CHAPTER XIV.
The summer of 1810 was quiet and hopeful in America. For the first time since December, 1807, trade was free. Although little immigration occurred, the census showed an increase in population of nearly thirty-seven per cent in ten years,—from 5,300,000 to 7,240,000, of which less than one hundred thousand was due to the purchase of Louisiana. Virginia and Massachusetts still fairly held their own, and New York strode in advance of Pennsylvania, while the West gained little relative weight. Ohio had not yet a quarter of a million people, Indiana only twenty-four thousand, and Illinois but twelve thousand, while Michigan contained less than five thousand. The third census showed no decided change in the balance of power from any point of view bounded by the usual horizon of human life. Perhaps the growth of New York city and Philadelphia pointed to a movement among the American people which might prove more revolutionary than any mere agricultural movement westward. Each of these cities contained a population of ninety-six thousand, while Baltimore rose to forty-six thousand, and Boston to thirty-two thousand. The tendency toward city life, if not yet unduly great, was worth noticing, especially because it was confined to the seaboard States of the North.
The reason of this tendency could in part be seen in the Treasury reports on American shipping, which reached in 1810 a registered tonnage of 1,424,000,—a point not again passed until 1826. The registered foreign tonnage sprang to 984,000,—a point not again reached in nearly forty years. New vessels were built to the amount of one hundred and twenty-seven thousand tons in the year 1810.[246] The value of all the merchandise exported in the year ending Sept. 30, 1810, amounted to nearly sixty-seven million dollars, and of this sum about forty-two millions represented articles of domestic production.[247] Except in the year before the embargo this export of domestic produce had never been much exceeded.[248] The imports, as measured by the revenue, were on the same scale. The net customs-revenue which reached $16,500,000 in 1807, after falling in 1808 and 1809 to about $7,000,000, rose again to $12,750,000 in 1810.[249] The profits of the export and import business fell chiefly to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where the shipping belonged; and these cities could not fail to attract labor as well as capital beyond the degree that a conservative republican of the Revolutionary time would have thought safe.
More than half of these commercial exchanges were with England or her dependencies. Great Britain and her American colonies, Portugal and Spain in her military protection, and British India consumed at least one half of the exports; while of the net revenue collected on imports, Gallatin estimated six and a half millions as derived from articles imported from Great Britain and the British dependencies, all other sources supplying hardly six millions.[250] The nature of these imports could be only roughly given. In general, sugar, molasses, coffee, wines, silk, and tea were not British; but manufactures of cotton, linen, leather, paper, glass, earthen-ware, iron, and other metals came chiefly from Great Britain. To the United States this British trade brought most of the articles necessary to daily comfort in every part of the domestic economy. The relief of recovering a full and cheap supply exceeded the satisfaction of handsome profits on the renewed trade. Experience of the hourly annoyance, expense, and physical exposure caused by deprivation of what society considered necessities rendered any return to the restrictive system in the highest degree unwise, especially after the eastern people acquired conviction that the system had proved a failure.
Thus the summer passed with much of the old contentment that marked the first Administration of Jefferson. Having lost sight of national dignity, the commercial class was contented under the protection of England; and American ships in the Baltic, in Portugal, and in the West Indies never hesitated to ask and were rarely refused the assistance of the British navy. From time to time a few impressments were reported; but impressment had never been the chief subject of complaint, and after the withdrawal of the frigates blockading New York, little was heard of British violence. On the other hand, Napoleon’s outrages roused great clamor in commercial society, and his needless harshness to every victim, from the Pope to the American sailors whom he shut up as prisoners of war, went far to palliate British offences in the eyes of American merchants.
News of Napoleon’s seizures at San Sebastian arrived before the adjournment of Congress May 1; and as fresh outrages were reported from every quarter by every new arrival, and as Cadore’s letters became public, even Madison broke into reproaches. May 25 he wrote to Jefferson:[251] “The late confiscations by Bonaparte comprise robbery, theft, and breach of trust, and exceed in turpitude any of his enormities not wasting human blood.” These words seemed to show intense feeling, but Madison’s temper indulged in outbursts of irritability without effect on his action; in reality, his mind was bent beyond chance of change on the old idea of his Revolutionary education,—that the United States must not regard France, but must resist Great Britain by commercial restrictions. “This scene on the Continent,” he continued to Jefferson, “and the effect of English monopoly on the value of our produce are breaking the charm attached to what is called free-trade, foolishly by some and wickedly by others.” He reverted to his life-long theory of commercial regulations.
