CHAPTER IX.
John Henry, whose reports from Boston to Sir James Craig at Quebec had been received with favor in 1808 and 1809 both in Canada and in London, not satisfied with such reward as he received from the governor-general, went to England and applied, as was said, for not less than thirty-two thousand pounds, or one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, as the price he thought suitable for his services and his silence.[134] Whatever was the sum he demanded, he failed to obtain it, and left England in ill humor on his return to Canada, carrying his papers with him and an official recommendation to the governor-general.
On the same ship was a Frenchman who bore the title of Count Edward de Crillon. His connections, he said, embraced the noblest and highest families of France; among his ancestors was the “brave Crillon,” who for centuries had been known to every French child as the Bayard of his time. The Count Edward’s father was the Duc de Crillon; by marriage he was closely connected with Bessières, the Maréchal Duc d’Istrie, Napoleon’s favorite. Count Edward de Crillon had fallen into disfavor with the Emperor, and for that reason had for a time quitted France, while waiting a restoration to the army. His manners were easy and noble; he wore the decoration of the Legion of Honor, received and showed letters from his family and from the Duc d’Istrie, and talked much of his personal affairs, especially of his estate called St. Martial, “in Lebeur near the Spanish border,” and, he took pride in saying, near also to the Château de Crillon, the home of his ancestors. He had met John Henry in London society. When he appeared on the Boston packet, a friendship arose between these two men so hardly treated by fortune. Henry confided his troubles to the count, and Crillon gave himself much concern in the affair, urging Henry to have no more to do with an ungrateful government, but to obtain from the United States the money that England refused. The count offered to act as negotiator, and use his influence with Serurier, his minister, to approach the Secretary of State. The count even offered to provide for Henry’s subsequent welfare by conveying to him the valuable estate at St. Martial in consideration of the money to be obtained for Henry’s documents. At St. Martial, under the protection of the Crillons, John Henry would at last find, together with every charm of climate and scenery, the case of life and the social refinement so dear to him.
Henry entered into a partnership with the Frenchman, and on their arrival at Boston Crillon wrote to Serurier, introducing himself, and narrating the situation of Henry, whose papers, he said, were in his own control.[135] Serurier made no reply; but Crillon came alone to Washington, where he called on the minister, who after hearing his story sent him to Monroe, to whom he offered Henry’s papers for a consideration of $125,000. Serurier liked Crillon, and after some months of acquaintance liked him still more:—
“His conduct and language during six weeks’ residence here have been constantly sustained; the attention shown him by this Government, the repentance he displayed for having incurred the displeasure of his sovereign, the constant enthusiasm with which he spoke of the Emperor, the name he bore, the letters he showed from his sister and from the Maréchal Duc d’Istrie, the decoration of the Legion he carried, and finally the persecution he suffered from the British minister and the party hostile to France,—all this could not but win my regard for him.”[136]
Yet Crillon did not owe to Serurier his introduction into society, or his success in winning the confidence of Madison and Monroe. Indeed, the French minister could not openly recommend a man who admitted himself to be banished from France by the Emperor’s displeasure. On the contrary, the favor that Crillon rapidly won at the White House served rather to establish his credit with his legation. The President and Cabinet ministers were civil to the count, who became a frequent guest at the President’s table; and the services he promised to Serurier’s great object were so considerable as to make the French minister glad to assist him. No French comedy was suited with a happier situation or with more skilful actors. During several weeks in January and February, 1812, Count Edward de Crillon was the centre of social interest or hostility at the White House, the State Department, and the French and the British Legations.
