CHAPTER VIII.
The Army Bill was understood to decide not so much the war as the change in domestic politics. That the party of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, and Monroe should establish a standing army of thirty-five thousand troops in time of peace, when no foreign nation threatened attack, and should do this avowedly for purposes of conquest, passed the bounds of inconsistency and proclaimed a revolution. This radical change was no longer disguised. Clay, Calhoun, Grundy, Lowndes, and Cheves made only a bare pretence of respecting the traditions of their party; while Giles, with a quality peculiar to himself, excused his assaults on Madison by doing public penance for his ancient errors in maligning Washington. “Further information and reflection,” he said, “and practical experience of more than twenty years, have completely convinced me of the superiority of the talent of this great man as a statesman as well as a soldier, and have also admonished me of my former errors.” If in America any politician could be found to whose public character such an admission was fatal, Giles might be regarded as the person; but conduct that ruined Giles’s character only raised the reputations of Clay, Lowndes, and Calhoun. These younger men were not responsible for what had been said and done ten or fifteen years before; they had been concerned in no conspiracy to nullify the laws, or to offer armed resistance to the government; they had never rested their characters as statesmen on the chance of success in governing without armaments, and in coercing Napoleon and Pitt by peaceable means; they had no past to defend or excuse, and as yet no philosophical theories to preach,—but they were obliged to remove from their path the system their party had established, and they worked at this task with more energy and with much more success than they showed in conducting foreign war. Even a return to Washington’s system would not answer their purpose, for they were obliged to restore the extreme practices of 1798, and to re-enact the laws which had then been denounced and discarded as the essence of monarchy.
Bitterly as all good Republicans regretted to create a standing army, that vote was easy compared with other votes it made necessary. Doubtless an army was an evil, but the effects of the evil were likely to appear chiefly in the form of taxes; and the stanchest war Republicans flinched at taxation. The British minister, who saw so much of these difficulties that he could not believe in the possibility of war, reported to his Government a story which showed how uneasily the Administration balanced itself between the two bodies of its supporters. In December, during the debate on the Army Bill, the Committee of Ways and Means was repeatedly urged to produce a scheme of war-finance, but failed to do so. Foster reported, on what he called good authority, that when the chairman of that committee went to Gallatin for information to meet questions in the House, the secretary declined giving estimates until the Army Bill should be disposed of; and he explained that if he submitted a plan of taxes, the Government would be charged with wanting to damp the ardor of Congress.[129] Every one knew that the ardor of Congress feared nothing so much as damping; but every one who knew Gallatin was persuaded that as long as he remained Secretary of the Treasury, taxes must proportionally increase with debt.
Foster’s story was probably true; for although Ezekiel Bacon, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, wrote as early as Dec. 9, 1811, to the secretary for advice, the secretary delayed his answer until January 10, the day when Congress agreed to pass the Army Bill. The letter was read to the House January 20, and proved, as had been foreseen, a serious discouragement to the war spirit. Yet Gallatin made an under-estimate of financial difficulties; for while he assumed the fixed charges at $9,600,000, and estimated the receipts from customs under the existing duties at only $2,500,000 during war, he assumed also the committee’s estimate of $10,000,000 as the annual loan that would be required to meet the expense of war. In order to pay the fixed charges of government, the customs revenue must be raised to $6,000,000; and for this purpose he asked Congress not only to double the existing duties, but also to reimpose the old duty on salt. To meet the remaining charge of $3,600,000 and the accruing interest on new loans, he asked for internal taxes to the amount of $5,000,000.
Unfortunately Gallatin had carelessly said, in his annual report of November, that a revenue of nine millions would, with the aid of loans, answer the purposes of war; while his letter of January 10 required, as was proper, that the interest of each new loan should be added annually to the nine millions. The difference amounted to $600,000 for the first year alone, and in each successive year increased taxation by at least an equal sum. Gallatin himself was in a defiant mood, as he well might be, since he saw Congress in a position where it must either submit or take the responsibility of bankrupting the Treasury; and he did not content himself with demanding unpopular taxes, but read Congress a lecture on its own conduct that had made these taxes necessary. He recalled his promise of 1808 that “no internal taxes, either direct or indirect, were contemplated even in the case of hostilities carried on against the two great belligerent powers;” and he showed that since 1808 Congress had thrown away his actual or expected balance of twenty millions, had refused to accept twenty millions that might have been obtained from the Bank, and had thus made internal taxes necessary, while making loans more difficult to obtain even on harder terms.
