These depredations were not confined to the seizing and confiscating American ships under the pretense that their cargoes were contraband. Seamen were taken out of them on the charge of being British subjects and deserters, not only on the high seas in larger numbers than ever before, but within the waters of the United States. No doubt these seamen were often British subjects and their seizure was justifiable, provided England could rightfully extend to all parts of the globe and to the ships of all nations the merciless system of impressment to which her own people were compelled to submit at home. Monroe, in a note to Madison, said that the British minister had informed him that "great abuses were committed in granting protections" in America, and acknowledged that "he gave me some examples which were most shameful." But even if it could be granted that English naval officers might seize such men without recourse to law, wherever they should be found and without respect for the flag of another nation, it was a national insult and outrage, calling for resentment and resistance, to impress American citizens under the pretense that they were British subjects. But what was the remedy? As a last resort in such cases, nations have but one. Diplomacy and legislation may be first tried, but, if these fail, war must be the final ordeal. For this the administration made no preparation, and the more evident the unreadiness the less was the chance of redress in any other way. Immediate war would, of course, have been unwise; for what could a nation almost without a ship hope from a contest with a power having the largest and most efficient navy in the world? If this, however, was true from 1805 to 1807, it was not less true in 1812. But it need not have been true when war was actually resorted to, had the intervening years been years of preparation. The fact was, however, that the party which supported the administration was no more in favor of war at the earlier period than the administration itself was; and meanwhile, till a war party had come into existence and gained the ascendency, the country had been growing every year less and less in a condition to appeal to war.

The first measure adopted to meet the aggressions of the English was an act prohibiting the importation of certain British products. This had always been a favorite policy with Madison. He had advanced and upheld it in former years, when a member of Congress, and when Great Britain had first violated the rights and dignity of the United States by interference with her foreign trade and by impressing her citizens. Non-intercourse had been an effective measure thirty years before, and had a kind of prestige as an American policy. It was not seen, perhaps could not be seen without experience, that a measure suited to the colonial condition was not sufficient for an independent nation. But the President and secretary were in perfect accord; for Jefferson preferred anything to war, and Madison was persuaded that England would be brought to terms by the loss of the best market for her manufactures. Others, and notably John Randolph, saw in the measure only the first step which, if persisted in, must lead to war; while, in the mean time, to interfere with importations would be quite as great an injury to the United States as to Great Britain. Randolph was apt to blurt out a good deal of truth when it happened to suit him. Impressment, he said, was an old grievance which had been thought a sufficient provocation for war when the nation was not prepared; and it was no more ready to resort to that desperate remedy now than it had been in the past. Without a navy it would be impossible to prevent the blockading of all the principal American ports by English squadrons. The United States would need an ally, and he was not willing she should throw herself into the arms of that power which was seeking universal conquest. France, he said, would be the tyrant of the ocean if the British navy should be driven from it. The commerce, moreover, which it was proposed to protect, was not the "honest trade of America," but "a mushroom, a fungus of war,—a trade which, so soon as the nations of Europe are at peace, will no longer exist." It was only "a carrying trade which covers enemy's property;" and he did not believe in plunging a great agricultural country into war for the benefit of the shipping merchants of a few seaports. There were many who agreed with him; for it was one of the cardinal principles of the Jeffersonian school of politics that between commerce and agriculture there was a natural antagonism.

But the administration did not rely upon legislation alone in this emergency. The President followed up the act prohibiting the introduction of British goods by sending William Pinkney to England in the spring of 1806 to join Monroe, the resident minister, in an attempt at negotiation. These commissioners soon wrote that there was good reason for hoping that a treaty would be concluded, and thereupon the non-importation act was for a time suspended. In December came the news that a treaty was agreed upon, and soon after it was received by the President. The most serious difficulty in the way of negotiation had been the question of impressment. The British government claimed the right to arrest deserters from its service anywhere outside the jurisdiction of other nations, and that jurisdiction, it was maintained, could not extend beyond the coast limit over the open sea, the highway of all nations. There was an evident disposition, however, to come to some compromise. The English commissioners proposed that their government should prohibit, under penalty, the seizure of American citizens anywhere, and that the United States should forbid, on her part, the granting of certificates of citizenship to British subjects, of which deserters took advantage. But as this would be an acknowledgment virtually of the right of search on board American ships, and the denial of citizenship in the United States to foreigners, the American commissioners could not entertain that proposition. They were willing, however, if the assumed right to board American ships were given up, to agree, on behalf of their government, to aid in the arrest and return of British deserters when seeking a refuge in the United States. But to this the British commissioners would not accede.

Monroe and Pinkney were enjoined, in the instructions written by the secretary of state, to make the abandonment of impressment the first condition of a treaty. A treaty, nevertheless, was agreed upon, without this provision. But when it was sent to the President, the ministers explained:—

"That, although this government [the British] did not feel at liberty to relinquish, formally, by treaty, its claim to search our merchant vessels for British seamen, its practice would nevertheless be essentially, if not completely, abandoned. That opinion has since been confirmed by frequent conferences on the subject with the British commissioners, who have repeatedly assured us that, in their judgment, we were made as sure against the exercise of their pretension by the policy which their government had adopted in regard to that very delicate and important question, as we could have been made by treaty."

These assurances did not satisfy the President. Without consulting the Senate, though Congress was in session when the treaty was received, and although the Senate had been previously informed that one had been agreed upon, the President rejected it. On several other points it was not acceptable; but, as Mr. Madison wrote to a friend, "the case of impressments particularly having been brought to a formal issue, and having been the primary object of an extraordinary mission, a treaty could not be closed which was silent on that subject." The commissioners, therefore, were ordered to renew negotiations. This they faithfully tried to do for a year, but were finally told by the British minister that a treaty once concluded and signed, but afterward rejected in part by one of the contracting powers, could not again be taken up for consideration. The opponents of the administration made the most of this action of Mr. Jefferson. The country was not permitted to forget, even were forgetfulness possible, that thousands of seamen had been taken from American vessels, and that the larger proportion of these were native-born citizens of the United States. Not that these opponents wanted war; that, they believed, would be ruinous without a navy, and therefore some reasonable compromise was all that could be hoped for. But what was to be thought of an administration that would not go to war because it was not prepared; would not prepare in the hope that some future conjunction of circumstances would stave off that last resort; and, meanwhile, would accept no terms which might at least mitigate the injuries visited upon the sea-faring people of the United States, and possibly relieve the nation from an insolent exercise of power which it was not strong enough to resent?

As England's need of seamen increased, the captains of her cruisers, encouraged by the failure of negotiation, grew bolder in overhauling American ships and taking out as many men as they believed, or pretended to believe, were deserters. In the summer of 1807 an outrage was perpetrated on the frigate Chesapeake, as if to emphasize the contempt with which a nation must be looked upon which only screamed like a woman at wrongs which it wanted the courage and strength to resent, or the wisdom to compound for. The Chesapeake was followed out of the harbor of Norfolk by the British man-of-war Leopard, and when a few miles at sea, the Chesapeake being brought to under the pretense that the English captain wished to put some dispatches on board for Europe, a demand was made for certain deserters supposed to be on the American frigate. Commodore Barron replied that he knew of no deserters on his ship, and that he could permit no search to be made, even if there were. After some further altercation the Englishman fired a broadside, killing and wounding a number of the Chesapeake's crew. Commodore Barron could do nothing else but surrender, for he had only a single gun in readiness for use, and that was fired only once and then with a coal from the cook's galley. The ship was then boarded, the crew mustered, and four men arrested as deserters. Three of them were negroes,—two natives of the United States, the other of South America. The fourth man, probably, was an Englishman. They were all deserters from English men-of-war lying off Norfolk; but the three negroes declared that they had been kidnaped, and their right to escape could not be justly questioned; indeed, the English afterward took this view of it apparently, for the men were released on the arrival of the Leopard at Halifax. But the fourth man was hanged.