The negotiation through Serurier was successful. Henry was secretly summoned to Washington, and consented to desist from his demand for $125,000. Secretary Monroe agreed to give him $50,000, and to promise that the papers should not be made public until Henry himself was actually at sea, while Crillon received the money, delivering to Henry the title-deeds to the estate of St. Martial. The money was paid, February 10, out of the contingent fund for foreign intercourse. Henry left Washington the next day to sail from New York for France in a national ship-of-war, but the Count Edward de Crillon remained. March 2 Serurier reported,[137]—
“The Administration has decided to publish Henry’s documents. The order has been sent to New York that in case the ship which was to give him passage has not arrived, he is to be embarked on a merchant-vessel; and then all the papers are to be sent to Congress by special message. Much is expected from this exposition. The conduct of M. Crillon since his arrival here has never ceased to be consistent and thoroughly French. It has drawn on him the hatred of the British minister and of all the British party; but he bears up against it with the noblest firmness, and sometimes even with an intrepidity that I am obliged to restrain. He keeps me informed of everything that he thinks of service to the Emperor; and his loyalty of conduct attaches the members of the Administration to him. I have personally every motive to be satisfied with him, and I hope that the service he has just rendered, the sentiments he professes on all occasions, his so enthusiastic admiration for the Emperor, his devotion, his love of his country and his family, will create for him a title to the indulgence of his sovereign and the return of his favor. He will wait for them here, and I pray your Excellency to invoke them on my part.”
The President waited only for the news that Henry had sailed, before sending to Congress the evidence of British intrigues and of Federalist treason; but as soon as this news arrived, Saturday, March 7, Monroe sent for Serurier:[138]—
“The Secretary of State asked me to come to his office to inform me of the determination. He asked me if I did not agree with him that it was better not to mention me in the Message, as such mention might injure its effect by giving it a French color. I told Mr. Monroe that I should leave the President entirely free to follow the course he thought best in the matter. He might say that the documents had come into my possession, and that I had at once sent them to him as interesting the Republic exclusively; or he might restrict himself to the communication of the papers without detail as to the route they had followed. That I had taken no credit, as he could remember, in regard to the service I had been so fortunate as to render the Administration; and that I had on my own account no need of newspaper notoriety or of public gratitude.”
Monday, March 9, the President sent Henry’s papers to Congress, with a message which said nothing as to the manner of acquiring them, but charged the British government with employing a secret agent “in fomenting disaffection to the constituted authorities of the nation, and in intrigues 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 forming the eastern part thereof into a political connection with Great Britain.” Serurier reported that the Administration had great hopes through this discovery of deciding the result, inflaming the nation, and throwing it enthusiastically into the war:—
“The American people recalls to me the son of Ulysses on the rock of Calypso’s isle; uncertain, irresolute, he knows not to which of his passions to yield, when Minerva, flinging him into the sea, fixes his fate, leaving him no other choice than to overcome by his courage and strength the terrible elements she gives him for an enemy.”
When John Henry’s letters were read in Congress, March 9, 1812, the Federalists for a moment felt real alarm, for they knew not what Henry might have reported; but a few minutes of examination showed them that, as far as they were concerned, Henry had taken care to report nothing of consequence. That he came to Boston as a British agent was hitherto unknown to the Federalists themselves, and the papers showed that he never revealed his secret character to them. His letters were hardly more compromising than letters, essays, and leading articles, sermons, orations, and addresses that had been printed again and again in every Federalist paper in Boston and New York. Here and there they contained rows of mysterious asterisks, but no other sign of acquaintance with facts worth concealing. The Federalists naturally suspected, what is evident on comparison of the papers bought by Madison with the originals in the Record Office at London, that Henry intended to sell as little as possible at the highest price he could exact. His revelations told nothing of his first visit to Boston in 1808, nor was one of the letters published which had been written in that year, although his documents incidentally alluded to information then sent; but what was more singular and fatal to his credit, the letters which he sold as his own were not copies but paraphrases of the originals; the mysterious asterisks were introduced merely to excite curiosity; and except the original instructions of Sir James Craig and the recent letter from Lord Liverpool’s secretary, showing that in view of an expected war Henry had been employed as a secret agent to obtain political information by the governor-general, and that his reports had been sent to the Colonial Office, nothing in these papers compromised any one except Henry himself. As for the British government, since war was to be waged with it in any case for other reasons, these papers distracted attention from the true issue.