The sting of this reproof came at the end of the secretary’s letter, where he named the objects of internal taxation. These were spirits, refined sugar, licenses to retailers, auctions, stamps, and carriages for conveyance of persons. Here was the whole armory of Federalism, that had once already roused rebellion, and after causing the grievances which brought the Republicans into power, appeared again threatening to ruin them as it had ruined their predecessors. Standing army of thirty-five thousand men, loans, protective duties, stamps, tax on distillation,—nothing but a Sedition Law was wanting; and the previous question, as a means of suppressing discussion, was not an unfair equivalent for the Sedition Law.
Gallatin’s letter caused no little excitement in the House. Congress recoiled, and for more than a month left the subject untouched. The chance that England might still give way, or that something might at the last prevent actual war, made every member anxious to avoid committing himself on matters of taxation. The number of representatives who favored war was supposed not to exceed forty or fifty in a House of one hundred and forty-one,—as many more would vote for war only in case they must; but the war men and the peace men united in private to fall upon Gallatin,—the first, because he had chilled the national spirit by saying that taxes must be laid; the last, because he had not said it earlier, and had not chilled the national spirit once for all.
Laying aside the question of taxes, Congress took up two other subjects of pressing importance. Every one doubted the possibility of raising a regular army, and those persons who knew best the character of the people were convinced that the war must be waged by militia on land, and by privateers on the ocean.
The House began with the militia. December 26 Porter brought in a bill authorizing the President “to accept of any company or companies of volunteers, either of artillery, cavalry, or infantry, who may associate and offer themselves for the service, not exceeding fifty thousand,” officered according to the law of the State to which the companies belonged, and liable to service for one year, with the pay of regular troops. Evidently these volunteers were State militia, and were subject to be used only for purposes defined in the Constitution. In 1798 the attempt to raise such a corps had been denounced as unconstitutional, a device to separate a part of the State militia in order to put it under the President’s power in a manner expressly forbidden by the Constitution and peculiarly dangerous to the public liberties; and although the device of 1798 was made more evident, as its efficiency was made more certain, by the provision that these corps should be officered by the President, the device of 1812 was not less offensive to men who held that Congress had no power to call out the State militia except “to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions,” of course only within the limits of the United States. The chief service desired from these volunteer corps was the conquest of Canada and the occupation of Florida; but every principle of the Republican party would be outraged by placing the militia at the President’s orders, to serve on foreign soil.
Porter, who wanted express legislation to overcome this difficulty, stated his dilemma to the House; and the debate began quietly on the assumption that these volunteers were not to serve in Canada or Florida without their own consent, when, January 11, Langdon Cheves, with much seriousness and even solemnity of manner and language, informed the House that the Republican party had hitherto taken a wrong view of the subject. The distinguished South Carolinian affirmed doctrines that had never before been heard from Republican lips:—
“The power of declaring and making war is a great sovereign power, whose limits and extent have long been understood and well established. It has its attributes and incidental powers, which are in the same degree less equivocal than those of other powers as it excels those powers in its importance. Do you ask then for the right of Congress to employ the militia in war? It is found among the attributes of the sovereign power which Congress has to make war. Do you ask for the limits to which this employment may extend? They are coextensive with the objects of the war.”
The President himself, added Cheves, was understood to hold this opinion, and ought to be left to act under the high responsibility attached to his office. Anxious as the party was to support the President, Cheves’s speech met with protest after protest, until Henry Clay came to his support and adopted his argument. On the other hand, the Federalists, although consistency required them to take the same view, and even war Republicans, like Porter and Grundy, rejected the idea of an unlimited war power, and declared that the volunteers must be retained within the national boundaries. The point was left unsettled; January 17 the House passed the bill by a vote of eighty-seven to twenty-three, leaving the decision in the President’s hands, or, what was worst of all, in the hands of the volunteers. In the Senate, Giles made an interesting speech against the bill, avoiding the constitutional question, but arguing that the volunteer force would prove inefficient, and that a regular army could alone serve the purposes of war. He had no difficulty in proving the correctness of his view and the fatal folly of short enlistments; but he could not explain how the ranks of the regular army were to be filled, and his objections took no practical form. The bill passed without a division, and February 6 was approved by the President.