For this direct national insult, explanation, apology, and reparation were demanded, and at the same time the President put forth a proclamation forbidding all British ships of war to remain in American waters. Of how much use the latter was we learn from a letter of Madison to Monroe: "They continue to defy it," he wrote, "not only by remaining within our waters, but by chasing merchant vessels arriving and departing." Some preparation was made for war, but it was only to call upon the militia to be in readiness, and to order Mr. Jefferson's gunboats to the most exposed ports. Great Britain was not alarmed. The captain of the Leopard, indeed, was removed from his command, as having exceeded his duty; but a proclamation on that side was also issued, requiring all ships of war to seize British seamen on board foreign merchantmen, to demand them from foreign ships of war, and if the demand was refused to report the fact to the admiral of the fleet. It was not till after four years of irritating controversy that any settlement was reached in regard to the affair of the Chesapeake.

New perils all the while were besetting American commerce. In November, 1806, Napoleon's Berlin decree was promulgated, forbidding the introduction into France of the products of Great Britain and her colonies, whether in her own ships or those of other nations. This was in violation of the convention between France and the United States, if it was meant that American vessels should come under the prohibition; but for a time there was some hope that they might be excepted. In the course of the year, however, it was officially declared in Paris that the treaty would not be allowed to weaken the force of a war measure aimed at Great Britain. Under this decision, cargoes already seized were confiscated and the trade of the United States faced a new calamity. The decree, it was declared, was a rightful retaliation of a British order in council of six months before, which had established a partial blockade of a portion of the French coast. In the kidnaping business, France could not, of course, compete with England; for there were few of her citizens to be found on board of American vessels, and to seize a Yankee sailor, under the pretense that he was a Frenchman, was an absurdity never thought of. But hundreds of Americans, the crews of ships seized for violation of the terms of the Berlin decree, were thrown into French prisons. So far, therefore, as the United States had good ground of complaint on any score against either power, there was little to choose between them. Mr. Jefferson's repugnance to war was sufficient to hold him back from one with England, though he might have had France for an ally; still more unwilling was he, by a war with France, to make a friend of England, whom he still looked upon as the natural enemy of the United States; for, notwithstanding all that had come and gone, he still regarded France with something of the old affection. In the autumn of 1807 he called a special session of Congress in consideration of the increasing aggressions of Great Britain, especially in the attack upon the Chesapeake, and the injury done by the interdiction of neutral trade with any country with which that power was at war. But he had no recommendations to offer of resistance nor even of defense, except that some additions be made to the gunboats, and that sailors on shore be enrolled as a sort of gunboat militia. The probable real purpose of calling the extra session, however, appeared in about two weeks, when he sent a special message to the Senate recommending an embargo.

An act was almost immediately passed which, if anything more was needed to complete the ruin of American commerce, supplied that deficiency. A month before this time the English ministry had issued a new order in council—the news of which reached Jefferson as he was about to send in his message—proclaiming a blockade of pretty much all Europe, and forbidding any trade in neutral vessels unless they had first gone into some British port and paid duties on their cargoes; and within twenty-four hours of the President's message recommending the embargo, Napoleon proclaimed a new decree from Milan, by which it was declared that any ship was lawful prize that had anything whatever to do with Great Britain,—that should pay it tribute, that should carry its merchandise, that should be bound either to or from any of its ports. All that these powers could do to shut every trading vessel out of all European ports was now done; and at this opportune moment Mr. Jefferson came to their aid by compelling all American vessels to stay at home. It is not easy in our time to conceive of a President proposing, or of a party accepting, or of the people submitting to, such a measure as this. But Mr. Jefferson's followers were very obedient, and there was, undoubtedly, a very general belief that trade with the United States was so important to the nations at war that for the sake of its renewal the obnoxious decrees and orders in council would soon be repealed. But, except upon certain manufacturers in England, little influence was visible. General Armstrong, the American minister in France, wrote: "Here it is not felt; and in England, amid the more recent and interesting events of the day, it is forgotten." When, however, the effect was evident at home of a law forbidding any American vessels from going to sea, even to catch fish, and prohibiting the export of any of the products of the United States, either in their own ships or those of any other country, then there arose a popular clamor for the abandonment of a policy so ruinous. Within four months of its enactment, Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts declared, in a debate in Congress, that "an experiment such as is now making was never before—I will not say tried—it never before entered into the human imagination. There is nothing like it in the narrations of history or in the tales of fiction. All the habits of a mighty nation are at once counteracted. All their property depreciated. All their external connections violated. Five millions of people are engaged. They cannot go beyond the limits of that once free country; now they are not even permitted to thrust their own property through the grates." While American ships at home were kept there, those which had remained abroad to escape the embargo were met by a new peril. Some of them were in French ports awaiting a turn in affairs; others ventured to load with English goods in English ports, to be landed in France under the pretense, supported by fraudulent papers, that they were direct from the United States or other neutral country. The fraud was too transparent to escape detection long, and Napoleon thereupon issued, in the spring of 1808, the Bayonne decree authorizing the seizure and confiscation of all American vessels. They were either English or American, he said; if the former, they were enemy's ships and liable to capture; but if the latter, they should be at home, and he was only enforcing the embargo law of the United States, which she ought to thank him for.

The prosperity and tranquillity which marked the earlier years of Jefferson's administration disappeared in its last year. Congress, both in its spring and winter sessions, could talk of little else but the disastrous embargo; proposing, on the one hand, to make it the more stringent by an enforcement act, and, on the other, to substitute for it non-intercourse with England and France, restoring trade with the rest of the world, and leaving the question of decrees and orders in council open for future consideration. The President no longer held his party under perfect control. The mischievous results of the embargo policy were evident enough to a sufficient number of Republicans to secure in February, 1809, the repeal of that measure, to take effect the next month as to all countries except England and France, and, with regard to them, at the adjournment of the next Congress. But the prohibition of importation from both these latter countries was continued till the obnoxious orders in council and the decrees should be repealed.



CHAPTER XVIII

MADISON AS PRESIDENT

Mr. Jefferson named his own successor. Of the three Democratic candidates, Madison, Monroe, and George Clinton, he preferred Madison now, and urged Monroe to wait patiently as next in succession. Beyond two lives he did not, perhaps, think proper to dictate; and, besides, Clinton was not a Virginian. What little opposition there was to Madison in his own party came from those who feared that he was too thoroughly identified with Jefferson's policy to untie the knot in which the foreign relations of the country had become entangled. Of the 175 electoral votes, however, he received 122; but that was fewer by 39 than had been cast for Jefferson four years before. Of the New England States, Vermont alone gave him its votes, changing places with Rhode Island, which had wheeled into line again with the Federalists.

During the winter of 1808-9, after Madison's election but before his inauguration, he had quietly conferred with Erskine, the British minister at Washington, upon the condition of affairs. Much was hoped from these conferences; but the end which they helped to bring about was the reverse of what was hoped for. Could Madison have had his way, he would probably have preferred that Congress should have left untouched at that session the questions of embargo and non-intercourse; for the tone of the debates and the tendency of legislation naturally led the English ministry to doubt the assurances which Erskine gave that these proceedings did not truly represent the friendly disposition of the incoming President. In answer to those representations, however, there came in April from Canning, the foreign secretary, certain propositions which were so presented by Erskine, and so received by the administration, as to promise a settlement of all differences between the two governments. Erskine was a young man, anxious very likely for distinction; but a laudable ambition to be of service in a good cause made him over-zealous. He exceeded the letter of his instructions, while keeping, as he thought, to their spirit. Probably he mistook their spirit in assuming that his government cared more to secure a settlement of existing difficulties than for the precise terms and minor details by which it should be reached. At any rate, he agreed that Great Britain would withdraw her orders in council provided the United States would maintain the non-intercourse acts against France so long as the Berlin and Milan decrees remained in force. This being secured, he did not insist upon two other conditions—partly because it was represented to him that they would need some action by Congress, and partly because he believed that the essential point was gained by an agreement on the part of the United States to enforce non-intercourse against France while her decrees were unrepealed. These other conditions were, first, that the United States should cease to insist upon the right to carry on in time of war the colonial trade of a belligerent which had not been open in time of peace to neutrals; and, second, the acknowledgment that British men-of-war might rightfully seize American merchant vessels when transgressing the non-intercourse laws against France. He also proposed a settlement of the Chesapeake question, but omitted to say, as Canning had instructed him to say, that some provision would be made, as an act of generosity and not of right, for the wives and children of the men who were killed on board that ship. But when that settlement was accepted by the administration, he failed to resent some reflections from Robert Smith, the secretary of state, on the conduct of Great Britain in that affair, which Canning, when he heard of them, thought should have been resented and their recall demanded, or the negotiation stopped.