After a night’s reflection the Federalists returned to the Capitol convinced that the President had done a foolish act in throwing away fifty thousand dollars for papers that proved the Federalist party to be ignorant of British intrigues that never existed. Fifty thousand dollars was a large sum; and having been spent without authority from Congress, it seemed to the Federalists chiefly their own money which had been unlawfully used by Madison for the purpose of publishing a spiteful libel on themselves. With every sign of passion they took up the President’s personal challenge. A committee of investigation was ordered by the House, and found that Henry, with the Government’s privity, had already sailed for Europe. Nothing remained but to examine Crillon, who gave evidence tending to prove only such facts as he thought it best that Congress should believe. In the Senate, March 10, Lloyd of Massachusetts moved a Resolution calling on the President for the names of any persons “who have in any way or manner whatever entered into, or most remotely countenanced,” the projects of Sir James Craig. Monroe could only reply that, as John Henry had mentioned no names, the Department was not possessed of the information required. The reply made the Federalists only more angry; they were eager for revenge, and fortune did not wholly refuse it. They never learned that Henry’s disclosure was the result of French intrigue, but they learned enough to make them suspect and exult over some mortification of the President.
Soon after Count Edward de Crillon gave his evidence to the investigating committee, news arrived that France was about to make war with Russia, and although Crillon had decided to wait in Washington for his recall to the Emperor’s favor, he became suddenly earnest to depart. March 22, Serurier wrote:[139]—
“At the news of a possible rupture with Russia, the blood of M. de Crillon, always so boiling, has become hotter than ever, and he has decided to return to France without waiting an answer from your Excellency; he wants to throw himself at the Emperor’s feet, tell him what he has done, invoke pardon for his errors, and go to expiate them in the advance guard of his armies.”
April 1 Crillon left Washington bearing despatches from Monroe to Barlow, and from Serurier to Bassano. Neither he nor John Henry is known to have ever again visited the United States, and their names would have been forgotten had not stories soon arrived that caused the Federalists great amusement, and made President Madison very uncomfortable. Barlow wrote to the President that Count Edward de Crillon was an impostor; that no such person was known to the Crillon family or to the French service. Private letters confirmed the report, and added that the estate of St. Martial had no existence, and that Crillon’s draughts in Henry’s favor were drawn on a person who had been five years dead.
“The President, with whom he has often dined,” continued Serurier,[140] “and all the secretaries, whose reception, joined with the political considerations known to your Excellency, decided his admittance to my house, are a little ashamed of the eagerness (empressement) they showed him, and all the money they gave him. For my own part, Monseigneur, I have little to regret. I have constantly refused to connect myself with his affairs; I sent him to the Secretary of State for his documents; the papers have been published, and have produced an effect injurious to England without my having bought this good fortune by a single denier from the Imperial treasury; and I have escaped at the cost of some civilities, preceded by those of the President, the motive of which I declared from the first to be the services which the Administration told me had been rendered it by this traveller.”
Serurier continued to declare that he had honestly believed Crillon to be “something like what he represented himself;” but he could not reasonably expect the world to accept these protestations. He had aided this person to obtain fifty thousand dollars from the United States Treasury for papers not his own, and instead of warning the President against an adventurer whose true character he admitted himself to have suspected, the French minister abetted the impostor. Although the truth was revealed only at a much later time that Crillon was an agent of Napoleon’s secret police,[141] no Frenchman, who had enjoyed the advantages of a diplomatic education, could have been wholly deceived in regard to the character of a person so evidently suspicious.
That the President should be mortified was natural, but still more natural that he should be angry. He could not resent the introduction of a foreign impostor to his confidence, since he was himself chiefly responsible for the social success of the Count Edward de Crillon; but deception was a part of the French system, and Madison felt the Crillon affair sink into insignificance beside the other deceptions practised upon him by the government of France. He was as nearly furious as his temperament allowed, at the manner in which the Emperor treated him. Before Crillon appeared on the scene, Madison used language to Serurier that betrayed his extreme dissatisfaction at being paraded before the public as a dupe or tool of France. At Savannah a riot took place between French privateersmen and American or English sailors; several men on both sides were killed; the privateers were burned; and Serurier complained in language such as Napoleon might be supposed to expect from his minister in regard to a violent outrage on the French flag. At the White House on New Year’s day, 1812, the French minister renewed his complaints, and the President lost patience.