A few days afterward Madison wrote to Armstrong fresh instructions founded on the Act of May 1, which was to be the new diplomatic guide. These instructions,[252] dated June 5, were of course signed by the Secretary of State, Robert Smith, who afterward claimed credit for them; but their style, both of thought and expression, belonged to Madison. Even the unfailing note of his mind—irritability without passion—was not wanting. He would wait, he said, for further advices before making the proper comments on Cadore’s letter of February 14 and on its doctrine of reprisals. “I cannot, however, forbear informing you that a high indignation is felt by the President, as well as by the public, at this act of violence on our property, and at the outrage both in the language and in the matter of the letter of the Duc de Cadore.” Turning from this subject, the despatch requested that Napoleon would make use of the suggestion contained in the Act of May 1, 1810. “If there be sincerity in the language held at different times by the French government, and especially in the late overture, to proceed to amicable and just arrangements in case of our refusal to submit to the British Orders in Council, no pretext can be found for longer declining to put an end to the decrees of which the United States have so justly complained.” One condition alone was imposed on Armstrong preliminary to the acceptance of French action under the law of May 1, but this condition was essential:
“If, however, the arrangement contemplated by the law should be acceptable to the French government, you will understand it to be the purpose of the President not to proceed in giving it effect in case the late seizure of the property of the citizens of the United States has been followed by an absolute confiscation, and restoration be finally refused. The only ground short of a preliminary restoration of the property on which the contemplated arrangement can be made will be an understanding that the confiscation is reversible, and that it will become immediately the subject of discussion with a reasonable prospect of justice to our injured citizens.”
The condition thus prescribed seemed both reasonable and mild in view of the recent and continuous nature of the offence; but Madison could not, even if he would, allow his own or public attention to be permanently diverted from England. As early as June 22 he had begun to reconstruct in his own mind the machinery of his restrictive system. “On the first publication of the despatches by the ‘John Adams,’” he wrote to Jefferson,[253] “so strong a feeling was produced by Armstrong’s picture of the French robbery that the attitude in which England was placed by the correspondence between Pinkney and Wellesley was overlooked. The public attention is beginning to fix itself on the proof it affords that the original sin against neutrals lies with Great Britain; and that while she acknowledges it, she persists in it.”
The theory of original sin led to many conclusions hard to reconcile; but, as regarded Napoleon, Madison’s idea seemed both sensible and dignified,—that England’s original fault in no way justified the recent acts of France, which were equivalent to war on the United States, not as one among neutrals, but as a particular enemy. Fresh instructions to Armstrong, dated July 5,[254] reiterated the complaints, offers, and conditions of the despatch sent one month before. Especially the condition precedent to action under the law of May 1 was repeated with emphasis:—
“As has been heretofore stated to you, 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. And you will moreover be careful, in arranging such a provision for that particular case of spoliations, not to weaken the ground on which a redress of others may be justly pursued.”
The instructions of June 5 and July 5 went their way; but although Armstrong duly received them, and wrote to Cadore a letter evidently founded on the despatch of June 5, he made no express allusion to his instructions in writing either to the French government or to his own. Although he remained in Paris till September 12, and on that day received from Cadore an explicit avowal that the sequestered property would not be restored, but that “the principles of reprisal must be the law,” he made no protest.