In this matter Congress, without absolutely rejecting Cheves’s doctrine, evaded a decision; but another subject remained which was not so gently treated. From the first, the Republican party had opposed a navy. The United States owned five or six frigates, but not one ship-of-the-line; New York or Philadelphia might be blockaded, perhaps ransomed, at any time by a single seventy-four with a frigate or two in company. To seafaring men, the idea of fighting England without ships seemed absurd, but the Republican party was pledged by every line of its history not to create a navy. The dilemma was singular. Either the Republican party must recant its deepest convictions, or the war must be fought without ships except privateers, and England must be left with no anxiety but the defence of Canada.
Once more Langdon Cheves took the lead. January 17, after the House voted on the Volunteer Bill, Cheves as chairman of the Naval Committee asked an appropriation to build twelve seventy-fours and twenty frigates at a cost of seven and a half million dollars.
“I know,” he began, “how many and how strong are the prejudices, how numerous and how deeply laid are the errors which I have to encounter in the discussion of this question,—errors and prejudices the more formidable as they come recommended by the virtues and shielded by the estimable motives of those who indulge them. I have been told that this subject is unpopular, and it has been not indistinctly hinted that those who become the zealous advocates of the bill will not advance by their exertions the personal estimation in which they may be held by their political associates.”
In few words Cheves avowed that while he preferred to act with the Republican party, he was in truth independent, and he warned his friends that on the subject of a navy they must in the end either conquer their prejudices or quit office.
After this preamble, Cheves struck once more at the foundations of his party. His argument, as a matter of expediency, was convincing; for every American ship-of-war, even when blockaded in port, would oblige the British to employ three ships of equal or greater size to relieve each other in blockading and watching it. The blockading service of the American station was peculiarly severe. England had no port nearer than Halifax for equipments or repairs; in general all her equipments must be made in Europe, and for only three months’ service; in winter she must for months at a time abandon the blockade, and leave the coast free. No method could be devised by which, with so small risk and so little waste of money and life, the resources of England could be so rapidly drained as by the construction of heavy war-vessels. Once at sea, an American seventy-four had nothing to fear except a squadron; and even when dismantled in port, she required the attention of a hostile fleet.
The House had submitted with slowly rising ill-temper to each successive demand of the war it would have preferred to avoid; but this last requirement threw it into open revolt. Cheves found himself for a time almost alone. Even Richard M. Johnson, always ardent for war, became mournful with prophecies of the evils that Cheves was about to bring upon the country. “I will refer to Tyre and Sidon, Crete and Rhodes, to Athens and to Carthage.” Plunder, piracy, perpetual war, followed the creation of every navy known to history. Armies might be temporary, but navies were permanent, and even more dangerous to freedom. “Navies have been and always will be engines of power, employed in projects of ambition and war.”
These were the old and respected Republican doctrines, still dear to a large majority of the party. William Lowndes came to the support of his colleague, and ridiculed Johnson’s lessons from ancient history; Henry Clay protested against the unreasonable prejudice which refused naval assistance, and which left New York and the commerce of the Mississippi at the mercy of single British ships; but when the committee of the whole House came to a vote, Cheves found a majority opposed to him on every motion for the building additional ships of any sort whatever. The House continued the debate for several days, but ended, January 27, by refusing to build frigates. The division was close. Fifty-nine members voted for the frigates; sixty-two voted against them. While Cheves, Lowndes, Calhoun, Troup, Porter, and the Federalists voted for the ships, Ezekiel Bacon, Grundy, R. M. Johnson, D. R. Williams, and the friends of the Administration in general voted against them.