“The President,” wrote Serurier,[142] “answered me with vivacity, that doubtless such indignities were subject for much regret; but it was not less distressing to learn what was passing every day in the Baltic and on the routes from America to England, where some American ships were burned, while others were captured and taken into European ports under French influence and condemned; that such proceedings were in his eyes hostilities as pronounced as were those of England, against whom the Republic was at that moment taking up arms.... Mr. Madison ended by telling me that he wished always to flatter himself that Mr. Barlow would send immediate explanation of these strange measures, and notice that they had ceased; but that for the moment, very certainly, matters could not be in a worse situation.”
Disconcerted by this sharp rebuff from the President, Serurier went to Monroe, who was usually good-humored when Madison was irritable, and irritable when Madison became mild. This process of alternate coaxing and scolding seemed to affect Serurier more than it affected his master. Monroe made no reproaches, but defended the President’s position by an argument which the Republican party did not use in public:—
“He urged that the captures of these ships, though perhaps inconsiderable in themselves, had the unfortunate effect of giving arms to the English party, which obstinately maintains that the repeal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees has not taken place; ‘that repeal,’ he added, ‘on which nevertheless the whole actual system of the Administration is founded, and which, if it be not really absolute, would render the war we are undertaking with England very imprudent and without reasonable object.’”
This admission, although made in private, seemed humiliating enough; but as weeks passed, Monroe’s complaints became stronger. March 2 Serurier reported him as avowing that he considered Barlow’s mission fruitless;[143]—
“After delays that have lasted three months beyond what we feared, we have as yet received only projects of arrangements, but nothing finished that we can publish.... You are witness to our embarrassment. Our position is painful. We will treat with England on no other ground than that of withdrawing the Orders in Council, and nothing promises this withdrawal. We are then decided for war. You see us every day making our preparations. If these meet with obstacles, if they suffer some delay, if Congress seems to grow weak and to hesitate, this slackening is due to the fact that we come to no conclusion with France.”
Ships were still captured on their way to England. “If your decrees are in fact repealed,” asked Monroe, “why this sequestration?” Serurier strove in vain to satisfy Monroe that the decrees, though repealed in principle, might be still enforced in fact. He failed to calm the secretary or the President, whose temper became worse as he saw more clearly that he had been overreached by Napoleon, and that his word as President of the United States had been made a means of deceiving Congress and the people.
Had the British government at that moment offered the single concession asked of it, no war could have taken place, unless it were a war with France; but the British government had not yet recovered its reason. Foster came to Washington with instructions to yield nothing, yet to maintain peace; to threaten, but still conciliate. This mixture of policy, half Canning and half Fox, feeble and mischievous as it was, could not be altered by Foster; his instructions were positive. “Nor can we ever deem the repeal of the French hostile decrees to be effectual,” wrote Wellesley in April, 1811, “until neutral commerce shall be restored to the condition in which it stood previously to the commencement of the French system of commercial warfare.” Wellesley hinted that the Decrees of Berlin and Milan were no longer important; they were in effect superseded by Napoleon’s tariff of prohibitions and prohibitive duties; and until this system of war was abandoned, and neutral rights of trade were respected, Great Britain could not withdraw her blockades. In obedience to these instructions, Foster was obliged to tell Monroe in July, and again in October, 1811, that even if the repeal of the decrees were genuine, it would not satisfy the British government. Not the decrees, but their principle, roused British retaliation.
When the President in his Annual Message represented Foster as requiring that the United States should force British produce and manufactures into France, Foster protested, explained, and remonstrated in vain; he found himself reduced to threats of commercial retaliation which no one regarded, and his position became mortifying beyond any in the experience of his unfortunate predecessors. Compelled to witness constant insults to his country, he was still ordered to maintain peace. As early as Dec. 11, 1811, he notified his Government that unless its system were changed, war was likely to follow. The suggestions offered by the Federalist congressmen, February 1, could hardly fail to show the British government that at last it must choose between war and concession. Feb. 26, 1812, Foster wrote again that war might be declared within a fortnight. March 9 the revelations of John Henry gave the minister another anxiety, and called from him another lame disavowal. Yet throughout these trying months Foster remained on friendly and almost intimate terms with Monroe, whom he described as “a very mild, moderate man.”[144]
Matters stood thus till March 21, 1812, when Washington was excited by news that Foster had received recent instructions from his Government, and the crisis of war and peace was at hand. “The anxiety and curiosity of both Houses of Congress,” reported Foster, April 1,[145] “to know the real nature of the despatches was so great that some of the members on committees told me they could not get the common routine of business at all attended to. The Department of State was crowded with individuals endeavoring to obtain information from Mr. Monroe, while I was questioned by all those with whom I happened to be acquainted.” A report spread through Washington that the Orders in Council were repealed, and that an immediate accommodation of all differences between England and the United States might be expected.