Equally obscure was the conduct of Madison. Cadore’s letter of August 5 announcing that the French Decrees were withdrawn, on the understanding that the United States should by November 1 enforce their rights against England, reached Washington September 25, but not in official form. Nothing is known of the impression it produced on the Cabinet; nothing remains of any discussions that ensued. If Gallatin was consulted, he left no trace of his opinion. Hamilton and Eustis had little weight in deciding foreign questions. Robert Smith within a year afterward publicly attacked the President for the course pursued, and gave the impression that it was taken on Madison’s sole judgment. The President’s only authority to act at all without consulting Congress depended on the words of the law of May 1: “In case either Great Britain or France shall, before the third day of March next, so revoke or modify her edicts as that they shall cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States, which fact the President of the United States shall proclaim by proclamation,” the non-intercourse of March 1, 1809, should at the end of three months revive against the nation which had not revoked its edicts. Under this authority, President Madison was required by Cadore’s letter to proclaim that France had revoked or modified her edicts so that they ceased to violate the neutral commerce of the United States.
Madison was doubtless a man of veracity; but how was it possible that any man of veracity could proclaim that France had revoked or modified her edicts so that they ceased to violate the neutral commerce of the United States when he had every reason to think that at least the Bayonne Decree, barely six months old, would not be revoked, and when within a few weeks he had officially declared that the revocation of the Bayonne Decree was “an indispensable evidence of the just purpose of France” preliminary to a non-intercourse with England? If the President in June and July thought that provision indispensable to the true intent of the law which he aided in framing, he would assume something more than royal dispensing power by setting the indispensable provision aside in November.
This objection was light in comparison with others. The law required the President to proclaim a fact,—that France had revoked or modified her decrees so that they ceased to violate the commerce of America. Of this fact Cadore’s letter was the only proof; but evidently Cadore’s letter pledged the Emperor to nothing. “I am authorized to declare to you,” wrote Cadore, “that the Decrees of Berlin and Milan are revoked, and that after November 1 they will cease to have effect, on the understanding that in consequence of this declaration ... the United States, conformably to the Act you have just communicated, shall cause their rights to be respected by the English.” Napoleon not only reserved to himself the right of judging whether the measures to be taken by the United States should “cause their rights to be respected,” but in doing so he reversed the process prescribed by the Act, and required the President to enforce his rights before the Emperor should withdraw his decrees.
From the standpoint of morality, perhaps the most serious objection of all was the danger of sacrificing national and personal self-respect by affecting to regard as honest a promise evidently framed to deceive, and made by a man whom Madison habitually characterized in terms that implied, to speak mildly, entire want of confidence. If America would consent to assert her rights against England in no way more straightforward than this, she might perhaps recover her neutral profits, but hardly her national self-respect.
A few months afterward, when Robert Smith gave to the world the amusing but not wholly new spectacle of a Secretary of State attacking his own President for measures signed by his own name, Joel Barlow wrote for the “National Intelligencer” a defence of the President’s course, in which he gave reasons supplied by Madison himself for holding that Cadore’s letter satisfied the conditions of Macon’s Act.
To the first objection, founded on the Rambouillet and Bayonne Decrees, Barlow replied that the American government had habitually distinguished between maritime edicts violating neutral rights and municipal edicts attacking private property. “We could not in strictness arraign such municipal spoliations under the head of violations of our neutral rights, nor of consequence regard them as contemplated by the Acts of Congress defining the acts whose revocation would satisfy the conditions of that Act.” This reasoning, though not quite convincing, might have had weight but for two objections. First, the President himself, in June and July, had declared these municipal spoliations to be contemplated by Macon’s Act as “an indispensable evidence of the just purpose of France;”[255] and, second, the President in November notified Armstrong, that,[256] “in issuing the proclamation, it has been presumed that the requisition contained in that letter [of July 5] on the subject of the sequestered property will have been satisfied.” Barlow’s idea of a municipal spoliation, independent of the jus gentium, was an afterthought intended to hide a miscalculation.
One other argument was advanced by Barlow. Erskine’s arrangement having been accepted without question of previous British spoliations, not only did impartiality require the same treatment for France, but a different rule “would have led to the embarrassment of obliging the Executive, in case the British government should be desirous of opening a free trade with the United States by repealing its orders, to make it a prerequisite that Great Britain also should indemnify for her respective spoliations.”