On the terms, however, as Erskine chose to present them, an agreement was reached, and the President issued a proclamation repealing the acts of embargo and non-intercourse as against Great Britain and her colonies after June 10. On that day more than a thousand ships, loaded and riding at anchor in all the principal ports in anxious readiness for the signal for flight, spread their wings, like a flock of long-imprisoned birds, and flew out to sea. There was an almost universal shout of gratitude to the new President, who, in the first three months of his administration, had banished the fear of war abroad, and at home was sweeping away involuntary idleness, want, and ominous discontent. Madison had known something of popularity during his long career; but never before had he felt the exultation of riding upon the very crest of a mighty wave of popular applause. But it was one of those waves that collapse suddenly into a surprising flatness. Canning repudiated all that Erskine had done and immediately recalled him. The ships that had gone to sea, under the sanction of the President's proclamation, were permitted by an order in council to complete their voyages unmolested; but otherwise all commerce was once more brought to a standstill. It would have been easier to bear some fresh misfortune than to be compelled to struggle again with calamities so well understood and which it was hoped had been left behind forever. Gallatin had been retained in the Treasury Department and was the President's chief adviser, and the two were now accused of having been either imbecile or treacherous. It was openly said that they had led the young minister to agree to an arrangement which they knew his government would not sanction. But they could hardly have been so foolish as to make a bargain with the certainty that it would stand only so long as a ship could go and come across the Atlantic. Nobody understood better than Madison how grateful a reconciliation with England would be to a large proportion of the people, and nobody was more disappointed that the negotiations came to worse than nothing, inasmuch as their failure led to new embarrassments.

He said with some bitterness, in a letter to Jefferson, early in August: "You will see by the instructions to Erskine, as published by Canning, that the latter was as much determined that there should be no adjustment as the former was that there should be one." He was unjust to Canning; the real fault was with Erskine, and with him only because his zeal outran his judgment. In another letter to Jefferson, the President says: "Erskine is in a ticklish situation with his government. I suspect he will not be able to defend himself against the charges of exceeding his instructions, notwithstanding the appeal he makes to sundry others not published. But he will make out a strong case against Canning, and be able to avail himself much of the absurdity and evident inadmissibility of the articles disregarded by him." Possibly Mr. Erskine considered that his government would approve of his not urging these points too earnestly, inasmuch as the other side refrained from insisting upon the abandonment of impressment of seamen on board American ships. But Mr. Madison's indignation must have covered up a good deal of mortification. He could hardly have been without the sensation of one hoisted by his own petard. It was only two years since Mr. Jefferson, with his approval, had rejected the Monroe-Pinkney treaty because instructions had not been literally complied with. Mr. Canning, in following that example, could have pleaded, had he chosen, much the stronger justification, under the circumstances of the two cases; and Mr. Madison could not fail to remember, without being reminded of it, when this agreement was thrown back in his face, that he had been willing to accept it without any protection of the rights of American seamen, the want of which was the ostensible reason for rejecting the Monroe-Pinkney treaty.

However, the administration was now compelled to meet anew the old difficulties which the Erskine agreement had failed to dispose of. The President's first duty was to issue a second proclamation, recalling the previous one which had sent to sea every American ship in port. They could all come back, if they would, to be made fast again at their wharves, till the recurrent tides at last should ripple in and out of their open seams, and their yards and masts drop piecemeal upon the rotting decks. But many never came back, preferring rather the risk of being sunk or burned at sea, which happened to not a few, or of capture and confiscation by the belligerents whose laws they defied. Erskine was followed by a new ambassador from England, Mr. Jackson. His mission, however, had no other result than to widen the breach between the two nations. A controversy almost immediately arose between the minister and Mr. Smith, the secretary of state,—or rather Mr. Madison himself, who, as he complained at a later period, did most of Smith's work as well as his own,—touching the arrangement with Erskine. Jackson intimated, or was understood as intimating, that the administration must have known the precise terms on which Erskine was empowered to treat with the government of the United States; and when a denial was made with a good deal of emphasis on the part of the administration, the insinuation was repeated almost as a direct charge. Of course there could be but one conclusion to correspondence of this sort; further communication with Jackson was declined and his recall asked for.

It was plain enough in the latter months of Jefferson's administration, to himself as well as to everybody else, that the embargo had not only failed to bring the belligerents to terms abroad, but that it had added greatly to the distress at home. That the measure was a failure, Madison himself acknowledged in one of his retrospective letters written in the retirement of Montpellier, sixteen years afterward. It was meant, he said in that letter, as an experimental measure, preferable to naked submission or to war at a time when war was inexpedient. It failed, he added, "because the government did not sufficiently distrust those in a certain quarter whose successful violation of the law led to the general discontent, which called for its repeal." That is to say, the government relied too confidently upon the submission of New England; was too ready to believe that her merchants would not let their ships slip quietly out to sea whenever they could evade the officers of the customs, nor slip in to land a cargo at some unfrequented place where there was no custom-house. "The patriotic fishermen of Marblehead," he says, "at one time offered their services;" and he regrets they were not sent out as privateers to seize these contraband ships as prizes, and to "carry them into ports where the tribunals would enforce the law." Apparently there was not a reasonable doubt in his mind whether such tribunals could be found in any port along the coast of New England. It is also rather more than doubtful—even assuming that there was much of the kind of patriotism which he says existed in Marblehead—how long, had the government offered commissions to private citizens to prey upon their neighbors, the embargo would have been respected at all east of Long Island Sound. But this was the afterthought of 1826. Madison's policy in 1809-10 was rather to conciliate than provoke "those in a certain quarter." He could not command entire unanimity even in his own party. Congress passed the winter in vain efforts to find some common ground, not merely for Democrats and Federalists, but for the Democrats alone. Various measures were proposed to meet the critical condition of the country. Some were too radical; some not radical enough; and none were so acceptable that it was not easy to form combinations for their defeat. All were agreed that the non-importation act must be got rid of; but the difficulty was to find a way to be rid of it so that the nation should at once maintain its dignity, assert its rights, and escape a war. The President would have preferred that all British and French ships be excluded from American ports, and that importations from both countries should be prohibited except in American vessels; and a bill to this effect was one of several that was defeated in the course of the session. But at last, in May (1810), an act was passed excluding only the men-of-war of both nations, but suspending the non-importation act for three months after the adjournment of Congress. The President was then authorized, when the three months were passed, to declare the act again in force against either Great Britain or France, should the commercial orders or decrees of either nation be continued in force while those of the other were repealed.

If the aim of the dominant party had been to devise a scheme sure to lead to fresh complications more difficult to manage than any that had gone before, it could not have hit upon a better one than this. Hitherto, in all the perplexities and anxieties of the situation, the government had, at least, kept its relations to other powers in its own hands, to conduct them, whether wisely or unwisely, in its own way. It could resent or submit to encroachments upon the commerce of the country, as seemed most prudent; it could close or open the ports, as seemed most judicious; or it could join forces with that one of its two enemies whose alliance promised to secure respect on the one hand, and compel it on the other. But now it had tied itself up in a knot of provisos. It would do something if England would do something else, or if France would do something else. If the proposition was accepted by England and was not accepted by France, then the United States would remain in friendly relations with England, and assume by comparison an unfriendly attitude toward France; and if France accepted the condition and England declined it, then the situation would be reversed. Nothing would be gained in either case that might not have been gained by direct negotiation, and, no doubt, on better terms. But if the proposition now offered should be disregarded by both powers, the situation would be worse than before. This evidently was Madison's view of the question. He wrote to Pinkney, the minister at the Court of St. James, a month after the act was passed: "At the next meeting of Congress, it will be found, according to present appearances, that instead of an adjustment with either of the belligerents, there is an increasing obstinacy in both; and that the inconveniences of embargo and non-intercourse have been exchanged for the greater sacrifices, as well as disgrace, resulting from a submission to the predatory system in force." Not that he wanted war; his faith in passive resistance was still unshaken; embargo and non-intercourse he was still confident would, if persisted in long enough, surely bring the belligerents to terms. But as to this act, he weighs the chances as in a balance. In England some impression may be made by the prices of cotton and tobacco,—"cotton down at ten or eleven cents in Georgia; and the great mass of tobacco in the same situation." He has, however, no "very favorable expectations." But as to France, he evidently is not without hope that she will be wise enough to see that "she ought at once to embrace the arrangement held out by Congress, the renewal of a non-intercourse with Great Britain being the very species of resistance most analogous to her professed views." But he was clearly not sanguine.