Foster would have been glad to find his new instructions composed in such a sense; but he hardly expected to find them so positive as they were in an opposite spirit. Lord Wellesley’s despatch of Jan. 28, 1812,[146] which may be said to have decided the declaration of war, was afterward published, and need not be quoted in detail. He remonstrated against the arming of merchant vessels, and ordered Foster to speak earnestly on the subject “for the purpose of preventing a state of affairs which might probably lead to acts of force.” The pretended revocation of the French Decrees, said Lord Wellesley, was in fact a fresh enactment of them, while the measures of America tended to occasion such acts of violence as might “produce the calamity of war between the two countries.” This usual formula, by which diplomacy announced an expected rupture, was reinforced by secret instructions warning Foster cautiously to “avoid employing any suggestions of compromise to the American government which might induce them to doubt the sincerity or firmness of his Majesty’s government in their determination, already announced, of maintaining steadfastly the system of defence adopted by them until the enemy shall relinquish his unwarrantable mode of attack upon our interests through the violation of neutral rights.”
Foster regarded this order as a rebuke, for he had talked freely, both to his own Government and in Washington, of the possibility that the Orders in Council might be withdrawn. The warning gave him a manner more formal than usual when he went, March 21, to assure Monroe that the Prince Regent would never give way. Monroe listened with great attention; “then merely said, with however considerable mildness of tone, that he had hoped his conversations with me at the early part of the session would have produced a different result.” Foster left him without further discussion, and announced everywhere in public that, “far from being awed and alarmed at the threatening attitude and language” of Congress, his Government would maintain its system unimpaired.[147]
The President looked upon this declaration as final. Already every preparation had been made to meet it. Only a fortnight before, the papers of John Henry had been sent to Congress, and the halls of Congress, as well as the columns of every Republican newspaper in the country, were filled with denunciations of England’s conduct, while the President prepared a message recommending an embargo for sixty days,—a measure preliminary to the declaration of war,—when March 23, two days after Foster’s interview, news arrived that a French squadron, under open orders, had begun to burn and sink American commerce on the ocean. The American brig “Thames” reached New York March 9, and her captain, Samuel Chew, deposed before a magistrate that February 2, in the middle of the Atlantic, his brig on the return voyage from Portugal was seized by a French squadron which had sailed from Nantes early in January, and which had already seized and burned the American ship “Asia” and the brig “Gershom.” The French commodore declared that he had orders to burn all American vessels sailing to or from an enemy’s port. The American newspapers were soon deluged with affidavits to the same effect from the captains and seamen of vessels burned by these French frigates, and the news, arriving in Washington at a moment when the Federalists were most eager to retaliate the insult of the Henry letters, caused extreme sensation. In face of these piratical acts no one longer pretended that the French Decrees were repealed. Republicans were angrier than Federalists. Madison and Monroe were angriest of all. Serurier was in despair. “I am just from Mr. Monroe’s office,” he wrote March 23;[148] “I have never yet seen him more agitated, more discomposed. He addressed me abruptly: ‘Well, sir, it is then decided that we are to receive nothing but outrages from France! And at what a moment too! At the very instant when we were going to war with her enemies.’” When the French minister tried to check his vehemence of reproach, Monroe broke out again:—
“Remember where we were two days ago. You know what warlike measures have been taken for three months past; adopted slowly, they have been progressively followed up. We have made use of Henry’s documents as a last means of exciting (pour achever d’exalter) the nation and Congress; you have seen by all the use we have made of them whither we were aiming; within a week we were going to propose the embargo, and the declaration of war was the immediate consequence of it. A ship has arrived from London, bringing us despatches to February 5, which contain nothing offering a hope of repeal of the orders; this was all that was needed to carry the declaration of war, which would have passed almost unanimously. It is at such a moment that your frigates come and burn our ships, destroy all our work, and put the Administration in the falsest and most terrible position in which a government can find itself placed.”