By the middle of February, Congress reached a point of disorganization that threatened disaster. The most ardent urged immediate war, while not a practical step had yet been taken toward fighting. Such was the chaos that Peter B. Porter, who had himself reported the Army and Volunteer bills, asked for a committee to raise another provisional army of twenty thousand men, for the reason that the two armies already provided were useless,—the regular force, because it could not be put into the field within the year; the volunteers, because they could not lawfully be used for offensive war. “What force have we given the President?” asked Porter. “We have made a parade in passing laws to raise twenty-five thousand regular troops, and fifty thousand volunteers; but in truth and in fact we have not given him a single man.” The House refused to follow Porter’s advice; but as usual the war Republicans were obliged to coalesce with the Federalists in order to maintain themselves against these Executive reproaches. What Porter said was mainly true. With the exception of the peace establishment consisting of nominally ten thousand men, and the vessels of war actually afloat, the President had not yet been given means of defending the coasts and frontiers from hostile forces which, in the case of the northwestern Indians, were already actually attacking them.
In the midst of this general discouragement, February 17, Ezekiel Bacon brought in fourteen Resolutions embodying a scheme for raising money. Gallatin’s measures were expected to be harsh, but those proposed by Bacon seemed more severe than had been expected. The customs duties were to be doubled; twenty cents a bushel were laid on salt, fifty cents a gallon on the capacity of stills; licenses and stamps in proportion; and a direct tax of three million dollars was to be apportioned among the States. A loan bill for eleven millions at six per cent was easily passed, but all the force of the war feeling could not overcome the antipathy to taxation. The Resolution for doubling the customs duties met little resistance; but February 28 the House refused, by sixty to fifty-seven, to impose a duty on imported salt, and for the moment this vote threatened to ruin the whole scheme. The House adjourned for reflection; and on the following Monday a member from Virginia moved to reconsider the vote. “It now seems,” he said, “that if the article of salt is excluded, the whole system of taxation will be endangered. We are told in conversation, since the vote on the salt tax, that the system which has been presented by the Committee of Ways and Means is a system of compromise and concession, and that it must be taken altogether, the bad with the good; that if we pay the salt tax, the eastern and the western country will suffer peculiarly by an increase of the impost, and by the land tax.” In short, he thought it better to take the whole draught even if it were hemlock.
This view of the case did not find easy acceptance. Nelson of Virginia exhorted the majority not under any circumstances to accept the impost on salt; and Wright of Maryland, a man best known for his extravagances, took the occasion to express against Gallatin the anger which the friends of the Smiths, Giles, and Duane had stored. Gallatin, he said, was trying to fix the odium of these taxes on Congress in order to disgust the people and chill the war spirit; he was treading in the muddy footsteps of his official predecessors, in attempting to strap around the necks of the people this odious system of taxation, for which the Federalists had been condemned and dismissed from power. The salt tax would destroy the present as it had destroyed the old Administration; the true course was to lay taxes directly on property. Probably most of the Republican members sympathized in private with the feelings of Wright, but Gallatin had at last gained the advantage of position; the House voted to reconsider, and by a majority of sixty-six to fifty-four accepted the duty of twenty cents on imported salt.
The salt duty distressed the South, and in revenge many Southerners wished to impose a tax of twenty-five cents a gallon on whiskey, which would be felt chiefly in the West; but this was no part of the Treasury scheme. Grundy and R. M. Johnson succeeded in defeating the motion; and after deciding this contest, the House found no difficulty in adopting all the other Resolutions. March 4 the committee was instructed to report by bill; Bacon sent the Resolutions to the Treasury, and the secretary waited for events. Every one admitted that while war was still uncertain, the financial policy undecided, and a Presidential election approaching, only the prospect of immediate bankruptcy would outweigh the dangers of oppressive taxation.