Such a prerequisite would have been proper, and ought to have been imposed; but Barlow’s argument was again answered by the President himself, who actually insisted on the demand against France, and assumed the demand to be satisfied. If this was partiality to England, the President was guilty of it. Probably at the time he saw reasons for thinking otherwise. The secrecy, the continuance, the pretext of the French seizures, their municipal and vindictive character and direct Imperial agency seemed to set them apart from those of England, which, although equally illegal, were always in the form of lawful trial and condemnation.
The same argument of impartiality served to justify immediate action on Cadore’s offer as on Erskine’s, without waiting for its execution. That one admitted mistake excused its own repetition in a worse form was a plea not usually advanced by servants, either public or private; but in truth Erskine’s pledge was distinct and unconditional, while Cadore’s depended on the Emperor’s satisfaction with a preliminary act. Had Erskine made his arrangement conditional on Canning’s approval of the President’s measures, Madison would certainly have waited for that approval before acting under the law; and after the disastrous results of precipitancy in 1809, when no one questioned Erskine’s good faith, wisdom called for more caution rather than less in acting, in 1810, on an offer or a pledge from a man in whom no one felt any confidence at all.
In truth, Madison’s course in both cases was due not to logic, but to impatience. As Barlow admitted: “We know it had been the aim of our government for two or three years to divide the belligerents by inducing one or the other of them to revoke its edicts, so that the example would lead to a revocation by the other, or our contest be limited to a single one.” Madison gave the same reason in a letter of October 19 to Jefferson:[257] “We hope from the step the advantage at least of having but one contest on our hands at a time.” He was mistaken, and no one expressed himself afterward in language more bitter than he used against Napoleon for conduct that deceived only those who lent themselves to deception.
October 31, Robert Smith sent for Turreau and gave him notice of the decision reached by the President and Cabinet:[258]—
“The Executive,” said Robert Smith, “is determined not to suffer England longer to trammel the commerce of the United States, and he hopes to be sustained by Congress. If, then, England does not renounce her system of paper-blockades and the other vexations resulting from it, no arrangement with that Power is to be expected; and consequently you will see, in two days, the President’s proclamation appear, founded on the provisions of the law requiring the non-intercourse to be enforced against either nation which should fail to revoke its edicts after the other belligerent had done so.... Although we have received nothing directly from Mr. Armstrong on this subject, which is doubtless very extraordinary, we consider as sufficient for the Government’s purposes the communication he made to Mr. Pinkney, which the latter has transmitted to us.”
The next day Robert Smith made some further interesting remarks.[259] “The Executive thinks,” he said, “that the measures he shall take in case England continues to restrict our communications with Europe will lead necessarily to war,” because of the terms of the non-intercourse. “We have with us a majority of Congress, which has much to retrieve, and has been accused of weakness by all parties.”
On leaving Smith, Turreau went to see Gallatin, “whose opinion in the Cabinet is rarely favorable to us.”
“Mr. Gallatin (by the way long since on bad terms with Mr. Smith) told me that he believed in war; that England could not suffer the execution of measures so prejudicial to her, and especially in the actual circumstances could not renounce the prerogatives of her maritime supremacy and of her commercial ascendency.”
Both Smith and Gallatin evidently expected that war was to result, not from the further action of the United States, but from the resentment and retaliation of England. They regarded the non-intercourse as a measure of compulsion which would require England either to resent it or to yield.
Having decided to accept Cadore’s letter as proof that an actual repeal of the French Decrees, within the meaning of the Act of Congress, had taken place November 1, the President issued, November 2, his proclamation declaring that “it has been officially made known to this Government that the said edicts of France have been so revoked as that they ceased, on the said first day of the present month, to violate the neutral commerce of the United States;” and simultaneously Gallatin issued a circular to the collectors of customs, announcing that commercial intercourse with Great Britain would cease Feb. 2, 1811.
By this means Madison succeeded in reverting to his methods of peaceful coercion. As concerned England, he could be blamed only on the ground that his methods were admittedly inadequate, as Gallatin, only a year before, had officially complained. Toward England the United States had stood for five years in a position which warranted them in adopting any measure of reprisal. The people of America alone had a right to object that when Madison began his attack on England by proclaiming the French Decrees to be revoked, he made himself a party to Napoleon’s fraud, and could scarcely blame the Federalists for replying that neither in honor nor in patriotism were they bound to abet him in such a scheme.