If that was his wish, however, it was gratified. Napoleon did take advantage of the act, but in such a way as to reverse the relative positions of the two nations by seizing for France and taking from the United States the power or the will to dictate terms. The French minister, Champagny, announced in a letter merely, in August, the revocation of the Berlin and Milan decrees from the 1st of the following November; and, a day or two after, such new restrictions were imposed upon American trade, by prohibitory duties and a navigation act, as pretty much to ruin what little there was left of it. The revocation of the edicts, moreover, was coupled with the conditions that Great Britain should not only recall her order in council, but renounce her "new principles of blockade," or that the United States should "cause their rights to be respected by the English." Napoleon had in this three ends to gain, and he gained them all: First, to secure France against a renewal of the non-importation act of the United States, if the President should accept this conditional recall of the decrees as satisfactory; second, to leave those decrees virtually unrepealed, by making their recall depend upon the action of England, who, he well knew, would not listen to the proposed conditions; and, third, to involve the United States and England in new disputes, which might lead to war. Everything turned out as the emperor wished. The President accepted the conditional withdrawal of the French decrees, as in accordance with the act of Congress; England refused to recognize a contingent withdrawal as a withdrawal at all; and the result at length was war between England and the United States.

The acquiescence of the President in the decision of Napoleon was the more significant inasmuch as Mr. Smith, the secretary of state, had assured the French government, when a copy of the act of May was sent to it, that there could be no negotiation under the act until another matter was disposed of. A decree, issued at Rambouillet in March, 1810, and enforced in May, ordered the confiscation of all American ships then detained in the ports of France, and in Spanish, Dutch, and Neapolitan ports under the control of France. The loss to American merchants, including ships and cargoes, was estimated to be about forty million dollars. This decree was ostensibly in retaliation of that act of non-intercourse passed by Congress more than a year before, and was, therefore, a retrospective law. The non-intercourse act, moreover, had expired by its own limitation months before many of these ships were seized; but all, nevertheless, were confiscated, though some of them had entered the ports merely for shelter. By order of the President, Smith wrote to Armstrong, the American minister at Paris, that "a satisfactory provision for restoring the property lately surprised and seized, by the order or at the instance of the French government, must be combined with a repeal of the French edicts, with a view to a non-intercourse with Great Britain; such a provision being an indispensable evidence of the just purpose of France toward the United States." The injunction was repeated a few weeks later; but when the emperor's decision upon the decrees was announced, in August, the "indispensable" was dispensed with, and a few months later an absolute refusal of any compensation for the spoliation under the Rambouillet decree was quietly submitted to.

But meanwhile the President, in November, issued a proclamation announcing that France had complied with the act of the previous May and revoked the decrees, while the English orders in council remained unrepealed. But England still had three months, according to the act, in which to make her choice between a recall of her orders in council or the alternative of seeing the American non-intercourse act revived against her. But, it is to be observed, the French minister's announcement of the acceptance of the act of May was not made till August, and then the revocation of the decrees was not to take effect till November. November came bringing with it the President's proclamation, when it soon appeared that there was still to be "tarrying in the eating of the cake." The decrees were to remain in force at least three months longer, till it should be known whether Great Britain would comply with those terms which France—not the United States—made the condition of revoking the orders in council; and if Great Britain did not comply, then the French decrees were not revoked. The legality of the President's proclamation, of course, was questioned. There was, as Josiah Quincy said in debate in the House, the following February (1811), "a continued seizure of all the vessels which came within the grasp of the French custom-house, from the 1st of November down to the date of our last accounts." Other members, not more earnest, were less temperate in the expression of their indignation at what, one of them said, would be called swindling in the conduct of private affairs; while another declared that the President was throwing the people "into the embrace of that monster at whose perfidy Lucifer blushed and hell stands astonished." France knew all this while what England's decision would be. She was ready to rescind the orders in council when the French edicts were revoked, but she did not recognize a mere letter from the French minister, Champagny, to the American ambassador as such revocation. The second French condition, that England should abandon her "new principles of blockade" and accept in their place a new French principle, was peremptorily rejected by the English ministry. That proposition opened a question not properly belonging to an agreement touching the decrees and orders,—a question of what was a blockade, and what could properly be subject to it. Napoleon's doctrine was, not only that a paper blockade was not permissible by the law of nations, but that there could be no right of blockade "to ports not fortified, to harbors and mouths of rivers, which, according to reason and the usage of civilized nations, is applicable only to strong or fortified places." Mr. Emott, a member of the House from New York, said in debate that the United States might well be grateful to both England and France, if they would agree upon this doctrine as good international law; since in that case, as there were no fortified places in the United States, she would never be in peril of a blockade. But it was precisely what England would not admit nor even discuss as relevant to an agreement to revoke the orders and decrees.

To "this curious gallamatry," as Quincy called it, "of time present and time future, of doing and refraining to do, of declaration and understanding of English duties and American duties," was added another ingredient of Madison's own devising. The American ministers in England and France were instructed that Great Britain would be expected to include in the revocation of her orders in council the blockade of a portion of the coast of France, declared in May, 1806; and the President offered, unasked, a pledge to the French emperor, that this should be insisted upon. Whether he meant to make it easier for Napoleon and harder for Great Britain to respond to the act of May is a question impossible to answer; but the opponents of the policy he was pursuing were careful to point out that the act of May said nothing whatever, either of this or any other blockade; that when, the year before, the agreement was made with Erskine, the President did not pretend that the orders in council included blockades; and that it was remarkable that he should forget his own declaration regarding the monstrous spoliation of a few months before by the French, under the Rambouillet decree, and yet remember this British order of blockade of four years before, which everybody else had forgotten. Indeed, so completely had it passed out of mind, that the American minister in London, Mr. Pinkney, was obliged to ask the British foreign secretary whether that order had been revoked or was still considered as in force. It had never been formally withdrawn, was the answer, though it had been comprehended in the subsequent order in council of January, 1807. England refused, however, to recall specifically this blockade of 1806, for that would have been construed as a recognition of Napoleon's right to demand an abandonment of her "new principles of blockade;" but in fact—as the British minister in Washington afterward acknowledged—the recall of the order in council of 1807 would have annulled the order of blockade of 1806, which it had absorbed.

The truth is, the whole negotiation was a trial of skill at diplomatic fence, in which England would not yield an inch to the United States or to France. Madison and his party were more than willing to aid Napoleon; and Napoleon hoped to defeat both his antagonists by turning their swords against each other. A quite different result would have followed had France been as willing as England apparently was that the commercial edicts should be considered without regard to other questions; or if the American Executive had insisted that it would accept their unconditional revocation, pure and simple and not otherwise, from either power, as was contemplated in the act of May, 1810. But instead, when Congress rose in March, 1811, it left behind it an act renewing non-intercourse with England, in accordance with Napoleon's demand that the United States should "cause their rights to be respected by the English." This meant war.



CHAPTER XIX

WAR WITH ENGLAND

In May, 1811, there occurred one of those accidents which happen on purpose, and often serve as a relief when the public temper is in an exasperated and almost dangerous condition. This was the fight between the American frigate President, of forty-four guns, and the English sloop-of-war Little Belt, of eighteen guns. This vessel belonged to the British squadron which was ordered to the American coast to break up the trade from the United States to France; and the President was one of the few ships the government had for the protection of its commerce. The ships met a few miles south of Sandy Hook, chased each other in turn, then fired into each other without any reasonable pretext for the first shot, which each accused the other of having fired. The loss on board the English ship, in an encounter which lasted only a few minutes, was over thirty in killed and wounded, while only a single man was slightly wounded on board the President. It was, as Mr. Madison said, an "occurrence not unlikely to bring on repetitions," and that these would "probably end in an open rupture or a better understanding, as the calculations of the British government may prompt or dissuade from war." This certainly was obvious enough; though it would be a great deal easier for England to bring on a war than to avert it, in the angry mood in which the majority of the Democratic party then was. But Mr. Madison preserved his equanimity. Considering his old proclivity for France, and his old dislike of England, his impartiality between them is rather remarkable. But his aim was still to keep the peace while he abated nothing of the well-founded complaints he had against both powers. When a new Congress assembled in the autumn he was careful to point out in his message the delinquencies of France as well as the offenses of England. He insisted that while England should have acknowledged the Berlin and Milan decrees to be revoked and have acted accordingly, France showed no disposition to repair the many wrongs she had inflicted upon American merchants, and had lately imposed such "rigorous and unexpected restrictions" upon commerce that it would be necessary, unless they were speedily discontinued, to meet them by "corresponding restrictions on importations from France."