Four months of continuous session had passed, and spring was opening, when the Legislature reached this point. The result of the winter’s labor showed that the young vigor of this remarkable Congress had succeeded only in a small part of the work required to give Jefferson’s peaceful system a military shape. Although the nominal regular army had been raised from ten thousand to thirty-five thousand men, the Act of Congress which ordered these men to be enlisted could not show where they were to be found; and meanwhile the sudden strain broke down the War Department. Rumor pointed at Secretary Eustis as incompetent, and the chances were great that any secretary, though sufficiently good for peace, would prove unequal to the task of creating an army without men or material to draw from. Whether the secretary was competent or not, his situation exposed him to ridicule. He had hitherto discharged the duties of Secretary of War, of Quartermaster-General, Commissary-General, Indian Commissioner, Commissioner of Pensions, and Commissioner of Public Lands; and although Congress promised to create a quartermaster’s department, and had the bill already in hand, the task of organizing this department, as well as all the other new machinery of war, fell on the secretary and eight clerks, not one of whom had been twelve months in office. Any respectable counting-house would have allowed some distribution of authority and power of expansion; but the secretary could neither admit a partner nor had he the right to employ assistance. Adapted by Jefferson, in 1801, to a peace establishment of three or four regiments, the Department required reorganization throughout, or Congress would be likely to find the operations of war brought to a quick end.
Had Congress undertaken to wage war on the ocean, the same difficulty would have been felt in the navy; but this danger was evaded by the refusal to attempt naval operations. At all times the Republicans had avowed their willingness to part with the five frigates, and these were perhaps to be sent to sea with no great hope in the majority for their success; but the Navy Department was required to make no other exertion. Secretary Hamilton, like Secretary Eustis, was supposed to be unequal to his post; but his immediate burden amounted only to fitting out three frigates in addition to those in actual service, and the expenditure of two hundred thousand dollars annually for three years toward the purchase of ship-timber.
To meet the expenses thus incurred for military purposes, in the absence of taxes which, if imposed, could not be made immediately productive, Congress authorized a loan of eleven million dollars at six per cent, redeemable in twelve years.
An army of thirty-five thousand regulars which could not be raised within a year, if at all, and of fifty thousand volunteers who were at liberty to refuse service beyond the frontier, promised no rapid or extensive conquests. A navy of half-a-dozen frigates and a few smaller craft could not be expected to keep the ports open, much less to carry the war across the ocean. Privateers must be the chief means of annoyance, not so much to British pride or power as to British commerce, and this kind of warfare was popular because it cost the government nothing; but even the privateers were at a great disadvantage if the ports were to be closed to their prizes by hostile squadrons. Such means of offence were so evidently insufficient that many sensible persons could not believe in the threatened war; but these were only the most conspicuous weaknesses. Armies required equipment, and the United States depended on Europe, chiefly on England, for their most necessary supplies. The soldier in Canada was likely to need blankets; but no blankets were to be had, and the Non-importation Act prevented them from coming into the market, whatever price might be offered.
Not only was the machinery of government unsuited to energetic use, but the Government itself was not in earnest. Hardly one third of the members of Congress believed war to be their best policy. Almost another third were Federalists, who wished to overthrow the Administration; the rest were honest and perhaps shrewd men, brought up in the school of Virginia and Pennsylvania politics, who saw more clearly the evils that war must bring than the good it might cause, and who dreaded the reaction upon their constituents. They could not understand the need of carrying into every detail a revolution in their favorite system of government. Clay and Calhoun, Cheves and Lowndes asked them to do in a single session what required half a century or more of time and experience,—to create a new government, and invest it with the attributes of old-world sovereignty under pretext of the war power. The older Republicans had no liking for such statesmanship, and would gladly have set the young Southerners in their right place.
By force of will and intellect the group of war members held their own, and dragged Congress forward in spite of itself; but the movement was slow and the waste of energy exhausting. Perhaps they failed to carry their points more often than they succeeded. Energetic as their efforts were, after four months of struggle they had settled nothing, and found themselves in March no further advanced than in November. War should already have been declared; but Congress was still trying to avoid it.
Federalists had much to do with causing the confusion of Republicans. Their conduct could seldom be explained on rational grounds, but in January, 1812, they seemed to lose reason. Their behavior, contradicting their own principles, embarrassed their friends still more than it confused their enemies. The British minister wrote to his Government constant complaints of the dangerous course his Federalist allies were pursuing.