The Proclamation of Nov. 2, 1810, was not the only measure of the autumn which exposed the President to something more severe than criticism. At the moment when he challenged a contest with England on the assertion that Napoleon had withdrawn his decrees, Madison resumed his encroachments on Spain in a form equally open to objection.
The chaos that reigned at Madrid and Cadiz could not fail to make itself felt throughout the Spanish empire. Under British influence, Buenos Ayres in 1810 separated from the Supreme Junta, and drove out the viceroy whom the Junta had appointed. In April of the same year Caracas followed the example, and entered into a treaty with England, granting commercial preferences equally annoying to the Spaniards and to the United States. Miranda reappeared at the head of a revolution which quickly spread through Venezuela and New Grenada. A civil war broke out in Mexico. Even Cuba became uneasy. The bulky fabric of Spanish authority was shaken, and no one doubted that it must soon fall in pieces forever.
England and the United States, like two vultures, hovered over the expiring empire, snatching at the morsels they most coveted, while the unfortunate Spaniards, to whom the rich prey belonged, flung themselves, without leadership or resources, on the ranks of Napoleon’s armies. England pursued her game over the whole of Spanish America, if not by government authority, more effectively by private intrigue; while the United States for the moment confined their activity to a single object, not wholly without excuse.
As long as Baton Rouge and Mobile remained Spanish, New Orleans was insecure. This evident danger prompted Madison, when Secretary of State, to make a series of efforts, all more or less unfortunate, to gain possession of West Florida; and perhaps nothing but Napoleon’s positive threat of war prevented the seizure of Baton Rouge during Jefferson’s time. After that crisis, the subject dropped from diplomatic discussion; but as years passed, and Spanish power waned, American influence steadily spread in the province. Numerous Americans settled in or near the district of West Feliciana, within sight of Fort Adams, across the American border. As their number increased, the Spanish flag at Baton Rouge became less and less agreeable to them; but they waited until Buenos Ayres and Caracas gave notice that Spain could be safely defied.
In the middle of July, 1810, the citizens of West Feliciana appointed four delegates to a general convention, and sent invitations to the neighboring districts inviting them to co-operate in re-establishing a settled government. The convention was held July 25, and consisted of sixteen delegates from four districts, who organized themselves as a legislature, and with the aid or consent of the Spanish governor began to remodel the government. After some weeks of activity they quarrelled with the governor, charged him with perfidy, and suddenly assembling all the armed men they could raise, assaulted Baton Rouge. The Spanish fort, at best incapable of defence, was in charge of young Louis Grandpré, with a few invalid or worthless soldiers. The young man thought himself bound in honor to maintain a trust committed to him; he rejected the summons to surrender, and when the Americans swarmed over the ruinous bastions they found Louis Grandpré alone defending his flag. He was killed.
After capturing Baton Rouge, the Americans held a convention, which declared itself representative of the people of West Florida, and September 26 issued a proclamation, which claimed place among the curious products of that extraordinary time. “It is known to the world,” began this new declaration of independence,[260] “with how much fidelity the good people of this territory have professed and maintained allegiance to their legitimate sovereign while any hope remained of receiving from him protection for their property and lives.” The convention had acted in concert with the Spanish governor “for the express purpose of preserving this territory, and showing our attachment to the government which had heretofore protected us;” but the governor had endeavored to pervert those concerted measures into an engine of destruction; and therefore, “appealing to the Supreme Ruler of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, we do solemnly publish and declare the several districts composing the territory of West Florida to be a free and independent State.”