This tone is even more pronounced in his letters for some following months. If anything, it is France rather than England that seems to be looked upon as the chief offender, with whom there was the greater danger of armed collision. A fortnight after Congress had assembled he wrote to Barlow, the new minister to France, that though justified in assuming the French decrees to be so far withdrawn that a withdrawal of the British orders might be looked for, "yet the manner in which the French government has managed the repeal of the decrees, and evaded a correction of other outrages, has mingled with the conciliatory tendency of the repeal as much of irritation and disgust as possible." "In fact," he adds, "without a systematic change from an appearance of crafty contrivance and insatiate cupidity, for an open, manly, and upright dealing with a nation whose example demands it, it is impossible that good-will can exist; and that the ill-will which her policy aims at directing against her enemy should not, by her folly and iniquity, be drawn off against herself." French depredations upon American commerce in the Baltic were "kindling a fresh flame here," and, if they were not stopped, "hostile collisions will as readily take place with one nation as the other;" nor would there be any hesitation in sending American frigates to that sea, "with orders to suppress by force the French and Danish depredations," were it not for the "danger of rencounters with British ships of superior force in that quarter."

By this time, however, Congress, under the lead of younger, vigorous men—chief among them Clay and Calhoun—panting for leadership and distinction, was beginning its clamor for war with England. How much respect had Madison for this movement, and how much faith in it? A letter to Jefferson of February 7 answers both questions. Were he not evidently amused, he would seem to be contemptuous. "To enable the Executive to step at once into Canada," he says, "they have provided, after two months' delay, for a regular force requiring twelve to raise it, and after three months for a volunteer force, on terms not likely to raise it at all for that object. The mixture of good and bad, avowed and disguised motives, accounting for these things, is curious enough, but not to be explained in the compass of a letter." This is not the tone of either hope or fear. If war was in his mind at that time, it was not war with England. Three weeks later he writes to Barlow at Paris. On various points of negotiation between that minister and the French government, he observes much that "suggests distrust rather than expectation." He complains of delay, of vagueness, of neglect, of discourtesy, of a disregard of past obligations as to the liberation of ships and cargoes seized, and of late condemnations of ships captured in the Baltic; and concerning all these and other grievances he says: "We find so little of explicit dealing or substantial redress mingled with the compliments and encouragements, which cost nothing because they mean nothing, that suspicions are unavoidable; and if they be erroneous, the fault does not lie with those who entertain them." He believed that France, in asking for a new treaty, which he thinks unnecessary, is only seeking to gain time in order to take advantage of future events. The commercial relations between the two countries are so intolerable that trade "will be prohibited if no essential change take place." Unless there be indemnity for the great wrongs committed under the Rambouillet decree, and for other spoliations, he declares that "there can be neither cordiality nor confidence here; nor any restraint from self-redress in any justifiable mode of effecting it." The letter concludes with the emphatic assertion that, if dispatches soon looked for "do not exhibit the French government in better colors than it has yet assumed, there will be but one sentiment in this country; and I need not say what that will be."

Congress all this while was lashing itself into fury against England. The ambitious young leaders of the Democratic party in the House were, so to speak, "spoiling for a fight," and they chose to have it out with England rather than with France. Not that there was not quite as much reason for resentment against France as against England. Some, indeed, of the more hot-headed were anxious for war with both; but these were of the more impulsive kind, like Henry Clay, who laughed in scorn at the doubt that he could not at a blow subdue the Canadas with a few regiments of Kentucky militia. But war with England was determined upon, partly because the old enmity toward her made that intolerable which to the old affection for France was a burden lightly borne; and partly because the instinctive jealousy of the commercial interest, on the part of the planter-interest, preferred that policy which would do the most harm to the North. On April 1, 1812, just five weeks after the writing of this letter to Barlow, Mr. Madison sent to Congress a message of five lines recommending the immediate passage of an act to impose "a general embargo on all vessels now in port or hereafter arriving for the period of sixty days." It was meant to be a secret measure; but the intention leaked out in two or three places, and the news was hurried North by several of the Federalist members in time to enable some of their constituents to send their ships to sea before the act was passed. Nor, probably, was it a surprise to anybody; for war with England had been the topic of debate in one aspect or another all winter, and the purpose of the party in power was plain to everybody. That the embargo was intended as a preparation for war was frankly acknowledged. An act was speedily passed, though the period was extended from sixty to ninety days. Within less than sixty days, however, another message from the President recommended a declaration of war. On June 3 the Committee on Foreign Relations, of which Calhoun was chairman, reported in favor of "an immediate appeal to arms," and the next day a declaratory act was passed. Of the seventy-nine affirmative votes in the House, forty-eight were from the South and West, and of the other thirty-one votes from the Northern States, fourteen were from Pennsylvania alone. Of the forty-nine votes against it, thirty-four were from the Northern States, including two from Pennsylvania. On the 17th, a fortnight later, the bill was got through the Senate by a majority of six.

Mr. Madison for years had opposed a war with England as unwise and useless,—unwise, because the United States was not in a condition to go to war with the greatest naval power in the world; and useless, because the end to be reached by war could be gained more certainly, and at infinitely less cost, by peaceful measures. The situation had not changed. Indeed, up to within a month of the message recommending an embargo as a precursor of war, his letters show that, if he thought war was inevitable, it must be with France, not England. But the faction determined upon war must have at their command an administration to carry out that policy. Their choice was not limited to Madison for an available candidate. Whoever was nominated by the Democrats was sure to be chosen, and Madison had two formidable rivals in James Monroe, secretary of state, and De Witt Clinton, mayor of New York, both eager for war. The choice depended on that question and between the embargo message of April 1 and the war message of June 1, the nomination was given to Madison by the congressional caucus. It was understood, and openly asserted at the time by the opponents of the administration, that the nomination was the price of a change of policy. At the next session of Congress, before a year had passed away, Mr. Quincy said in the House: "The great mistake of all those who reasoned concerning the war and the invasion of Canada, and concluded that it was impossible that either should be seriously intended, resulted from this, that they never took into consideration the connection of both those events with the great election for the chief magistracy which was then pending. It was never sufficiently considered by them that plunging into a war with Great Britain was among the conditions on which the support for the presidency was made dependent." The assertion, so plainly aimed at Madison, passed unchallenged, though the charge of any distinct bargain was vehemently denied.

If Mr. Madison's conscience was not always vigorous enough to enable him to resist temptation, it was so sensitive as to prompt him to look for excuses for yielding. In a sense this was to his credit as one of the better sort of politicians, without assuming it to be akin to that hypocrisy which is the homage vice pays to virtue. Perhaps it was this sentiment which led him to accept so readily the pretended disclosures of John Henry, and to make the use of them he did. These were contained in twenty-four letters, for which the President, apparently without hesitation, paid fifty thousand dollars. On March 9 he sent them to Congress with a message, and on the same day, in a letter to Jefferson, alludes to them as "this discovery, or rather formal proof of the cooperation between the Eastern Junto and the British cabinet." In the message he intimates that this secret agent was sent directly by the British government to Massachusetts to foment disaffection, to intrigue "with the disaffected for the purpose of bringing about resistance to the laws, and eventually, in concert with a British force, of destroying the Union" and reannexing the Eastern States to England. In the war message of June 1 these charges are repeated as among the reasons for an appeal to arms. Mr. Calhoun's committee followed this lead and improved upon it in the report recommending an immediate declaration of war. The Henry affair was declared an "act of still greater malignity" than any of the other outrages against the United States of which Great Britain had been guilty, and that which "excited the greatest horror." The incident was seized upon, apparently, to answer a temporary purpose, and then, so far as Mr. Madison was concerned, was permitted to sink into oblivion. In the hundreds of pages of his published letters, written in later life, in which he reviews and explains so many of the events of his public career, there is no allusion whatever to the Henry disclosures, which in 1812 were held, with the ruin of American commerce and the impressment of thousands of American citizens, as an equally just cause for war. In truth there was nothing whatever in these disclosures, for which was paid an amount equal to the salary of half a presidential term, to warrant the assumptions of either Mr. Madison's messages or Mr. Calhoun's report. The man had been sent, at his own suggestion, early in 1809, by the governor of Canada to Massachusetts to learn the state of affairs there and observe the drift of public opinion. His national proclivity—he was an Irishman—to conspiracy and revolution had led him to see in the dissatisfaction with the embargo a determination in the New England people to destroy the Union, reannex themselves to England, and return to the flesh-pots of the colonial period. To learn how far gone they were in these designs, to put himself in intimate relations with the leading conspirators and to bring them into communication with Sir James Craig, the governor-general of Canada, that sufficient aid should come through him at the proper moment from the British government, was Henry's mission. Of this truly Irish plot Henry was the villain and Craig the fool; but it is hardly possible that three years afterward Madison and his friends, with all the letters spread before them, could really have been the dupes.