“The Federal leaders,” Foster wrote Dec. 11, 1811,[130] “make no scruple of telling me that they mean to give their votes for war, although they will remain silent in the debates; they add that it will be a short war of six or nine months. To my observations on the strange and dangerous nature of such a policy, they shrug their shoulders, telling me that they see no end to restrictions and non-importation laws but in war; that war will turn out the Administration, and then they will have their own way, and make a solid peace with Great Britain.”
To this policy Federalist leaders adhered. As the weeks passed, Foster’s situation grew more difficult. Disgusted equally by the obstinacy of his Government and by the vacillations of Congress, he found his worst annoyances in the intrigues of his friends. Toward the close of the year he wrote:[131]—
“The situation that I find myself thus unexpectedly placed in is, I must confess, exceedingly embarrassing. I am aware that H. R. H. the Prince Regent wishes to avoid a rupture with this country, and yet I see that the efforts of a party, hitherto the most adverse to a war with Great Britain, are united with those of another, which till now has been supposed the most considerable in point of numbers, for the purpose of bringing it on; while Government, although wishing for delay, are yet so weak and little to be depended on that it is to be feared if the two Houses were to decide on hostilities, they would not have resolution enough to oppose the measure.”
January 16, 1812, he wrote again.[132] Somewhat encouraged by the evident difficulties of the war party in Congress, he was then disposed to look less severely at Federalist tactics:—
“The opposition know the embarrassment of the President, and endeavor to take advantage of it by pushing for measures so decisive as to leave him no retreat. It has been told me in confidence more than once by different leaders, that if the Orders in Council are not revoked he must eventually be ruined in the opinion of the nation. Some individuals have even gone so far as to reproach us for not concerting measures with them for that purpose, observing that the French have managed this country by concert with a party; and that unless Great Britain do the same, the French party will always be predominant. I should mention to your Lordship that the Federalists are by no means united. From twelve to sixteen vote for peace measures, while eight only, though of the leaders, vote the contrary way.”
February 1, a fortnight after this letter was written, two Federalist leaders, whose names Foster wisely suppressed, called on the British minister to give him their advice as to the best course his Government could take “in order to produce a thorough amalgamation of interests between America and Great Britain.” Their conversation, which seems to have been in no way invited by Foster, was reported by him to Lord Wellesley without comment of any kind.[133] Had the two Federalists foreseen the scandal to be caused, six weeks later, by the publication of John Henry’s papers, they would hardly have dared approach the British minister at all; and they would at least have been reminded that such advice as they gave him was not only forbidden by law, but bordered closely upon treason.
“The sum of these suggestions was that we should neither revoke our Orders in Council nor modify them in any manner. They said this Government would, if we conceded, look upon our concessions as being the effect of their own measures, and plume themselves thereon; that they only wanted to get out of their present difficulties, and if we made a partial concession they would make use of it to escape fulfilling their pledge to go to war, still however continuing the restrictory system; whereas if we pushed them to the edge of the precipice by an unbending attitude, that then they must be lost, either by the disgrace of having nearly ruined the trade of the United States and yet failed to reduce Great Britain by their system of commercial restrictions, or else by their incapacity to conduct the government during war. These gentlemen declared they were for war rather than for the continuance of the restrictory system, even if the war should last four years. They thought no expense too great which would lead to the termination of the irritating, fretful feelings which had so long existed between the two countries. They animadverted on the peevish nature of the answers given in the affairs of the ‘Chesapeake’ and to my note on the Indians, and whenever any spirit of conciliation was shown by Great Britain, and told me it would ever be so until the people felt the weight of taxes; that nothing would bring them to a right sense of their interests but touching their purses; and that if we did go to war for a time, we should be better friends afterward. In short, they seemed to think that Great Britain could by management bring the United States into any connection with her that she pleased.”
The President, as his office required, stood midway between the masses of his followers, but never failed to approve the acts and meet the wishes of the war members. Early in March, at a moment when they were greatly embarrassed, he came to their aid by a manœuvre which excited much feeling on all sides, but especially among the Federalists engaged in abetting the war policy. He seemed to have fallen on the track of a conspiracy such as had overthrown the liberties and independence of classic republics, and which left no alternative but war or self-destruction; but the true story proved more modern, if not less amusing, than the conspiracies of Greece and Rome.