A few days afterward the convention, through its president, wrote to the Secretary of State, Robert Smith, urging the annexation of the new territory to the United States, but claiming all the public lands in the province for “the people of this Commonwealth, who have wrested the government and country from Spain at the risk of their lives and fortunes.”[261] These words accorded ill with their appeal to the Supreme Ruler of the world for the rectitude of their intentions, and their protest of “our inviolable fidelity to our king and parent country while so much as a shadow of legitimate authority remained to be exercised over us.” Yet neither with nor without their elaborate machinery of legitimate revolution could Madison have anything to do with them. Innumerable obstacles stood in his way. They declared the independence of territory which he had long since appropriated to the United States. This course alone withheld Madison from recognizing the new State; but other difficulties forbade any action at all. The Constitution gave the President no power to use the army or navy of the United States beyond the national limits, without the authority of Congress; and although extreme emergency might have excused the President in taking such action, no emergency existed in October, 1810, since Congress would meet within six weeks, and neither Spain, France, nor England could interfere in the interval. The President’s only legal course was to wait for Congress to take what measures seemed good.
Madison saw all this, but though aware of his want of authority, felt the strongest impulse to act without it. He described his dilemma to Jefferson in a letter written before he received the request for annexation, then on its way from Baton Rouge:[262]—
“The crisis in West Florida, as you will see, has come home to our feelings and interests. It presents at the same time serious questions as to the authority of the Executive, and the adequacy of the existing laws of the United States for territorial administration. And the near approach of Congress might subject any intermediate interposition of the Executive to the charge of being premature and disrespectful, if not of being illegal. Still, there is great weight in the considerations that the country to the Perdido, being our own, may be fairly taken possession of, if it can be done without violence; above all, if there be danger of its passing into the hands of a third and dangerous party.”
Casuistry might carry the United States government far. The military occupation of West Florida was an act of war against Spain. “From present appearances,” continued Madison, “our occupancy of West Florida would be resented by Spain, by England, and by France, and bring on, not a triangular, but quadrangular contest.” Napoleon himself never committed a more arbitrary act than that of marching an army, without notice, into a neighbor’s territory, on the plea that he claimed it as his own. None of Madison’s predecessors ventured on such liberties with the law; none of his successors dared imitate them, except under the pretext that war already existed by the act of the adverse government.
Madison was regarded by his contemporaries as a precise, well-balanced, even a timid man, argumentative to satiety, never carried away by bursts of passion, fretful rather than vehement, pertinacious rather than resolute,—a character that seemed incapable of surprising the world by reckless ambition or lawless acts; yet this circumspect citizen, always treated by his associates with a shade of contempt as a closet politician, paid surprisingly little regard to rules of consistency or caution. His Virginia Resolutions of 1798, his instructions in the Louisiana purchase, his assumption of Livingston’s claim to West Florida, his treatment of Yrujo, his embargo policy, his acceptance of Erskine’s arrangement, his acceptance of Cadore’s arrangement, and his occupation of West Florida were all examples of the same trait; and an abundance of others were to come. He ignored caution in pursuit of an object which seemed to him proper in itself; nor could he understand why this quiet and patriotic conduct should rouse tempests of passion in his opponents, whose violence, by contrast, increased the apparent placidity of his own persistence.
Forestalling the action of Congress which was to meet within five weeks, President Madison issued, Oct. 27, 1810, a proclamation announcing that Governor Claiborne would take possession of West Florida to the river Perdido, in the name and behalf of the United States. This proclamation, one of the most remarkable documents in the archives of the United States government, began by reasserting the familiar claim to West Florida as included in the Louisiana purchase:—
“And whereas the acquiescence of the United States in the temporary continuance of the said territory under the Spanish authority was not the result of any distrust of their title, as has been particularly evinced by the general tenor of their laws and by the distinction made in the application of those laws between that territory and foreign countries, but was occasioned by their conciliatory views, and by a confidence in the justice of their cause, and in the success of candid discussion and amicable negotiation with a just and friendly Power; ... considering, moreover, that under these peculiar and imperative circumstances a forbearance on the part of the United States to occupy the territory in question, and thereby guard against the confusions and contingencies which threaten it, might be construed into a dereliction of their title or an insensibility to the importance of the stake; considering that in the hands of the United States it will not cease to be a subject of fair and friendly negotiation and adjustment; considering finally that the Acts of Congress, though contemplating a present possession by a foreign authority, have contemplated also an eventual possession of the said territory by the United States, and are accordingly so framed as in that case to extend in their operation to the same,”—