Henry went to Boston and remained there about three months, living at a tavern. He found out nothing because there was nothing to be found out. He knew nobody, and nobody of any note knew him, and all the information he sent to Craig might have been, and doubtless was, picked up in the ordinary political gossip of the tavern barroom, or culled from the columns of the newspapers of both parties. He compromised nobody, for—as Mr. Monroe, as secretary of state, testified in a report to the Senate—he named no person or persons in the United States who had, "in any way or manner whatever, entered into or countenanced the project or views" of himself and Craig; and all he had to say was pointless and unimportant, except so far as his opinions might have some interest as those of a shrewd observer of public events. Indeed, his own conclusion was that there was no conspiracy in the Eastern States; that the Federal party was strong enough to keep the peace with England; and that there was no talk of disunion, nor any likelihood of it unless it should be brought about by war. The correspondence itself showed, in a letter from Robert Peel, then secretary to Lord Liverpool, that the letters of Henry were found, as a matter of course, among Canadian official papers, as they related to public affairs; but they had either never attracted any attention or had been entirely forgotten, and Lord Liverpool was quite ignorant of any "arrangement or agreement" that had been made between the governor of Canada and his emissary to New England. It was only because of his failure to get any reward from the British government or from Craig's successor in Canada, for what he was pleased to call his services, that the adventurer came to Washington in search of a market for himself and his papers. He came at an opportune moment. Notwithstanding the secretary of state frankly declared, that neither by writing nor by word of mouth did the man implicate by name anybody in the United States; notwithstanding one of the letters was evidence, the more conclusive because incidental, that the British secretary of state had known nothing of this mission contrived between Henry and Craig,—yet Mr. Madison pronounced the letters to be the "formal proof of the cooperation between the Eastern Junto and the British cabinet." The charge was monstrous, for this pretended proof had no existence. If the President, however, could persuade himself that the story was true, it would help him to justify himself to himself for a change of policy, the result of which would be the coveted renomination for the presidency.

Not that there had never been talk of disunion in New England. There had been in years past, as there was to be in years to come. But talk of that kind did not belong exclusively to that particular period, nor was it confined to that particular region of country. Ever since the adoption of the Constitution the one thing that orators, North and South, inside the halls of Congress and outside them, were agreed upon was, that in all debate there was one argument, equally good on both sides, to which there could be no reply; that in all legislation there was one possible supreme move that would bring all the wheels of government to a dead stop. The solemn warning or the angry threat was always in readiness for instant use, that the bonds of the Union, in one or another contingency, were to be rent asunder. But so frequent had been these warning cries of the coming wolf that they were listened to with indifference, except when some positive act indicated real danger, as in the Jefferson-Madison "resolutions of '98." It was easy, therefore, to alarm the public with confessions of a secret emissary, as he pretended, who had turned traitor to the government which had employed him and to the conspirators to whom he had been sent; and the more reprehensible was it, therefore, in a President of the United States, to make the use that was made of this story, which an impartial examination would have shown was essentially absurd and infamously false. Mr. Madison's intelligence is not to be impugned. He was too sagacious, as well as too unimpassioned a man, to be taken in by the ingenious tale of such an adventurer as Henry. In a letter to Colonel David Humphreys, written the next spring, in defense of the policy of commercial restrictions, he says: "I have never allowed myself to believe that the Union was in danger, or that a dissolution of it could be desired, unless by a few individuals, if such there be, in desperate situations or of unbridled passions." New England, he continues, "would be the greatest loser by such an event, and not likely therefore deliberately to rush into it." "On what basis," he asks, "could New England and Old England form commercial stipulations?" Their commercial jealousy, he contends, forbade an alliance between them, for that was "the real source of our Revolution." He closes with the significant assertion that, "if there be links of common interest between the two countries, they would connect the Southern and not the Northern States with that part of Europe." How, then, could he seriously accept Henry's pretended disclosures as "formal proof," as he wrote to Jefferson at that time, "of the cooperation between the Eastern Junto and the British cabinet"? By the Eastern Junto is meant the Federal party, or at least the influential and able leaders of that party; and he could not consider, nor would he have spoken of them as "a few individuals, if such there be, in desperate situations or of unbridled passions." He accepted, then, the Henry story in spite of his deliberate opinions, as a help to involve the country in a party war.

Even at the risk of some prolixity it is needful to follow the course of events that led to this war a little farther; for here was the culmination of Mr. Madison's career, and from his course in shaping and directing these events we best learn what manner of man he was, and where his true place is among the public men of our earlier history. For a year and a half the United States had acted on the assumption that France had recalled her decrees, and that England had not revoked her orders. The extracts from Mr. Madison's letters, given on previous pages, show his conviction that the revocation of either decrees or orders was practically no more true of one power than it was of the other. The government of the United States, nevertheless, submitted to the one, and against the other it first reenacted the non-intercourse act, then proclaimed an embargo preparatory to war, and finally declared war. Yet the whole world knew, and nobody so surely as the emperor of France, that the Berlin and Milan decrees had never been formally repealed at all; meanwhile French outrages upon American commerce had continued, and all redress so persistently refused that, so late as the last week in February, 1812, the President intimated that war—war with France, not England—might prove the only remedy. But he suddenly yielded to the clamors of the war party at home, whatever may have been his motive. Then, and not till then, were the decrees actually revoked by Napoleon. In May, 1812, more than a month after the President had recommended an embargo, the hostile purport of which was so well understood, a decree was proclaimed by the emperor which for the first time really revoked those of Berlin and Milan. True, it was dated—"purported to be dated," it was said in an official English document—April, 1811. But that was of no moment; the essential point was, that it had never seen the light; that any hint of its existence had never been given to the American government, or its representatives abroad, till the United States had taken measures to "cause their rights to be respected by the English," which was the original condition of a revocation of the decrees. Its ostensible date was when the news reached France that non-intercourse had been again enforced against England in March, 1811; but its promulgation was to all intents and purposes the real date, when news reached France, in April or May, 1812, that war against England was finally determined upon.

