State known the instructions which the British Foreign Office was drafting at this moment for Mr. Augustus J. Foster, Jackson’s successor, he would have been less sanguine. This “very gentlemanlike young man,” as Jackson called him, was told to make some slight concessions to American sentiment–he might make proper amends for the Chesapeake affair but on the crucial matter of the French decrees he was bidden to hold rigidly to the uncompromising position taken by the Foreign Office from the beginning–that the President was mistaken in thinking that they had been repealed. The British Government could not modify its orders-in-council on unsubstantiated rumors that the offensive French decrees had been revoked. Secretly Foster was informed that the Ministry was prepared to retaliate if the American Government persisted in shutting out British importations. No one in the ministry, or for that matter in the British Isles, seems to have understood that the moment had come for concession and not retaliation, if peaceful relations were to continue.
It was most unfortunate that while Foster was on his way to the United States, British cruisers would have renewed the blockade of New York. Two frigates, the Melampus and the Guerriere, lay off Sandy Hook and resumed the old irritating practice of holding up American vessels and searching them for deserters. In the existing state of American feeling, with the Chesapeake outrage still unredressed, the behavior of the British commanders was as perilous as walking through a powder magazine with a live coal. The American navy had suffered severely from Jefferson’s “chaste reformation” but it had not lost its fighting spirit. Officers who had served in the war with Tripoli prayed for a fair chance to avenge the Chesapeake; and the Secretary of the Navy had abetted this spirit in his orders to Commodore John Rodgers, who was patrolling the coast with a squadron of frigates and sloops. “What has been perpetrated,” Rodgers was warned, “may be again attempted. It is therefore our duty to be prepared and determined at every hazard to vindicate the injured honor of our navy, and revive the drooping spirit of the nation.”
Under the circumstances it would have been little short of a miracle if an explosion had not occurred; yet for a year Rodgers sailed up and down the coast without encountering the British frigates. On May 16, 1811, however, Rodgers in his frigate, the President, sighted a suspicious vessel some fifty miles off Cape Henry. From her general appearance he judged her to be a man-of-war and probably the Guerriere. He decided to approach her, he relates, in order to ascertain whether a certain seaman alleged to have been impressed was aboard; but the vessel made off and he gave chase. By dusk the two ships were abreast. Exactly what then happened will probably never be known, but all accounts agree that a shot was fired and that a general engagement followed. Within fifteen minutes the strange vessel was disabled and lay helpless under the guns of the President, with nine of her crew dead and twenty-three wounded. Then, to his intense disappointment, Rodgers learned that his adversary was not the Guerriere but the British sloop of war Little Belt, a craft greatly inferior to his own.
However little this one-sided sea fight may have salved the pride of the American navy, it gave huge satisfaction to the general public. The Chesapeake was avenged. When Foster disembarked he found little interest in the reparations which he was charged to offer. He had been prepared to settle a grievance in a good-natured way; he now felt himself obliged to demand explanations. The boot was on the other leg; and the American public lost none of the humor of the situation. Eventually he offered to disavow Admiral Berkeley’s act, to restore the seamen taken from the Chesapeake, and to compensate them and their families. In the course of time the two unfortunates who had survived were brought from their prison at Halifax and restored to the decks of the Chesapeake in Boston Harbor. But as for the Little Belt, Foster had to rest content with the findings of an American court of inquiry which held that the British sloop had fired the first shot. As yet there were no visible signs that Monroe had effected a change in the foreign policy of the