Considering all these reasons, substantially the same self-interest by which France justified her decrees, and England her impressments, the President ordered Governor Claiborne, with the aid of the United States army, to occupy the country and to govern it as a part of his own Orleans territory.[263] By a letter of the same date the Secretary of State informed Claiborne, that, “if contrary to expectation, the occupation of this [revolutionized] territory should be opposed by force, the commanding officer of the regular troops on the Mississippi will have orders from the Secretary of War to afford you, upon your application, the requisite aid.... Should however any particular place, however small, remain in possession of a Spanish force, you will not proceed to employ force against it, but you will make immediate report thereof to this Department.”[264] Having by these few strokes of his pen authorized the seizure of territory belonging to “a just and friendly Power,” and having legislated for a foreign people without consulting their wishes, the President sent to the revolutionary convention at Baton Rouge a sharp message through Governor Holmes of the Mississippi territory, to the effect that their independence was an impertinence, and their designs on the public lands were something worse.[265]
A few days after taking these measures, Robert Smith explained their causes to Turreau in the same conversation in which he announced the decision to accept Cadore’s letter as the foundation of non-intercourse with England. The wish to preclude British occupation of Florida was the motive alleged by Smith for the intended occupation by the United States.[266]
“As for the Floridas, I swear, General, on my honor as a gentleman,” said Robert Smith to Turreau, October 31, “not only that we are strangers to everything that has happened, but even that the Americans who have appeared there either as agents or leaders are enemies of the Executive, and act in this sense against the Federal government as well as against Spain.... Moreover these men and some others have been led into these measures by the hope of obtaining from a new government considerable concessions of lands. In any case you will soon learn the measures we have taken to prevent the English from being received at Baton Rouge as they have been at Pensacola, which would render them absolute masters of our outlets by the Mobile and Mississippi. We hope that your Government will not take it ill that we should defend the part of Florida in dispute between Spain and us; and whether our pretensions are well-founded or not, your interest, like ours, requires us to oppose the enterprises of England in that country.”
Claiborne took possession of the revolutionized districts December 7, and the Spanish governor at Mobile was not sorry to see the insurgents so promptly repressed and deprived of their expected profits. Yet Claiborne did not advance to the Perdido; he went no farther than the Pearl River, and began friendly negotiations with Governor Folch at Mobile for delivery of the country still held by the Spaniards between the Pearl and the Perdido. Governor Folch had none but diplomatic weapons to use in his defence, but he used these to save that portion of the province for some years to Spain.
The four districts west of the Pearl River were organized by Claiborne as a part of the territory of Orleans, in which shape, the President’s proclamation had said, “it will not cease to be a subject of fair and friendly negotiation and adjustment” with Spain. Within a few weeks the President announced to Congress in his Annual Message that “the legality and necessity of the course pursued” required from the Legislature “whatever provisions may be due to the essential rights and equitable interests of the people thus brought into the bosom of the American family.” The difficulty of reconciling two such assertions perplexed many persons who in the interests of law and of society wished to understand how a people already brought into the bosom of the American family could remain a subject of fair negotiation with a foreign Power. The point became further complicated by the admission of Louisiana as a State into the Union, with the four districts which were “to be a subject of fair and friendly negotiation.”
The first result of these tortuous proceedings was to call a protest from Morier, the British chargé at Washington, who wrote to the Secretary of State, December 15, a letter[267] containing one paragraph worth noting:—
“Would it not have been worthy of the generosity of a free nation like this, bearing, as it doubtless does, a respect for the rights of a gallant people at this moment engaged in a noble struggle for its liberty,—would it not have been an act on the part of this country dictated by the sacred ties of good neighborhood and friendship which exist between it and Spain, to have simply offered its assistance to crush the common enemy of both, rather than to have made such interference the pretext for wresting a province from a friendly Power, and that at the time of her adversity?”
Spain had little reason to draw distinctions between friends, allies, and enemies. She could hardly stop to remember that the United States were filching a petty sand-heap in a remote corner of the world, at a time when England was “wresting” not one but all the splendid American provinces from their parent country, and when France was kneeling on the victim’s breast and aiming stab after stab at her heart.