The Duke of Bassano, the French minister, had not, moreover, brought out this year-old decree without pressure from the American minister, Barlow. The President had written Barlow, in that February letter already quoted, that if his expected dispatches did not "exhibit the conduct of the French government in better colors than it has yet assumed, there will be but one sentiment in this country, and I need not say what that will be." When the dispatches came, Mr. Madison received no assurances of redress for past wrongs and no promises for the future; but he learned, on the contrary, that Bassano, in a recent report to the emperor, had referred to the decrees of Berlin and Milan as still in force against all neutral nations which submitted to the seizure of their ships by the British when containing contraband goods or enemy's property. Naturally the British ministry was not slow in presenting this precious acknowledgment to the United States as a proof that she had all along been in the wrong, and that in common justice to England the non-importation act should now be repealed. The assurance was at the same time repeated, possibly in a tone of considerable satisfaction, that when Napoleon really should revoke his decrees Great Britain was ready, as she always had been, to follow his example with her orders. It was an awkward dilemma for the President and his minister to France. But by this time, the Presidential nomination impending, Mr. Madison had made up his mind what to do. He was not exactly a wolf; neither was Great Britain a lamb; but the argument he used was the argument of the fable. Instead of advising—Bassano having declared the decrees still in force—a repeal of the non-importation act, as Great Britain claimed was in justice and comity her due, he recommended a war measure. But Barlow evidently felt himself to be under some decent restraint of logic and consistency. He urged upon the French minister the necessity now of a positive and imperial declaration that the decrees, so far as regarded the United States, were absolutely revoked; for this recent assertion of Bassano, that they were still in force, put the United States in an attitude both towards France and England utterly and absurdly in the wrong. Barlow represented that, should the revocation be extended only to the United States, Great Britain would not for that alone repeal her orders. In that case France would lose nothing of the advantage of her present position, while everything would be lost should the United States be compelled to repeal her non-importation laws against England. Bassano was quick to see the necessity of jumping into the bramble-bush and scratching his eyes in again, and he then produced his year-old edict. Being a year old, it of course covered all questions. But was it a year old? Who knew? It had never been published? No, the duke said; but it had been shown to Mr. Jonathan Russell, who at that time was charge d'affaires at Paris. Mr. Russell denied it, though a denial was hardly needed. He would not have ventured to withhold information so important from his government; and it was evident, from the tone of his dispatches of a subsequent date, that he had no suspicion of its existence. For he had maintained it, as a point of "national honor," that the revocation of the French decrees must have preceded the President's proclamation of November 1, 1810; and this he would not have dared to do had he known that the actual revocation by the French minister was not made till six months after the date of the President's proclamation, and was then made secretly.

However, as if to defeat all these machinations of France and the United States, Great Britain immediately recalled her orders in council, when, in May, 1812, the Duke of Bassano announced the edict of April, 1811, revoking the Berlin and Milan decrees, though so far only as they concerned American vessels. The declaration of war of June 18 had not reached England, and there was still a chance for peace. Foster, the late English minister to the United States, learned at Halifax—where he had stopped on his way home—that the orders in council were repealed, and he took immediate steps to bring about an armistice between the naval commanders on the coast of Nova Scotia, and between the governor of Canada and the American general, Dearborn, in command of the frontier. The government at Washington, however, refused to ratify any suspension of hostilities. Some negotiations followed, but, decrees and orders being out of the way, there was nothing left to negotiate about except the question of impressment. Upon that question the two governments were as wide apart as ever, and not in the least likely to come together. Mr. Madison determined that on that ground alone the war should go on. It had been as good and sufficient ground for such a war any time for the past dozen years; but whether it could be settled by an appeal to arms was a question of possibilities and probabilities by which both Jefferson and Madison had hitherto been ruled. Was that still the essential question? With the result came the answer. Two years later the administration was glad to accept a treaty of peace in which impressment was not even alluded to. Great Britain did not relinquish by a syllable her assumed right to board American ships in search of British seamen; and the administration instructed its peace commissioners not even to ask that she should.



CHAPTER XX

CONCLUSION

Early in the war Mr. Madison said to a friend, in a letter "altogether private and written in confidence," that the way to make the conflict both "short and successful would be to convince the enemy that he was to contend with the whole and not part of the nation." That it was a war of a party, and not of the people, was a discouragement to himself, however the enemy may have regarded it, which he could never see any way of overcoming. He could not listen to an opponent nor learn anything from disaster. "If the war must continue," said Webster within a year of its end, "go to the ocean. Let it no longer be said that not one ship of force, built by your hands since the war, yet floats. If you are seriously contending for maritime rights, go to the theatre where those rights can be defended.... There the united wishes and exertions of the nation will go with you. Even our party divisions, acrimonious as they are, cease at the water's edge.... In protecting naval interests by naval means, you will arm yourself with the whole power of national sentiment, and may command the whole abundance of national forces." Taking now in one view the events of those years, it is easy to see in our generation how mad were Madison and his party to turn deaf ears to such considerations as these. Their force and wisdom had already been proved by eighteen months of disaster on land, which had made the war daily more and more unpopular; and by brilliant success for a time at sea, when each fresh victory was hailed with universal enthusiasm. "Our little naval triumphs," was the President's way of speaking of the latter; and the only importance he seems to have seen in them was, that they excited some "rage and jealousy" in England and moved her to increase her naval force. How could Mr. Madison expect that the whole and not a part only of the nation could uphold an administration which, after eighteen months of fighting, could be reproached on the floor of Congress with not having launched a ship since the war was begun? Or did he only choose to remember that the navy, which alone so far had brought either success or honor to the national arms, was the creation of the Federalists in spite of the Jeffersonian policy? It surely would have been wiser to try to propitiate New England, with which he was in perpetual worry and conflict, by enlisting it in a naval war in which it had some faith. A large proportion of her people would have been glad to escape idleness and poverty at home for service at sea, though they were reluctant to aid in a vain attempt to conquer Canada.



Even to that purpose, however, Massachusetts contributed, in the second campaign of 1814, more recruits than any other single State; and New England more than all the Southern States together. New England could have given no stronger proof of her loyalty, if only Mr. Madison had known how to turn it to advantage. He was absolutely deaf and blind to it; but his ears were quick to hear and his eyes to see, when he learned presently that the New Englanders were seriously calculating the value of the Union under such rule as they had had of late. It was not often that he relieved himself by intemperate language, but he could not help saying now, in writing to Governor Nicholas of Virginia, that "the greater part of the people in that quarter have been brought by their leaders, aided by their priests, under a delusion scarcely exceeded by that recorded in the period of witchcraft; and the leaders themselves are becoming daily more desperate in the use they make of it." The "delusion" was taking a practical direction. Mr. Madison had learned before the letter was written that a convention was about to meet at Hartford, the object of which was to weigh in a balance, upon the one side, the continuation of such government as that of the last two or three years, and, upon the other side, the value of the Union. He ardently hoped that the commissioners, then assembled at Ghent, would agree upon a treaty; and there seemed to be no good reason why there should not be peace when nothing was to be said of the cause of the war, no apology demanded for the past, and no stipulation for the future. But if by any chance the commissioners should fail, Mr. Madison saw in the Hartford Convention the huge shadow of a coming conflict more difficult to deal with than a foreign war. It was the first step in dead earnest for the formation of a Northern Confederacy, and it is quite possible he may have felt that he was not the man for such a crisis. Every line of the letter pulsates with anxiety. The only consoling thought in it is that without "foreign cooperation revolt and separation will hardly be risked," and to such cooperation he hoped a majority of the New England people would not consent. A treaty of peace, however, came to save him and the Union. Within a few weeks the administration papers were laughing at Harrison Gray Otis of Boston, who had started for Washington as the representative of the Hartford Convention, but turned back at the news of peace; and were advertising him as missing under the name of Titus Oates. It was, however, the hysterical laugh of recovery from a terrible fright.

If ambition to be a second time President led Mr. Madison to consent against his own better judgment to a war with England, he paid a heavy penalty. It was the act of a party politician and not of a statesman; for the country was no more prepared for a war in 1812, when as a politician he assented to it, than it had been for the previous half dozen years when as a statesman he had opposed it. He gave the influence of the United States in support of a despotism that aimed at the subjugation of all Europe; he threw a fresh obstacle in the way of that power to which Europe could chiefly look to resist a common enemy; and he did both under the pretense that the just complaints of the United States were greater against one of these powers than against the other. He declared war mainly to redress a wrong which ceased to exist before a blow was struck; he then rejected an offer of peace because another wrong was still persisted in; but finally, of his own motion, he accepted a treaty in which the assumed cause of war was not even alluded to.

That Mr. Madison was not a good war President, either by training or by temperament, was, if it may be said of any man, his misfortune rather than his fault. But it was his fault rather than his misfortune that he permitted himself to be dragged in a day into a line of conduct which the sober judgment of years had disapproved. He is usually and most justly regarded as a man of great amiability of character; of unquestionable integrity in all the purely personal relations of life; of more than ordinary intellectual ability of a solid, though not brilliant, quality; and a diligent student of the science of government, the practice of which he made a profession. But he was better fitted by nature for a legislator than for executive office, and his fame would have been more spotless, though his position would have been less exalted, had his life been exclusively devoted to that branch of government for which he was best fitted. It was not merely that for the sake of the Presidency he plunged the country into an unnecessary war; but when it was on his hands he neither knew what to do with it himself nor how to choose the right men who did know.