For the hundredth time Monroe repeated the old story that the repeal of the French Decrees was the foundation of the whole American system; “that should the Executive now propose the embargo or the declaration of war, the whole Federal party—reinforced by the Clinton party, the Smith party, and the discontented Republicans—would rise in mass and demand why we persist in making war on England for maintaining her Orders in Council when we have proofs so recent and terrible that the French Decrees are not withdrawn.” He added that if the question were put at such a moment, he did not doubt that the Government would lose its majority.
Foster also attempted to interfere in this complicated quarrel:—
“I took an occasion to wait on Mr. Monroe,” wrote Foster April 1, “to hear what he would say relative to this outrage. He seemed much struck with the enormity of it, and ... admitted that there were some circumstances in this particular instance of peculiar violence, and calling for the highest expressions of resentment on the part of this government. He told me that M. Serurier in an interview he had with him on the subject stated his disbelief in the fact.”
Foster wrote an official note to Monroe, using the recent French outrages as new ground for demanding to see the instrument by which the decrees were said to be repealed.
Serurier himself was little pleased with the Emperor’s conduct, and expressed his annoyance frankly to his Government; but he consoled himself with the conviction that President Madison could no longer recede, even if serious in wishing to do so. Congress was equally helpless. Nothing could exceed the anger of congressmen with France. As Macon wrote to Nicholson, March 24,[149] after Captain Chew’s deposition had been read in the House, “the Devil himself could not tell which government, England or France, is the most wicked.” The cry for a double war with France as well as with England became strong enough to create uneasiness; and although such a triangular war might be a military mistake, no one could explain the reasoning which led to a declaration of war with England, on the grounds selected by Madison, without a simultaneous declaration against France. The responsibility Madison had incurred would have broken the courage of any man less pertinacious. With difficulty could the best Republican conceive how the issue with England could have been worse managed.
At this moment, according to a Federalist legend, Madison was believed to hesitate, and Clay and Grundy coerced him into the recommendation of war by threats of opposing his renomination for the Presidency.[150] In reality, some of the moderate Republicans urged him to send a special mission to England as a last chance of peace.[151] Perhaps Clay and Grundy opposed this suggestion with the warmth ascribed to them, but certainly no sign of hesitation could be detected in Madison’s conduct between the meeting of Congress in November and the declaration of war in June.[152] Whatever were his private feelings, he acted in constant agreement with the majority of his party, and at most asked only time for some slight armaments. As to the unprepared state of the country, he said that he did not feel himself bound to take more than his share of the responsibility.[153] Even under the exasperation caused by the conduct of France, he waited only for his party to recover composure. March 31 Monroe held a conference with the House Committee of Foreign Relations, and told them that the President thought war should be declared before Congress adjourned, and that he would send an Embargo Message if he could be assured it would be agreeable to the House.[154] On the same day Foster called at the State Department for an answer to the note in which he had just asked for proof that the French Decrees were repealed. Monroe made him a reply of which Foster seemed hardly to appreciate the gravity.[155]
“He told me, a good deal to my disappointment I confess, that the President did not think it would lead to any utility to order an answer to be written to either of my last notes; that he could not now entertain the question as to whether the French Decrees were repealed, having already been convinced and declared that they were so. He said that the case of the two American ships which were burned could not be said to come under the Berlin and Milan Decrees, however objectionable the act was to this Government; that the declaration of the French commodore of his having orders to burn all ships bound to or from an enemy’s port was given only verbally, and might not have been well understood by the American captain, who did not very well understand French; while the declaration in writing only alluded to ships bound to or from Lisbon and Cadiz.”
Nothing could be more humiliating to Monroe than the resort to subterfuge like this; but the President left no outlet of escape. The Committee of Foreign Relations decided in favor of an embargo; and April 1, the day after this interview, Madison sent to Congress a secret Message, which was read with closed doors:—
“Considering it as expedient, under existing circumstances and prospects, that a general embargo be laid on all vessels now in port or hereafter arriving for the period of sixty days, I recommend the immediate passage of a law to that effect.”