It is our amiable weakness—if one may venture to say so of the American people—that all our geese are swans, or rather eagles; that we are apt to mistake notoriety for reputation; that it is the popular belief of the larger number that he who, no matter how, has reached a distinguished position, is by virtue of that fact a great and good man. This is not less true, in a measure, of Mr. Madison than of some other men who have been Presidents, and of still more who have thought that they deserved to be. But, if that false estimate surrounds his name, there is a strong undercurrent of opinion, common among those whose business or whose pleasure it is to look beneath the surface of things historical, that he was wanting in strength of character and in courage. He did not lack discernment as to what was wisest and best; but he was too easily influenced by others, or led by the hope of gaining some glittering prize which ambition coveted, to turn his back upon his own convictions. It was this weakness which swept him beyond his depth into troubled waters where his struggles were hopeless. Had he refused to assume the responsibility of a war which his judgment condemned, and which he should have known that he wanted the peculiar ability to bring to a successful and honorable conclusion, he might never have been President, but his fame would have been of a higher order. History might have overlooked the act of political fickleness in his earlier career, which was so warmly resented by many of his contemporaries. Abandonment of party is too common and often too justifiable to be accounted as necessarily a crime; and it can rarely be said with positiveness, whatever the probabilities, that a political deserter is certainly moved by base motives. It is rather from ex post facto than from immediate evidence, as in Madison's case, that a just verdict is likely to be reached. But there can be neither doubt nor mistake as to the President's management of foreign affairs during the two years preceding the declaration of war against England; nor of the remarkable incompetence which he showed in rallying the moral and material forces of the nation to meet an emergency of his own creation.

Opposition to war generally and therefore opposition to an army and navy were sound cardinal principles in the Jeffersonian school of politics. Mr. Madison was curiously blind to the logical consequences of this doctrine; he could not see, or he would not consider, that, when war seemed advisable to an administration, the result must depend mainly upon the success of the appeal to the people for their countenance and help. But he unwisely sought to raise and employ an army for the invasion and conquest of the territory of the enemy in spite of the opposition of a large proportion of the wealthiest and most intelligent people in the country; while at the same time he refused to see any promise or any presage in a naval warfare which had opened with unexpected brilliancy, and would, had it been followed up, have been sure of popular support. His title to fame rests, with the multitude, upon the fact that he was one of the earlier Presidents of the republic. But it is that period of his career which least entitles him to be remembered with gratitude and respect by his countrymen.

Its crowning humiliation came with the capture of Washington in August, 1814, when the British admiral, Cockburn, entered the Hall of Representatives, at the head of a band of followers, and springing into the speaker's chair shouted: "Shall this harbor of Yankee Democracy be burned? All for it will say, Aye!" Early in the war Madison had written to Jefferson, "We do not apprehend invasion by land,"—the one thing, it would seem, that a commander-in-chief should have apprehended, whose single aim was the invasion and conquest of the enemy's territory. His devotion to this one purpose, to the exclusion of any other idea of either offense or defense, and in spite of continued failure, was almost an infatuation. Within a year of that expression of confidence to Mr. Jefferson the whole coast was blockaded from the eastern end of Long Island Sound to the mouth of the Mississippi. For a year before Washington was taken, the shores of Chesapeake Bay were harassed and raided and devastated by a blockading force, till the people were reduced almost to the condition of a conquered country. Two months before the British commanders, Ross and Cockburn, went up the Potomac, Mr. Gallatin, who was then in London, had informed the President that the fleet was to be reinforced for that very purpose; but neither he nor Congress took any effective measures to meet a danger so imminent. Their eyes were fixed with a far-off gaze across the Northern border, while only five hundred regular troops, a body of untrained militia who had never heard the whistle of a bullet, and a few gunboats on the Potomac, guarded the national capital against a British fleet, a thousand marines, and thirty-five hundred men from Wellington's best regiments. The President fleeing in one direction with the secretary of war, the secretary of state, and the general in command; Mrs. Madison fleeing in another, with her reticule filled with silver spoons snatched up in haste as she left the White House;[15] behind them all as they fled, the horizon red with the blaze of the largest navy yard in the country and of all the public buildings, but one, of the capital,—these incidents are an amazing commentary on the early assertion that invasion was not to be apprehended.

The end of this wretched war, which has been foolishly called the second war of independence, came four months afterward. Never was a peace so welcome as this was on all sides. England was exhausted with the long contest with Napoleon; and now, that being over, as there was no practical question to differ about with the United States, the ministry were not unwilling to listen to the demands of the commercial and manufacturing classes. In America so great was the universal joy that the Federalists and the Democrats forgot their differences and their hates, and wept and laughed by turns in each other's arms and kissed each other like women. One party was delivered from calamities for which, if continued much longer, there seemed only one desperate and dreaded remedy; the other was overjoyed to back out of a blunder which was the straight and broad road to national ruin. Of all men, Mr. Madison had the most reason to be glad for a safe deliverance from the consequences of his own want of foresight and want of firmness. Less than two years remained to him of his public career. In that brief period much was forgotten and more forgiven—as our national way is—in the promise of a great prosperity to be speedily achieved in the released energies of a vigorous and industrious people. He had not again to choose between differing factions of his own party, nor to carry out a policy against the will of a formidable opposition. To the Federalists hardly a name was left in the progress of events at home and abroad; while all immediate vital questions of difference vanished, the party in power remained in almost undisputed ascendency. The most important Democratic measures it then insisted upon were a national bank and a protective tariff. To the establishment of a bank Mr. Madison assented against his own conviction that any provision could be found for it in the Constitution; and a tariff, both for revenue and for the protection and encouragement of American industry, he agreed with his party was the true policy.

For nearly twenty years after his retirement to Montpellier—a name which, with rare exceptions, he always spelled correctly, and not in the American way—it was his privilege to live a watchful observer of the prosperity of his country. If it ever occurred to him in his secret soul that at the period of his preeminence he had done anything to arrest that prosperity, he gave no sign. He loved rather to remember and sometimes to recall to others the part he had taken in the nurture of the young republic in the feeble days of its infancy. Of his own administration and the events of that time he had much less to say than of the true interpretation of the Constitution, of the intent of its framers, and the circumstances that influenced their deliberations. His voluminous correspondence shows the bent of his mind as a legislator and a student of fundamental law; and on that, rather than on his ability and success as the chief magistrate of the nation, rests his true fame.

These twenty years, though passed in retirement, were not years of leisure. "I have rarely," he wrote in 1827, "during the period of my public life, found my time less at my disposal than since I took my leave of it; nor have I the consolation of finding, that as my powers of application necessarily decline, the demands on them proportionally decrease." Much as he wrote upon questions of an earlier period, there were no topics of the current time that did not arouse his interest. Upon the subject of slavery he thought much and wrote much and always earnestly and humanely. How to get rid of it was a problem which he never solved to his own satisfaction. Though it was one he always longed to see through, it never occurred to him that the way to abolish slavery was—to abolish it. How kind he was as a master, Paul Jennings bears witness. "I never," he says, "saw him in a passion, and never knew him to strike a slave, though he had over a hundred; neither would he allow an overseer to do it." He rebuked those who were in fault; but, adds Jennings, he would "never mortify them by doing it before others." It will be remembered that on the first occasion of his being a candidate for public office he refused to follow the universal Virginian habit of "treating" the electors. To the principle which governed him then he adhered through life, and his letters show the warm interest he always took in every phase of the temperance movement. "I don't think he drank a quart of brandy in his whole life," says Jennings. A single glass of wine was all he ever took at dinner, and this he diluted with water, when, says the same witness, "he had hard drinkers at his table who had put away his choice madeira pretty freely." This will go for something, considering the times, with even the most zealous of the modern supporters of that cause; but they must be quite satisfied to know that "for the last fifteen years of his life he drank no wine at all." Consideration for his own health, always feeble, may have led him to this abstinence; but it is rather remarkable that a man of his position should have held, fifty years ago, the advanced notions which he certainly did upon this question, and that the doubt only of the possibility of enforcing laws for prohibiting the manufacture and sale of spirits seems to have withheld him from proposing them.